EliasMooseblaster

I second TheGreek's warm welcome, and applaud your thoroughly entertaining takedown of our deeply troubled mother tongue! Just to reassue any people who might feel particularly precious about the state of the English language, it's not entirely alone in this respect - I remember an old office in which my French colleagues often mocked the "old-fashioned" Canadian French spoken by our particularly uptight Quebequois colleague. And in the office before that, there were two women from opposite ends of Germany, who preferred to converse in English because they found each other's Northern-German and Bavarian dialects too difficult to follow. Love the joke at the end - I will definitely be keeping that one for use on future occasions!

I don't mean to alarm you further, but while scrolling idly through the Instagrams on my commute this morning, it suggested a follow a bass-related hashtag, and the preview composite included a photo of none other than your Uberhorn - the very same photo that is your current profile picture on here! Unfortunately, when I clicked through, I couldn't find the full photo to identify the culprit.

Yesterday, I met Bassy (Nick) in a pub near Tower Bridge, and surreptitiously slid an envelope of money under the table in exchange for the beautiful Shuker he had up for sale. This is new territory for me. Not just owning a Shuker; this is my first five-string. I've been through several fretless basses, I've owned an active bass previously, but this is the first time I've owned one with a B-string. Isn't she lovely? Macassar Ebony, apparently. I've really only included this picture to get the luthiers in a lather. Head nicely bookmatched to the body, and what appears to be a brass nut. Your starter for ten: whose strings are these? The silk at the bridge ends is all blue, but at the top I have lilac (B), red (E), blue (A), black (D), green (G). They're rounds, and feel like a fairly standard gauge. Here's where the fun really begins. The onboard EQ is quite gentle, but offers a lot of very agreeable variation, especially with the sweepable mid in that stacked knob. Combined with the coil tap and blend, I could be playing around with these controls for days... The sound is quite glorious. I fancied something a bit more modern than my usual, and I certainly got that! I'm not sure whether it's the strings, the Wizard humbuckers, or that brass nut, but there's a wonderfully piano-like quality to some of the notes. I'm surprised how quickly I've got used to the wider fretboard, but I suspect the slender neck profile helps with that. (Now I just need to get out of the trap of going for the low F and accidentally hitting a bottom C...) At some point, if you're really unlucky, I'll get round to making a demo video, so you can hear it in actionUPDATE: scroll down for not one, but TWO demo videos. Until then, is a NBD thread really a NBD thread if you don't include a hokey picture of yourself playing the thing?

Met Nick yesterday in a pub, with an envelope full of cash. He swapped the envelope for a delightful Shuker fretless. Smashing feller, and a pleasure to do business with.

You could almost argue that Behringer represent a budget rival to a lot of products - *some* of their pedals sound as good as more expensive equivalents; *some* people find their BDI-21 an adequate substitute for a Sansamp; *some* of their bass amps sound surprisingly good; *some* of their microphones get rave reviews from recording engineers. I stress the word "some," because there are plenty of "misses" to balance their "hits" - and when they miss, they really miss. Tech21, Markbass, Shure, etc., need not quake in their boots just yet.

**Retraction** I have just bought a Shuker fretless 5. **Retraction Ends**

If we're just talking about the modes of the major scale... The Ionian ("major"), Mixolydian and Aelioan ("natural minor") are probably the most commonly heard. In fact, the Mixolydian and Aeolian probably make up the majority of pop and rock music. (The flattened 7th in the Mixolydian lends itself to a lot of modern chord progressions, and when did you last hear something on the radio that used the melodic or harmonic minor?) Given their similarity to major and minor scales, you can write with the Dorian and Lydian relatively easily. The Dorian sounds particularly good in a folk context; the Lydian gives you a slightly more wistful-sounding major-ish palette. The Phrygian is handier than you might think. It sounds very "Spanish," but if you look closely you see that it still contains all the notes from the minor pentatonic. You could let your guitarist widdle freely in the Phrygian over a 12-bar blues, as long as you warn the rhythm players to stay off the 9ths. ...and then there's the Locrian. Always the last one to get picked for the team, but I'm led to believe that Bjork used it to great effect in Army of Me.

