EliasMooseblaster

It's also worth bearing in mind that if you're not entirely sold on the tone, you could probably get a Tonerider or Wilkinson pickup to replace the stock P for south of £50 - just make sure the neck feels right!

Ain't that the truth! There are a lot of musicians in my office, and they'd been putting on a few regular music nights long before I started in the job. After getting to know people I was invited to come and play at one of these nights. I arrived while they were setting up in a nearby pub, and they seemed to be having some difficulty getting the PA to play nicely. I don't know how they got the impression that I might know what I was doing...I think a few of them had checked out Cherry White online, been impressed, and somehow put two and two together to get five, with the non-sequituur that I must therefore know how to operate a 16-channel mixing desk. Working it out was a mixed blessing - on the plus side, I got a decent sound out of it all, and the gig went well. On the downside, they now expect me to function as sound engineer at all subsequent nights. As the saying goes, in the land of the needy, the man too polite to say "no" is at risk of becoming the band's b**ch.

Now come on, Rog, at least give your own band until '73, and Quadrophenia. For me, there's a stretch between '67 (The Who Sell Out) and '73 where they can do no wrong. They came off the boil a bit after that period, but plenty of other bands started peaking then. Waters-era Pink Floyd probably hit their peak between '73 and '77, for example.

This is probably a very important distinction to make! And now that you've made it, I shall be completely contrary and bring up the excellent bang-for-buck that can (sometimes) be achieved with parts or kit builds. My kit-build Precision and my shonky 3-pickup Frankenbass are probably still the cheapest in my collection; not necessarily the best tones but I'm certainly very happy with them. For one that I can stick a definite list price on, my cheapest bass is an Epi EB-3. I don't know about "best" tone - it's an acquired taste at the best of times, but after its upgrade (a DiMarzio to replace the stock mudbucker), it's greatly improved, and is kind of in a category of its own compared to my others...

Edited - duplicate post

^ this. My first thought for low-mid priced would be the Squier VMs - they do a Jazz and a Precision, but the fret lines are standard. On the other hand, I know from experience that you might be able to pick up a second-hand Warwick-Rockbass Corvette for not much more, and that likely have a blank board. Gibson-style fretlesses seem to be like hen's teeth from what I've seen. Short of a stroke of good luck, I expect you'd have to look into a custom job for a fretless SG. Though, speaking of custom jobs, you could always nab yourself a loaded Jazz body and a fretless neck to bolt together - you could probably do quite well off Fleabay without having to spend too much.

Buggrit, I'm going to bend the rules: Korg Pitchblack+. Yep, I know it's a tuner, but the "+" model is also an A/B switch. On the occasions when my pedals haven't made it to the venue, this has been the once I've missed the most - I can trust my guitars to keep their tuning reasonably well during a set, but most gigs really call for a 4-string and an 8, and having to swap leads around between songs is quite a discomfort in the fundament when you're trying to make a set run smoothly!

Yes, to be fair, after posting that sweeping statement I did decide it was high time I revisited the two Kenney Jones-era albums. I'm coming to the conclusion that I should give It's Hard more credit than I have done previously - it does have a lot of the elements that made me think Endless Wire was a surprisingly good album, except that the latter didn't have Mr Entwistle on bass.

I suspect it's the balance in life between how much you're out playing versus how much you're earning. At the point in my life when I was out playing most frequently, I had a Precision copy and an EB-3. I'd even traded in an old Aria bass so I'd have enough money to buy the EB-3. Most of the gigs I was doing, it was the toilet circuit tightrope of turning up at an unfamiliar venue and hoping you could get a decent sound out of the house bass amp, which they insisted you use. When I did bring my own amp, I'd lug my old Laney combo onto the tube and hope it still worked after I'd schlepped it to the venue. Then a full-time job came along. I had disposable income. I thought "my poor old Precision is in desperate need of some attention. And I've not treated myself for a while..." and bought a Schecter to take its place while I refurbished it. I also revived a project I'd been scavenging parts for. Then I thought, "perhaps, once I've redone the finish on my old Precision, I should treat it to a nicer pickup." And it went on like this, to the point that I've recently finished up the fiddly wiring to get the DiMarzio mudbucker I popped into the old EB-3 to do series/parallel coil switching with a push/pull in the volume control, whilst I wonder whether I'd trade any of my other basses in to make room for a Sandberg...

