chriswareham

I suspect that whichever factory in China originally "cloned" the 4003 did so from pictures rather than forking out for a real one to examine. Since intellectual property is not a thing in China, that original clone design then made its way to all the factories out there. Checking Aliexpress, different sellers do sometimes offer variations but that terrible bridge is pretty much standard as far as I can tell, so I guess that's produced by one manufacturer. Something similar happened in Japan, where intellectual property and patents weren't really a thing until at least the late 1970s. If you read the autobiography of Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, he talks about an ever expanding book of designs that did the rounds of Japan's early electronic music equipment manufacturers. That's probably why copying of US made guitars became such a big thing, as the concept of something being a "counterfeit" was not part of the culture.

I use the earlier 16 bit version of the Akai EIE, since it has a lot of features and also functions as a USB MIDI unit. Works perfectly with my Debian Linux system, and pops up cheaply second hand. (The later Pro version doesn't work with Linux though, as it uses it's own driver for 24 bit support).

Two others that come to mind are Modern English and Love And Rockets. They also suffered at the hands of the UK music press, particularly L&R who had already endured a lot of spite in their preceding incarnations as Bauhaus and Tones On Tail.

The Psychedelic Furs had far more success in the US than at home in the UK. The infamously bitchy music press here wrote them off when they released their third album, and back then bad reviews in the weeklies could kill a band overnight.

I seem to recall that the Spotify desktop application is an abomination that basically wraps the core of the Chrome web browser. If so, I wonder if one of their JavaScript geniuses introduced an OS version check that sees that you're running version macOS 10 and is trying to suggest that you update to Windows 11.

I'll check - I now recall the thread on here about that bloke. Thanks for the info. Our singer is the person that deals with the booking agencies and promoters, so I'm going to suggest that he contacts the promoter and makes it clear that unless a fully equipped PA and a sound engineer is provided that we'll be cancelling the show.

A tribute act I'm in are booked to play Ronnie Roos in a few days time. We've just had a message from someone saying that they have replaced the original promoter since he was "doing a bad job". So far, so worrying. Now we've been asked if we'll be bring our own mixing desk and sound engineer, since the venue apparently doesn't have either... I can't find much more than pictures or flyers when I search for the venue, including their own Facebook page. The best I can see is a couple of pictures of an unusual but decent looking venue with a bunch of adequate looking PA speakers to the sides of a low stage. So have any Basschatters played this venue recently, and if so what was the deal with the PA and sound engineer?

I think this one qualifies as a bad cover of what was a bloody annoying song in its original form: Human League - Rock Me Again And Again And Again And Again And Again And Again As for the vocals on this, if it was me I would have wanted to forget about it rather than release it: Gary Numan - On Broadway And any cover by Guns And Roses. I loathe them as a band anyway, but they also released a lame version of one of my favourite songs and their fans seem to think they wrote it. I'll link the original version instead: Rocket From The Tombs - Ain't It Fun

Same height as me apparently (6'4" / 193cm). I briefly played a Hofner violin bass, which really did look like a ukulele on me 😄

Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. Not the most proficient bassist but he's pretty decent on drums, which reinforces my view that every musician harbours a secret desire to really be a drummer.

Yup, that's the one! Sounds like the staff member that claimed it was Wyman's was full of it then, as I can't see them not mentioning that to you if really had been his.

It was the last time I went in their, which is about a year or so ago. There's a set of stairs leading down from the ground floor to basement, and it's hanging on the wall about halfway down. It's actually in unplayable condition, with considerable damage to the body. Surprised they've not had it restored if it really is ex-Rolling Stones.

The story I heard is that Rose Morris got annoyed with Rickenbacker not shipping enough instruments to meet demand, so they imported good quality fakers from Japan and sold them under their Shaftesbury brand. As well as the 4001/4003 style basses they also made a semi acoustic - a battered example, claimed to have previously been owned by Bill Wyman of the Stones - is on the wall of the Rose Morris shop in London. I owned one of the semi acoustics, and it was a nice bass with a very narrow neck.

