EliasMooseblaster

[quote name='Mykesbass' timestamp='1449051577' post='2920304'] Cheap and easy to develop in the first stages - two guys with acoustic guitars can probably get two or three gigs a week and run an open mic session or two every month. Less cost to landlord, less intrusive, so can fit in as background music, and without meaning to sound disparaging as it isn't meant that way, it appeals more to people who wouldn't go out specifically for music. [/quote] This is a very good point - it's a good way to almost gig by stealth! You can't really put a rock band into a pub discreetly, and you do seem to be increasingly at risk of setting off the punters who just think that live music is a nuisance. I just wish some of the acoustic-bangers would be a bit more adventurous - Ian Siegal, for example, is living proof that one man and a guitar can be incredibly engaging, so what's stopping so many of the others?

[quote name='Heket' timestamp='1449002530' post='2920035'] Honest question, if rock is on the decline, what do you feel is on the upswing? What's "new"? Pop or indie stuff? Electro genres? Any music that gets people dancing is good surely, so what about disco and funk? [/quote] I honestly don't know...though that may be partly down to my ignorance of modern chart music, and it's a very good question in any case! I'm tempted to say that it might be Ed Sheeran and Mumford clones - "nice young men" with acoustic guitars and just the right amount of facial hair. The best indicator is usually the heavily manufactured model the record company pops out within six months of a fad becoming popular, and I think Sam Smith's sudden appearance is probably the result of the big labels trying to create their own Mr Sheeran.

"Hook has accused Bernard Sumner and Stephen and Gillian Morris of "pillaging" the pop group's assets." Would it be very distasteful to suggest that New Order were basically the result of pillaging Joy Division's remaining assets in the first place...?

How huge is this huge jump? I'd expect the tonal characteristics of a note to be different depending on the neck position you use to play it, but if it's bordering on the unworkable then you might have a problem with the guitar's setup. First thing I'd try to do is plug it into a different amp and see whether you get the same results - if yes, you might want to tweak the pickup height. If not, perhaps it can be EQ'd out of the amp. (To be honest, if you're playing through an 810, you can probably get away with cutting quite a bit of bottom end to get a bit of a clarity!)

[quote name='Kiwi' timestamp='1448980455' post='2919760'] No name acts that stand out as bad for me but there a few amateur nights with solo singer songwriters that I'll never recover from. [/quote] Good point...I've been to a few open mic nights where I've lost the will to live after the ninth identikit man-bun has shuffled on stroking an acoustic guitar under the inexplicable delusion that he's the next Neil Young/Bob Dylan.

[quote name='blue' timestamp='1448918435' post='2919246'] Trolling? No, not at all. Only in the sense that I wrote the post with the intent on generating responses. Blue [/quote] I agree, there is a growing diversity in approaches that I've seen even within the cluster bands I've worked with, and it's not even necessarily a question of snobbery. It's very easy to fall into the instinctive response that "well, if we don't rehearse every week then we're not really a band," but if you think about it, does it always make sense to maintain such a regime? For example, when you first put the band together, you've got a lot of work to do - original or covers, you want to make sure that your live set is as tight as a gnat's chuff. Then the gigs come in, so you want to polish the set for those - and, hopefully, work retrospectively on the bits that do and don't work. Maybe you want to start recording, so you make sure the arrangements are absolutely spot on in the cheaper environment of a rehearsal space. But then the two species of band probably diverge a bit. Covers bands are more likely to be playing over christmas, for instance, so it makes sense to keep that engine well-oiled. But originals? It's tacitly accepted that most small groups won't have a big draw for christmas or January gigs, so it's just sensible to take a bit of a break and save some money - even if just from a business perspective, as you could well make a loss playing to an empty room. Taking the latter approach to more extreme levels, I know some bands who will seemingly drop off the radar for three months at a time while they work on a single gig to make sure they get word out in the local area and can be confident of filling the venue. It's less fun musically but might well make sense from a business perspective. Even as recently as the beginning of this year, I thought their approach was a bit much, but after a couple of "three men and a dog" gigs in October, I'm starting to sympathise with their point of view!

[quote name='Cosmo Valdemar' timestamp='1447102978' post='2904946'] Here's a clip of an early Cataldo bass being played, very well I should add, with a treblier, driven sound. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I17XWY3kBxk [/quote] That Cataldo sounds amazing!

[quote name='Merton' timestamp='1448653515' post='2917262'] Damn I miss that amp! [/quote] I hope it gives you some comfort to know it's gone to an owner who loves it very dearly!

