EliasMooseblaster

Sorry, I should have thought about the non-Spotifiers! it can also be heard via Bandcamp without any kind of sign-up or what-not: https://ralphbeeby.bandcamp.com (Thank you very much for attempting to give it a listen!)

That question of where we draw the line is a really tricky one. Ian Watkins of Lostprophets fame is an easy one to judge because it stands out as an extreme even among cases like Glitter, King, and Jackson. But at the other end of the scale, Mick and Keef have convictions for drugs charges. Now we might not disgust us in the same way, but the law says drugs are bad (mmmkay), so should we judge them to be bad people and stop playing their songs? Of course we don't; the charges seem too trivial. Turn it up a notch and consider Jim Morrison's conviction for indecent exposure. Now, his bandmates have protested ever since that there was no substantive evidence to back this charge, but he was convicted in a court of law - is flashing a live audience morally rephrensible enough to drive fans of The Doors away from their music? Apparently not. I don't know where the line is, and nor do many record companies, it seems: there is a CD reissue of two later Beach Boys albums (I think it's the Friends / 20:20 disc) which includes, among the unreleased bonus tracks, a couple of songs written for the group by none other than Charles Manson. Now, these tracks have only seen the light of day some 20 or 30 years after Sharon Tate's murder, but with some of her relatives still alive and having to endure the continuing pop culture references to the event, I would have thought that it was a little bit soon to be releasing those songs for public consumption.

I'll take nickel if I can get 'em, but I'm happy enough playing stainless steels - I happily used Rotosound RS66 in stainless steel for years, before a friend pointed out that they also did a nickel-plated version. So it's nickel if I have the choice, but I'll happily default to stainless if, say, offered a discount bundle of Warwick Reds.

This sounds like very sound advice - especially this last paragraph. It might be seen as being in poor taste while the new film is fresh in people's minds, and he's in the headlines again. Once the dust has settled, it's probably safer to test the waters with your audiences. It is an enduring and morally murky problem, that some great art is made by some truly terrible people. In some cases, it's easy to dismiss the music along with its creator - Lostprophets and Gary Glitter being obvious examples - as they were popular at one point, but haven't pervaded popular culture to the same extent as Michael Jackson. See also Chris Brown, convicted for domestic violence - reviews of an album he released not long after his conviction focused on what an awful man he was, and barely discussed the music within. But plenty of his fans were quite prepared to treat the album and its creator as two separate entities. I expect plenty of Jackson fans will be prepared to do the same - you could argue that they've been doing it for decades - but while he's in the news, you'd be right to worry about objections from other people.

New single I finally popped out recently, for those who enjoy a bit of Davy Graham / Bert Jansch / that kind of thing:

Nice tune, that - thanks for sharing!

Drop E? So is that a 7-string (or baritone) tuned down a fourth - with the bottom string the same pitch as a standard 4-string bass? Sometimes I wonder how many sludge/doom metal bands have seriously experimented with playing their rhythm guitar parts on heavily distorted Bass VIes...

I enjoyed that. I'd certainly be intrigued to hear more of her stuff - thanks for sharing! I had to stop watching the video though, as every time the camera angle showed the paraphernalia in front of Ms Wilkenfeld, I found myself peering at the bottom of the screen thinking "I'm sure Mrs Mooseblaster has a water bottle like that..."

A friend of mine joined some kind of metal band (like the good friend I am, I never got round to listening to them) where the two guitarists played everything in C-standard. As he already favoured 6-string basses, he found it was easiest just to tune his bass up a semitone...is there a term for the opposite of "drop" tuning?

Now this is a very important point: how has a thread loosely centred on P/J basses managed to get this far without me jumping on my flightcase to bang on about how wonderful the Schecter Model T is? Still one of my favourites (that I've owned), though in the name of full disclosure, I do believe the P pickup is a little bit further back than it would be on a "traditional" Precision. That said... ...it's subtle. I'd say it has a little bit more "honk" to the tone when isolated. Just to complicate things, my passive Model T has SD pickups (the actives have EMGs) and none of my other basses do, so I've not been able to compare like-for-like with pickup placement. If you back off the tone control a bit, this difference becomes even harder to detect. With other instruments piled on top, no one's going to hear the difference.

See also that the insufferably pretentious Dandy Warhols' insufferably pretentious signature song Bohemian Like You is not actually about two blokes befriending each other and realising they both come from Prague.

