EliasMooseblaster

The weekend before last, my CTM100 chalked up a (very unofficial) victory in the (very unofficial) volume war between our guitarist and me - at an open-air gig I actually had to turn down for a change! Admittedly I was driving two 12" speakers to his one, with 100W to his 15W, but we all know the lengths to which we have to go to keep up with most guitarists. At any rate, the tone was to die for.

I find it's better not to s**t on them in the first place.

Another vote here for Fast Fret on uncoated strings. It won't bring a set back to life, but they'll go for a lot longer before they start to sound dead if you're diligent with the stuff. Back when I still had flats on my fretless, I found it was pretty nifty on those as well (anyone else find that flats get a bit "sticky" if you don't clean them?)

For as we all know, a watt in the valve is worth two in the transistor...or something like that.

True; I'd suggest it more as a pair of stabilisers than a long-term solution. As you say, Brubeck and co were more able to break free once they were more comfortable with the material, and I'm sure our Leonard will do the same once he's feeling more settled in the band.

How improvised is "semi-improvised"? Can I assume you at least agree on a time signature beforehand, and the only difficulty is tracking the drummer's pulse? If so: be the pulse. Even if just to build your own confidence to begin with. While we're all citing Take Five as an example, there's a great example at the end of the Time Out album where Eugene Wright keeps the band anchored to 6:4 by playing steady crochets throughout the whole bar, and Morello is free to just float around his pulse:

Probably has a lot to do with it - admittedly one of my tonal holy grails is "Live at Leeds," but I'm not always going for such an in-your-face tone, and the warmth and fullness of a more moderate valve tone is hard to beat - at least to my ears. There's no way the LB30/CTM30 is going to compete with a Trace Elf on weight, for example, but in terms of being small and portable it's the kind of thing I can carry to the bus stop in one hand without any trouble. And not to do down the Class Ds by any means. I've played through some tiny little lightweight amps at jams and suchlike, and some of them sound really nice; they just wouldn't be my first choice from a tone point of view. Does make me tempted to try out the Little Stubby though - I seem to remember @Merton speaking very highly of the one he tried.

The LB30 wasn't discontinued so much as rebadged - the CTM30 is the same 30W all valve head in a different case, and if anything I think Ashdown are trying to expand upon the design (see the "Little Stubby" variant they recently released). You do raise a good point, though - small guitar amps have probably done well because the majority of guitarists still ultimately want a valve tone, whereas bassists are split across more different camps. Some of us want valve sounds, some of us want tight, clean Class D-type sounds, and various shades in between, so the demand probably isn't as evident.

The Ashdowns mentioned above all have a post-preamp DI socket if the sound guy wants a DI signal. That, and the scale of gigs I'm typically playing tend to be vocal-only PAs.

I have heard about this happening to some friends of mine without any sudden change of owner! I happened to end up talking to a guy who'd organised an event, and told me he'd booked a band for it, but they were so awful that he'd decided to pay them off after their first set and mumble some excuse about messed-up scheduling so as not to hurt their feelings. As if I hadn't been cringing hard enough as he told me this tale, he then told me the name of the band - I decided to bite my tongue and not mention that they were friends of mine...

Perhaps I've been lucky, but with Cherry White we've been fortunate enough to find recording engineers who are to happy to put a mic in front of a bass cab (at least one has even favoured the approach). Most of them have taken a dry DI signal as well for everything <100Hz, but by either re-amping or putting the amp in a different room, I've had the pleasure of recording with a vintage Fender Bassman, a B15, and my own LB30.

Oh hell yes, the LB30 is without doubt the best looking amp I've ever owned! I always heavily qualify my claims that it was powerful enough to gig, as the gritty, mid-focused tone I use to fill the space between a loud drummer and a lone guitarist in relatively small venues is not going to work for everyone. But yeah, if you ever get your hands on a 100...

True, and I know it's a thread which has already been flogged to death! All I shall say on that front is that the Viz cartoon "Ed Sheeran and The Fountain of Popularity" resonated quite strongly with my own feelings on the man...

+2! The LB30 and CTM30 are, I believe, the same amp in different cases. I have the former at home, and it's superb for recording. Also holds its own surprisingly well at *smaller* gigs, especially with a decent cab. PS: Its bigger brother, the CTM-100, is definitely powerful enough for live use. I actually managed to drown out our guitarist at our last gig!

Rather p!$$es over Ed Sheeran's loop pedal, doesn't it?

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...