cytania

My four year old trusty Laney Richter 1 is making a headache inducing high-pitched ringing. It's like string harmonics even if the strings vibrate minutely. I think this problem is more apparent since I got a decent cable from obbm/RockWire. Now looking for a practice amp. Thought of an Eden N8 but noticed a review that mentioned treble/string noise on this too. Anyone know the Line6 Lowdown Studio 110, I like the sound of this as it has DI out so could be used if the stage rig fails. There's also the Roland Cubes and Phil Jones Cub... Or should I be going virtual? Amp simulator on the computer or in a pod? But I'm not keen on headphones...

Loose wood nodule, amazingly uber-gnarly! Could add distortion even when the WishBass is played acoustically. Elsewise I'd lock it in with some glue. Love the gnarly wood, don't let ParcelFarce detract from a wonderful piece.

Oh, now my head's really spinning... When I looked into scales I thought it would be like ear training. There'd be a dozen or so scales I could play, get used to the sound of and then I'd be hearing them in music I want to play (rock, soul, ska covers). At present I think I could gamble on 'major or minor' without losing too much money I think what's confusing me is that in a lot of cases many of these scales are for exotic stuff, I guess most music is standard major scales. Certainly when I play the major scale at various points on the neck all sorts of melodies come to mind (or is it that they come to my fingers?), usually old hymns, children's songs and national anthems. But I would like to get better at spotting when something unusual is being done and have an idea of just what. Anyone know of a resource where popular songs are broken down and labelled scale-wise?

Thanks JR, what's this Perfect business? I understand flat and I assume major means as in the normal major scale I can play. Are there any other varieties of scale lurking other than natural, pentatonic or chromatic? Where does chromatic get used other than as a flourish?

I used to think there was just major and minor. I got that, one sounds happy the other sad. Then I was told scales could be diminished or dominant. Then there are modes which are the particular flavours of major and minor. But where does pentatonic and chromatic fit? And chromatic, that's all the notes right?, almost a denial of the scale since nothing is selected or omitted. Alot of the modes seem so exotic that naming examples means experimental jazz and classical exercises, doesn't help get familiar with them. Can anyone explain in plain language? How do they teach this stuff to children?

Raise your hand and repeat after me. 'This is my bass. There are many like it but this one is mine. I picked it out of the many and I like the way it sounds. Others may not understand it. Others may not like the way it looks. Others may not like it's action or it's neck or it's tuners or it's pickups... but this is my bass and I will practice with it and gig with it and sweat with it until I am at one with the music. With it I shall take the drumbeat and add melody. With it I shall lock in and find the pocket. Guitarists may get the glory up front, the audience may hang on the singer's every word but without the bass there is no funk. Without bass there is no grind, no growl and no grunt. With my bass the music will rock. With my bass I shall lay down the low end and groove. This I swear.' Thank you, now call me Leonard Pyle!

Part of the mystique of 'tonewoods' is creating the idea that if it says Ash it'll sound X, if it says Wenge it'll sound Y. This appeals to people who want to buy blind off the internet and feel like they are getting a known quantity. It also appeals to those making expensive custom orders. You tick your spec boxes, you factor against money and voila you have 'the best' instrument. Big makers are often guilty of making a wood sandwiches and covering them in finishes and then putting a bland tag against them for their website comparison applet. Bespoke luthiers also want to encourage the idea that they can control the sound when you custom order. However I have met people who vow never to order bespoke again. People need to get out and try out the actual instruments. We can't cut out the perplexing trugging around shops by substituting brand-names and wood names. The results of all the maker's careful manufacturing _can_ vary.

Start of last night's show, wallop! A song called 'Get Out Of Denver' which might be a Pete Seeger cover but sounded like the band playing Johnny B. Goode badly with cobbled together lyrics... But the attitude was there; lead singer wearing his girlfriend's oriental silk top, the drummer playing in his underpants and the bass player actually sporting a black t-shirt with the word 'PUNK' on it in big white letters. If labels make genres...

Ou7shined - I'm now imagining your place to be like Q's lab in a Bond movie, but for basses. "Careful with that 007, it may look like a P bass but it has a laser and tear gas built in for difficult gigs."

So I was putting away my Steve Miller CD when I noticed the band picture looked weird. Or rather Gerald Johnson's bass. So I googled him up and saw this [url="http://www.myspace.com/geraldjohnson101/photos"]http://www.myspace.com/geraldjohnson101/photos[/url] A left-handed body with a right hander's neck bolted on?! Clearly his bass of choice not a pawn shop find. What can you see as the advantages or drawbacks of this arrangement? Did Leo get it wrong?

