EliasMooseblaster

You'd think a company that had kept Black Sabbath in amps for several decades would enjoy a better reputation! I've been quite staunchly loyal to Laney for most of my time as a bass player - partly because they were among the best-sounding bass amps I could afford for a long time. I always thought they sounded good and were pretty solidly built, and I probably would have stayed with them if not for the temptation to drift towards all-valve heads.

^ this is surely the best motivation for replacing a bridge. I've long since learned to keep my SG bass flat on its back while changing strings, but it's not always a practical option...

Officially, 18. Though most of us start a few years before that, depending on how confident we are that we can pass for 18. Does make me curious, though: what was the rationale behind raising it to 21 in the '70s? I always assumed that the US legal drinking age was set at 21 as a hangover from the Prohibition era, but clearly I was wrong!

That reminds me of Rory Bremner's impression of Blair, which always began with the nervous blink-and-grin, followed by "Look..."! It seems to have been replaced with the increasingly popular "Let me be clear...", which, as we all know, means, "Let me be evasive and obfuscatory..."

I believe there are plenty of onboard preamps desinged work with passive pickups, though I'm not an authority on which ones are worth trying! It did occur to me, however: one of the benefits of an active bass is that you can turn down the onboard volume without compromising the tone: is it worth turning down the active P to match the output of the passive Jazz?

Hmm...it sounds to me like there probably was something a little awry with the bass pot. The amp has a very bass-heavy tone, but I've never found the bass control to be that ineffective. (The bass-shift control was in the 'off' position, I assume?!) That said, I have come to like the old-fashioned tone stack. I appreciate that it's not everybody's cup of tea; you certainly can't "sculpt" a tone like you can with a lot of modern amps, but I already like the "baked-in" tone so it works for me. The biggest revelation for me - and you may have already tried this - was pushing the mid-range shift. Made the mids much clearer and more aggressive - more to my taste, anyway!

You'll forgive me, I hope, if I've bored you with this one before, but to me it's a great example of one guv'nor deciding that he knew best, and the only example of Cherry White being sufficiently micturated off to pack up and walk out of a gig. It began as a residency in a place that was otherwise styling itself as a kind of generic modern bar, which seemed like a (potentially) excellent development for a band which hadn't been playing together all that long. It was initially conceived by a friend of our drummer, who'd had some very promising conversations with the landlord, but he disppeared from view once it started to look like hard work. So on Mondays we hosted a jam night, and on Fridays we'd be the sole entertainment and play for most of the evening. Things started well: the landlord took the very encouraging attitude that he'd never hosted live music before, so he was happy to defer to us on most matters. And, as all such things begin, most of our friends were all too keen to come along to either play at the jam, or come and listen to us on the Friday nights. After a few weeks, the cracks started to show. Every night we went down there, the landlord complained that we were too loud. Even when we were turned down to the point that our guitarist could hear his own strings while he was checking tuning during a guitar-free section of a song, and our drummer might as well have been playing with two pencils. He seemed surprised that the audiences diminished - we tried to explain that (i) our friends were not going to come and see us every single week, (ii) he was competing with every other Monday jam night and every other Friday band night in London, and (iii) hiding the band away in the basement of your bar, and turning them down so nobody can hear them, is not the best way to advertise a live band to any passing trade. Worst of all, he kept talking about his sound system. He'd installed a surround sound system in the basement, which no doubt sounded great when he put a CD on...but he wanted to run our vocals through it. "Wouldn't that sound great?" he kept asking, "it's a really good system." Attempts to explain the limitations of a Hi-fi for live music fell on deaf ears. Suddenly the guy who once admitted he knew nothing about live music, thought he was some kind of authority on the subject. One night, we arrived to find that he'd connected the mixing desk to his CD player and quite literally hidden the rest of the PA somewhere else. We tried our best to be professional, and gamely soldiered on for the half-dozen people scattered around the downstairs bar. We could barely hear a thing we were singing. At the start of our third set, he'd obviously decided that even this was too loud, as he nipped down and turned the volume down even further on the already barely audible Hi-fi. Our drummer declared that this was just ridiculous, and he couldn't do another 45 minutes like this. Our singer decided to try and reason with the landlord, who apparently told her to eff off, because he was in the middle of something else. So we packed up and left. (Right after I'd cashed in my last two beer tokens.)

