Woodinblack

I posted that a few pages earlier, and even tagged him - no reply @Bluewine - you still out there?

I have a couple of them, they are good preamps - pots not fantastic, but good enough and obviously the better shielded the better.

Ultimately I might just put an mm pickup on the tmb35 at some point

Wow - would so love that - a defense against the singer jumping into your space

Eric Clapton is very much a guitarist first and foremost. I suppose sting is best known as a singer

I was going for the bilboard chart positions - they are the ones that 50 cent also had. To be honest I have no idea who drake is, but that isn't surprising, not my demographic There seems to be a whole thread here that I care how many people bought how many singles. I don't - I just think the whole 'beatles sold all these singles they must be fantastic musicians' line that seems very odd, especially from those people who don't rate current chart toppers. I mean if you look at spoitifys top 100 - the beatles aren't anywhere to be seen.

There is always the EHB short scale. Slightly different price bracket though! Not sure what the pickups are, they don't say anything, they look pretty generic. I would suspect they would be similarish. It is very clearly not SR like at all though!

Which is easy when everyone is rubbish. In 2006 the charts were in such a bad way that a number one got there with just 17,000 sales. 10 years before that it wouldn't have got in the top 40 with that, so it isn't a fixed amount. The year that we are talking about for the beatles, they didn't make the top bought songs, that was held by two roy orbison songs and two jim reeves songs, and only one of theirs beat the two cilla black songs. And what I am pointing out, is that if your logic says "The beatles must have been good, because of their chart success", then you have to accept the logic that it means they are not as good as Justin Beiber, or Drake!

Indeed - only equalled by 50 cent and drake. Generally I would put that at a sign of a very poor year with not much around. Same as a few years ago when ed sheeran had 12 songs in the top 20. And recently Taylor Swift had 5 songs in the top 20, and that album wasn't as good as the previous one!

Honestly I would think that Maria Carey and Madonna probably got most of their hits before the streaming age.

Yep, would be interested in that. It is really the only blot (not that it is a major thing) on an otherwise splendid instrument

Indeed, chart position is important - they got one more number one song in the top ten than Mariah Carey, and almost as many top 10 hits as Drake and Madonna. Also only 10 weeks less cumulative time in the charts as Justin Beiber.

I won't play oasis, because I really hate the sound. I am not bothered by blur either way and they are not of my generation either. TBH, although the whiney horrible sound of oasis puts my teeth on edge, what I hate more is "cover bands playing oasis" and "drunk people in pubs singing oasis" Beatles, not so bothered about either way, we do "come together" and "twist and shout" (I know that's not really Beatles but it is), and I enjoy doing both of them, no particular desire to do more. pin the grand scheme of pop I think he was a good bass player, singer and songwriter even if not particularly my thing. I think they moved music on. Also seeing them playing live on early recordings they are very tight as a group and confident, I would be happy to be in a group that tight, whatever they were playing

So not really today, it was last week. After much deciding on a short scale bass, I decided I wanted to get the TMB35 but turned out there aren't many around until things are restocked . I had a previous bad experience of dealing with Bax, but as this is quite a cheap bass anyway (and a tenner cheaper from bax), I thought I might as well try them. Was disappointed when I saw from the tracking that it was in Amsterdam, but it spent a weekend travelling and turned up without trouble on the date when it said it would, so full marks for them, and it seems like apart from having to deal with our UPS guy, they seemed to do the job too. So the bass is a 5 string 30" scale with wider than I like string spacing and quite a fat neck for an ibanez - nothing like an SR. It has a P pickup and a J pickup, and is passive with a tone control. It was £193. It came setup fine, and I haven't had to adjust anything at all. The tone control was loose as the bolt had fallen off the pot, but turned out I had to take them all off to get the plastic off anyway. The colour is probably best described as 'toothpaste green'. It is reasonably light compared to most of my full length basses but the headstock is a bit massive and the machineheads are large, so it is noticably headstock heavy both sitting and standing, which is unfortunate, not sure if I can do much about that. I find the headstock ugly but on a bass like this I don't mind so much. It is hugely fun to play and it is an easy thing to just pick up and play which is what is happening with it, it sits behind me at my work desk and gets picked up a lot. Sound wise it sounds great, especially the B string, which is very useable and it doesn't sound like a short string, or like you are missing anything. the P pickup is great and with mixing of the j pickup there are a lot of really useable sounds. The J pickup on its own is a bit noisy and thin, but its ok. It is definitely playing above its cost. I would have no problem gigging this - in fact at some of the more 'down to earth' venues, I almost certainly will! The bass - Pigeon for scale

Does this help at all? bass.mp3

Hmm.. We are 3 pages into a conversation about McCartney, and haven't heard anything from @Bluewine, hope all is ok?

I find it hard to image that the Hofner looked better than anything!

Hard to imagine that Paul McCartney could be under appreciated when hardly any time goes by on here without a thread on how excelent he was. So I think he is probably appreciated enough!

I am sure he is playing enough BPM to make the gold standard

We have 2 in July, 2 in august and 2 in september so far for the summer, (and others further out as well as some posponed weddings next year) so far. I thought we had something for the end of june but it doesn't seem to be in the calendar, maybe not sorted yet.

If the 16.5 feels good, it seems like it is the right thing to play

What - no gold knobs?? 😮

Oh ok, sorry. I have no real problem going between 4 and 5 strings, just the spacing. As much as I only play 5 strings, and the 5 string fretless ibanezes are great, i never really found the B string on fretless all that useful. They don't seem to work well as flatwounds and they are a bit flappy on roundwounds!

Remap the fretboard? hardly, the strings are just a bit further apart. It is an inconvenience yes, but no real difference apart from the muscle memory of location.