EliasMooseblaster

It's a shame this is only for a single snapshot in time - you're quite right to mention different decadal trends, as I suspect they'd paint a much more interesting picture! Blues, for example, would have been huge in this country in the '60s and early '70s, but has dwindled to a niche interest in more recent decades; I think it's fair to say it's had a more stable (albeit small-ish) audience in the US. I'm sure EDM trends would be interesting, too - I'm no expert, but I think I'm right in saying that neither Garage nor Grime really translated their success across the pond.

Another one enforcing the 34" hegemony, I'm afraid - the majority of my bass guitars are all that scale length, but I've had a few exceptions over the years, and enjoyed all of them. Didn't realise my 8-string was a 30" scale until I got it home, but it's been a blessing in disguise: the "official" Hagstrom strings are nigh-on-impossible to come by, but because the design only allows through-body stringing, I can get them up to appropriate tension with a 34"-scale D'Addario set! (The biggest shock was moving to a 35" fretless and realising my intonation was all over the shop...)

Only five months late to this discussion, but I can report very good plug-n-play experience with both a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and, more recently, a Steinberg UR44. They've been connected via USB and have talked to various editions of Ubuntu running Ardour versions 4 through 6 - no issues to date! As has been alluded above, the only difficulty comes in with some newer editions which have software controls for some features (e.g., I think the newer Focusrites use it to switch inputs between mic- and line-level gain). There have been some attempts to port this control software, and some people report varying levels of success running the original Windows versions through WINE. But if you can control everything you need to from the device itself then you're laughing.

I'm with you here: don't know if it's just companies using cheap spade connectors, but I've had amps spontaneously fail on me, only to open them up and realise, yep, it's one of the spade connectors on the power switch. Must have got a bump going down the stairs because it's just popped right off the terminal. Easy enough to fix, but it makes you worry if the next time it's going to fall off will be the middle of a song! Obviously I can see the benefits of a solderless system - easier to fix, surely! But if they were harder to break in the first place, you wouldn't be fixing them as often.

Some devices will work fine down to a lower voltage, others will complain or crap out as soon as the battery dips below 8.9V! As a cheapskate who likes to wring every last coulomb out of a battery, I've found that pedals and active basses will start to complain a lot earlier than, e.g., digital tuners or metronomes, so the higher-demand devices get treated to fresh batteries, while my tuner gets the hand-me-downs. See also bike lights vs remote controls, when it comes to AAAs...

Looks a real beauty! Interesting to see that the neck pickup's a bit further back than they normally are - is this one of those rarities from the early '70s?

It probably just further confirms that these list are just a lazy way to fill column inches, but hasn't Rolling Stone been a fairly pop/rock-oriented magazine from the off? So it wouldn't surprise me if they focus chiefly on rock and its subgenres, while paying lip service to Jazz, Country, Blues, Folk, etc - the likes of John Fahey or Davey Graham probably flicker into their peripheral vision only occasionally. Their main crime is being sloppy with the title - "greatest rock guitarists" would probably appease most of us - but then it wouldn't attract as many clicks!

It is a damn fine looking bass - can't deny I'm quite envious of the twin P-pickups, quite apart from anything else! This is why I'm in equal parts curious and doubtful: I know it won't sound like a Rick - so I need to tell myself I won't get that characteristic "clank" just by sticking an extra cap in the circuit! That said, your report of "hollow twang to the top end but still retains the mids" sounds encouraging. I like the idea of being able to some optional extra "bite" to a bass which is notoriously scant on higher frequencies. And I guess, in the worst case, I'm down maybe ten quid and half an hour of soldering for some underwhelming results.

I've already done the obvious mod on my Epiphone EB-3 - replace the stock mudbucker with a DiMarzio DP120. Later wired up a push/pull volume pot so I could switch series/parallel for a more single-coil-esque sound. So far, so good. I've been reading about the "Rick sound" and that tiny (4.7nF?) cap they have in the back pickup which acts as a bass choke. I'm wondering whether I could get a similar (obviously not identical) effect by putting one of those caps on a push/pull in the bridge tone control. Before I order parts and open up the bass again: has anyone done anything similar? Is it a great idea or a terrible one? Should I aim for a different capacitance to compensate for the (presumably) greater impedance of the EB-3 bridge HB?

