NancyJohnson

IMO the European Spector basses are great quality for a production line made instrument. Fantastic fit, finish, workmanship. Can't really fault them. I think you get an awful lot for your £££ compared to Fender/Gibson stuff.

If it's a like for like swap, do it yourself! It's pretty easy.

I've got some old boards here...

Plenty I've bought because I thought I'd like them, but only one I didn't like initially but got on a trade. MusicMan Bongo 5HH. It's one of three basses that in hindsight I have regrets about moving on. It was a superb thing.

They look a bit home made.

I watched the Christine McVie documentary yesterday, I think I may have recorded it about a year ago. There's one bit at the end around the time FM took on Neil Finn to handle guitar duties where Christine McVie says something like, 'Oh, I love Lindsey, but we had to fire him.'

I'm in a little village about seven or eight miles east of Reading. Nothing here. Locally Bracknell has a couple of venues, The Cellar at South Hill Park, The Acoustic Lounge (not strictly acoustic). Reading is better, quite a few small/decent places, Face Bar, Sub 89, Purple Turtle, The Butler, South Street Arts, The Turks, Velocity, Oakford Social - there are a few that I've played but not certain whether they're still open; Readipop was great, there was a bar in the Town Hall I gigged once. There was one place in Reading, old metal pub called The Rising Sun. It was a fantastic place. The inside was wallpapered (walls and ceiling) with pages from The Beano and The Dandy and for good measure the place had a old rowing boat in one corner (riding on a sea of papier-mache). I played there just the once...the place was absolutely rammed, literally people falling onto the low stage. When we were loading in we got heckled by a group of metal-boys nursing pints of lager but the level of heckling reduced with the more gear we bought in. Reckon we played about an hour and aside from a gig I did in Milan, I'd say it was one of the best gigs I've ever played. The bar staff said we were the loudest band they'd ever had in there.

I liked SlTs...bought them in the US. They felt nicely rough/gritty. Closest from a feel perspective is the Markbass LongEvo. Very similar in feel, and as they're coated, they last for ages.

I've been on EQX 102.7fm all day. They're a tiny radio station in Manchester, VT, they just do alternative music, all good. Found so much new stuff through them. They broadcast from a quintessential/beautiful house in a little village in the Green Mountains, about 40km northeast of Albany NY.

Charles Berthoud, yes. That's the guy. I mean, there's no doubting the guy can play, but for me it just seems all a bit unnecessary.

I've never been remotely interested in playing like Flea/Claypool any more than I've been interested in bands that sound like RHCP/Primus, so have never even tried emulating what these guys (and a zillion of other players) do. Oddly, its getting to the point where I feel marginally embarrassed to say that I'm 'just' a rock/indie/punky/post-hardcore player.

The video below was delivered to my Instagram feed earlier. I've honestly no idea why. It's just some bloke doing tricks with a football. It struck me that these (cough) skills (cough) have little or no relevance in real world football, where the opposition are more interested in kicking lumps out of you rather than how good you are at keepy-up. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkfPgCDAXzV/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= To a degree something clearly short-circuited in my head at such an early hour and I was reminded of some videos I got from a client one time of a bloke slapping and popping a bass that had D-tuners on every machine head. It was frankly unlistenable. They asked, 'Can you do something like this?'. My answer was, 'No, and why would I, this is unusable in the real world and frankly it's a bit sh*t.' The response from them was, 'Wot, are wuu a likkle bit jealoush?' (this was the actual spelling). That was the last I heard and I never got paid for the rest of my work. There's the real world at work for you.

Interesting how people's entry points to bands alter one's perception. This album was the beginning of the end (of Rush fandom) for me; mud.

I think the first time I was aware of bass was Steve Priest's bits towards the end of Rock & Roll Disgrace and the bass breaks in Man With The Golden Arm. I wasn't playing at this point but it was just something I loved the sound of. I suppose my more formulative grounding would have been Geddy Lee (All The World's A Stage), Sparks (Martin Gordon era) and bass-heavy singles by The Stranglers (although I was never a fan). Despite loving Kiss, I couldn't see anything of merit from Gene Simmons' tone. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but the reason I loved Thunderbirds was more about Overend Watts and Jackie Fox than Nikki Sixx. Shhh.

