JoeEvans

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]I'm playing such basic stuff nearly anyone could play it.[/font][/color][/quote] Yes, but that also covers the basslines on a good half of the best songs ever written... That's the beauty of being a bass player, you don't need to play too many notes - and I sometimes think that too much technique doesn't always make for the best baselines [*cough*MarkKing*cough*]...

Join a rowdy pub blues band and have a laugh; and meanwhile keep doing your scales, up and down against a metronome in an unstressed, meditational mood without any real targets or sense of pressure - just slow down until they flow evenly and easily then repeat, repeat, repeat until the rough edges are polished smooth. Don't worry too much about what your girlfriend said - very few bass players sound good when they are practicing by themselves, it's just not that kind of instrument; and the truth is that playing a musical instrument does sometimes put pressure on the time available within a relationship, which isn's always easy for the other partner. But she would want you to be happy (I hope!) so if playing bass is what you want to do then go for it. And keep doing your scales.

A quick update - I succumbed to temptation and drove down to Ben's in Kent yesterday (www.thedoublebassroom.com), coming away with a lovely 1970s violin-cornered bass. I was able to play at least five basses for £3k or under and had a hard time deciding between them; there were some really characterful instruments and the prices seemed very reasonable to me. Anyway, there were a couple there that I didn't buy but which someone needs to snap up - an 1880s German flatback that looks like a barn find on the outside but has an amazingly subtle, rich tone (apparently fully restored inside and recently set up); and a scrumptious-looking busetto that was a bit beyond my price range but looked absolutely fabulous.

I'm going to say £400 but that's a wild stab in the dark...

It depends how you normally pluck - do you use one finger at a time as on an electric bass, two fingers together, or index finger pointing downwards? I find that if I use a bass-guitar-style technique, snapping the plucking finger onto the string below, I get quite a bit of unwanted thump even playing unamplified. I've adjust my technique to either pull the string up for a softer attack, or kind of pressing it down and across with two fingers then letting it twang free, for a somewhat brighter, harder attack. I shy away from the index-finger-pointing-downwards technique because I find it harder to switch to alternating first two fingers for faster passages.

Love those bouncy octaves.

What will take the place of us gigging is other, younger bands gigging, playing music that we don't like and wearing trousers that irritate us. It's one of the miracles of human civilisation that even though you would think that there were only limited variations possible in trouser design, each subsequent generation nevertheless invents a type of trouser that the previous generation finds irritating.

It's not cool to have to try too hard, or to need complex and expensive kit to get a good sound, so a simple, classic bass is cool. However, it's also not cool to be the same as everyone else, and it's cool to be an early adopter of new things or a connoisseur of the rare and exotic, so a simple, classic bass is uncool, and a unique and unusual bass is cool. I hope that helps.

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1453500182' post='2960187'] Anyone have any experience of [url="http://thedoublebassroom.com/"]http://thedoublebassroom.com/[/url] ? I have a friend fancying something there and she just wants to make sure he is ok. [/quote] I bought a cheaper bass from him (a somewhat battered but charismatic Hungarian solid top) and I liked him a lot - he seemed to be very much in it for the love of the instrument and he's very straightforward to deal with. It also looks like pretty much the only place in the country where you could try out five or ten interesting basses for under £4k in one morning. At some point soon I'm going to go down there and buy myself a nice solid wood bass - he's got a couple at the moment that I would love to try.

Ok - £300, £100 each for the two who don't know the birthday boy, and £50 each for the two who want to do it for cheap.

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]I have just started getting into jazz and trying to find a way to mix it with punk rock! Its hard to get right but I love experimenting with it. I will post some stuff up here once Ive recorded it. But in the meantime can anyone recommend any punk jazz (if it exists??!)[/font][/color][/quote] Blurt! http://youtu.be/RBFyHfqfW-E Although no bass...

Get the drummer booked in for minor surgery to have one of those midi sockets installed, discreetly tucked away behind the left ear.

You could always wrap an SM57 in foam and tuck it under the bridge? That would probably produce a respectably fifties sound with plenty of thump, click and slap. Cheap, too, if you can pick one up on eBay. Or I think some people do cunning things with elastic bands to suspend the mic in the hole under the bridge.

I was chatting the other day to someone about creativity in classical music vs creativity in bands playing original material. In classical music, people can go through a whole career without being expected to play a single note they wrote themselves, and yet they bring a huge amount of creativity to their interpretation of the repertoire. Cover bands are in exactly this situation too. On the other hand, when you write material for a band, you always draw on all the music you've heard and generally you work within a genre, making music that is really quite close to the other bands in the genre. It might well be that the actual proportion of creativity against repetition is broadly similar in both cases...

I've always used Photoshop for that kind of graphic design, which is probably a bit OTT but it definitely does the job...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_URuSSCBL9g There's a whole story there and a great album if you haven't come across it.

My favourite contemporary jazz musician is Tomasz Stanko - to my mind, 'Soul of Things' and 'Suspended Night' are pretty much perfect albums. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H51xGk0lMwk[/media] Although now I come to think about it, I can't talk about contemporary jazz without mentioning EST - 'Strange Place for Snow' is just an amazing album... [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkjWW8V49kI[/media]

[quote][color=#000000][font=Calibri][size=3]Does anyone have any info on this bass, is it all laminate[/size][/font][/color][/quote] If you post a good close-up photo of the top of the bass including some of the edge, I'll have a good guess at whether the top is laminate or solid wood - I don't know all that much about basses but I know a bit about plywood!

I play 'Tico Tico' with my band on db, switching between a rumba rhythm (e.g. A, C, E on the 1, 2.5 and 4) and a straight walking bassline, playing four notes to the bar. Seems to work although it pushes it more in the direction of gypsy swing than choro...

Looks like he's been wearing sander disks for cufflinks.

One definition of a professional musician is someone who earns more from music than they spend on equipment.

I'm going to guess that you'd wear out both strings and frets faster by playing with a lot of vibrato, than by slapping and popping.

It's normally thought of as part of slap technique - 'slapping and popping'. You might slap the A-string with the thumb then maybe twang ('pop') an octave up on the G-string. With both the slap and the pop (and probably with life in general), the trick is to practice getting the result you want without overdoing it, which will minimise fret wear as well as muscle strain, and enable faster playing.

Some people put a bit of black and yellow hazard tape around the bottoms of the legs of their speaker stands if they are using them for gigs where the band is down on a level with a drinking public. That way people are genuinely more likely to see them, but if worst comes to worst you can also say that you risk-assessed the set-up, identified that there was a possibility of people tripping over the legs or bumping into the stands, and took action to mitigate the risk. Likewise, depending on lighting set-up, you could also mount a little red LED bike light on each speaker stand upright (or on the protruding front leg) to draw attention to the hazard. Might look at bit silly in some circumstances but if there was a fairly busy lighting set-up it might look ok.