I've been there! I went to see a friend's band play, and I was amazed that said friend didn't knock himself out while onstage, as he's about 6'4 and must have been chafing his head on the low ceiling. It's basically a smelly cave with overpriced beer.

I'd like to think I'm doing my bit to fight this homogeneity: every music video I've done with the band, I've ended up "playing" either one of my Gibson-style basses or the Hagstrom 8-string. (Even on one song where I'd actually used a glorified Precision copy on the original recording...)

Oh, crap. Those SG-style basses might actually fit the spec for the "ideal" bass I had in mind: SG shape with a T-bird pickup configuration. Anyone know if they're neck-through? 'Cause if they are, my wallet could be in trouble...

Careful now, this might add an extra dimension to another old argument: "fingers, plectrum, or barge-pole?"

Ashdown themselves would advise (have advised) against it, but I've managed plenty of small gigs with a Little Bastard 30 (since rebadged as the CTM-30) and a not-particularly-efficient 1x15. More recently, it's been paired with a far superior 2x12 and those 30 watts have gone even further. I can also reassure you that the LB30/CTM-30 has a much fuller, richer sound than the CTM-15, but I guess that's what doubling the wattage does for you! Normally, to be on the safe side, I drive the 2x12 with a CTM-100, but then I'm playing with a loud drummer, and I have a lot of sonic space to fill as we only have one guitarist. So I think my advice would be to see if a 30W is loud enough for your needs, but be prepared to move to something a little bigger if necessary!

Is this the danger of leaving pianists to write most musicals? I'm sure I've heard similar anecdotes of guitarists having conniption fits when their MDs insisting on them sticking to the written chord voicings...

I might venture that the question is flawed statistically, as it's probably a safe bet that more players globally - pro, amateur, semi-pro, and every level in between - are still playing 4s than 5s. So you could propose that, just on probability, more famous basslines are likely to have been played on 4s than on 5s. So yes, there are more famous bass players who have (predominantly) played 4s, but as a proportion of all the 4-string players worldwide, how does that compare to the relative proportion of famous bassists who favour a 5? We should probably apply some kind of weighting to this. If there were, say, twice as many 4-string players as 5-string players in the world, we might want to make a famous bassline played on a 5 worth two basslines played on a 4. Going further into ERB territory, 6s and 7s are even rarer, so 1 Anthony Jackson might be worth 50 or 100 Adam Claytons. And that's before we split hairs about those bassists who flit readily between 4s, 5s, and others, and how they balance their time between them; whether we count 8/10/12-strings in the same category as 4/5/4, or as separate entities; whether we can really count it as a 4-string bassline if the player spent their entire career on the E and A strings...am I overthinking this?

I'm rather fond of Gabriel-era Genesis, but I know what you mean...something about albums like Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme does sound very much "of the '70s." Maybe "twee" is the right word; I think it's that aspect which some of their contemporaries (e.g., Pink Floyd and Camel) managed to steer clear of, and they seem to have aged better! There's definitely a thing about "British production" as well - Genesis suffered from it, and I think the first two Who albums do as well. Almost as if they couldn't let go of the "stick the band in a room and put some mics up" approach. I think the finest example is probably the Moody Blues' Go Now, which sounds like it was recorded in a biscuit tin! Compare it to the much crisper sounds American bands like The Byrds and The Doors were getting at the same time, and you have to wonder what combination of the technology and the know-how some British producers were oblivious to...

The biggest barrier I have to getting on with Muse is that I've noticed Matt Bellamy's audible gasps for breath before every single line that he sings. Once you've noticed it, it's impossible not to notice it on EVERY SINGLE MUSE SONG. There. I've just ruined Muse for the rest of you now as well.