I try to read some of the more technical posts here and it's like I just go word blind; I'm not saying this data isn't useful in some capacity to some people, but by and large surely, given the amount of Poweramps and stomps out there, a lot of this is no use to anyone? As previously posted, I ran (several) rack set ups for 30+ years. Not once have I suffered from anything not working or under performing. Not once did I refer to the manual of any unit to read up on input sensitivity (or anything). The only thing I didn't do 'properly' was to always have the poweramp outputting at 100% and controlling the output volume off the pedals/rack kit. Maybe I was just lucky.

For many years I ran a 4U rack, a dual channel Matrix Poweramp (2U) that could be bridged for more output, Korg tuner (1U) and a variety of Tech21 units RBI (5/5), GED2112 (initially great, developed a fault, distributor hopeless 5/5 to 1/5), VTBass (sold on, didn't like it). The great thing about the different pre-stages is you're just amplifying the manufacturer's unit uncoloured and it's pretty simple to swap these around for different applications. I also ran a board with a dual channel set up BDDI/GT2 which I ran into the Matrix and into two cabs...this kind of emulated the dUg tone. If @tech21nyc had rolled out the dUg pre in a 1U unit, I'd probably still be running the rack to this day.

Yikes! From wikipedia: 'Fingernail and toenail loss may occur a few weeks later, but they will regrow with time.' What? Whaaaaaat? Get well chum!

Well if there is an upside to me pulling out because of my knee, me and the wife (plus mother in law) are all positive for COVID, so I'd probably have infected a few of you...

Not certain what you're asking here...

I'm struggling for Sunday now too. I had knee surgery about six weeks ago and I'm still hobbling about. Spoke to the consultant yesterday, he's just suggested the ongoing pain I'm in is part of the healing process and has suggested I keep off the leg (Rest/Ice/Compress/Elevate). I'll see how I go today.

My desired tone has been a gritty hybrid of Geddy Lee, dUg Pinnick and Jean-Jacques Burnel, largely facilitated by using guitar heads into large enclosures, then following the gear clearout of 1999 I went to BassPODs, then a variety of Sansamps until I hit paydirt (GT2s, BDDIs, VTBass, Geds, DP3). Honestly never had an issue with mud or shrieking highs. If you're interested look me up on Spotify (Lutz/Lizard Sweets/Ninety Six Decibels).

Hmm. I appreciate that every facet of the signal path has the ability to alter tonality, but realistically unless you're using a cable that's hundreds of meters long any loss of tone will be negliable. A couple of weeks ago, I watched an interesting video about a guy who was running power, water, twisted core and audio cable (for an intercom) to a garage on his property. Said garage was about 80m from the junction box and exterior wall. There was a drop in voltage of about 8% over that distance which was accounted by the length of cable and resistance in the copper. Everything suffered over that distance, even the water pressure was a bit iffy. The point being a drop of 19.2v still kept the supply within a usable 220/240v. The same principal will apply (more or less) in instrument cables. I would wager that if you connected your bass to your gear with one of these, you'd not notice any improvement over a 10m cable.

Onboard preamp (active circuit). I used to own a Bongo 5HH. Would sound lovely at the start of a rehearsal, little bit of tweakage to get a decent sound/clarity for levels and the room. As session would go on, inevitably everything would be tweaked to the max and isolated tone would be a horrific mush. Lesson#1: if you need to be heard, turn up the amp. Lesson#2: while it's difficult to keep away from the knobs, leave them alone once you're happy. Outboard preamp (Sansamp etc.). Set your tone and leave it alone (aka Lesson#3). I use a mix of passive and active basses into Tech 21 DIs. I tend to favour John East units on the basses that have gone from passive to active conversions. My general rule? Go with lesson 2, then lesson 3 and then lesson 1.

You don't actually need the valve pre-amp, you know this, right? You're effectively pushing a (Sansamp) pre-stage through a second (Ashdown) pre-stage, before the signal hits the poweramp. My experience of the valve side of the ABM was that the drive just added an unpleasant crackle rather than any creamy/controllable drive or dirt. The BDDI is more than capable of providing everything you should need. You're also saying that you're boosting mids off the BDDI and scooping (removing) them with the pre shape button, which is a bit odd. If it works for you, fine!