Having your only web presence on Facebook means you're reducing your potential audience by a massive amount. An increasing number of people have never signed up for a Facebook account, have closed their account or haven't used it in years. Facebook are also keen to make their site a "walled garden", so pages are becoming less likely to be indexed by search engines such as Google or Bing. Your best bet is to cover as many bases as possible - website, Facebook (depending on the demographic you're targetting), Bandcamp, etc. As others have said, shop around for a cheap domain name registrar (a company that will let you buy a domain name such as mybandname.com) and web hosting. There are free websites that allow you to build an acceptable looking set of webpages, such as Wix. If you have the skills or a reasonably web savvy friend, then copy the web pages from the website builder's website, remove any unwanted branding ("this site built with wix.com", etc) and upload the pages to your web hosting.

Best bass amp I've ever played was an Acoustic Control Corporation 140 into an Ampeg fridge - phenomenally loud, definitely more than the 100W or so it was supposedly meant to be. It was very clean sounding and had only the most basic controls of volume, treble, bass (plus a completely useless bright switch that cut all the bass out). If I needed grit then I just put a distortion pedal in front of it. It was eventually paired with an Acoustic 370 with a splitter box so effects (chorus or distortion) went to the 140 and a clean, bass heavy signal went to the 370. Foolishly sold the two amps to buy an Ampeg SVT CL, but I now own the combo version of the 140 thanks to a seller on this here forum.

I've actually used a Hofner Violin bass (one of the cheap Ignition ones) for metal. It was OK, but the novelty quickly wore off and I went back to a Stingray. Talking of unlikely genres for particular makes or models of bass guitar, Peter Steele used an Alembic Spoiler as his main bass in his thrash band Carnivore. He only retired it from live use with his later band Type O Negative because it had got a bit fragile from all the abuse it had suffered. He still used it for Type O studio recordings though.

First gig was aged nineteen in 1991 at a venue in the hellhole that is Aldershot, home of the British Army. I'd only been playing bass for a few months and I recall having an A3 pad of paper on the floor with the song structures written on them in marker pen. I really wanted to be a keyboard player, but very few bands in the area wanted one since they were mostly trying to emulate local heroes Mega City 4. I really liked Peter Hook's bass playing though, so I traded my Roland MC-202 synth/sequencer for a terrible Aria bass (one of the later Korean made ones rather than a decent Matsumoku one). It was actually a good thing when the headstock snapped off the Aria a year or so later, as my next bass was a Westone Thunder which was a totally wonderful instrument.

I bought Chris's Acoustic 136 amplifier. Fantastic bit of kit, and Chris carefully packaged it for collection by a courier.

Google are removing the ability for Ublock Origin and similar extensions to function in a future version of Chrome. They've postponed the change a couple of times but the change is inevitable - after all, Google make the overwhelming majority of their revenue from adverts, so it's in their best interests to prevent people blocking them.

Running a bit of software at home called "Pi Hole" (it was originally intended to run on a cheap Raspberry Pi computer, but happily runs on any Linux based computer). It acts as a DNS service that blocks known advert sources. I also run the Ublock Origin extension in the Firefox web browser, and see virtually no adverts. If you use Google's Chrome browser, any of Microsoft's browsers (Internet Explorer, Edge, etc) or Safari then just stop and install Firefox with Ublock Origin. I'm always amused by how terrible other people's web browsing experiences are when I get to see what it's like without at least an ad blocker extension.

I used to tune as low as drop A. The thing I found that made a difference was using strings from a company called Circle K in the US. They're now using the brand name of Kalium, and sell custom sets that maintain a consistent tension for various tunings. Before that I would use the heaviest four strings from a five string set of Ernie Ball "Power Slinkys" (135, 105, 85, 70). They were great when I was doing drop C, but the lowest string became horribly slack and flabby sounding when used for drop A. Edited to add that these strings and tunings were on a Musicman Stringray, so similar neck to a Precision. I also had a similar set on an old Hondo Precision copy from the 1970s, and even with a traditional passive P bass pickup they sounded great.

Suicide - Ghost Rider. Three notes cycling in an utterly hypnotic and disturbing way. Fehlfarben - Militürk. Another late 1970's example of "less is more". (The version by DAF is even more spartan).

One of the few bands in my Dad's music collection that I actually liked. He had the Manifesto and Avalon albums, and I was delighted to discover their earlier stuff thanks to local second hand stores. Then in the YouTube age it was great to see videos of them on shows like Old Grey Whistle Test. Andy Mackay's impossibly tight strides and "crotch bulge" are a little unsettling though...

This reminds me of how disappointed I was to discover that the "brown note" wasn't really true.

Strings now on their way to a new home!