I've been rather enjoying Nancy Johnson's thread about Albums You've Really Tried To Love... and it reminded me of a bit of a shock I got a few weeks ago. But first, the question: are there any albums which you used to love, but which have aged really badly in retrospect? For me, the shock was Nirvana's apparently seminal Nevermind. I'd gone back to Soundgarden and Mudhoney with reasonable regularity, but I hadn't put this album on in years. And I adored that album as a teenager. So, I thought, surely it would do to revisit the album that is, for many, the defining grunge LP? My god. Two things stuck out: my tastes have matured, and the sloppy-but-kind-of-cool songwriting I used to be impressed by now just sounds sloppy. It's also painfully apparent that Cobain couldn't really sing. But the other is the production...it sounds so dated now. That strange conflict of trying to move away from the pomp of overproduced '80s rock albums but still using most of the same techniques, combined with the (possibly coke-driven) instinct to keep nudging the faders up until everything's far too loud and compressed to buggery. (Further revisiting has led to me be to believe that the Foo Fighters' debut, from later in the decade, has stood the test of time a lot better.) Over to you...

I could also get behind this - the title track from London Calling as such a promising start, but then I find myself skipping every other track. Quite the anticlimax!

Sounds like a good choice to me - my first one was a Hohner (in D). I've since acquired a few Lee Oskars for different keys after a friend introduced me to them, but I still play the Hohner (when the right key comes up!) I can offer you two tips: 1. Don't expect it to sound great in C. Ironically enough, diatonic harps sound best when played in "second position", also known as "cross position", which is in G. Basically the fifth of whichever key your harp is tuned to. Cross-position gives you a Mixolydian mode, which most harp licks are based on. "First position" (C) can be made to work, but I've only ever got horribly Bob Dylan-esque results from it myself. (1a. Similarly, they also sound good in "third position" - D in this case - as you get a nice wistful Dorian mode.) 2. Learning how to bend notes is worth the effort. It takes a while to work out what to do with your mouth, but it will give you a lot more control over the instrument once you nail it. Hope you enjoy it - for such a tiny instrument, it can be a lot of fun!

What beautiful specimens! I know the feeling: I once went out to buy a pair of jeans, and made the mistake of taking a route through Denmark Street. By the time I got home I'd somehow acquired an 8-string bass as well.

Ooh, what flavour? I've been playing diatonic blues harps on and off for quite a while now - often been tempted to give a chromatic one a go, but I suspect it may be a very different beast to work with!

Trout Mask Replica ...and I'm sure I won't be alone in this respect. I quite like Beefheart on the whole. The Magic Band were wilfully weird and "out there" at the best of times, and I will readily defend several of their other albums. As a huge fan of Tom Waits, I can see why the Captain was such a big influence, and having come to love a lot of Waits' more "challenging" albums, I felt compelled to give this one its due attention. I still don't get it. It's just too incoherent. I can see from previous attempts that it has its merits, but I just can't see it growing on me.

There was a guitarist I played with for several years, who always had a lovely tone - one thing I noticed was that he always had the output volume on his Blues Junior fully up, and adjusted the input and guitar volumes to get things sounding right. I was reminded of this while reading WoT's very interesting and highly GAS-inducing Handbox thread (see below) - the chap who built it apparently suggested running the volume fully open for best results. Now after years of playing with (admittedly never very high-end) SS amps, I always started with the bass volume on '10' and relied on the output volume to set my level. But I recently tried the above with my guitars (into a little hybrid amp) and found the clean tones much more satisfying, even through headphones. Tried the same at the last rehearsal, where I can run the Ashdown at a decent volume, and the tone was certainly good...I didn't have enough time to experiment and decide whether it was "better." Since I can't really use my bass valve amps in anger at home with a sleeping toddler, anyone care to validate these findings for me? Have you found better results backing off the volume on your passive basses and making the power stage valves do the heavy lifting?

Did anyone else click onto this thread hoping that the "Japan Confusion" might be an exciting new design by Fender?

It's even better when you're playing bass for a bloke who's rushed through his set with 15 minutes to spare, panics a bit, and starts blasting through a load of new songs that he's never even played to you before, let alone rehearsed with you, hoping that you'll "pick it up in no time" - not only have I never heard of the song, nobody else in the room has either...