thisnameistaken

Currently I do all of my practise on double bass, and I spend pretty much all of it improvising in a handful of keys and deliberately reaching for stuff that I'm not sure will work. I've found in the past that I am too content to stick to what I know, and I don't learn anything doing that, so now I go for stuff I don't know and I make some pretty horrible noises sometimes but I learn what I was going for and what I should've done. And sometimes I surprise myself by making a sound I didn't imagine but I really like, so then I figure out what it was so I can do it again. Incidentally when I go back to bass guitar and have frets to give me hints about what I'm doing, all the stuff I picked up on the upright can be applied with much less thinking and concentration on intonation and so on, so I've found it gives me much more facility on the bass guitar if I only practise on the upright. I only really play with my fingers on both instruments so I'm not missing out on 'technique' practice on the guitar or anything.

I've got a fairly portable rig anyway - I can carry the cab in one hand and the amp weighs a little more than a bag of sugar - so I wouldn't gain much from using a Pod. Also I like the sound I get from my amp. It's easy to get a nice sound that doesn't swamp the stage in bass, and using backline leaves the foldback monitors for vox and brass. I sing harmony as well as play bass, so it's important that I can hear my vocal well. At the places I usually rehearse I don't imagine the bass would work very well through the PA. Also if I go for a jam at someone's house to work on songs or whatever, there is no PA. So I've got to have an amp for those scenarios, and if I can use it for monitoring at larger gigs too then what's the reason I'd want a Line 6 processor *as well* as an amp/cab?

Most* sound guys just want to get the night over with and go home, the last thing they care about is what the bass sounds like, that's why they'll spend an hour EQing the drums and probably under a minute on the bass. Even if you do get a post-EQ signal out to the desk most guys will pull out most of your signal anyway. Sadly most sound guys are rockers, and they're used to the bass sound in rock bands, so they think your role is purely to make the guitar sound bigger. In reality most bands have hopeless plodding bass players anyway so their beliefs are reinforced daily. Good luck getting anything better out of them. * I did say 'most'.

[quote name='Grissle' timestamp='1372712405' post='2129118'] Heat gun and scraper are your friends here. [/quote] Nah I did that once, it's too easy to scorch it. I'm stripping a Jazz body at the moment that's got a ridiculously thick paint job. I'm using Nitromors 'craftsman' strength and while I agree it's nowhere near as good as it used to be, it got through god knows how many layers of paint in several applications and scrapes over a couple of hours. This was paint a good 2mm thick. Give it ten minutes to soften the paint, scrape it off, re-apply. You'll get there eventually. If you don't have the patience for paint stripper then use a sander, not a heat gun.

Didn't make much difference to the top end available or the treble roll-off when the tone is dialled down? I'd be surprised if that's the case. I experimented quite a bit on my Jazz a couple of years ago and ended up with 500k log volumes, 500k lin tone and .1uF tone cap because it gave me a really big range - a very full-range signal with the tone up and LOTS of roll-off for reggae. Way more of the extremes than I had with the stock electronics (IIRC 250k volumes and a .47uF tone cap).

I like this idea. The less stuff you have to attach to a bass the better it sounds, but I was put off by the idea of wearing it. It was a bit like a musical bum-bag.

I think lyrics are the key to longevity. A catchy tune is good enough to get people listening to something, but if the lyrics are great they'll still be listening to it decades later. There's a local singer/songwriter guy up here who had some success fronting a band and now performs solo, he's a great performer, very charismatic, has a fairly original sound, a really excellent voice, but his lyrics are just dire and it totally ruins the whole thing. :/

I don't think so, no. They sounded good when I took them off, but at first I did think something inside had broken when I took them off and saw them all floppy like that. When I saw they were all like that I just assumed it was normal. Would be nice if you could find out if this is normal though, given that I was going to sell the set to a friend.

All of my Silver Slaps looked like that after I took them off the bass. I thought it was just a point where the construction of the string changes? Is that not normal, Daf?

[quote name='yorks5stringer' timestamp='1372460622' post='2126167'] Pretty sure that's a Sadwosky he's playin.... [/quote] I don't know why people spend so much money chasing that sound. That 'hi-fi, super-jazz' sound, it's immensely dull.

Not exactly new but yeah it's a genuinely good idea.

Cannonball - The Breeders Kill Your Television - Ned's Atomic Dustbin I Ain't Goin Out Like That - Cypress Hill

It's not for me, it's a stage production with an actor/musician so he needs to be wireless. :/

He was touring with Wilko Johnson earlier this year.

I usually check bc on my phone these days so I can't really listen to anyone's recordings. :-(

Hey all, Has anyone ever run a piezo into a wireless transmitter mounted on the bass? I'm just wondering if your typical 'guitar' wireless pack can cope with a very high impedance input.

Since I started playing double bass I struggle to find anything shocking about the price of bass guitar strings... I tried elixir strings for the first time s couple of weeks ago and I thought they sounded very good, and to be fair if they last three times longer than normal roundwounds then it's not such a bad price.

[quote name='mentalextra' timestamp='1372190786' post='2122750'] I sympathise with you, although when I mentioned a similar thing a while ago I was slammed for daring to suggest that musicians play for anything other than the love of music! Apparently I've been told, most bass players are independently wealth and/or have fantastically well paid careers that allow them to indulge themselves playing in a band as an amusing hobby, and the concept that some need payment is vulgar! [/quote] You can get a bass and amp good enough to gig for £500. It's not an expensive hobby as hobbies go, and you certainly don't need to be wealthy or well-paid to do it. Do you really not do anything just for the joy of doing it?

The only rule is that everybody who ever buys more than one pedal must start a thread about what order to connect them in. You've got wires and pedals, you can work out what sounds you like.

[quote name='chris_b' timestamp='1372157205' post='2122216'] If you are getting "boom" on stage then the Gramma would be the first step, then a better cab, like a Bergantino.[/quote] The first step is to try moving your speakers. And buying 'a better cab like a Bergantino' is never the solution.

[quote name='skankdelvar' timestamp='1372113675' post='2121936'] Strings for rock covers? Well, I'd imagine a bog-standard set of roundwounds would do the job in most cases. [/quote] You would probably need more than one set of roundwounds, although it does depend on the size of the rocks.

Those old '70s plywood Jazz copies that were everywhere in the '70s. There's some freak trying to sell them for £300+ on eBay these days, they are truly awful.

If you're after a hatch the mk2 focus is better in pretty much every aspect than any other hatch of the same age, including load capacity. Very anonymous too, which I find is a plus.