JoeEvans

Somewhere round '69 to '72 for me - Noel Redding, John Paul Jones, Bootsy Collins in his youthful prime... Maybe extend it to '73 to include 'Blackboard Jungle Dub'.

In higher education generally, the real value has always been the time and space that a degree, masters or phd gives you to explore your own thoughts and ideas and to try and make sense of them. I guess the same would be true of a jazz course - it's not so much that you learn everything there is to know about jazz, more that it can only be beneficial to spend a year or two with your whole focus on music, surrounded by other great musicians and with no immediate pressure to make a living.

I tend to say yes to everything... I would take the wedding gigs and use them as a mechanism to drive up your db jazz skills, both from point of view of the practice you'd need to do, and from actually doing the gigs - I find that performing in public at the edge of my technical ability creates big improvements in skill and confidence. That way, you're getting paid cash to get better, which can't be bad. Then you can come to your next self-indulgent noise project as a much better player, and drop the wedding band when you've had enough.

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]I put a set of Custom Shop 62s in my Tokai Hardpuncher and it now sounds gorgeous.[/font][/color][/quote] Old Tokai + good new pickups = happy bassist.

PM'd re a friend of a friend...

Bartolinis!

I'm getting on ok with a Fishman Platinum - not the Pro one, the cheaper 'stage' model. The Bassmax seems to need a bit of a treble boost and some careful work on the middle; different venues seem to need slightly different eq too.

[quote name='Beer of the Bass' timestamp='1470402934' post='3105773'] Hey, this one has shot up since you posted the link - it's currently at £1,420. It does look like it has potential, and while I've no idea what it is, it's something different from the more ubiquitous German shop basses. [/quote] Yes - if it was near me I would have gone and had a look at it but not for £1400+. It's definitely interesting although the grain on the front is a bit rustic, and there's a bit scar on the back that needs examination. For a while I thought that I could buy a good bass fairly cheap on eBay by very carefully shopping around the older basses that come up, but it's amazing how much people seem to be prepared to pay for something as complicated as a double bass without seeing it in person. When I bought my current bass I ended up going to Ben's place in Hildenborough (www.thedoublebassroom.com) just because that's about the only place the country where you can try a dozen or more basses that are very much the real thing.

It's plywood and needs a lot of work... Solid wood will show a straight, vertical grain on front and back, and straight grain running across the ribs. Typically a carved bass will be pine on the front with growth rings (grain) between maybe 1mm and 5mm wide. Maple back and ribs will show a bit of 'flame' pattern and a very close, barely visible vertical grain. Plywood will show a wavering grain pattern without distinct parallel grain lines, because it's rotary cut from the log like a giant pencil sharpener. This one is solid wood - compare the grain on the front to the one originally posted. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Old-Double-Bass-/322215269300?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276

On a parallel note, it can be instructive to temporarily replace your expensive speaker leads with bog standard mains cable. Sounds just the same to me and many others.

This is the one accessory that I would strongly recommend to all fellow Trace Elliot owners... http://www.screwfix.com/p/folding-platform-truck/68443

I have a folding sack truck from Screwfix - I should have bought it years ago.

If I'm seeing it right in the photo, I think that's a plywood top, not a solid top. A solid top will always have straight, parallel grain running vertically, because they are cut from boards that are either quarter-sawn (a chunk like a thin slice of cake running into the middle of the log) or slab cut (the middle slice if you cut a trunk into slices). Plywood never has that grain pattern because it's made by peeling wide, thin slices off the outside of a log, sort of like a giant pencil sharpener.

I've been very pleased with my carbon bow with natural hair from Dictum (https://www.dictum.com/en/tools) - I've always been a huge fan of their beautiful tools, especially the Japanese woodworking tools, and (in my ignorant and amateurish judgement) the bow seems like a very well-priced item. It's certainly transformed my double bass playing, trying to play with a bow. It puts your intonation, shifting and vibrato under an extremely critical spotlight.

You can get pegs and suchlike from Dictum - https://www.dictum.com/en/tools. Very good carbon fibre bows as well, and all your general bits and bobs for building and repairing string instruments. Not sure about machines though - as TPJ says, don't they all have wooden pegs?

Bare essentials = 1 bass, 1 lead and 1 amp, surely?

If you're still looking, there's a good-lloking B&H for sale on this forum for £800 now, grab that then spend a bit more than you were planning to on a decent bow and some new strings...

Yes please! PMd...

If you get hooked, at some stage you are going to want to spend £2k+ (+++) on a decent solid wood bass, perhaps an older one that has settled in properly and been well set-up. When that day comes, you are going to want to spend a few hours in a room with a good number of nice old basses, trying them all to see which one is really right. But to choose the right bass, you need to be able to play the damn thing reasonably well, so that you can get the best out of them and see if they can make the kind of noises you like making. So you need a temporary bass, good enough to get your skill level up but cheap and battered enough that you can do pub gigs without getting stressed, and not new so that you can sell it for something close to what you paid for it after a year or two when you buy the really nice bass. On that basis you might look for an older Czech or Hungarian plywood or solid top bass for under a grand - Golden Strad, Boosey and Hawkes 400 or similar, maybe.

45kg! Looks good though, I quite fancy it.

Clunk isn't good but LS2 looks interesting... Am I right in thinking that I could use A<>B mode to switch between the two loops, and just create empty loops by plugging the outs into the ins with short patch cables? That would give me my ideal pedal, which is a straight switch between two independently adjustable levels. I use a piezo pickup into a preamp, so presumably this would be best placed between the preamp and the amp?

Thanks both - the EHX Signal Pad looks like exactly the right thing - set volume for pizzicato then adjust cut for arco.

Is there such a thing as a volume pedal with presets? I want to be able to switch between two preset volume levels instantly and accurately, rather than adjusting my volume gradually and by ear. It's for switching between arco and pizzicato on a double bass - arco is a lot louder, but often I want to use it in places where I would like to be the same volume or quieter than my pizzicato volume.

I'm trying to develop a semi-respectable arco technique and I have had this same problem. The following fixed it, but as I did them all more or less at once, I don't know whether one or all of them are the answer... 1. New bow. I got a carbon fibre one from Dictum which I am very pleased with. 2. Different rosin (Petz medium). 3. Working on the balance between bow pressure, bow speed and bow placement - on any one note, vary one while keeping the other two constant and see what happens. 4. 'Attack' / 'bite'. I think this one is probably the key to it. There's something which happens at the start of a note, when the bow gets a grip on the strings before coming up to speed. I don't think I can put it into words but you can play around with it, stopping and starting a note several times within a single stroke of the bow until it starts sounding better.

I started off using a mic, thinking that the kind of low-volume gigs I'm doing would be fine like that. I used a Sennheiser e608, which I had anyway; the sound was great at lower volumes and for recording. However, recently I had a gig where I was getting terrible feedback problems - a big low vibration with the whole body of the bass getting involved. So I've bought a K&K Bass Max which so far sounds very good. It's a less natural double bass sound, but I actually prefer that for the sound of the band - it has more middle and top end in it, which cuts through a bit better, whereas the natural sound of my bass is very, very deep and bassy. We recently did some recording and in the mix I ended up taking about 15db off everything under 200hz because there was so much volume down there that it boomed everything else out. So for the near future it will be K&K Bass Max for live, and the mic plus the Bass Max for recording, or Bass Max and a condenser mic on a stand if I ever happen to do any isolated recording of just bass, rather than full-band sessions. That said, I think if I wanted a really good natural live DB sound I might invest in a Troll, which look fantastic.