EliasMooseblaster

It's never *just* a look in the window, is it? Gorgeous bit of kit, that!

Depends what you're looking for, I suppose, when there's so much variety available these days. For less than £750, I still think the Schecter Model T is a fantastic bass (the Diamond series are quite well-regarded in general, I believe). Less than £200 is a bit of a trickier one - though I have tried a couple of Squier CVs and VMs in guitar shops and generally been quite impressed.

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1426164565' post='2715088'] I do quite well out of it through an incredibly well run and established company in the States called 'Audiosparx'. They chase up cue sheets, register everything with ASCAP, so it's easy for PRS to collect. [/quote] Aha, now this is interesting, because this is the same company I've been in contact with! After reading some very negative forum comments I was a bit put off, but if you reckon they're still worth their salt then perhaps I should reconsider. One thing that does strike me as a potential snag is that they don't let you remove material from their library once it's been accepted - if I were uploading incidental music or jingles I can see this being fairly trivial, but I'm looking to licence regular rock/pop songs with them. Just wondering whether this could present a stumbling block a few years down the line...any thoughts?

Some footage from last Friday (6th March), when we played the [b]Hope & Anchor (Islington).[/b] [url="https://youtu.be/BjX3D8X-kFc"]http://youtu.be/BjX3D8X-kFc[/url] Apparently, the Stranglers had played a secret gig here earlier that afternoon...does this mean I can technically claim to have shared a stage with them?

(Wasn't sure if this was more suited to GD or Recordings; mods, please feel free to move if you see fit!) I'm sure a few of you have found a way to earn a few bob by sharing your music on one or more online music libraries: are there any that you'd recommend for licensing a rock song? It's something I've been keeping one eye out for recently, as a half-decent song placement seems like a good way to secure a little bit of regular revenue, which my band could really do with at the moment! See, I got quite excited yesterday when I got some tentative interest from a US-based library who, initially, seemed to be offering what I was looking for. Unfortunately, while reading their Ts and Cs this morning, a few alarm bells were triggered - I did some further research, and a forum on GigSlutz gave the impression that they used to be quite good but have since gone massively downhill. Being a little disappointed, I know I can usually rely on the good folk of BC to pick me up and point me in the right direction...over to you.

[quote name='tauzero' timestamp='1425912153' post='2712088'] And it's back! [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/OFFERS-THROW-NUMBERS-AT-THIS-TENNESSEE-15-STRING-EXTENDED-RANGE-BASS-/291402250210?ssPageName=ADME:SS:SS:GB:3160"]http://www.ebay.co.u...E:SS:SS:GB:3160[/url] [/quote] At least, we assume he doesn't have more than one of these monstrosities to sell...

[quote name='mike257' timestamp='1425651216' post='2709401'] You might find some music to listen to on there but in terms of its use as a tool to reach an audience, it's dead. Used it heavily for my band back in its "glory" days c.2005/6 and it enabled us to build pockets of support all over the country and tour moderately successfully under our own steam but it peaked then really died out (much like the band at the time, haha!) [/quote] It was such a shame to see it go, in that respect - when it was at its peak there was massive potential to reach a fanbase. Has anything really stepped up to fill that role in the meantime? Reverbnation, BandInTown, and all the others just don't seem to be as ubiquitous...or maybe I'm just not using them properly!

[quote name='Meddle' timestamp='1425250443' post='2705629'] I just don't understand it. Ampeg come out with massively unreliable Class D amps and people defend them to the hilt. Ashdown come out with new technology and everybody uses this as a chance to get the boot in. If British bassists defended British manufacturers the same way American bassists defended theirs then this forum would be a slightly more positive place perhaps. Not sure we need pages of Ashdown bashing, and I'm glad to see a rep coming on here and kicking some backsides. [/quote] People mocked the horseless carriage and said it would never catch on. As other people have pointed out, Ashdown aren't the first company to produce something in this vein, but they are dabbling in a [i]relatively[/i] new concept, which will unfortunately attract a lot of people whose instinct will be to say, "what's the point of that?", "it'll never catch on", or, occasionally, "yes, but is it any good for metal?"

We're on second, so we should be hitting the stage about 9.30. (And I'll be wearing your old T-bird, now I think about it...)

One last bump as this is tomorrow night. Anybody looking for something the night before LBGS, you'll be able to catch me giving Merton's old Ashdown through its paces in its maiden voyage with Cherry White, with two other great bands on the bill as well - all for just five English pounds!

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1425430123' post='2707387'] [i]I superstes erit![/i] [/quote] [i]Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.[/i] There, I've said it.

Funny how we're always the ones who have to think about EQing, isn't it? The above points about "big" guitar sounds may be the key to it: see how high your guitarists have their bass controls set, and see whether you can roll some of that off. Guitarists (as a heavily generalised rule-of-thumb) seem to be particularly bad at not realising that what sounds good in their bedroom doesn't necessarily sound good in a band setting!