Two for the price of one here: some feet and a broken bottle. Story goes that Keith couldn't come up with anything to go over what is, essentially, a John Lee Hooker-style stomping blues before the chorus kicks in, so they settled for some footstomps and a few cymbal washes. Perhaps ironically for a Who song, I think it works better this way - I can't really imagine it working with the usual cascade of toms and cymbals that served their other songs so well.

I happened to notice a few very nice-looking Schecter and Sandberg fretted fives on the FS section. I can speak very highly of both companies' four-string basses, but I've not tried any of their fives. Not that I'd be an expert either way...I will not become a five-string owner until Wednesday afternoon.

^ now there's a good point: technically I bought two guitars last year, as I also managed to track down the specific model of acoustic guitar that Mrs Mooseblaster used to own before we met. It made for quite a challenging hunt, but also gave me the satisfaction of searching around to buy a guitar, even if it wasn't for me in the end. I'm looking forward to the day that Mini Mooseblaster is old enough to take an interest in learning bass, so I can take him shopping for a Chowny short-scale...

Almost enough for a wall of Wal?

Well, it arrived last week, and I'm delighted with it. As far as my ear can judge, it does exactly what I expect a Tubescreamer to do. The difference between the 9 and the 808 is subtle but audible, and for less than £30 I couldn't be happier. That said... ...and of course, it is just another cheap clone of a circuit that's been around for somewhere in the region of 40 years. It's been copied and modded to buggery, so the existence of a cheap Chinese clone is hardly surprising. (Even the switch between the two modes isn't an innovation, as JHS have fully outdone them with the Byobu, which offers 9 different TS variants in one pedal!) It does what I want, but it does nothing new, much like my other economy-donkey pedals. If I were a serious effects enthusiast, I'd still be looking to the boutique makers for new ways to preen, squash and bend my sound.

Exactly...it's simply designed to encourage you to pose like a rockstar!

He's a funny one, is Bonzo: I can see why people like him, and I can admire his playing from a technical point of view. Just something about his feel which seems a bit leaden (ledden?) to me. But then I have always preferred the jazz-trained drummers like Baker, Mitchell, Densmore, etc., so perhaps I prefer Paice's more relaxed feel. (Incidentally, are there any Grand Magus fans on here? Their current drummer - or whichever one played on The Hunt - sounds almost exactly like Paice...at least when he's not doing the double-kick stuff.)

I do feel like Paice gets massively underrated as a drummer. I suppose, just as Zeppelin overshadowed Purple as a whole in terms of popularity, so Bonham overshadowed Paice - which seems as a shame, as Bonham's playing doesn't really do it for me, but Paice's playing always seemed to be on the money.

Yeah, whatever I said a few weeks ago about "being good this year"...I might have to retract that fairly soon.

You can atone for your sins by posting some pictures when it arrives!

I guess for the "pub band" situation, the key is make the bass solo part of the entertainment. My Generation is a great example of how to do it, where the bass solos are snappy, two-bar breaks which work as a call-and-response between the bass and the rest of the band. If you changed that out for a full 32-bar break for the bass player to go through his/her whole book of chops, then you'd lose that pace and the queue for the bar would probably grow quite quickly. (So at least the landlord would be happy...)

It's a contraction of an old instruction that Geordie bandleaders used to give to their rhythm guitarists.

The string tension is likely to be ridiculous if you bring those four strings up a whole fourth from their intended pitch...I would have some concerns about the safety of the neck!

A cab with a built-in motor and wheels on the back, so I could lie it down and ride it to gigs, using the amp as a backrest and the bass guitar as a punt to steer it.

There's no shame in using an open string to give your ear some reference and reassurance...if the key of the song permits, of course!

I humbly beg to differ...