NancyJohnson

Following a chance meeting with Larry Hartke in New York, I had one with Hartke (I think it's probably still active). It was a somewhat lovely thing to behold; you just have visions of vans full of gear arriving, but in truth I only had three HyDrive cabinets off them, along with a replacement 10" speaker, as there was little necessity to keep swapping my backline out with fresh cabinets.

The voice of reason says: God, they look horrific. Message ends.

Ooh, I'd just like to direct you to this link. Same bass through the GED, pretty much the same settings, same interface: Let me know if you can hear the difference.

I'm having an issue with my GED 2112 unit and to support an ongoing query I have T21 and the UK distributor, if it's possible could I ask owners to dial up (for the sake of clarity) the Roundabout settings and record a short isolated bass clip and upload here please. If you listen to my mixdown it's producing a very uncharacteristic non-Ged tone, just a nasty phatty fuzz (there's two short pieces, the first is with the unit set to the manual's 'Roundabout' settings - which should be super bright - and for the second I've rolled the mid and mid shift forward to the two o'clock position which should enhance the drive...I've panned the drive to the left channel and the deep to the right. The deep side sounds fine, no issues with that). Getting a decent clanky tone from Tech21 stuff is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but apparently I've somehow lost the ability to do that with this unit. My BDDI and dUg stompboxes are fine, proving I have no issues with amps/cabinets. Thanks. Mixdown.mp3

Blimey, listen to you lot. When this was all fields, I used to drop the needle and play along with the track a few times. No tabs or software required.

A while back my old band were supporting a three piece punk band and their bass player was using an Affirma (or whatever it was called back then). No qualms about how it sounded, but it was the most ridiculous looking bass I'd seen in a while, especially in a punk band.

OK, here goes. Quite a while back I was listening to LBC radio (Robert Elms) and caught the tail end of a discussion in which someone was talking about the north side of Oxford Street. The guy was saying that when the old Tyburn Road was being redeveloped into Oxford Street, there wasn't wholesale demolition of the old warren of streets on the north side as Tyburn Road was elevated, higher that the surrounding land. As a consequence, there was little effort to raise the grade and in particular the location of one of the buildings HMV were using (I'm assuming the original site, but not 100% certain which one) had been built over the old street, literally by driving steel piles over it and that some of the houses and the original street still existed under the shop in the basement. I found this yarn fascinating, it has to be said. A while later I heard another radio phone in where someone was describing the houses and they were used for storing stock. I've not been able to find anything online to verify this; old maps seem to support there were streets and hearing the same thing twice from different sources gives the story a little credence.

Did anyone here work in either of the Oxford Street locations? I'm curious about something...

The Rock Box used to be wonderful...haven't been in there for years and it's only about ten minutes from me. Just as a trivia point, Ken put Muse on in the shop at a midnight show the day their first album was released.

Me and the good lady just watched it. I'll say from the outset that I never found This Is Spinal Tap remotely amusing and to describe the Bros: After the Screaming Stops as being comedy gold is a bit fallacious. Sure there's some truly terrible dialogue, but this isn't the Troggs Tapes or a documentary peppered with observational Tufnelesques such as, 'These go to eleven.' I found it very uncomfortable viewing to be honest; have no idea how much of it was scripted/staged, but some of the rehearsal footage reminded me of situations I'd been in in the past ('Is this what it was like in the Johnsons?' Asked my wife at one point.) Matt Goss just comes over like a mousy-haired and less-astute version of Jamie Redknapp, whereas Luke seems to be a little more switched on. Both of them seemed to be prone to turning on the waterworks at the mention of family/money. Sadly, no mention of Camberley life or Ken Craig (hopefully the lad distanced himself from this, but he seems to have landed on his feet). One viewing is enough!

