NancyJohnson

When I left my junior school, I used to have to take a bus to school. Fare was 4p each way. With a pocket of change and we'd hit up the sweet shop at 8.00am, buy two Mars bars for 8p and start walking.

Are you using the active circuit? Fully charged?

I'd never really given much thought to the actual value of money if you factor in inflation, something else to keep me awake at night I suppose. Thing is, unless you took the risk and either invested in* something that is now magically worth a fortune, you're always sliding in the wrong direction. (*Didn't someone sell his 10% in Apple for $800 about 30 years ago?). Fender Precision basses aren't the way to make a fortune. The only way to make a decent investment return is to go into retail, but you're reliant on there being a ready market for what you're selling I'm sure the more specialist guitar retailers would says it's hard work and a struggle.

I'd be incredibly cautious about buying instruments as an investment, certainly where the instrument is mass produced. I'm not currently on the market for something I can flip for profit, but I do have c.£30k in premium bonds that my wife has said I can draw from if something came up. I follow Hamer... specifically three digit serial# Standards. Gibson. Hmm. I nearly pulled the trigger on a Gibson Theodore (could have almost doubled my investment in under a year), missed the Slash 4 Les Paul. Suspect that if the Gibson Kirk Hammett Flying V happens - and it's a limited one - I'll buy one (or two) of those and just stick it/them under the bed.

Blimey. I have one six string guitar hanging on the wall in the room I record in, my basses stay in their cases. It's only there because floorspace is limited. Again, I'll refer to a friend who has this gallery of guitars hanging in his front room. They never get played, they're just hanging there, unplayed, covered in dust and other grime. There's an Ace Freshly Budokan Les Paul (£8-10k), an EVH Masterbuilt Frankenstein (£15-20k), a Wolfgang (£3k). It makes me want to cry.

It's quite brilliant, eh?

I have a Joe E Lee playlist playing. Sitting in the garden. Glass of red. This is joy.

Technically, I'm bringing the sideburned one...

I couldn't warrant spending stupid money on the Radial, so pulled the trigger on a Palmer PAN-04, which got great reviews and was under half the price of the Radial. It's built like a tank...1/4" jacks from the Focusrite, XLRs to the monitors. Hiss free.

I've been as guilty as many here in being of the belief that all these expensive/ridiculous tweaks we do will somehow make a ton of difference to how we sound; tonally, there's so many facets in play - everything within the entire signal path, from string choice (and freshness thereof) through to the speakers in your rig - will have an effect, plus you need to factor in the tone you create from you hands. (A couple of years back, I used flats for the first time in about 40 years...they didn't sound that different to rounds once I'd tinkered with things.) I'd wager Geddy Lee would sound different from me if I simply gave him a bass I'd just been using. In my entire journey, I've only played one bass that seemed to sound different from everything else and that was a Rickenbacker 4003, everything else? All a bit meh and samey, irrespective of cost point/claims. The pursuit of tone is personal and subjective. It's well documented on this site what my desired tone is and I can get this easily enough from any bass I own. The most important element of my set up is the Geddy/dUg stomps that sit between the bass and my amp. That's it. I wish people could just grasp that pickups, nut widths, hi-mass bridges, etc etc mean nothing. We just love to tweak things!

Is the bridge aged or something? The finish looks a bit bobbly/skanky.

From my limited exposure to the format - I own all the available Tears For Fears and XTC/Dukes 5.1 reissues plus a smattering of others (Night At The Opera, some Dream Theater), I adore listening to the reinterpretation of the audio, with instrumentation coming at you from every direction. One album I'm very familiar with is Destroyer by Kiss...Steven Wilson mixed that for 5.1, but it's not available as a standalone disc and I'm certainly not forking out 200 British pounds for a full boxset. @cetera you bought this?

I'm not certain whether there's any fans of listening to audio in 5.1/Atmos - the work Steven Wilson has done for his own stuff and the Tears For Fears and XTC/Dukes of Stratosphear back catalogue is pretty spectacular. Blu-Ray is just the perfect source for this content (if you can't cope with Blu-Ray, there's ways and means to rip the disc content and convert to a format that plays off a NAS to a receiver). Just as a heads up (if this is your thing), there's a Dolby Atmos/DTS HD 5.1 version of Shakespears Sister's Hormonally Yours coming in September. The mix has been done by Caesar Edmunds (https://www.caesaredmunds.com/) and Alan Moulder (who produced the original version). If you want it, be quick; once the pre-order closes (29/7/22), that's it. If you're interested, link here: https://www.thesdeshop.com/products/shakespears-sister-hormonally-yours-sde-exclusive-blu-ray-audio

This morning is going to be the deluxe-edition triumvirate of Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk.

