Oscar South

Sounded good, only thing I'd say is that the bassline seemed to vary a bit too much for Reggae (IE. any variation at all ).

Danelectro released a pretty cool new short 30 scale bass recently didn't they? Not sure of the cost though.

I think its generally solid apart from the unneeded generic Jaco-esque harmonics which he seems to just be hitting at random. I did actually like most of the fingerstyle stuff, the rapid bursts of articulations on one note were very effective and the runs were relatively cool, nice tone too. I just think a video spotlighting the six string bass should show off a bit more of its harmonic potential rather than sticking on one simplistic groove with a bit of redundant ornamentation.

I think what I really didn't like about the PodXT (live anyway, which is what I had) were the foot controls, too easy to hit the wrong button and you could only use one button at a time, with stomp boxes you can just stomp anywhere in the general location of the switch and hit it, with the PodXT you've got to be really precise, and screwing up hitting the wrong button can have dire consequences (especially with the iffy volume levels on the PodXT series).

Ironic that there wasn't one bit of remotely interesting bass playing for the entire song. OK video though I want to see a Jean Baudin track on MTV

[quote name='benwhiteuk' post='220726' date='Jun 17 2008, 04:35 PM']i can get get a good fuzz out of my XT Pod Live - both subtle boost and full on punch in the face stylie. With multi fx pedals i think it's just about perseverance[/quote] I thought the same until I bought a proper distortion box, I found PodXT to be by far better for recording than playing live in sound and usability.

I've never heard a multi effect distortion that even sound half decent, I'd get a separate pedal for it.

[quote name='lowhand_mike' post='220484' date='Jun 17 2008, 11:43 AM']the modded one was quite noisey, too much hiss, it just didnt sound right where as the behringer was virtually transparent.[/quote] Which mod are you talking about? My old modded CS-3 (Monte Allums) was practically noiseless, you got a TINY bit of hiss if you turned the sustain dial to max but thats it. Used it for recording vocals and guitars with absolutely no noise problems, sold it and got an Aphex Punch Factory because I couldn't find a use for it on bass Its the best pedal I've ever used for an acoustic guitar though, made it sound 1000x better.

I don't rate most boss effects pedals, maybe the tuner, the EQ, the Noisegate, the Delays, basically utility pedals like that are ok but I can't stand any of their 'tone dependent' stuff. I've used a bunch of them including wahs, distortions, compressers, phasers etc., the modded CS3 I think is decent but better for guitar or vocal than for bass but all my boss stuff now has been sold and replaces with, MXR, Aphex, EHX and Korg pedals. On the other hand most of their effects are excellent for electric guitars.

Or get a preamp, put the passive through that and plug it into the active input.

Cheers, any genre really, we're working on a version of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) on Cello, Double Bass and Acoustic guitar with the riff played between the Cello and bass, should be fun and a good exercise to get our coordination together.

Can anyone recommend any music either specifically for these two or that could be adapted? On the easy side preferably as we're both not experts at arco playing. Thanks, Oscar.

[quote name='elom' post='217282' date='Jun 11 2008, 11:21 PM']Why not just reply and tell him that you've been in floods of tears ever since getting his email and that you have now given up the bass?[/quote] No need to encourage this type of behavior

I'm up for it, hopefully this'll be a little more successful than my basschat bass comp : /

[quote name='steve-norris' post='217150' date='Jun 11 2008, 07:57 PM']one ska influenced band i love are Sublime, Santeria, Badfish and Wrong way are tracks i love playing, nice baselines in a lot of their stuff. For early stuff and a good foundation Reggae bass by Ed Friedland ( published by Hal Leonard, ISBN 0-7935-7994-5) is well worth buying. Some Madness stuff is also fun to play. I will have a hunt for the guitar pro files if you need them.[/quote] My complaint about that book is he should have put the drum score in (like in 'Bass Grooves'), otherwise good.

[quote name='jakesbass' post='216893' date='Jun 11 2008, 02:29 PM']Get a real book and learn about 1000 (exaggerating slightly) tunes, if you consider that Cole Porter alone wrote 1500 that gives you an idea of the wide range of standards that people play. I've played in trios backing visiting soloists in amongst others Alexanders in your very own Chester including Dick Morrisey, Bobby Wellins, Don Weller, Snake Davis, Jim Mullen and many others, they all do different tunes and sometimes expect you to know them. So learning a load of them is useful in many ways.[/quote] Alexanders is a really good venue, played there a bit and hope to do more in the future. Unfortunately I don't have that much time , I'm working on a lot of stuff at the moment so I really only want to stick to a few tunes, I do have the real books though. I'm going to do the 'learning masses of tunes' thing when I'm a bit more experienced at Jazz, probably next summer as I'm playing in my own Jazz band throughout next year which will give me the experiance I need to get me properly on my feet.

