Happy Jack

Best thing is when you turn up at a jam with a bass that looks like you found it in a skip, and when all the guys with their Stingrays and Dingwalls and Sadowskys have been up and played root+5 for their three songs, you provide 10 minutes of aural chocolate ...

Playing a big pub in Ickenham (just outside Uxbridge), first time we've played there so should be interesting.

£2k for two sets? Huh. Kids today, eh, they don't know they're Bjorn.

Spoiler: This isn't going to end well. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64063660

A lot less than you think ... NZ$ is worth 52p.

Where's the loo? Couldn't hold on if I wanted to.

Mind you, given the age range of the guests perhaps it should be Gimme Gimme Gimme A Nan After Midnight.

https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/12/22/money-money-money-abba-spat-goes-to-disputes-tribunal/?fbclid=IwAR2DyZEOtxKjrLv9wDyR0_SAjYhm8P2k4z_-FdPQVtwMzxrGmJ3XzMpcYLY

Different world now, with crowd-sourcing and loads of freebies on that there Internet thingy. If soundmondo didn't exist then the Reface DX would be an awkward beast supplied with a wide range of fairly useless sounds as standard. A couple of hours on soundmondo and I have every sound I am ever likely to need (playing in general covers bands and a specialist soul band) and all with no need at all to learn how to 'tweak' any parameters, still less actually program anything.

That's an 8-string uke-bass, right? 😂

Just slave it to a 76/88-key unit with the (supplied) midi break-out cable. That's what I do with my Reface CP. I hate midi and don't even begin to understand it (AFAIK those are 5-pin DIN plugs) but even I could manage that much. 🙄

Crackling is usually caused by coating with olive oil and sea salt, and then whacking the temperature up very high for the first half-hour. Hope that helps.

Some years ago @Silvia Bluejay and I did a tour of the Fodera workshop in Brooklyn. Silvie wrote it up afterwards, but I can't remember where it was published. They're lovely people, it's a very nice production facility, they make great basses. I had my choice of them all to noodle on for an uninterrupted hour, which I took full advantage of. I could have bought one had I really wanted it, but none of the ones I played made me think I couldn't live without it, which rather surprised me. I've had basses by Alleva Coppolo and especially by Mike Lull which were far more my cup of tea. My experience has always been that it's individual basses I fall for, rather than brand names or reputations. On that same New York trip I played a Warwick Jack Bruce Custom (and yes, that really did exist) which I confidently expected would be complete pants (I hate Warwicks), and it just blew me away. I also played a Fender Custom Shop Dusty Hill Precision which was just ludicrously overpriced at US$6000 or something, and Silvie had to pry it out of my hands and frogmarch me out of the shop. Don't you know you never can tell ...

Hmmmmmmmmm ... even with that nasty poly-peeling going on, I'm not convinced. Right now, it is what it is and always has been, a cheap Japanese copy that was and remains better than it has any right to be as a player's bass. And yes, I used to own a more-or-less identical bass. If you leave it alone and just play it, then that's what it will always be, plus it has FORTY YEARS of your life baked into it. Fiddle about with it just once and that's gone. Worse, any decent refin is almost certainly going to cost more than the bass is worth right now. From an investment POV (and I know that's not what this is about) you're talking money straight down the drain. If I was lucky enough to have owned an instrument for as long as that, I'd leave it untouched, take it to dodgy pub gigs and jam nights, and enjoy playing it and the memories that come with it. The refin money would go on something more useful.

Done. Mind you, I get a dodgy email from you @ped and all bets are off. 😂

Given that my two main keyboards are a Hammond and a Korg Kross, the DX is there to 'fill the gaps' in the range of voices supplied by the main two. With 32 carefully-chosed presets, I can do the full Rick Wakeman if I need to. Now all I need to do is learn to play keyboards. 🙄

I'm guessing you never discovered https://soundmondo.yamahasynth.com/ then? Most of the 32 presets / favourites that the Reface DX comes with are, I agree, complete pants. But then you crowd-source (through Soundmondo) what others have tweaked or programmed, and things move along really quite fast. At least half the sounds on my DX came (free) from Tom Ansink.

Only if it's a 4-string converted to a 5-string (i.e. one extra string squeezed into the existing size). With 'proper' 5-string Ricks being readily available, that's another reason not to buy a conversion jobbie.

Send it back immediately, demand a replacement. I've had two of these and they're (usually) bulletproof. If you have an electrical problem buried in there, you don't want to spend the rest of your ownership waiting for it to obey Sod's Law.

Yes yes yes, but what's that in hectares?

Luckily enough, running flat out for eight hours is not one of my requirements.

Yup, I have a Tonika hanging over my fireplace. Srsly.

Finest kind.

Well certainly NOT as a headphone amp! The PJB Bass Buddy has always been the category killer for that purpose. I long ago gave up worrying about the metrics quoted in adverts. Actual volume frequently bears very little resemblance to what the figures might predict, and the choice of cab is IMHO by far the most important factor. I have two potential uses: 1. For when I want to play in my woods up in the Chilterns. This turned out to be an unexpected Godsend during Covid, since my band could drive independently to the woods, then set up in a civically-responsible socially-distanced sort of way and keep rehearsing. I have alternative ways to achieve this, but they're pretty clunky. 2. For busking ... something I have never done in my life, but a guy I know does this purely for fun (with a Taylor, no less) and he's offered to take me along as his personal rhythm section. Would either of these justify splashing £349? Don't be bloody silly! 😂