Frank Blank

Persevere Sir, I listen back to tracks and watch videos of my fretless playing and some of it needs huge improvement, but on others I can see/hear that I have improved since starting and playing fretless has definitely improved my fretted playing and my ear for intonation. I say keep going.

I can confirm they make splendid pyjamas too.

*CALLING ALL 32" BASS OWNERS* My 32" short-scale ACG is a lovely thing, however, in my experience it is the one scale length that is incredibly difficult to find a good case/gigbag for. Any recommendations for such from any 32" bass owners would be much appreciated. If it helps this is the bass in question.

^^^Absolutely this^^^ buy the bass you like/feel comfortable with, @Delberthot is right on the money. Trying to play/feel comfortable on a bass you dislike is going to be extremely difficult, probably impossible but to tweak the bass you love to make the sound you want is much, much easier. My first ‘serious’ bass was a Jaydee Supenatural, I played it in a nasty, noisy thrash metal band and got lots of puzzled looks from other bass players but it was a bass I felt really at home with so that’s what I used, you’d never know from recordings what bass it was.

They are top quality schmutter.

Welcome @grendelkhan

Welcome @Drobny

Funny you should say that but on first glance I mistook it for the Dordogne and hurriedly got the family in the car to enjoy a couple of weeks in the sun. Mind you I was out of my noggin on space rusks so who can say?

Mind you, you were off your tîts on herbal flange biscuits, no wonder.

Not really, after all I’m off my tree on magnetic gas plums.

I am having exactly the same problem, listening back to several bass lines that I recorded over lockdown and can’t play one of them, not a one. Mind you, I am smashed out of my gourd on elastic spasm cakes so who knows?

Did you enjoy that after just one read?

This isn’t a derail, it’s in keeping embellishment, like some folk with taste put a turd on a doily.

I volunteered as an unsuitable forum poster at the village fete but was refused by the Vicar as I’d honked up in the tombola.

I learnt the whole of Topographic Oceans without listening once, granted I was off my mash on Rendlesham Sparklers and woke up in a ditch but nonetheless, nailed it.

Until you fell off and face planted a tree, only took one accident though.

I had it away with a large, grey pachyderm in my heels this morning. Made a change not blow my own trumpet.

I learnt that one, it took 327 listens but 320 of those were out of contrary spite, 5 I didn’t really hear because I was having an epileptic episode. I could have played it after 2 listens but I don’t like to brag.

It’s an algorithm or a meme, just ignore it.

Come on you lot, I was able to play the entire bass solo output of Oscar Pistorius after one listen. Granted I was off my mash on Cricklewood bazookas at the time but there we are.

...which is why throughout my post I wrote, several times, in my opinion and what FRFR meant to me.

Eugene Wright and Joe Morello, impossibly cool...

In my humble opinion, FRFR to me meant finding amplification that made my basses louder but didn’t colour the tone in any way whatsoever, or at least as close to that as possible. For me, until I found that fundamental basic tone of a bass it was pointless manipulating that tone when you weren’t ‘at zero’ so to speak. I finally felt I’d found that fundamental tone once I began using the QSC K12.2. From that point on I began to manipulate the tone with a HX Stomp, even though these manipulations were tiny, in my opinion this made the signal no longer FRFR. Playing the bass through an active uncoloured speaker with nothing else in the signal chain is what FRFR means to me but the minute you manipulate the tone in any way or listen to the tone via IEMs, a PA, headphones, whatever, then part of your tone is the bass, part of it is the other things the signal is travelling through. So, for me, FRFR was about finding as uncoloured tonal basis from which I could start. All the other benefits, the small size of the rig, the happy faces of FOH engineers when they can DI straight out of the back of the speaker and finally hearing how my basses really actually sound and being able to work with that tone from as close to flat as I could get.

I use one monitor, but am considering IEMs in the future.