[quote name='Twincam' timestamp='1448602750' post='2916746'] Was thinking of a cool idea, I know at some of the bigger bass bashes people do comparisons etc. Well maybe a wattage comparason might be cool so 100, 200, 300, 400 watt and so on fed through the same cab tested with a db meter or have a number of small combos tested anything from sub 50w to 500w. I know there are lots of variables on this one but it's more for fun and a general view. [/quote] I'd be very interested to hear the results! Personally I'm in the camp that says "my 100W valve head is fine," but then my tonal holy grail is [i]The Who: Live at Leeds, [/i]so my honking, overdriven Ashdown probably wouldn't suffice for anyone playing dub reggae. It's made for some very interesting reading, this thread, though I do feel the question of overall tone and EQ has got slightly short shrift.

[quote name='rubis' timestamp='1448630338' post='2916969'] Be careful dealing with Gear4Music though , they sell off an awful lot of (very) damaged stock on ebay They seem to be a bit cackhanded with their stock [/quote] Tallies with my experience...if memory serves I tried to buy a Pitchblack+ from their eBay page. Paid my money and then heard nothing from them for about a week, so I raised it as an issue and they refunded my money without evening telling me what had gone awry.

A quick BUMP just to say that it's on tomorrow!

I have seen Yngwie. And thankfully it was not an Yngwie concert; he was a guest at a much more expansive lineup. Unfortunately, I'd already been subjected to an hour or so of shredding, so by the time he came on, he didn't really bring anything new to the party and just looked a bit tragic (we're talking three or four years ago...he really ought to give up on the leather trousers). By the third time he came on I wanted to throttle him. I remember being colossally underwhelmed by Elbow. I think they'd just released their first album, and my sister persuaded me to take her along on the strength of [i]Anyday Now, [/i]which I thought was a very good song; pleasantly atmospheric, a bit different. They opened with that song and then played a load of seemingly homogeneous downbeat stuff that never seemed to gain much momentum. However, the [b]most utterly terrible band[/b] I've witnessed...well, I've done the Camden toilet circuit, so I've seen a few. But one really stood out, and if memory serves, they were called All the Jacks. I was playing bass for one of the other three bands who were on that night, so I had the joy of watching the entire car crash unfurl from the beginning. It's not uncommon for bands to be unable to make the soundcheck. If you let the soundguy know in advance, it's generally not considered a problem. Turning up fifteen minutes before your set time is, however, the point at which you really ought to go and apologise to the sound engineer and promoter and hope they don't pull your set. These kids decide to go to the bar. Five minutes later (ten minutes to set time), one of them seems to be hurrying frantically around the room looking for the other bands' guitarists. He's forgotten his guitar strap, and can he borrow one of theirs? Five minutes to stage time and they've dragged their half-cut backsides onstage and are tuning up. The set hasn't even started and the drummer's making an absolute racket behind the kit. The sound engineer, tiring of this farce, strolls over and tells the singer that if he doesn't finished tuning his guitar and get this shambles sorted out pronto, he'll cut their set. The drummer has a go at the sound engineer. The engineer repeats his ultimatum to the gobby drummer, who is being calmed and/or restrained by the rest of the band. The music is utterly without merit. It's a snotty, sloppy facsimile of the Libertines' laziest B-sides and even their friends don't seem to be overly thrilled by it. Everyone is quietly grateful when they vacate the stage. I'm surely I wasn't the only left wishing the sound engineer had cut their set.

[quote name='steve-bbb' timestamp='1448005209' post='2912146'] Ok hands up everybody in here of a certain age who when as a teenager thought they were on some god given mission to save the world from banality and mediocrity by listening to prog How did that work out? [/quote] I'll have to sheepishly raise a hand here. Though I am still proudly listening to various prog-rock bands, not to mention discovering new ones.

[quote name='Naetharu' timestamp='1447949730' post='2911770'] Well all I can say is that I heard Everything Everything's song No Reptiles for the first time last night. If there was ever any doubt in my mind that 'pop' is alive and well it is certainly gone now. Seems to me that far from bemoaning the state of current music certain people need to put a bit more effort into discovering all of the fantastic stuff out there and not just expect it delivered to them via MTV. [/quote] Unfortunately MTV has worked itself into a very good niche of providing music for people who don't care about music. I'd like to think that anyone who is genuinely interested in music has the wherewithal to search beyond MTV for something more interesting. (It's not like you even have to desert the mainstream altogether - I know a few people who are very enthusiastic about their local music scene but still inexplicably think Coldplay are god's gift to music...)

