NancyJohnson

We've just finished up track #18. Shameless plug:

When you look at bridge saddles and know there's no way the bass will intonate properly. When the strings don't line up with the pickup polepieces (even though it's unlikely to affect the tone). Curly guitar leads where the curl has gone backwards. People who use Gaffa tape to hold their straps on their guitar. Amp head overhang.

This_Policy_Hurts_MIX1.mp3

I honestly don't know what the hold up can be. Didn't Gibson lose the body shape European trademark for all their Thunder/Firebird designs (and the old pointy stuff) a year or so ago? I like the Korean 4X model, but not enough to swing for one...god, imagine a 4X in that purple LT finish.

Personally, I believe the 50s-style Juniors (top) are just better looking compared the the DC tributes (bottom). Gibson made a frankly lazy (and horrific) decision in going with the front rout and scratchplate on the Tribute model, especially as we live in a time where Gibson are doing all these correctly-specced 50s/60s/70s legacy reissues of Les Pauls etc. I'm sure the new ones play nicely, sound OK, but, well, nah. Yes, I know I could order up a custom shop one, but not at £3-4K a pop. Spot the difference: ...sorry, an edit. This is what lurks under that scratchplate. Oh, the horror. It also alludes that they actually did the finish before they routed out the body. Sheesh.

I don't really have many thoughts about bass related gear. I'm lucky enough to own some lovely basses and backline. Happy, I suppose. A Spector EuroBird with a nice top would get me moist, but I'm not holding my breath. Non-bass related stuff, I'd like Gibson to put out an affordable (sub-£1K, I suppose) 50s doublecut Les Paul Junior. GAS? Vanity purchases more than anything else. Still hunting for a Hamer Cruisebass, might buy a second Darkglass 1x12. If Gibson pull their finger out, I might swing for a (used) Evil Robot combo if one became available. No rush.

Is there no end to Fender's reinvention of its legacy models? Decades old designs, rehash, rehash, rename, custom colours, tick a famous signature on it and sell it for $$$, yaaaaawn. It's not like there's not a bass in the marketplace that has a pickup in that position. I forget who it was, but I seem to remember an old bloke who owned a biggish guitar company set up with another bloke and made a bass with a pickup in that position. Oh, what was the name of that company? The model was name after a fish. Perhaps if I take an old Jazz and put 5 pickups on it there'll be a NJ Signature Model in the pipe.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Please don't tell anyone.

OK, here goes. Strings off so the neck isn't under tension. If you try to tighten the truss rod (righty tighty), is the adjustment nut tight? ie it won't move any more?

Moving an album forward, anyone here remember that a clutch of tracks from Kamakiriad were released (mainly as b-sides) with just the drums, bass and vocals?

Get a dUG DP-3X. Seriously. It'll do the BDDI thing. It'll do the Geddy thing. It does the dUg thing.

Loads!

Not certain whether this will play direct off here*, but this is what I've been involved with. It's a bit quirky and odd. Mike Lull 5-string recorded direct with a bit of BOD VST to shizzle it up. [*Edit: clearly not. Just click it and play it in your favoured player.] Counting_Sheep_Mix2.mp3

The Complete Flanders & Swann.

The singer has been posting stuff up before it's actually 100% finished...aargh...keen I suppose. His Soundcloud is here:

If this counts... I've done about 20 tracks with Lizard Sweets since April. Guitarist/producer lives about ten miles away, singer is 100+ miles away on the south coast. Once we resolved the technical issues it got very productive and every new song seems better than the last. All this material should be up on Spotify etc. shortly. The singer is posting up odds and sods on Facebook which are easy enough to find if you want a taster.

I might give Shotcut a punt...

I downloaded Davinci a couple of days ago, nothing to do with this thread, the other guys wanted to do a video and I offered to have a punt at editing. Ahead of the the project itself, I just pulled in some short videos shot on a variety of phones and cameras. I'm struggling to actually keep the program open! It crashes constantly.

My current projects are wholly recording ones...I record two streams, one clean, one dirty (off a dUg). The dirty is just a reference for me alone; it helps with knowing how long to hold a note and what I can get away with when my playing is a bit sloppy. When the stems go over to the studio, the producer always uses the clean recordings and adds everything in post. He favours either the BOD plugin (essentially a digital Sansamp BDDI and it's free) or Amplitube SVX. Initially I'd have preferred to record with the dirt, but to be honest clean is better.

I remember years ago (in my teens) some mates of mine were gigging in some village hall and as was our want a group of us decided it might be fun to custard pie them at the end of their last song. The bass player was using one of these Guilds...it sounded amazing. So the last song in, a few of us pile in, flinging the flans, everyone is laughing. Set ends. A few minutes later, I get a tap on my shoulder. Angry dad of bass player asking whether I was the ringleader of the prank as 'there's shaving foam on my boy's guitar and it's ruined'. I'm like, 'Whaaaaat?' I saw the bass a few years back. It still looked very clean 35 years later. Ruined, my donkey. These are so solid they would probably survive a nuke.

Although I'd identify as a bit of a whore for Tech 21 kit, I'm presently down to a single unit (the dUg) and admit that I do still feel somewhat let down by their aftercare following the failure of the rack GED-2112. Due to inactivity caused by the virus, I've been playing less, but the newish DI-2112 has picqued my interest, but at £400 I'm unsure whether I can justify pulling the trigger on this, given the dUg does everything I want, given I previously described this unit as being like the GED on steroids. Anyone bought one?

This is a great graphic (although I'm not entirely certain whether bass refers to electric bass guitars, or orchestral uprights). Years ago I gigged at a place where the sound guy was saying we needed to 'own our frequency'; our guitarist favoured a very deep and boomy tone and by way of compansation, I tended to roll off the bass a bit and play with a bit more top. Sound guy was mooning around our kit and pre-stage time, rolled off some of the bass on the guitar and turned it up on mine and the sound came alive.

A word (which I believe I termed) was Ponk/Ponky. It was just a generalisation for this tone from the 60s...you have loads of guys creaming themselves over vintage basses/amps, but tonally there's little by way of dynamic range on a lot of those recordings. Listen to some of those old Motown/Jackson 5 isolated recordings. Jazz bass/dead flats/foam under the strings. Just tuned thumping. Ponk.

Blimey, that's probably more than Bass Direct! Harhaaaaaar!