Dan Dare

I never disembarked. Record playing as I type. I'm not a flat earther, but I have a lot of nice stuff on vinyl that I still enjoy listening to.

My Aguilar AG700 has the same button (or rather a button that does the same thing). It seems to me to be more a device intended to impress in the showroom. At working volumes, it's too much and OTT. I almost always cut, rather than boost eq, but using the bass control to boost allows you to add the desired amount of extra low end subtly, rather than the all or nothing you get with the button. Trust me when I say you wouldn't want to use both at the same time.

Yep. It's also a great electrical conductor. You have to be careful, especially out in the countryside, where high voltage lines can be quite close to the ground. You don't even need to touch one. Get it close enough and it can arc.

Double post

If you have a decent folding trolley, your cabs don't need to be the lightest possible. Don't go for cheapies from the likes of Rolson. If you're in the UK, have a look on the Parrs Workplace Equipment website. They do several trollies that fold flat. The one I bought will carry 100kg+, folds to 30"x19"x3" and cost just over £100 delivered. A lot cheaper than a set of GR carbon cabs, albeit not as funky looking (I do love that shiny black woven carbon fibre look). Carbon fibre is fantastic stuff in the right applications. It has great tensile strength, recovers very quickly from flexing/bending and is light and rigid. I'm a golfer and an angler, so I'm a fan and have some nice carbon toys. It's disadvantage is that it doesn't like impacts very much, especially ones concentrated in a small area (such as you might get if you knock your carbon cab into a door handle). You can get around this by adding glass and kevlar to the weave and using specialised resins to bind it, but that adds weight. It's also quite resonant, especially higher modulus carbons. The sections of my Daiwa Tournament fishing pole ring like a bell if you tap them with a finger. That's not a good thing in a speaker cab. Again, varying the mix of fibres and resins, together with bracing can alleviate this, but that will increase weight and negate the main advantage of lightness. You pays yer money and takes yer choice.

Had a surprising experience last weekend playing through a MB 1x12 combo and add-on 1x12 cab. No matter what I tried, I couldn't escape mud city. I've always had good results from MB gear previously. I wonder whether it was faulty.

Strictly speaking, two. However, I went modular years back, so have six cabs and two heads. I can use them in any combination/permutation, depending on how much noise I need to make.

The song was recorded in 1966, when Motown was still in Detroit, so almost certain to have been Jamerson. It could have been Bob Babbitt (the "other" Motown bassist, but it sounds like a Jamerson part). Carol Kaye played on some Motown records after the company relocated to California, but not whilst they were in Detroit afaik. It doesn't sound like pick playing to me. The pick sound is probably due to the fact that Jamerson used dead strings (with foam under the bridge), a high action and damped with his right hand.

Dave N explains that his motivation is primarily pragmatic. If a channel on an analogue console goes down, you can pull it and slot in a fresh one. You can't do that with digital. I agree that those of a certain age - me included - tend to prefer a physical control layer or device. It isn't "phobia". It's just that we are comfortable with the familiar. Although I could spend time learning to use a digital desk (as I have with my simple laptop-based home recording set-up), I don't see the point when I already have something that works well for me.

Very helpful conversation about live sound mixing with FoH engineer Dave Natale on Rick Beato's channel. His observations about global eq towards the end are particularly interesting.

Ah, Soul

I agree with Bill (as I usually do). If you want something that gives you more than your Bass Cub, I'd look at augmenting it with an additional power amp and cab or powered cab. I use and like PJB cabs and take out between one and five of their 4x5s, depending on how loud I need to be. Obviously, you need a vehicle to move more than a couple of them around. I used to live in London and found a decent folding trolley very helpful when I had to use public transport. It took two C4s without difficulty.

Don't these muppets think one might check one's PP account for payments before parting with the item?

20w and an 8" speaker will struggle to be heard over anything other than an unamplified solo acoustic guitar and voice. The laws of physics and all that, Jim. You definitely need a bigger amp.

"JM's voice thin and expressionless and his lyrics as badly crafted and banal."? Typical of what one expects from snotty nosed public school boys who write for the broadsheets. JM was one of those responsible for bringing a lot of good and interesting music to our attention and for that he deserves our gratitude and thanks. He had a long life and lived it well. RIP John and thanks.

