NancyJohnson

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.

I've got loads of connectors at home - at work at the moment, there's loads of them...bendy/straight. Shoot me a PM with your address, I'll let you know what I have and I'll send some over. If you're anywhere near Reading, pop over and take your pick.

It's an odd one...there's this belief that as a chorus pedal modulates, it should modulate after the signal has gone through any kind of distortion or dirtbox. What is odd (well to me at least, 'cos I'm so old school it hurts) is that most guys who plug into an amp would not utilise an effects loop and just go guitar/bass > chorus > amp.

Assuming everything is well with your bass, I'd say it's nigh on impossible to not get a decent tone out of a BDDI; I did have issue with the VTBass DI and the VTBass rack (too ponky). I've been using a variety for Tech21 stomps for years and years and my main bit of advice is actually the opposite of that of the honourable member for Hemel Hempstead; the Tech21 units have enough of a peak output to drive a poweramp, so I've always run these units into the effects return of a head or a poweramp, thus bypassing any pre-staging the amp may have. I've done this on a variety of heads (Trace/Ashdown/Matrix) and am currently doing the same on a Darkglass A/O 900w head. Just let the BDDI shape all your tone. Insofar as best tone? Subjective. My desired sound is a kind of a gnarly Geddy Lee/Jean Jacques Burnel hybrid thing and it'll do that until the cows come home. I'd just let the BDDI control everything; Blend on 100% (so no clean signal in the mix), the Level I'd just rotate to stop clipping on the powerstage of any amp once the other controls were where I wanted them, the bass/treble/presence just do what they do (the presence just adds a subtle mid-style level that helps you cut through the mix - I'm not even certain what frequency this operates at, but it works fine and doesn't make you sound like a transistor radio). If you want a hotter signal using one of the sliders in the Output or XLR will give you a 10db boost.

Michelle Branch. Wonderful.

I posted here a while back that as I have the inability to bite my nails due to a slight bit of tooth chippage.damage/crossover, my luxury item if I was on a desert island would be a decent pair of nail clippers. Who cares about matches and record players? Sensible nails is the way to go. Ditched the oh-look-these-came-free-in-a-christmas-cracker clippers and bought these babies in early 2019: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0762MBQ2G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Initially I hadn't appreciated how bad the old clippers were and I initially cut myself LOTS of times. I suppose the old ones were just very blunt.

XTC this afternoon. Skylarking demos at the moment.

I'm not the type of person that wants to get drawn into whether they pop, ponk or shizzle; pickups for me are just a means to transfer sound from your bass to your amp...I've put all manner of pickups into basses, strat pickups, humbuckers, P90s; none of them really make that much of a difference. For maybe 25 years I've been using outboard processing (generally @Tech21NYCkit - BDDI/VTBass/RPI/dUg/Geddystuff/GT2), this stuff will help you dial in just about anything, irrespective of the pickups you use. Josi's stuff is great value and works. Buy one, if you don't like it, sell it here, spend seven times more on something else and then wonder whether using that money against a used BDDI might have been a better option.

I've used Josi Warman's pickups in several projects, zebra humbuckers, regular humbuckers, P-94s and, most importantly in consideration of the OP, Jazz bass and Precision bass pickups. Absolutely no issues with them and I'd wager (with some certainty) that nobody would be able to tell the difference between these and any other make/specification. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I don't care where they're from or whether they're rebadged far-eastern knockoffs. They're cheap and cheerful and they work. If you don't like the Warman logo on the pickup cover, just buy new blank covers, scuff them up and tell people they're vintage 70s DiMarzios if it'll make you feel happier.. No one will be able to tell the difference.

Considering Gibson are so obsessive about year-specific reissues of Les Pauls etc. it does break my heart that they refrain from re-issuing a 60s spec TBII or TBIV. Not that I'd be in the market for one, that ship sailed a few years back and I have a Euro-X coming.

This is just another case of venue operators/promotors creaming a bit off the top. I have a friend whose daughter's boyfriend has a business doing event catering; he has a 100% rating on Trustpilot during the pandemic he regularly pitched up outside hospitals and fed the staff for free. I was staggered to find out that venues insist their on-site caterers take card payments (no cash) and that you use one of the venue card machines during the event. End of the day the venue takes - are you sitting down here - 25% of all takings put through the card machine. Shocker.

With this thread on 425 pages, I'd err that posts this far down will be skimmed past. Anyhow, here's today's listening. Momma are a three/four piece from Los Angeles, soundwise let's just say they lean heavily on Veruca Salt and there's elements of Smashing Pumpkins and Motion City Soundtrack kicking in too. The new album is superb, 5/5. The studio is certainly their friend, the live stuff I've seen is a bit patchy, but I reckon give them a year or two, they'll be main stage fodder for Reading/Leeds.

Similar in principal, I have an old Ibanez (for sale folks) and just wired the P/J pickups into a pickup selector switch, into a volume pot. then to the output jack. I tend to just leave the selector in the centre position so both pickups are active. No issues. As to why? Much like the OP, I tend to play passive kit with everything open and here I really couldn't be bothered wiring in tone pots.

BBOT bridge aside (promise me you'll put something chunkier on it if you pull the trigger), the lack of pickguard plays tricks with the aesthetics/geometry; that looks a lot nicer than any double-cut Les Paul Junior bass I've ever seen from Gibson. It has a distinct Hamer-esque look.

