NancyJohnson

We were in a place in east London, called the Engine Room. It's a live venue/rehearsal space that operates out of a very unglamorous railway arch on the edge of a tired business estate.

I did a video shoot a couple of months ago. It all seemed preposterous at the time, but the end result is decent enough.

Guitarist in my band has more guitars (50+), amps and outboard gear than you can shake a stick at; he mixes things up a lot, so every rehearsal/gig is a revelation. Right now he's favouring a class-d amp and assorted effects on a floorboard (about 18x12"), which he just jacks into whatever cabs are available. I suppose this will change again at some point. He always sounds fine, but part of me just prefers the straight approach, guitar into amp.

In general, if I lose love of a bass then that's it, no remorse. I forget why I felt the need to move on the Bongo...as I've mentioned elsewhere, tonally I never quite nailed it; there was a tiny sweet spot between clarity and mush. I wish I'd persisted.

Sellers remorse. The Travis Bean. The Bongo 5HH. The white Gibson Thunderbird.

My Thunderbirds used to be called Scott, Virgil, Alan etc. in the order of acquisition, now everything is just, 'the Cruisebass', or 'the Lull', or the Spector'. Beyond this, nah.

On your amp, you have the option of pre/post DI - this is selected by an in/out button on the fascia; ideally you want to send a post DI signal to the desk, this should be a flat line level signal and will tonally reflect what's going through your amp. This output signal should be unaffected by how loud you ramp things up when playing, so no necessity to turn your amp down. Just as far the Bongo goes, I owned a 5-string HH model a few years ago and while it played like a dream, tonally it was a fine line between tonal bliss and mush; there was always this thing where you just kept tweaking things up and up.

I'm playing AWTP this coming Saturday with The Adjacent Kings. The festival is in Wareham, Dorset...a two-dayer (2nd & 3rd), we should on sometime between 8.00 and 8.30pm. Unsure how big this is... possibly a few hundred people tops. Weather looks good too.l If anyone is going, come and say hello! Alices Wicked Tea Party Soldiers Rd, Wareham BH20 5DU https://maps.app.goo.gl/2g5xCo3YQThZPEZP6

I still don't 'get' the desire for a Signature bass, despite owning one right now and owning a Geddy Lee Jazz about ten years ago. Ownership is never going to magically turn you into Geddy/Flea/Marcus Miller (etc) although it has to be said, it's quite amusing to show up to a gig and see duplicates of the same bass being used in other bands, right down to similar areas of distressing. It's only a Geddy Lee model because he was fortunate enough to find it in a pawn shop. (I often wonder who owned it previously.) Fender wouldn't be remotely interested in putting the owner of the next serial numbered Jazz onto a Signature model.

The whole ridiculousness of chasing tone and the amount of money I've thrown at it. Sigh. Worst case was this frankly ridiculous tri-amp set up I ran about 30 years ago. TE preamp, TE stereo Poweramp, TE mono Poweramp, two SWR Goliath cabs (1x15/4x10) and a TE bright box. It sounded ok, but didn't deliver anything like the sound I was looking for. It wasn't until I got a BassPOD that things started getting interesting. Then a BDDI. The beauty now is that I get what I need from a set up barely bigger than a cabin bag.

At 6'4" and predominantly using Thunderbirds, I favour a Levy's extra long strap; there's certainly times where the strap has been too long and photographic evidence show me in a square-shouldered Herman Munster poise, just to raise the bass to a more comfortable playing position.

David Sylvian this morning. Early solo nonsense.

180° turnaround from a few years ago. Little Gator padded bag. Darkglass head, power cable, Speakons, spare 9v battery, little pouch of picks/pens, a few sheets of A4, strap, lead, headstock tuner.

I tend to buy all my strings from Amazon; pricewise there's got to be a degree of price-fixing given the similarity of prices elsewhere (and I mean, how much markup are there on strings, it's bonkers), but I'm a Prime member, so free shipping. Background behind a 5-string string change, my Lull is a 35" scale, checking my Amazon orders at the end of April 2021, I ordered a set of 14087s (45-105 XL nickel plated steels) and a 15433 (.130 XL taper wound). Like @glassmoon, I too was a bit surprised that Elixir didn't make XL five-string sets, so had to resort to two purchases. To compound issues, there was a really long lead time on the low-B, from memory it took 6-8 weeks to arrive (I suppose we were still in lockdowns of some sort at that time, so the world priorities were elsewhere at that point). Given we're nearly two years on, the bass hasn't seen a lot of use since I put them on, but I did have a noodle on it yesterday. They still sound fresh as.

Of the dozen or so Gibson models I owned, I'd say two were head and shoulders above the rest - a white one I imported from Japan (sold to @police squad) and a limited run Gothic (which now resides in Spain). This was nothing to do with tone or anything; the neck on the white one was skinny as hell, the black a bit more chunky. Both these had additional bridge replacements (Babicz FCH). To be brutally honest, I don't buy the 'ironically the sound...' argument...we've done the blind tone test at a pre-pandemic Bass Bash and scores were exceedingly low; all of them sounded more or less the same. Tone comes from a combination of many things, from your hands through to the backline the bass is going through. Nobody could tell the difference between Precisions, Jazzes, Musicmans etc.