Quite interested in this thread - been looking at options for this myself! Seems the video on a lot of modern phones is pretty impressive, but the sound is...ropey. I see there are lots of options for USB mics that can be plugged in to deal with this, but info is a bit scarce (most articles seem to cover mics for conferences or podcasts). Anybody know what options are like for an external smartphone mic that cope with live music? E.g., I see the Shure MV88 is quite well regarded, but it's not entirely clear what applications it was tested on - I don't want to accidentally sink a couple of hundred quid on a fancy podcasting mic...

No, I think you've understood me quite correctly - and I take your point re group channels as well. I've found those make life much easier when I've pointed multiple mics at a piano or drumkit, for example! As far as "global" effects go, so far I've put them on the Master - I figured that whatever goes through a separate "Mix bus" would end up going out to the Master anyway. (And if there are other things which bypasses that Mix bus, is it really a Mix bus / global effect any more?)

Glad I'm not alone in this one - I know we've all griped about playing with "shed-builders" in the past, but I've also lost count of the numbers of drummers I've met at jam nights, etc who think "relax; let it swing a bit" means "please play this next one as a lumpy, cack-handed shuffle."

I recently learned about the potential benefits of some subtle mix bus processing, and it has been quite eye-opening (ear-opening?) However, a big source of disagreement seems to be around where you do this processing: apply effects to the master bus, or create a separate aux channel which then goes out to the master bus? Being the internet, opinion I've seen sits on a scale between the extremes of "it doesn't really matter" to "only someone on a par with Harold Shipman would apply effects directly to the master bus." So, looking to a more level-headed community for advice: is there a good reason to keep effects off the master bus (at least at the mixing stage)? Is there a big benefit to routing everything through a separate bus before sending that onto the master? Or does it mostly come down to personal preference? (Not that I expect it to make much difference, but I'm working in Ardour, in case that informs anyone's response!)

Hands down, the Ibanez TS-9B, aka "Bass Tubescreamer" I shopped around a few different bass overdrives before settling on this one, and whilst most of them sounded quite nice, I felt like they were designed very much for comping. Sure, they all distorted the signal, fattened up the low end, but they all made the bass sit quite politely underneath everything else. I had been looking for something to help me push the bass forward in the mix for the songs in which I was soloing. Of course, the original Tubescreamer is a much-cloned and ubiquitous pedal among Blues guitarists, famous for providing a warm and mellow overdrive with a distinctive mid-range hump that helps to push the soloist through the mix. It also interacts nicely with the guitar's volume pot - crank it up for more aggressive overdrive, back it off for a smoother tone. So it made perfect sense that a bass version should do the same for me. There's not much I can say, other than it did exactly what I was hoping it would. It's a bit more elaborate than the guitar version: the vol/tone/drive controls are replaced with vol/drive/blend/bass/treble. The blend and EQ controls make it very versatile - if you want a more polite overdrive for comping, it can do that too. But then, I bought it for soloing, and it does that perfectly. So I say: bassists of the world, rise up (through the mix)! You have nothing to lose except your bandmates' patience!

Time to start splitting some hairs: not whole basses, but I have switched allegiance as far as pickups were concerned. I've always favoured quite a midrange-heavy tone (think classic Precision with the tone control up at 9 or 10), so I developed a dislike of bridge pickups, probably on account of the cheap, solid-state amps I was using for so long. Too burpy on their own, too scoopy when blended. I always defaulted to soloing the front pickup on whichever bass I was using. Enter a regular salary, and a line of vaguely affordable valve amps from Ashdown. With a bit of warm, valve saturation, I gradually started to come around to some of those mixed-pickup tones. Then enter a Gibson Thunderbird, which I had to admit had quite a pleasant-sounding humbucker in the bridge, and a delightful growl when brought up just behind the neck pickup. Or a splendidly aggressive twang when fully on, with the neck backed off a bit. I never run them at matched output though...too scoopy for my tastes, still!

Have you ever come across this blog before? https://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2014/02/nirvana-sheep.html In short, the guy digs around the various bootlegs and rarities to re-create albums that never were, or nearly were, or how they could have been. If I've understood correctly, this hypothetical reconstruction of Sheep is supposed to recreate how Nirvana's second album might have sounded if they'd stayed on Sub Pop. (Plus all the background info makes for interesting reading!)