I shall ignore the instinct to rubbish the original article, and try to contribute something more conversational: surely one key question is, [i]can the human ear actually detect the difference[/i]? Obviously we now have digital tuners (or even programs on our smartphones) which tell us how close our 'A' is to 440 Hz, but a large swathe of popular music will not have been recorded with the luxury of such accurate tuning. Bear in mind that the next semitone down on this scale is somewhere in the region of [s]422 Hz[/s]*, so tuning to A432 is roughly equivalent to tuning a quarter-tone flat. "Back in the day," if you had a keyboard player on the session, most bands would have had to tune to the piano. The piano would (hopefully) have been tuned by a professional piano tuner, who would either have used tuning forks or relied on the gift of "perfect pitch." But how good a guide are those, when you're then relying on either your ear's comparison between the fork and the piano strings, or the piano strings and your own mental reference point? In one of the stranger recording sessions I was ever hired for, I was asked to recreate the basslines on samples of some old '70s soul records. For each sample the guy wanted me to play over, we had to re-tune my bass up or down by about a quarter-tone because Isaac Hayes' band was tuned slightly flat or sharp back on that day in 1974 or whatever. Some of them certainly would have been closer to an A432 tuning than A440, some were probably closer to A443. I can't say that any of them felt more or less "natural" depending on the tuning, so I remain sceptical. *Edit: sorry, ignore my sloppy maths; I believe it should be closer to 415 Hz!

Good lord. Part of me thinks it's hideous...but then another part of me thinks it wouldn't look that out of place on a stand next to my Thunderbird.

...and on the off chance that anyone's in town and at a loose end the night before the show, there's going to be a great gig at the Hope & Anchor (Islington) on Friday 6th, featuring V-Device, The Cortège and *cough* Cherry White *cough* ...only a fiver...

[quote name='taunton-hobbit' timestamp='1425052327' post='2703460'] The Cash Converters route always worries me - when they started out (some time ago now) they were the first place that our local Plod called on if someone had a video recorder nicked...'course that was back in the day............ [/quote] Not so different these days, to be honest - the last time I was burgled, they took my flatmate's laptop. The police suggested I might like to have a gander round the local Cash Converters and similar shops to see if it was in any of those. Which took a while, as there's a depressingly large number of such shops down the Walworth Road!

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1425040625' post='2703278'] Just put a paper bag over [i]everybody's [/i]head, play a recording of some nice music and have a crafty Sherman. [/quote] It would certainly make for quite a memorable gig...

[quote name='Marvin' timestamp='1424515665' post='2697125'] You could always put a carrier bag over the headstock? [/quote] As a precaution in case the carrier bag comes off while you're playing, be sure to put a paper bag over your own head as well.

[quote name='Panamonte' timestamp='1424864847' post='2701268'] I thought when I got a 5 string last summer (taking the total number of basses up to 6) that I was sorted. But I've just bought an EUB. And now I'm on the lookout for a 5 string fretless. It really is hopeless. [b]On the plus side they do all get played [/b] [/quote] This is the key justification I cling to. My total now stands at 7, but I can confidently say that I'll use at least 4 of them at our next recording session in a couple of weeks!

[quote name='bartelby' timestamp='1424808224' post='2700732'] [color=#000000][font=DroidSansRegular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=3]"The spinal cord of JFK[/size][/font][/color] [color=#000000][font=DroidSansRegular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=3]Wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's negligee"[/size][/font][/color] [/quote] The 12 days of christmas?

The first step is admitting that you have a problem. So, in solidarity: my name is Elias Mooseblaster, and I have terrible GAS. The second step is deciding what steps you're going to take to fix the problem...but that sounds boring. Sod it, I'm off to Denmark Street.

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1424456326' post='2696584'] If he wants to shift it he should offer it for less than nine million pounds, imho. [/quote] Ha! I notice it now says "best offer accepted." I can only presume that somebody dropped him a line to say "I'll give you a tenner for it."

[quote name='1970' timestamp='1424777756' post='2700261'] GAS is like herpes. It never goes away. You'll get a flare up, mark my words. [/quote] And oh, how it itches...

I fear that as long as I remain on this forum, I will never truly cure my GAS. Back in 2013, I thought I was cured. I'd found and purchased an 8-string, and I had everything else I wanted covered. Well, except a valve head, and there seemed to lots of threads praising the Ashdown LB30, so I tried one of those and left the shop with it half an hour later. Trouble was, they let me plug a Gibson Thunderbird into it in the shop, and I started to want one. It can only have been a couple of months later that Billy Apple's T-bird went up for sale and I decided that was quite definitely the best deal I was going to get on one. I spent the train ride home thinking, [i]yes, this is it. This is the nicest bass I've ever played and now it's mine, and I will not have any desire to buy another bass for several years. I hope.[/i] That lasted all of nine months, after which I received a deep and very infectious bite from the fretless bug ([i]Cucilidus fretlus[/i]). But that was fine; that was a different [i]type [/i]of bass altogether, like the 8-string. And I'd have to learn how to play it properly, so that would keep my mind off my dreadful GAS for a while. Well, it did, for perhaps another seven or eight months, and then our guitarist upgraded to a Blackstar combo. Same wattage as his old Blues Junior, but considerably louder. Suddenly I didn't feel that my LB30 was going to cope so well...how fortuitous that Merton should have put his CTM100 up for sale last month. Now I'm done. Definitely. Except for possibly wanting a little 1x10 cab so I can take my LB30 home and set it up as a bedroom practice rig. But that's all. Honest.

Bumpity-bump...less than two weeks away now!