I played Gibson Thunderbirds exclusively for about a decade and while I'n still using basses of a similar shape (Lull/Spector/Hamer), they're all different to the Gibsons I owned. In answer to the OP, I'd consider three things, price, how long you're going to keep it for and resale value once you decide to chase down a Gibson (because you will). A while back there was a configuration tool on the Phoenix page and obviously I had a play; it spat out a purchase price and it wasn't cheap by any stretch. I mean, it looks similar to the model it's apeing, headstock is a little odd, maybe the body geometry is a bit off too. You're going to be buying blind unless you can work out a way to play before you buy it and most of us have read the manufacturers feelings about QC and aftercare. So, not for me, no.

On the 'what's the difference?' question, Fender are as guilty as all the prime movers in instrument manufacture, reinventing 60 year old designs year in, year out. I'd say pretty much all of us here wouldn't have a clue what bass we were hearing unless we had some kind of visual clue; a few basses do have a distinct/identifiable tone out of the box (IE Rickenbacker 400*), but let's face it, even then what we thought we were hearing, wasn't necessarily what we were actually hearing (point of fact, Geddy Lee's using a Fender Jazz). I know this may sound odd coming from someone who has basses costing thousands, but it doesn't (and shouldn't) matter whether anyone is using a non-US Fender, a Squier, or an Epiphone or a Sterling? Not in the slightest. If the decal on the headstock facia says Fender, nobody will know where the thing was made and frankly, nobody will/should really care. There shouldn't really be any stigma using something made in Japan, Mexico, China or Indonesia. If anyone does look down on someone because of their gear choices, then f*ck 'em.

I've lost count of the different amp/cab set-ups I've gone through since I started playing, arguably I'm the happiest I've been set the outset of this 30+ year sojourn, just running a Darkglass AO900 and a pair of Darkglass 1x12s. Last week I was at a rehearsal studio, the place hires out gear to musicians who turn up without amps, so the place is rammed with backline of all shapes and sizes. The owner casually says to me that, '...everything along that wall is for sale,' at which point my eyes start moving very quickly as I peruse the treasure trove of stock. Lots of Orange stuff, lots of bits and pieces I don't know anything about, Fender combos, Soundcity and Ampeg cabinets, Marshalls. I casually enquire the price of an American made Ampeg/SVT 8x10, to be told he'd probably take £400.00. I mean, it was a bit road worn, but £400.00?? It did get me thinking about my 'little' set up. I guess my outlay was over £2K for this. Easy to cart about, loud when it needs to be and sounds thunderous. I genuinely felt sorry for the old fridge and the other stuff in there just gathering dust when, if you went back 25 years, running an Ampeg 8x10 would leave people a bit slack-jawed.

Thank you to everyone who voted. As I said, god knows how this is compiled but we're at #10 this week. 😊

I played the Tower of Song in Kings Norton, Birmingham yesterday. Bit of an odd one; it was a Sunday matinee - three bands, doors at 3.00pm all done by 7.00pm. Early start, terrible traffic snarl up near Oxford (biggish detour) Venue is quite lovely to be honest. Clean, tidy, small bar, fantastic PA (all iPad/tablet driven) - two each side of HK Audio Polar 12s. First band were Year Zero - four piece punky band, the meat in the sandwich was The DC Spectres (the 'DC' being club owner David Checkley) - they reminded me of early Soul Asylum, then us (Eddie Roxy & The Adjacent Kings) headlining. We're only a handful of gigs in and I reckon this was the best one yet. No major f*ck ups (although inexplicably our drummer stopped playing during the first song...probably lost where he was) and pretty much everyone we spoke to after was very positive. So onwards. We're playing the Alice's Wicked Tea Party festival on 3rd June. Two weeks off.

Thank you! Wrote and recorded the audio about a year ago; there was a rough vocal. Drum loops. When we hooked up with Eddie (he fronted Department S), he redid the vocals, the guitars were rerecorded and our drummer redid the drums. The bass is the original recording, because I'm a machine, eh? I'm happy with the end result.

I'll profess that I haven't a clue what's going on here, but my band are currently #12 in the UK Legacy 365 Top 40 with a track called 'Let's Go'. (This kind of mirrors how one of my old bands were #6 in an Amazon chart for a few minutes.) The position seems to be driven by a multitude of things, streaming, voting, You Tube. Look, I know it's all a bit of nonsense, but if you can help to skew the numbers then put a vote in for us here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/TheLegacyChart ...just scroll down to Eddie Roxy & The Adjacent Kings, check the little box, hit enter. Much appreciated. P

#3 in a continuing series. I'll be making a rare trip to the Midlands on Sunday 21/5 to play The Tower Of Song on Kings Norton, Birmingham. Bit of an odd one (and something that echoes another gig we're doing at Islington's Hope & Anchor); doors are at 3.00pm and the place shuts at 7.00pm. We're last on, so if you're local you could be home by 7.30pm.

I only saw them once and then saw Corey Glover (with a different backing band) in New York about five years ago.