There's a second-hand record shop in my neck of the woods. Every so often he gets some real gems in - I've had various LPs by The Who, Camel, Deep Purple, Focus, etc which I've been all too happy to snap up, but there are a couple of albums which Mrs Mooseblaster and I seem to see every time we go into browse. Funnily enough, one of those is an album by The Glitter Band. We have imagined a future in which the shop owner decides to wind down his operation and has a closing-down sale...and as the last dog-eared vinyl LPs exchange hands for cash, the last dusty CDs bagged up for a journey to a new home, he turns off the lights and locks up the shop one last time. And in that moment, he will look over his should and see one lone album left unwanted on the shelves, and it will be that Glitter Band LP. (I say one lone album; for all I know he could be in the stockroom right now, ruefully looking at a stack of old Lostprophet CDs which will be keeping the Glitter Band LP company on that day...)

Without meaning to sound condescending: even if the second bass were only there as a backup, wouldn't you test them both during your soundcheck, just so you'd know in advance if the backup had a hotter signal than the main instrument, and could back off the onboard volume accordingly? I do regularly use two basses on a gig myself as there are a couple of songs in our set which use the 8-string. Personally I've found a Korg Pitchblack+ to be a tidy solution for combining an A/B switch and tuner into one handy pedal. No volume controls on that one, mind - but the volume knobs on the guitars themselves are quite handy for that kind of adjustment!

My instinct is to agree with this, but one thing gives me pause for thought: the promoters who do no promotion often have a lot of free time to get their version of the story out if they feel slighted by a band. This guy's clearly chock full of s**t, but there's a risk that he'll decide to spread a load of "fake nooze" about you guys cancelling and being unprofessional or whatever. If you wanted to hedge your bets...you said you've got some interest. Play this gig. Bring your crowd. Demonstrate just how good and professional you are - like Lozz said, watch the other bands, have a drink with them, make connections and flog some CDs if you can. Better still, asking the other bands seemingly innocent questions like, "oh, are you getting paid for this gig, then?" might help to sow the seeds of discord and quietly let them know that the promoter's trying to shaft you. If the promoter asks you whether you'd like to work with him again, you're in a really strong position to give him both barrels. If he doesn't, there are plenty of groups and message boards online where you can tell other musicians everything you've told us. E.g., if you're on Facetube, the "advice/blacklist for uk bands promoters and labels group" has about 17,000 users who could (should) be warned off working with the guy.

I think I'd heard about a "Live at Leeds" pedal which might have been Tech21's doing...are we thinking of the same model? Still, your homework shouldn't take too long as I can only think of two tracks on which he used an 8! There's Success Story off Who by Numbers, which I think might be a Rick 8-string prototype; and Trick of the Light from Who Are You, where he played a (very overdriven) Alembic 8. I don't know whether he crowbarred the 8s onto any tracks on the post-Moon albums, but then I don't know those ones so well (because, let's be honest, they're not very good).

I was fortunate enough to have a few prompts throughout my time as a bass player. Tone 1: John Entwistle's clanking Precision tone on The Who Live at Leeds, Live at the IoW 1970, etc - drove me towards Precision-type basses and valve amps. Tone 2: John Entwistle's more rounded-but-still-wonderfully-articulate Thunderbird tone circa Quadrophenia / Who by Numbers - inspired initial purchase of EB-3, which I felt outperformed the Epi 'birds at the same price point, and later an actual Gibson Thunderbird. Tone 3: John Entwistle's enormous 8-string bass tone on songs such as Success Story and Trick of the Light - OK, I'm never going to make my Hagstrom sound like a custom-built Alembic, but it's been a good starting point. Unfortunately, along came Tone 4...and as far as I'm aware, The Ox never played fretless, so I've had to look to other sources with that. But it's been a very enjoyable exploration.

My friend tried one of their guitars in Anderton's a while ago. His damned-by-faint-praise verdict was that it "didn't sound as bad as those Spider amps." He passed it to me and I had to admit that it was alright to play - heavy, yes, but the neck was nice enough. The only problem came when you had to plug the thing in...

