Frank Blank

I have discovered a couple of radio programmes lately that have been good sources for interesting music ... BBC Radio 3 - Late Junction BBC Radio 6 - Stewart Maconie's Freak Zone

God I had forgotten Consolidated, excellent band, saw them a couple of times, they stopped mid gig and did a Q&A!

Again, thanks to the latest Stewart Maconie’s Freak Zone (listening to a recording of it) his featured album this week ...

This is a great example, the music of Hendrix does absolutely nothing for me, leaves me completely cold, I don’t ‘get it’ at all, however I recognise his cultural significance and, simply by the effect he has on a huge swathe of musicians and non-musicians I realise he must be something extraordinarily special. I agree about Bowie, I love some of his material and am indifferent about lots of it. I’d take the first side of Low over 95% of any other music. Bowie’s undoubted genius was understanding twists and turns in culture and music and interpreting them, regurgitating them, in his brilliant style. It’s like he was a musical organiser, he gathered musicians, fashions, styles, culture under his flag and made some great art. Certainly a genius in my book.

I had a Seagull once, lovely guitar, it had the same Godin Quantum system, sounded superb.

...anyway, back on topic. Overrated - dependent on individual likes/dislikes which rarely include any kind of objective analysis. Underrated - ditto. I don't get what the fuss is about The Beatles, however I see how influential and important they are yet none of their output speaks to me in any meaningful way, although I must admit I do like Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! But that's about it. I'd rather listen to one Sparks track than anything by the Beatles. I'm not sure I really understand if the word overrated can be used as an objective term, I don't really like Bros but I think I understand their mass appeal, if there had been hundreds of screaming teenagers at a Public Image Ltd gig then I would have been confused. I suppose Adam and the Ants made a transition worth mentioning. I love the first A&TA album, Dirk Wears White Sox, it's one of my favourite albums but, gradually over the ensuing years their output became more accessible and gained broad appeal until they were huge and having number one hits. Despite me abandoning the Ant Ship around the release of Kings Of The Wild Frontier I still followed their progress with interest and still attended (albeit less frequently) their gigs right up until the Prince Charming era. I didn't personally like their direction but also I didn't start dissing them because they had become something different. I'm rambling, so much for on/off topic. Anyway... Kraftwerk are (imho) geniuses of a scale larger than Miles Davis and Beethoven put together, utter nonsense of course but there it is nonetheless.

Surely it makes them a genius at selling records?

Yes, Duke Ellington is often compared with Beethoven, as a great composer and Jazz musicians are often composing as they play in response to the players around them. If we are talking geniuses in a compositional sense I'd rate the great Jazz musicians way above classical composers, it's all very well sitting at a piano composing at your own speed, able to try parts over and over and rewrite notes, you only get one shot improvising in Jazz. I'd stand by Miles Davis being a bigger genius than Beethoven.

Several Jazz geniuses are, quite rightly. looking askance at this.

Any of these from Fishman.

Blimey! Good luck Sir!

Ella and The Duke, it doesn’t get much better.

Due to previous XTC posts ...

I use Newtone strings on both my ACGs as recommended by @skelf, very warm and round sounding.

Getting as close to an upright sound was something I was after too. Having bought a Rob Allen Mouse that seemed to do the trick the next thing was to find the right amp. Having gone through a few acoustic amps I ended up with an AER Basic Performer, (in fact here is mine after trading) having seen lots of upright players using AER amps live. It has four 8” cones. It was a lovely sound but still lacking something. Finally I ended up with an FRFR powered speaker and the HX Stomp, it’s the 12” speaker, that’s what I was missing, just the deeper, richer tones of the bigger speaker and then the massive versatility of the Stomp allows me endless tweaks to my core ‘upright’ tone. I have different (albeit small and subtle differences) tones for each Fretless song of our set. I don’t know if it really gives what other would consider even close to a ‘real’ upright tone but flirting around the edges of that idea with the Stomp and the QSC has been immensely satisfying and also enriched our songs no end.

Good question, let’s ask @Jabba_the_gut.

Hello *waves*

Me too. I almost exclusively use amp and cab modelling with ridiculously small, subtle adjustments, about the only effect I use is compression. I do go into an FRFR speaker but this is mainly because I want the sound coming from the speaker to be as close to the sound of the bass played acoustically as I can, the Stomp (paradoxically) is there to bring the final amplified sound back to that original acoustic sound.

Funny that, how this whole situation appears to have drastically affected everything apart from GAS!

Get in the queue son.

Exquisite.