NancyJohnson

I have a side jack/barrel on one of my Hamers. While it works ok, it simply will not stay tightly bolted in and the space inside the body cavity is a nightmare to get even a little spanner into to tighten the nut. Horrible things.

All down to personal preference, but you don't see many Hamer, Travis Bean, Mike Lull. At one point I thought I'd like an Aria Primary (one of the late '70s Jazz copies) to go with my Primary P-bass. Don't see these.

If that!

Not tending to do much home recording at the moment; got all the instruments, but guitar amp is elsewhere (and always such a faff to fire up, mic and use in the house). Never used amp-sims in my life, my only experience of anything similar is one producer insisting on recording guitars clean then adding effects in post. Armed with this, I just avoided them like the plague. Decided to spend an hour or two getting my head around amp sims. I'm running Cakewalk as my DAW, initially installed the Neural Amp Modeller (easy) and a couple .nam patches (it was harder trying to find the directory where to put these) and fired up Cakewalk. Honestly blown away. I downloaded a few more .nam files and some IRs. All free. Want to try and SVT through a Fender Tweed emulator? No problem. Want to sound like Eddie Van Halen? No problem. Within minutes I realised how unnecessary it was to have an amp set-up for home recording. I spent about four hours in all...a wonderful bank holiday diversion from the wind and rain happening outside. Only downside is my PC is woefully low on RAM so was getting some pops, so I've ordered a 16gb of (new) RAM.

I think it would be prudent to share who you play for (apologies if this has been mentioned elsewhere) and what you would gauge as 'a few knowing us in the UK'. A couple of years back my old band played three dates with a band of American younglings. They were travelling very light (minimal instrumentation/outboard) and were pretty much reliant on borrowing backline or sharing gear at each venue. One of the guys mentioned they had a small following in London, but needless to say not one of those following turned up. The live environment in the UK is, as I understand it, somewhat different to the US. People don't want to travel, it's difficult to park a car in a lot of venues and people would rather stay home and watch TV than pay to see a band.

It's also difficult enough if you're based in the UK as well!

As an aside, I've just eaten the Sweetwater sweeties that came in the box. Laffy Taffy. Kind of lime flavoured chewy Tootsie Roll. Soft toffee fudge thing. Dubble Bubble. Bubble gum. Softer than Basooka Joe, almost identical flavour. Smarties. Different to ours. Like little Love Hearts. Message ends.

Yarp, bloody whippersnappers! #335

I was on Bass world, honestly couldn't tell you what my username was; seem to remember being quite slack in moving over to Basschat and getting a membership number of 200 or something. It's odd how most of us older chaps were likely active on alt.bass or alt guitar.bass type newsgroups as well (back when we were all on AOL or had newsgroup access bundled in our email clients).

From past experience, it doesn't matter what you use, it's getting band members to actually use them.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

A year on and I'm still with Spotify. I run a Sonos system for my audio, stereo pairs (several), portable speakers. If anyone has been following the issues with the Sonos app in the last year, sticking with Spotify was probably a good decision, at least from the perspective of actually being able to push music to me system when the Sonos app was barely functioning. I think that right now, it's probably time to start thinking about switching to Tidal. There's a service called TuneMyMusic that'll transfer all my playlists from Spotify to Tidal, so maybe that's a project for Future Me.

Over the years, I've had so much Tech21 kit; I think where we are with this is a single box solution to a hybrid pedal set up I ran years ago (BDDI/GT2, Rolls Crossover), although the crossover back then just cut the frequencies to each stomp based on where the dial was. I'll give the muting thing a go. I'm loving this a lot.

Sigh. We live in times where there's a fine line between sarcasm/irony and genuine pleas for help; Basschat is no different. There's hundreds and hundreds of posts here where members are, in all seriousness, detailing similarities in your bullet points being of the belief that <insert bass/pickups/nut width/'tonewood' here> will make you sound like <insert name here>. There's a little unwritten rule that subtle use of 😉 or 😏 suffixed to a post might have helped.

£375

So. I had about 45 minutes of noodling before having to pop out. (I'm at my mother-in-law's at the moment.). I used my passive Aria Precision and my active Spector 4X. First impressions (after manscanning to instruction booklet), it seems fairly easy to dial in something useful within a minute or two. By way of a caveat, that due to time restrictions, I haven't really noodled too much with the mid boost/cut or the high/low pass filters at this point (see below). It's very nicely made, robust. The clean side of the unit is just delicious tonally, I would say it's very close to a BDDI in some respects. It's not wholly clean, but it's very phat and burpy. The compressor adds nice fullness to things. It like it shares the BDDI DNA with just a little bit of drive. The drive side is likely to be the thing needing controlling; in isolation it's exceedingly gnarly and you're actually asking yourself what it's contributing. I dialed in something that seemed acceptable, then hit the mix footswitch (so running the clean and dirty together) and frankly it was just so nasty I was asking myself whether I'd made an awful decision buying this! Finally, I hit the bi-amp emulator and the thing just came alive. The sweepable High/Low pass filters become active and it is epic. Each filter just directs lows to the clean, highs to the dirt with a level of crossover betwixt the two. Other stuff? There's a 10db +/- input cut/boost an a 10db +/- output cut/boost. The pre/post button controls the mids and puts the mids before or after the amp emulation. I did dial up one of the sample setting for the dUg and it was great. I'll give it a longer test this evening.

Knock, knock! It's here.

I've been asked to 'bolt together a cheapish Mark Hoppus style bass, but in black'. My first commission. Heh. As this is just going to be Modern Prometheus, I'd be interested in how close the body sizes of the Squier and Harley Benton JB basses are compared to what constitutes the real thing, or if there's any weird carves/bouts. Thanks muchly.

Done gigs where I've the basics (line check/30 seconds of something including a chorus) and the fuller thing (a couple of songs in full). In the main we've always used house engineers and generally they're on a needs must basis. In all cases, small room/big room, it's generally to an empty room, or at the very least the other bands/hangers on. Obviously the room dynamics will change once there's some people in, but by and large a decent sound guy will be able to sort that out on the fly.

Bullet point responses. A Warwick won't make you sound like any of their endorsees or make you play better. Tonally, I wouldn't compare anything on You Tube with a real life experience. Tonewood? Growl? If you want a frankly fantastic NS bass, just buy a Spector Euro model.

People have been taking guitars apart for decades and finding little bits of card/sandpaper under the heel joint. It's not cheating as such, it's just a fix to facilitate getting it right.

When I was doing the Eddie Roxy stuff, there was a degree of urgency in getting everything together reasonably quickly; obviously I knew Is Vic There? but for the rest of the material it was a case of tabbing off songs that were still evolving or had changed significantly from the original format. At some point you just have to decide to leave the crib sheets at home.

Looking at my gear ins/outs this year (so far) and am treating it more as an exercise in trying to keep in the black. Currently at about £75 in the red.

Odd post. Buy crap, do it up. Just buy a serviceable Squier, Harley Benton or EastCoast. And what exactly is a 'Hipshot rip-off tuner'?

Seen loads of bands where members have a pad on a stand next to their mic-stand. It's an absolute turn off for me. Would confidently say that if you need a comfort blanket like this, then you really shouldn't be gigging. Brutal opinion, eh? You learn your material, you rehearse and rehearse until the songs become muscle memory and then you go out and play live. The only prompt you should need is an A4 sheet of paper with your set list on it, beyond this, no safety net.