I don't think it's entirely paranoia: Mrs Mooseblaster lost an entire library of music because of a bug in an iTunes update. Apple's army of so-called "geniuses" were spectacularly unsympathetic about it and tried to make it seem like the problem in their software was somehow her fault. It's a pity sites like Bandcamp haven't caught on more widely, as they give you ongoing access to anything you've bought (or even had for free, where the price is set as such), so you can still listen to the music even if you lose the file. I'll often buy downloads from BC for this reason, and the fact that it seems a bit much to ask a tiny, independent band to send me a CD all the way from Canada, Australia, wherever.

Even live, I know John Entwistle went through several iterations of signal splitting over the years for his stage sound, and didn't Chris Squire have his Ricks modded for stereo wiring to basically do what Mr Blood does? Not to mention Billy Sheehan's ever-so-subtle bi-amped bass tone...and Royal Blood are hardly the first bass/drums duo - Clatter, anyone? No, I suspect it says more about how little attention people pay to the bass player in most bands, that it took a pair without any guitarists or standalone singers in the way, and a good PR engine behind them, for most people to realise, "ey up, he's doing all that with one of them new-fangled bass gee-tars."

I had been thinking through the possibility that the engineers would treat it like any other band, as long as RB's guy was doing the signal splitting himself - i.e., mic up his "guitar" amp, and DI his "bass" signal...but then when you frame the timeline like that, it's starting to look like a moot point anyway!

I don't know whether this first one counts, as I do own one of these basses, just not the specific, offending items: I quite like my Epi EB-3, despite their divisive nature. I bought it from Macari's, where in hindsight, they'd obviously taken five minutes to make sure their stock was at least playable. Going out to bigger shops to test amps and pedals, it's not been difficult to find an EB-3 to test them with...only for me to get a horrible shock as the assistant passes me a bass with wobbly pots and a crackling pickup switch. And the action. Oh, the action. I don't know how it's possible to have the strings high enough to limbo under, and yet still have the bottom couple of notes choked off when they rattle against the frets. The other one, which definitely counts, is the Hofner Violin. I couldn't vouch for its origins, or its authenticity - it was clearly an old instrument, and it looked an awful lot like a Hofner, so I assume that it was Hofner themselves who put the logo on the head. In any case, it felt like I was playing a toy. It's not the guitar's fault I'm a big chap, but that fiddly little neck was completely unworkable. It sounded...fine, I guess. For a couple of combinations of settings. I was initially quite excited to test the array of knobs and switches, but none of the tones they produced jumped out and made me think "yes, I will learn to tolerate the neck as long as I can get this sound."

Back when Hawkwind had smaller ambitions...

I would always try to give John Peel the benefit of the doubt with his myriad and eclectic discoveries, but what he saw in that song baffles me to this day.

So the brown note is (very likely) a myth, but if anyone's feeling particularly mischevious, I am assured that the same effect can be achieved by pressing a certain nerve ending on the body. I used to know a karate instructor who took a voracious interest in the Eastern philosophies around the martial arts (mainly, we suspect, as a means to further his similarly-enthusiastic-and-possibly-not-entirely-healthy interest in Asian ladies...), and his studies had led him to a lot of theories and teachings about pressure points. Apparently he spent an afternoon with his brother (also a martial arts enthusiast) working through the points described in one book. Upon testing one point, his brother had told him to stop quite urgently, because he could suddenly feel his sphincters relaxing. He steadfastly refused to tell us where it was...

Just use the alien sound, and say you're playing that lesser-known variation, Abducts, Probes and Partially Wipes Your Memory Like Jagger

I've some more worms here, where's my tin opener? Years ago, I built a very crude theremin as an undergraduate project. (Good fun it was, too.) One day, I brought my chromatic tuner into the lab to see if I could determine the (narrow) range of pitches it was producing. It couldn't work out which pitches I was playing. One explanation I was offered was that it was only producing the fundamental (which made sense given the way theremins work), and the tuner, having been designed for guitars, basses, etc, was expecting a much more harmonically rich signal...dare I extrapolate further from this and speculate as to whether the tuner would use the balance of harmonic content to help it work out which octave the pitch sat in?

Yes, increasingly I'm convinced it's endemic to the copy of Firefox on my home computer! I seem to be able to operate BC fine from within Midori for the time being - or indeed Firefox on any other computer - so my predicament is far from urgent.