Oh yea played Chameleon a bunch of times, we did some cool stuff to it like having piano/bass/guitar repeatedly trade parts and put some vocal ostinatos in there to keep the singers happy. Will check out those other songs, I want to stay away from modal Jazz for now though as I have a bit of trouble walking on only one chord for any length of time, I'm going to work on this with my tutor then go back to it.

Slightly on a tangent, a funny comment I heard someone say about Timmy C's elaborate and highly secretive setup a while ago was "Nobody can get his tone, but 8 year olds can play his basslines", made me chuckle at the time.

I want to learn a selection of standards to play at jam nights, I want to pick say 3 or 4 that I can pretty much guarantee that people (players, not necessarily audience) will know but that aren't REALLY obvious and overplayed (such as Autumn Leaves, Summertime and Fly Me To The Moon which I know already anyway), also preferably I'd like to possibly do a ii7-V7-I style one, a Jazz Blues and a Rhythm Changes style piece, for variation and also because I think this will help me more than learning a few similar pieces. Also preferable (but not vital) is that the piece can be sung, as it'll just be handy to add a few more Jazz tunes to my bands repertoire. Not looking for anything too difficult either as I'm still a reletive beginner to playing Jazz (not a total beginner and I've played a few gigs, just not too much experiance). Has anyone got any suggestions? Cheers.

I always found GP as a cross between Sibelius and Powertab, but not as good (or cheap) at presenting songs in an easy to learn format as Powertab and not as good for composing and arranging as Sibelius, plus it has a whole range of irritating bugs. I do quite like the percussion features on it (as long as you turn off RSE for percussion) though and its nice to get vocal lines on some transcriptions and be able to turn off tab is you want (even though the notation is pretty terrible). Also suffers from idiots just importing midi files they downloaded and submitting without formatting, which is no use to anyone.

[quote name='The Funk' post='214447' date='Jun 7 2008, 04:21 PM']Just checked out his myspace page. He's got good tone. Don't think that much of his band - especially the vocals. All his gigs are with the one band. I don't see how the fact that he's not a beginner is relevant. He's rude. He's trying to be helpful, sure, I can see that. He's not trying to be malicious, I can see that too. But he's being so patronising. Check out his blog for some advice on technique: it seems to be that he's been playing a long time and thinks it's his duty to pass on everything he knows. There's a right way and a wrong way.[/quote] Just playing Devils Advocate

I don't like chugga chugga detune 2 steps and follow the guitar style metal, but I like pretty much everything else.

What stuff did or do you do regarding bass playing that is technically wrong but you do it anyway out of pure laziness? As an example, when I was a beginner me and my friend used to cover a lot of rage against the machine songs but I couldn't be bothered to detune to drop D all the time, so I just played everything in standard tuning and hoped nobody would notice.

He does have a lot of gigs and seems to have plenty of evidence of his playing up (though none of it will load for me), so I can't imagine him being too shoddy, his 'best in the world' thing just looks like a play on the Carlsberg beer ads. Maybe he was just trying to help, albeit not very tactfully, some people don't come across well on the net through no fault of their own. If it was some kid with no gigs and no evidence of his ability up then It'd be a different matter, his email does seem a bit dumb and pointless though, it just seems like a vague claim masked as advise that you could fabricate equally convincingly about almost any player.

[quote name='Linus27' post='214275' date='Jun 7 2008, 11:36 AM']Well I tried an Alesis SR16 at Andertons and I was a little disapointed. The guy in Andertons was as useless as possible because I was not interested in spending £250 on the latest model of drum machine. So he was not interested in showing me the Alesis SR16 but he did show me how to scoll through the drum patterns and then just walked away So I had a play but I just found the machine to limited. It only had about 4 jazz beats and lots of rock beats. I guess I could programme some but at this stage I wanted to avoid this. Thanks for the help so far but I think I am going to keep looking. I may just go with a metronome at the moment as something to play along to.[/quote] The presets are okish, it comes into it own when you get into programming your own beats and sequencing full songs. The only thing I found I couldn't do was tempo changes mid song, you can bring it in and out at different tempos though with the tap tempo and some footpedals.