Most of his kit (there's loads) just suffers from the usual TLC issues, bowed necks, intonation, dead strings, high/low/indifferent action; I'm not saying it's all junk or anything, but he keeps everything in a drafty garage attached to his house and the temperature is generally a few degrees off of what's going on outside, so you can probably imagine what that's doing to the wood! I did the intonation on one guitar and he said it wasn't in tune going up the neck. Next time I saw him, the saddles were in a straight line across the bridge as opposed to (the regular) visual for EAD & GBE strings. He explained he thought I'd forgotten to line them up straight - the way he preferred it - so he'd done it himself. D'oh!

The guy is obsessed with cheap but usable kit. To be honest he owns a lot of gear but for me a lot of it is so poorly set up it's unplayable. I've suggested just bringing everything over here so I can set it up, but he's not interested! He's got a really sweet Gibson Melody Maker that's in desperate need for a set up!

A mate of mine just acquired this IGB-50 off eBay. £250 I think. I'll admit I'm a tad envious.

10,000 hours, you say?

Personally, I reckon unless we had several fivers in the mix, it would be too much of a giveaway if there was just one...the last shoot out was all four string basses. I was open to anyone submitting whatever bass they wanted. All this is detailed on the blog post below (there's video!) by @Silvia Bluejay: https://bassclef141.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/basschat-south-east-bash-2018/

During the pandemic I spent a bit of time transferring some old cassette recordings to my PC, some of these were from jams in the late 1970s (when I was listening to a lot of Rush, The Police and Rich Kids); reckon I'd been playing 12-18 months at that point; I'd be spending an hour a day playing along to albums in my bedroom and jamming on Saturdays in a local church hall with two other guys (our drummer's mother had spoken to the vicar because we were too loud for a terraced house). The playing on the recordings was surprisingly fast, clear, coherent, concise and in time. The turning point for me was that first live Rush album; I played along with that more times than I'd like to admit and would transfer my findings into early (original) material we'd jam on the weekend. (It was never, 'Oh, shall we play Message In A Bottle?') I was lucky enough to be playing with a drummer and a guitarist who were as equally obsessed with playing as I was and it was a sharp learning curve - occasionally a guitarist or keyboard player would come in to jam for a week or two, then not bother. It was just us three. There was urgency and desire in our playing which translated to achieving a fairly decent standard fairly quickly. Let's assume for a moment that I could plot my progress on a graph, zero being when I first picked up my mates Jedson Telecaster bass and 100 being now; I reckon I hit 85% ability in under two years, possibly less. The remaining 15% has taken 40 years and most of that is about theory and experimentation, more along the lines of what things would sound like if I played some weirdness instead of just sticking to the root. I've had the misfortune of playing with guys that have been playing for decades and who consider themselves 'pretty good'; some/many of these guys can barely muster a few major chords or play drums in 4/4, which leads to the conculsion that you either have an aptitude for the the instrument (same applies sport/ None of us are really masters of our craft and it would be wrong to assume otherwise. What is mastery anyhow?

I'm wondering whether @ceteraand I should do another bass shootout. We'd need ten basses (we probably all suffer short attention spans...ooh look, a cat); I'd just need to know what basses so I can print out a list ahead of time.

The Carpenters - Gold. Karen's voice. It just makes me warm and fuzzy.

Ponky. Heh. It's like where your tone sounds like you have foam mutes, dead strings and you're trying to hit harder to give it more attack but your bass just ponks. Umm. Like the baritone guitar at the start of Wichita Lineman. But for bass. With foam mutes and dead strings. There's a lot of recordings from the 60s/70s where the bass is very ponky!

I've used the dUg for recording and it's a tremendous thing. Because of the pandemic I've only used it a couple of times in a band situation and can wholly understand the reference to it being odd sonically. I did roll off the chunk considerably, which in effect caused the pedal to lose some of the inherent characteristic; I suppose it's all about sitting in the mix and owning your frequency...I have an old band thing that's in the process of resurrecting itself at the moment and while I'd love to use it in that, the guitarist is very heavy and I know the bass would just get lost.

I remember the first time I plugged in the BDDI, it really was an 'Oh, my, freaking, god, there's the tone.' My journey went from that to a racked RPI (I hung onto the BDDI at that point as it was easier to use that for recording). Sold the RPI in the belief that the VTBass rack was going to be better for me than the RPI...I gigged it once and didn't like it one bit, it didn't suit me one bit. Sold that and bought another RPI which I then moved along when the Geddy Lee rack unit came out (this was not a happy time). I bought a VTBass DI to add a bit of colour to a dual channel set up and sold that along before going back to my BDDI. I just carry one of the GED 2112 DI boxes and a dUg now. The Geddy is like the BDDI with squirt of steroids. The dUg is just off the scale...fantastic thing.