Just to answer the questions, I've tried ever conceivable powering option; PC and monitors on the same strip, different plugs etc. The Focusrite only has 1/4" jack outputs, the monitors accept 1/4" jacks or XLR. Headphones are fine, so clearly the issue is between the wired connection from the audio interface to the monitors.

I'm just posting in this area for maximum visibility. Has anyone got one of these that I can borrow for a day or two? Crowthorne, Berkshire. I have a high frequency ground loop issue from a PC/Focusrite audio interface/pair of M-Audio BX5 monitors (signal path is PC>USB>Focustrite>1/4" jacks>monitors) - it's irritating me so much I tend not to switch the monitors on. (Apparently) I can use one of these to lift the ground - and thus eliminating the hum - so out of the Focusrite I can go 1/4" jacks>ProD2>XLRs>monitors. I have zero noise to headphones from the Focusrite. I'd prefer to know it works before shelling out. Thanks Paul

Good lord.

I've seen a lot of official footage that sounded quite thin and restrained, if this makes sense, but this was probably one of the best sounding gigs I've ever been to. We were about 15-20 feet from the stage. I appreciate it's simply not possible to have six people onstage and create the vocals, so I'm fairly convinced they're using backing tracks for the BVs, there was one error during Head Over Heels (I think), that they recovered from well enough. Both guitars we're going through Kempers. Curt Smith was playing several lovely Duesenberg basses.

Saw Tears For Fears at Waddesdon Manor last night. Paid the golden circle ticket price...not rammed, private bar area, clean bogs etc. They honestly exceeded expectation, very good show, the new album material sits very comfortably with the old stuff. I guess the only (minor) downside was Curt Smith's voice giving out a bit towards the end, but it was great to see Roland Orzabal just stepping up and singing with him.

About 20 years ago I visited a Guitar Center in Las Vegas, to this day it's the only time where a salesman didn't have a problem opening boxes to just show me stuff. He knew full well I wasn't going to be buying anything, but his mindset seemed to be more global than local (if I didn't buy there, I'd buy from home). Interestingly, my mate was with me, a drummist. I could hear him playing one of our songs from deep in bowels of the store; I started playing with him and then a guitarist joined in. The shop went quiet. We stopped a few minutes later and a little ripple of applause went round the store. Nice memory.

"So what would you like to do with your custom configured BITE bass?" Change the shape of that absolute munter of a headstock for starters.

Ok...this post might get long and I will ramble (it's late, I'm tired and I've had a couple of glasses of a very nice red). I have two Lulls, a JAX-T4 and an NRT5; both oversized Thunderbird bodies (reverse/non-reverse), both have a pair of Lull Thunderbird pickups in them. (These were supposedly reverse engineered by Mike Lull from Gibson's 1950/60s lap-steel units.) Concerning tonality - and this is a point I've posted about previously and will continue to reiterate time and time again - while for me these basses deliver what I want, they do not sound significantly different from any of my other basses. (Other basses sport a variety of pickups; Warman, Delano, EMG, 80s DiMarzios, Bartolini.) From a design/visual perspective, the Lull pickups look right and work well with the overall aesthetic of the instrument(s) and the chrome hardware. That's it. It wouldn't unduly bother me if these basses were carrying P/J/MM/any other pickup. Remember that pickups are just one element in the entire signal chain; fresh strings make a difference, different amps/cabs/outboard kit makes a difference, even with the same settings a different person playing the instrument can make it sound different ('It's all in the hands.'). Going back to the OP, over the years, I've been fortunate enough to have owned about a dozen Thunderbirds; I was more in love with the shape (still am) than what pickups were in it. The shape was simply the epitome of cool and just throwing one over my left shoulder made my 50+ year old body feel like I was 20 again. It was like magic. Nobody in the circle of bands we gigged with played one and just popping open the case would make other bass players just go, 'F*cking hell, Paul that's lovely.' For these guys it seemed to be an aspirational bass to own (despite the rarity thing at the time, they weren't that popular and by consequence they really weren't that expensive - I was picking them up for £800-900 a pop, hence my ability to hoover up a load of them). I'm going to contradict myself here (a little) by saying out of all of these, only one seemed to excel, it just played better and went through several different sets of pots/caps before I was 100% happy with it, it just had something a bit extra going on. It was just a bit hotter, grittier (although this was in part down to the super-low action rattling off the frets). That said, all the others sounded more or less the same as each other and were distinctly underwhelming when you just pushed them (unaffected) into the front of an amp. I think from the perspective of musical instruments the whole original/copy thing is a subject for a whole different level of discussion. Despite not owning a single Gibson at the moment, I'll continue to vehemently defend my purchase choices over the past twenty-odd years. While the '60s models were the originals, I feel that Gibson is much like Ford; of the belief that every new iteration of product is (questionably) for the betterment of the design and functionality; it would be hard to deny the basses Gibson have mass-produced from the early 90s (when production restarted) have much in common with the 60s models, aside from looking similar and, like Epiphone now, are just copy/facsimiles of the original run(s). I really can't grasp what people really want from pickups to be honest. For me, I just don't care, it's more of a visual aesthetic. I put a Delano in my Precision because I liked that it looked different. I stuck EMGs in one of my Hamers because they were a good deal/cheap. I've put P90s, humbuckers and Strat pickups in basses to see what would happen (not much difference from pickups 'designed for bass' to be honest; end of the day they're just magnets with copper windings). I've screwed loads of different pickups into various old bodies, because they were just in my box of parts and the basses just made an acceptable noise. Time for bed.