I was disappointed to find out that Don McLean's most famous song, American Pie, had nothing to do with pastry.

Ah, a bit more like a T-bird's bridge pickup? I must admit I don't think I've ever played a Ray, so I'm less familiar with the nuances of its tone!

Hmm...I've tried a couple of Sandberg TM4s (Jazz front/Musicman back) which had a coil split switch for the MM pickup, so you could have J/MM blends or J/J. Now, Sandberg also do a VM4 which has a P pickup at the front. I don't know how easy it would be to find one of those with the MM coil split, but at least you'd have the core P and MM tones to play with.

That's a good point: when I (briefly) taught bass guitar, one of the finger-stretching exercises I used to get my (few) students to do was go up and down a few two-octave scales. F or G major over two octaves is a good warm up for the fretting hand on a four-string. Doing the same on a five rather takes the challenge out of it!

Yes. I speak from the perspective of someone who has only owned a fiver for a matter of months, but I can honestly say that once you get accustomed to the extended range, it does change the way you play certain lines. Typically, I've been given acres of space for improvisation with the basslines I play, so I'd second @josie's point above - the extra string gives me more options for places to go, especially if I'm walking through the changes. Sure, the notes below E are nice to have, but if some strange (and purely hypothetical) quirk of design and physics were to ever force me to choose between low-B-through-Eb and the extra hand positions, I'd keep the hand positions. As a few others have mentioned, being able to fret the low E does make you look at the board differently.

That does surprise me - I understand why Gibson basses are an acquired taste, but I've always found the necks very comfortable on the (admittedly rather small selection of) Thunderbirds I've played. Perhaps I've been lucky!

I'm not particularly fussy - I've never even thought to measure the string spacings on my basses - but then I have the advantage of long arms and big hands. Conversely, I remember hearing an interview with Joanne Shaw Taylor, who explained that she mostly stuck to Fender guitars because they suited her smaller hands, and had trouble finding Gibsons with a neck profile she could get her fingers around comfortably. This reminded me of an Aria bass I owned years ago: it had a two octave neck and quite a small body, which meant that the lower frets were quite a long way away if you sat down to play it. My sister tried to play it a couple of times and had to quite literally lean sideways to reach the low F. Spare a thought for those bass players of smaller stature!

Bear in mind you'd end up paying the current asking price at least twice over if you really wanted some strings on it! Egads...I've noticed it's just down the road from me. I dread to think what that crass embarrassment must be doing to the house prices locally.

I'm led to believe that the output transformer is one of the most commonly upgraded components in a Fender Blues Junior. Unfortunately I only heard the "before" and "after," via a former bandmate's amp a few weeks apart, but I think there was some subtle improvement to the tone. More discernible than gold-plated jack plugs or good ol'fashioned snake oil, at any rate...

Aha! Just looked up the Tenor model, where the description confirms it is indeed Nick Cave's current writing partner. I also didn't realise that tenor guitars were basically tuned like violins - so I have learnt something new today.

It's basically a Bronco with a posh pickup, isn't it? No bad thing - I didn't realise what a good bit of kit my Bronco was until I'd sold it on, though the pickup was one of the more idiosyncractic aspects! Is this the same Warren Ellis of Dirty Three/Bad Seeds fame?

1) There appears to be enough room to store my amp under the strings 2) Innovative proof-of-concept that you can, apparently, attach a neck using a rivet gun.

Keep the 1x15 for neighbour-friendly volumes; get a good quality 2x12 and you could probably do medium-sized pub gigs.

Yes, indeed, much as the others have suggested above, it will send a mono signal out to both sides if the pan control is centred. Just a couple of things to watch out for: - most importantly, I think some of those channels will only work as mono. I'm trying to do this from memory, but I think inputs 3 and 5(?) can be used as separate channels, or as the second part of a stereo pair, depending on what you plug in where. If you plug into one of those, you may only get a mono signal out in one ear! But the other two (2 and 4?) will give a stereo output if there's nothing plugged into their complementary channel (3 or 5, respectively). - there's a mic preamp on channel 1 only (hence the treble and bass controls on that one). This does provide some gentle colouring to the tone, so if you want a completely dry signal, you may be better off going into channel 2. I personally found it was a bit too much when combined with the amp sim element of my BDDI; that said it may be handy if you ever find yourself plugging a passive bass directly into the Xenyx.