Woodinblack

Obviously the weight doesn't equal quality, but I know on the few occasions i have specified the wood in a bass, the lighter ones were more expensive.

I was until 46 when my knee collapsed. Now I can't be bothered struggling with stuff. for 95% of my gigs in pubs, absolutely noone in the audience is going to be able to tell the difference between my valve amp and my tc450, which goes over my neck in a bag and I can carry it at the same time as the speakers. If I have the space on stage and the easy load in I will take the CTM. As long as I can be far enough away from it as my main gigging basses have nordy big singles in and multiple large transformers don't mix well with them.

To be fair, the drummer helps.

Umm.. isn't it? I haven't used my CTM100 for the last 20 gigs or so, just didn't have the space to take it in or the effort to fight through a pub crowd with it.

Hit me with your rythmn stick. For years it was just way too fast, then one day, it wasn't. Litterally one day, I couldn't play it the previous day, my hand worked it out while I was sleeping. Still can't play it well, but not really the point!

The CTM300 will take a few years off it!

How good is your back?

Better that way round certainly. Shipping is never a fun thing.

The look of the top of the neck of a bass when you are playing. If there was only one decent bit of wood, that is where it needs to be!

Maybe not in the same year as getting the Shuker and Ibanez EHB. Anyway, can't buy any more until I have sold some, numbers too high

Same here. Unfinished instruments as my wife calls them. used to have a telecaster with that transparent yellow stuff on it, she wouldn't allow that in the living room collection. If you are not colouring it, it needs to have some pretty impressive wood.

Depends how hot it is...

I have asked what the price on a 5 string like that was already. Not going to get one.. not going to get one.. not going to get one...

If I was in that situation I would go back to a TC combo. One box, spectacomp, amp, cab, tuner, audio lead, power lead, jobs done. I quite often wonder why I don't go back to that.

I must admit I would always put the whole thing with the case in cardboard to protect the case from getting scratched or the clamps being ripped off. I would view it as too much of a challenge for a courier otherwise if they knew it was a hard case! DPD certainly insist on it being in cardboard.

I think the pink looks great, its a good choice on Ibanezes part, sort of goes with the green option really. Now I have my replaced EHB, I must say that it and the shuker are all I am playing these days. The shuker is better standing up and the EHB is better sitting down.

Yep, can't go wrong with a patio sound!

There is a mod you can do to the CP which enables the analogue piano mode. I am not using my dx much at the moment as I am not gigging, but it will be back in use when / if we eventually do!

Oh yes, forgot about that one. Good idea. I don't want to step up to more leads, I already do all the leads including spares for when the guitarists fender leads fail again, don't want more but the bag is a good plan. Having said that, I didn't have much more room until recently when I changed car, so probably a good time to look at what I carry now. Assuming we get back to gigs at some point.

I think it seems that to most schools, music was a lesson to punish bad teachers, like RE, the ones they would get given if they had spare hours that didn't matter much, which is a bit of a shame!

Funny, I would view it the other way round. I would expect an expensive bass to be lightweight and a cheap bass to be heavy. I don't know about stingrays though. My expensive basses are the swamp ash ones, my harley benton was the heaviest bass I had!

Here is my lead bag after a gig: Before a gig it is very neat and organised, but afterwards everything just gets rammed in so I can leave, and it is also the one time when other people touch the leads. Bit of a mess really and that bag is starting to break now, with all the extra leads I have, especially since getting all the 10M red leads. How do you get your leads to gigs?

Are they really that mad?

As an aside on that, the XAirs internal wifi, for years I heard the 'oh you shouldn't use the internal router it won't work' and thought it was daft because it always worked. Then one gig, it just didn't, it was an absolute nightmare as I would try and make changes and they would ping back, or just happen 20 seconds later, completely lost control of it. Just the number of people in the crowd with phones looking for wifi, nothing you can predict beforehand. I alway have a 5GHz minirouter with WPA (£10 from pc world, smaller than the psu) connected to the xair, and connect to it from that. No trouble since that. I also have an ethernet cable in my bag, because I like being able to cope with everything I can think about, although never needed it!

Turns out I was wrong on that, you can't make your own models like Amp, but you can select rigs like Jam Up. Which is a shame as amp is very impressive, I guess you have to get their proper amps for that. Overall, the amp is good. It is fantastic for guitar, it is not really got much low end for bass, so at volume it would certainly struggle. With headphones it is obviously fine - shame it doesn't have a line out, might modify mine at some point to make one. The software is fantastic. When I first had it it would have trouble connecting, but thet seems to have stopped, probably one of the updates I did. So you turn the iPad on, you get the spark amp which lets you pick the model you want, and the effects etc and store them in the amp (it has a load of knobs on the top which you can adjust stand alone). Then it has a play section where you can select pretty well any song, it analyses it and gives you the guitar chords automatically. It either knows them instantly or it takes 30 seconds or so to analyse them, and it does it really well. As a guitar teaching tool, its second to none. But it is still handy on the bass. There are several different amp types and a load of effects, they work fine. Then you can play along with whatever you are playing on the iPad. There are some other lesson things, there is a section for bass where it plays chords and you do a baseline which is pretty useful, 'bass in the style of' with what is supposed to be generic music in a style for you to bass with but is actually pretty well a song from that style with no bass. Clearly this is a guitar tool and as it is, it is pretty fantastic. As a bass tool it is less focused and not as good, but still well worth having. As a bass amp it isn't great, and it isn't necessarily about size as it isn't much different to the Bose S1 that I use as my normal practice amp (obviously the Bose is twice the price) which handles bass with no issue. If I could have one change it would be a line out that I could plug into an amp, or maybe even just a speaker out (now there is a mod I might do) that I could plug into a proper speaker, as I am sure it is more a speaker issue than an amp issue. However that gets away from its portability. Also a shame it doesn't run in batteries. All in all though, I am pretty happy with it and I use it quite a lot.