So, must be a quirk of the circuit then, I can't see spear spending money developing special weedy pickups for no reason, particularly as alot of the hardware is standard stock stuff, hmm.

On most active basses when the battery goes that's it, nada, nowt, no signal. My Spear S2 has a life saving grace, a passive/active switch that means when the battery dies I can keep on playing. At the weekend I had the two 9v batteries die at soundcheck and replaced them with my spare set (brand new but they had been in the gig bag a few months). Second song of the set and the spare set fade. I switch up the gain and play on (thank god). Obviously the answer is to put fresh out the packet batteries in pre-gig but now I'm back home I notice how weedy the sound is with the practice amp. I guess I was lucky the SWR only needed a small gain tweak (my Spear is 18v). So do they use weaker pickups with active basses? Or is that the level I'd get with a passive P or J? Anyone experimented? Can you just make a passive pickup bass active by just adding a preamp? The other nagging doubt is the neutrik silent jack cable started interacting with the low batteries at soundcheck and I had to keep pushing it hard to keep things from cutting out. Anyone else had silent jack shenanigans that weren't the collar sticking leaving it on? Off to order an OBBM cable that I will treat nice and only bring out for gigs (no practice maltreatment for this one).

You lot get to move around? We played the smallest stage last night, more of a 'minstrel's gallery' above the bar. I got elbowed when the singer got kinetic and then felt the tiny patter of drums sticks in the back. Towards the end of the set I experimented with a semi-al-fresco 'almost out on the fire escape in the rain' position. Could have managed with a 1 metre lead! On a plus side everyone said we sounded great, seems the hall acoustics and PA did us alright.

Anyone remember the Real Audio format? Sounds like this forum is ready to throw MP3 in the same dumpster. The only real argument is between wav/aiff and flac. Nobody has really tried to convince me to stop spinning CDs but most are drawn to computerizing their music. Back in the 70s/80s people got turned on to Hi-Fi by hearing some else's system or hearing one in a specialist shop. No one mentioned backup or convenience. The sound was an instant seller. By the way, if the Sonos goes up in smoke does home insurance cover the downloads in it? More to the point has anyone here lost a physical record collection and got the cost back on their insurance?

I have no plans to go 'non-physical'. It strikes me that the reasons for going 'all MP3' are flawed. Ok so a house fire could take my CD collection. But wouldn't the iPod or Sonos also burn? Indeed one small electrical disaster could wipe out everything. I was on an IT course earlier this year, most of the guys there had gone to hard drive for movies and music. When I asked most of them admitted to losing all their stuff previously due to a hard drive failure. How many now had cast iron backup? Surprisingly few. My theory is that deep down people have grown to relish losing everything. It gives them a chance to redefine their musical tastes by the process of repurchasing. Gives them a killer collection when I still have a seven inch of the Goombay Dance Band somewhere. At this point the hippy skinflint in me rebels. "Hey dude's why you giving all your bread to The Man? Oh and it don't sound as good neither." Don't follow the crowd, you can get the CD off Amazon cheaper than the total album download cost.

Just remembered another reason for digital harshness Beedster. Watchout for iTunes' 'Sound Enhancer', hidden away under Preferences/Playback on a Mac. Initially it sounds great but after a while it just grates. AFAIK it's a software compressor, no on the file format but on the sound output, just the same as a compression pedal. My suspicion is that alot of soundcards and playback softwares are introducing their idea of a 'sound sweetener'. Which is a long way from the 'give me the source straight' hifi philosophy. Oh and a real sound killer is located at the back of your computer. The heat fan. CD will always sound better just because it's mechanism is quieter.

Yes, you'll certainly notice the drop from CD to MP3. AIFFs and WAVS are another matter but you'll need a huge hard disk to get any decent CD collection ripped in it's entirety. Also hard disks have a habit of dying so you'll need a back up device (or taking the CDs out of storage and re-ripping them becomes a chore every 6 or 7 years). The good news is a cheap CD player today is on a par with the high end a decade or so back. The bad news is there are fewer and fewer in the mid to budget marketplace. Download services often have some very poor versions of songs available. Some are clearly from 'hits collection' masters. Whilst some 'digital version's are HARSH eg. Snow Patrol 'Eyes Open' on iTunes. You'll also find that ripping from your own CD to MP3 gives some odd results, some mixes just seem to get screwed by the codec. Raw, gritty 60s tracks can become mushy mud. But there's no predictable pattern. I say we aren't there yet. Give it some years and maybe they'll come up with a format intended for music not ripped of a 90's movie encoding codec.