Our first appearance in Germany! We'll be playing an extended set at White Trash Fast Food (Flutgraben 2, 12435 Berlin) on Wednesday 25th November: [url="http://whitetrashfastfood.com/events/8574--cherry-white"]http://whitetrashfas...4--cherry-white[/url] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rluoaNi1LBg[/media] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp7UAvkMf64[/media]

[quote name='Mattspacebass' timestamp='1446700923' post='2901545'] Is it me, or is the top string not even over the fretboard what a pile of sh*te [/quote] It's almost thick enough to qualify as a fretboard in its own right...

Simple answer is "no," but to clarify that: I don't use any dedicated compression circuits. As BigRedX has rightly pointed out, playing through a valve amp will provide a certain amount of compression that I don't normally think about. And whilst my Tubescreamer and Big Muff are only kicked in for specific parts of the set, they will obviously squish the sound further. As for the studio, it's a similar story - seeing as I don't put a (dedicated) compressor into my chain normally, I figure my best bet is to give the engineer the sound I'd normally go for and let him/her do as they will with it. Most of the studios Cherry White have used blended a DI signal with a mic on the cab anyway, so I saw no need to complicate things further at my end!

After reading the quote in the OP, my initial reaction was to dismiss it as musical snobbery. Reading the full transcript (thanks ET!), I don't think I agree with him entirely, but he does make a good point: music, in whatever form and of whichever genre, is now so readily accessible that it is piped into almost every environment, to the point that it almost does become background noise. It's even a nuisance in a lot of cases - arguably, worse than the hotel lobbies that keep "muzak" artists in business are the trendy bars that crank Top 40 rubbish up to 11 in the hope that your herd mentality will encourage your friends to hang out there and the ear-splitting volume will reduce conversation and expedite the consumption and repeat purchase of booze. That said, he misses the key point that I and many others are also guilty of missing: an awful lot of people don't actually care about music. Whilst, for example, I went back to a much-beloved pub the other weekend and was delighted to notice they were playing Spirit's first album over the stereo, the majority of the punters likely didn't care. Drifting off my point, though, Timmo's point above regarding the dwindling longevity of Top 10 artists, in what has become a very "throwaway" culture in the business, does set a potentially worrying precedent. If anything you could argue that artists like Lady Gaga have done well to survive as long as they have.

[quote name='JamesBass' timestamp='1447364957' post='2907174'] Just curious, I've got a MIM P and was thinking of adding another P to the stable, one for rounds, one for flats kinda thing. So was curious to know what else is out there and what people are rating these days, I know Fender are rather hit and miss at times, I've had experience of that myself, played a 63 RI P and it was a pig, pick up sounded too bright to me, the neck was just uncomfortable, mainly due to the finish on it, and the set up was beyond terrible. My MIM P is my favourite bass I currently own though. [/quote] Schecter Model T, perhaps? New one would set you back about £6-700, so a little more than a MIM Fender. There's a perfectly serviceable J pickup in the bridge position as well as the obligatory split-coil; both are Seymour Duncans. The neck profile is more akin to a Jazz than a Precision - don't know whether that would put you off - but I'm certainly very fond of mine!

Bouquet of Dead Crows, at the Portland Arms in Cambridge this Friday. (They sound a bit like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcT5y3oq7NQ )

Don't know how easy they are to come by these days, but I'm still very fond of my Schecter Model T for filling that Precision-like niche. Body has a bit of 'retro' P-bass look, but the neck has more of a Jazz profile. Duncan P-bass pickup in the middle position, and a J-pickup by the bridge. It may be a bit bright-sounding for Motown, but that can be countered by rolling the tone down or - as people are suggesting - popping some flats on it. In any case I've found it very versatile. (Longer ramble about it can be found [url="http://thecrowfrombelow.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/gear-review-2-schecter-model-t/"]here)[/url]

...or the rest of Scandinavia, for that matter. I have heard talk of an "F Tax Certificate," which apparently is something every self-employed businessperson in Sweden has to register for. Looking around venues, I've seen a couple of places mention clauses to the effect that it's the artists' responsibility to make sure their F Tax thingummies are valid. Anybody know if this is something I might need to consider if I'm to take the band to Sweden? Or does it only apply to people who are resident (and therefore paying taxes) in Sweden?

Very soothing - thanks for sharing that one!

If it's a group I've never played with, or a jam I've not been to, I usually go with the safe/boring (delete as appropriate) option and take one of my Precision-style basses. I find it's good to get to know the lay of the land before turning up with the Thunderbird...or the 8-string!

I just haven't been bitten by the bug yet - which is not to say I won't ever be bitten by it. I also fear that, if I were to look into extending my range, the pragmatic/bloody-minded (delete as appropriate) part of me would go straight for a 6 or 7...