Nail bars and coffee shops aside, pretty much every generic High Street in the country is dying. I feel that where electrical retailing needs to go is having more of a showroom and delivery type thing going down; no actual saleable stock held on the premises, so a Sony showroom, a Samsung showroom, an LG showroom etc. Just somewhere you can go to look and test a product, quiz a salesman (although the likelihood would be that the salesman would be just as clueless as the customer), buy it and have it delivered same day (or at least within 24 hours). If Amazon can do next day with Prime, I see no reason why manufacturers couldn't either work with them to expedite product to the customer on a next day basis or at least get their shizz together to do it themselves.

There's a short/succinct piece about HMV on the Guardian website, which pretty much sums up the how we all seem to think. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/28/hmv-music-high-street-chains-record-shops

HMV, even back in the day, always seemed to be well behind the curve and it was never a go to location when I was still buying CDs or DVDs. They'd always seemed to be too mainstream and didn't really do that particularly well. While I should feel concerned about the death of the high street, insofar as HMV goes, I'm indifferent. There's nowt specialist about them; Amazon do the same product, for cheaper and with next day delivery. Why would I ever schlep into town to buy from them?

Bwahaha. I doubt I can justify a trip there for a sub-$600 bass! If I could source one here, I'd be over it like a tramp on chips.

American Music have a bass I'm very interested in and they won't ship internationally. Just looking for someone to help out. Thanks.

It's Christmas morning. 4.23am. I'm wide awake, listening to foxes howling somewhere close by. And an owl hooting. Woo-hooooooo. Woo-hooooooooo.

The point here is that he's only really been collecting/purchasing older basses; irrespective of what actually qualifies as 'vintage', there's a ton of pre-CBS Fenders and despite personally not being a Fender fan, it is fantastic, at the very least from a comparison perspective, to see all these basses in one edition. He doesn't seem that interested with more recent instruments. Interestingly, there's a recent interview with Geddy Lee on You Tube where he says that this book represents his entire collection as of June/July 2018 and that it's already swelled by another 30 since they finished photographing the collection, so expect a second book in a couple of years.

Just spent an enjoyable two hours going through this book. If Geddy Lee wasn't so damn nice, I could honestly hate the guy for snagging so many beautiful instruments. Have to say that after 200 pages of drooling content, it's just information overload. The content steers you round the ultimate question of, 'Whatever happened to that <insert manufacturer here> bass?' before drawing you in for the last few pages of the really important guitars. There's no envy here in the slightest; it's just a lengthy journal about vintage bass collecting. He's been a successful musician for donkey's years and now he's simply kicking back and reaping the rewards of that. It's a beautiful publication.

Days In Europa was the first album I bought in the 1980s.

Yep. The 'Bean. They were amazingly talented and raw. I find it a bit disconcerting what they actually turned into, but hey ho.

Oooh, now you've done it. I know it's all subjective, but I was lucky enough to see them several times before they became the immaculately groomed and coiffured playthings of Simon Napier-Bell and they were insanely good, brilliant even. Those first two albums (and the Live In Japan EP) are still in regular rotation in our house. I may listen to Obscure Alternatives again this evening now...

Big Country were in no way Skids v2; there was certainly provenance through Stuart Adamson, but this was a wholly new band. The Crossing was a great album, truly wonderful and I'd happily put on record it's a more complete record than anything Skids put out. Steeltown lacked the consistency of the first album, by the time The Seer came out I'd moved on.

I had a quick look when I got home. Well worth the sub-£20 I paid through Amazon's pre-order. The cover price is $75. Woop.

It's all about diminishing returns. I've always had these girlish crushes on bands and tended to lose interest when Teresa from the typing pool mentioned in passing that they liked <insert band here>. The one that really irks me? Japan. Man alive, they were incredible until they did the change of direction around the time Quiet Life came out and Sylvian commenced crooning in a lower register. There's dozens more that were better early on. Dozens. Difficult second album syndrome. Van Halen, Living Colour, Fishbone, Jane's Addiction, Live, Butch Walker, Queen, Cheap Trick. Nine Inch Nails. The first two Stereophonics albums were very strong, now the band are a joke. I could keep going. Interestingly, it would be easier to list bands that have been horribly consistent.

Anyone got theirs yet?