More important to put the oil on instruments that aren't getting alot of playing. Rosewood type boards will look dull and dry. With playing your skin greases keep things right. I disagree with RhysP, luthiers like to douse a board in oil before a refret job. Old dry boards split easier as the frets are pulled. The above doesn't really apply to varnished maple, or indeed Rickenbacker's with the original heavy varnish still on.

Think of the 'Town Called Malice' riff as a frustrated motown groove. Where motown would go somewhere Malice just repeats angrily. Make sure your band are following you in this song, there's that crucial bit where they all drop out leaving the bass solo. Also on the original there's a slight cheat as they jump in a fraction early for 'ghost of steam train', vital you work out with the drummer how to get that bit. Oh and the 'roast beef against the wall' slide/slurs always cause me grief. The good news is the public love it, feather in the cap of any band brave enough to pull it off.

"I've met a number of acoustic builders who have said to me that wood doesn't matter in acoustics either" The most obvious difference is playing any mahogany acoustic versus a normal pine top, the mahogany is instant delta blues and no maker can seem to mess it up. There are maker differences though Taylors have a trebley voice, not sure what part of their construction does this but even my cheap one has it. Oh and if you have £5K spare try a McPherson, their curvy bracing system gives their guitars something extra. I think this maker's tone thing holds more water than woods. Ibanez always has a clean, clinical (in a good way) sound to my ear no matter what style bass they do. Then there's the mystery of the Rickenbacker clank; huge bridge? metal clad pickup? or dual truss rod? but it's there waiting for a pick to unleash it. I think the moral of today's thread is yes wood is important but simply looking for the tag 'alder body' or 'maple' in the spec is not going to guarrantee a particular tone in a bass. I now resolve to ignore the body wood and try everything out in a store.

In theory you'd get some very unmusical instruments if you were able to make them out of say balsa at the low density extreme (any neck joint would shear off as you tightened the first string, balsa is that soft (bizarrely it's classed as a hardwood!)) or leadwood at the other (not sure you could even find a bit big enough for even a minimal body, once bought my brother a tiny ornament made of it, very heavy for it's size). Point of this is that guitar makers are trying for a proper decent sound so make choices that support each other. No one is in the business of making nasty sounding instruments that prove a point. There's another recent thread BC at present about non-wood bodies and the philistines should try a few acrylic et al basses. I was quite surprised how clearly different they sound. Somewhere out there I remember a research picture of the resonant parts of an electric guitar and the body hardly vibrates at all compared to the neck. So these experiments with lumber are revealing that in a sense the body and the body/neck joint are as much a damper as they are a resonator. Clearly the lumber used was part of the mid-spectrum of useable woods between the balsa/leadwood poles. If wood hasn't dried a long while it can split in itself and real long term the paint finishes that go over it can develop long splits (have seen such on a 70's Fender bass). Clearly there's alot going on even before we get to wood sandwiches. The point of the lumber experiments IMHO is that body wood isn't the most vital part of the equation. Alot of the obsession with body wood comes from the guitar world in particular acoustic guitars. Here the neck is stiffer and the guitar box does the main vibrating. With acoustics you really can hear alot of difference (bracing matters alot but I digress). One thing I've noticed in my quest for a good cheap bass is that manufacturers have a pecking order basicly maple/basswood/alder. See a cheap natural finish it's usually maple, see cheap alder body it's often multi-blocks with a veneer ontop. I've not found anyone breaking away from the pack. Industry delusion or basic wood economics?

Lots pf Tenacious D stage slide training must have worn the knees out of those those jeans...:-) Solid blues.

Didn't Fender's always used to be strings through bent tin bridge? When did the USA Fenders come to have through body stringing?

Thinking again, maybe next rehearsal I'll suggest doing it slower with the riff double time, maybe our drummer will pick up on the proper feel and it'll mesh more.

Thanks Graham, the audience has danced like billy-o every time we've played it. I'm also thinking our drummer is laying down a far more basic beat than the pitta-patta twist pattern of Ringo's. Also our guitarist had a revelation from the 'Butchering The Beatles' album, so it's quite rocked up, but... Can't help wanting to get it more Beatlesesque...