True. We have become used to cheap products in recent years due to the global economy. When I started playing, well over 50 years ago, stuff was much more expensive, in terms of the percentage or multiple of your earnings that you needed to spend to acquire it. Quite a few musical equipment companies build little themselves nowadays (even the big names tend to produce only flagship stuff in-house). They design/specify products and have them made by massive manufacturing firms situated in low wage economies. As consumers, we benefit in the short term from cheap products (albeit of sometimes questionable quality). If anything goes amiss, however, it can be difficult to get a problem solved. In the long term, if we outsource/offshore too much manufacturing capacity, our own economy suffers. We can't all feed ourselves courtesy of financial and service industries. Someone I used to know, who owned a small manufacturing company that is UK based, told me he had looked into the possibility of having stuff made in the Far East. He found two problems. Maintaining quality control and getting faults rectified was one. If you have to wait for two months for replacement stuff to arrive in a container from China, customers tend not to be happy. The other was patent enforcement. If you give your designs to a company thousands of miles away in a completely different jurisdiction, you shouldn't be surprised if low-cost knock-offs start appearing on the market. Trying to stop that is a nightmare and often just not possible. He decided against in the end. If someone is prepared to manufacture at home, pay their staff decent wages and offer quality products and after sales back-up, I think they deserve our support if we can afford to give it. I try not to buy Chinese if I can avoid it. If we all did that, the economy would be in better shape.

It's the same for many companies, especially those who don't source their stuff from Chinese factories staffed by people who earn £2 a day. Their costs have gone through the roof and they have to pass that on to consumers. On the plus side, if you want after-sales support, it's a lot easier if the manufacturer is in the same country as you and firms such as BF tend to stand behind what they make and sell. You pays yer money and takes yer choice.

Depends what kind of bassist you are, I think. Being a no-frills P or J bass type, a Telecaster is my weapon of choice. Has what you need and nothing you don't. If I played a 7 string active Fodera, my choice would probably be more adventurous.

As an oldie, I don't think it's a case of people not being able to make a living from music "anymore". It never was an option for most. When I started playing as more than just a hobby (slightly north of 50 years ago), the dream was to "turn professional". For the majority, including me, it remained just that. A dream. Occupations that everyone wants to pursue tend not to pay well for the majority. It's a case of supply and demand. If everyone wants to be a musician, actor and similar, the pay offered tends to be low because someone somewhere will bite. For much of my life, music has been a side-line, occasionally a moderately lucrative one. I've enjoyed brief periods during which music was my only source of income, but they were brief. It was always necessary to return to a day job to make ends meet, unless you wanted to live on baked beans, never own your own home, run a car that was on the verge of falling apart and not be able to have a family. Looking back now I'm in my dotage, I'm glad about that. When I hit 40, I realised that I had 25 years to pay off the mortgage and build some kind of provision for my old age, which I managed to do. I quit part-time casual working and got a "proper" job. The funny thing was that, once I had made the decision to keep music strictly as a side-line, I got offered a lot more work. Some I accepted if I could fit it around the job. The rest I politely declined, explaining that the job wouldn't permit (obviously sensible to keep people sweet in case they offered more in the future). It was a luxury being able to turn down offers to play in toilets to a room full of animals who hated me. All in all, I've done OK and can afford to enjoy my twilight years if I'm sensible. With the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

There's so much I could say in response, but I fear it would fall on deaf ears.

Fair enough, but you have left replies to me up and deleted all of my posts (and those of others), including those which were strictly factual. If you're going to moderate, do so impartially.

This. Many peoples' idea of BVs appears to be bellowing along to the melody in the background. BVs are tricky. All the consonants have to happen simultaneously and, crucially, the intonation has to be spot on for it not to sound like a bunch of lads chanting at the footie.

Is this old chestnut still grinding on? Re. the exchange above, it's interesting (and relevant, I suggest) that Dad has an engineering background. I don't think those disputing with him above do.

Quilter Bass Block is well under 10" wide. Sounds decent, too.