JoeEvans

Here are a few on eBay right now... http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-4-Double-Bass-THE-STENTOR-STUDENT-II-/201373350520?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-2-size-double-bass-Antoni-/221794299998?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Beautiful-Bargain-Bass-amp-extras-/121670261566?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276 I reckon any one of these would be a far better buy than a cheap new one.

Thomann are well spoken-of for double basses - a few on their site at 577 euros including a natty black rockabilly model... Or go up to 700-odd euros for a much nicer one. But I would always buy second-hand myself. I've seen some nice DBs go on eBay for under £500 recently.

It goes 'bwaahhh'.

Maybe use both - the piezo for very small gigs, then for louder gigs add the magnetic for volume and feedback-free on-stage sound, with a bit of the more natural acoustic tone of the piezo dialled in to the mix out front?

I think the contract thing is right. I used to book bands for a venue, and I would email out a summary of my understanding of the conversations I'd had with a band: time, date and place, tech spec, fee and rider, set length, cancellation arrangements etc. The band confirm it, I PDF it and send it back to them with the word 'Contract' on the top. Then everyone knows exactly what the deal is and there's less potential for arguments on the night. If the promoter isn't doing this, it's fine for the band to - it makes everyone's lives easier. Just as an aside, I learnt a lot about live music as a business in that job. it was amazing how few bands had good photos available to download on their website so that I could do a poster for them, and how few had decent bits of film on Youtube I could put up on the venue's website and Facebook page. It was a decent-sized venue, 400-capacity, so it wasn't tiny local bands, either. As a promoter, I didn't care if my audience hadn't heard of the band if the material was available to show them that it was going to be a good night; by the same token, I couldn't book anyone, however good they sounded, if there was nothing out there to show my punters by way of films, photos, website, reviews etc.

A good book. Always a lot of sitting around in that sort of situation. Probably worth a thread of its own as to which book...

Danny Thompson did a lot to establish a kind of default sound for the acoustic / folk singer-songwriter world, particularly in his playing with Nick Drake and John Martyn.

HMRC are quite pressed for staff and resources in the current climate of cutbacks. I would imagine that they are not at all interested in anything at a hobby level; they will be looking for high turnover traders who don't have a real-world business existence to match. I'd be surprised if they went after anyone turning over less than maybe £50k a year, apart from maybe the odd one or two to set a high profile example.

That looks ace and amazingly cheap!

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif] personally I find minor thirds (and major thirds to a lesser extent) difficult to nail at times[/font][/color][/quote] There's a genuine problem with thirds on unfretted instruments. If you work your way up the harmonics on a single sting, you'll find a harmonic that sounds as a major third. But t's not the same as a major third on a fretted instrument - there's a difference between a 'natural' major third and an equal temperament major third. It's all a bit complex and I can't quite work out how to explain it effectively so google if you're interested, but the upshot is that a major third sounds right if you play it slightly flat, but anyone playing am instrument with fixed intonation will be slightly sharp of you of they play the same note...

My tuner (and I suspect most tuners) can't keep up with general playing - it takes half a second or so to respond to a note. So it's not much use while actually playing. However, I do sometimes use it for exercises - I do one when I'm playing scales, where I stop at a random note, hold it and check that I'm in tune. I also do another one where I play a phrase right at the top of the neck (e.g. A-B-C on the A string with an open string for the A), then jump to repeat it an octave up, either on the same string or on the next higher string, and I hold the last note to check that I jumped to the right place.

Lemmy once said of Level 42 that they were a great band and they'd sound even better with a bass player. Which I take to mean that there needs to be someone just holding the song together, and if the bassist is all over the neck doing constant solos, it leaves a hole.

I would be inclined to scrape it off. The best thing is to learn how to use a glass cutter. Cut a strip of glass about 2" wide, the cut it down into pieces about 6" long. When you first cut them they will have a superb scraping edge. Lightly take off very narrow strips of the finish, holding the glass at maybe 70 degrees to the wood. When it feels like it's going blunt, cut a strip off the glass to get a fresh scraping edge. Various videos of this technique on Youtube such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBLdVKmcPw8 Probably good to lightly sand off the fingerboard afterwards.

I definitely have experience of musicians who think that they are ridiculously good and wouldn't hesitate to describe themselves as such; however, they don't generally need to go to Gumtree to find a band to play in. I'd be more worried about being irritated than outplayed here...

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]The most samey year comes out as 1986.[/font][/color][/quote] I can confirm the accuracy of the algorithm there.

Hiring is a really good idea - they are hard instruments to buy, because they are all so different, and hiring allows you to build a bit of technique and knowledge so that you can buy one from a more informed perspective.

Maybe a slight edit would make the question easier to answer: [quote] [b] Why are singers (generally) averse to lessons/instruction from the bass player?[/b] [/quote]

I actually quite like that. Bit of a Bridgit Riley vibe.

Hook one of those up to a digital metronome and you'd be onto something.

Listen to the kick drum all the time, work out how the notes in the baseline fit against the kick drum pattern (sometimes hitting the same beat, sometimes fitting in between each other's beats) and make it all fit together absolutely tightly so that every time you're both meant to be playing a beat, you hit it bang on together. Oh, and buy the drummer a metronome too...

Snap it up before I come over there and find it myself. As long as it sounds good, that is...

"Knock knock!" "Who's there?" "Terence Trent." "Terence Trent who?" That's show business! I actually always quite liked him myself.

If he's driving that car, he has extraordinarily long arms - the fretting hand is right by the left hand side of the windscreen. He also appears to be fretting it with his thumb, which is unusual.

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Trust me, Pino and Flea are behind and ahead of the beat respectively. [/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]We are talking absolute minuscule deviations, so much so that it is incredibly hard to pick out. But they are behind and ahead.[/font][/color][/quote] I did rip the audio and look at it, and it looked to me as though there was a pretty close correspondence between drum and bass on the RHCP track. Obviously on the D'Angelo track, the bass isn't playing right on the drum beats for a lot of the line; for the notes where he is, I'm pretty confident that he's hitting it, but he could well be behind it on the other notes. But that was why i was keen to hear from someone who has looked at multi-track recordings in this light. My feeling is that a lot of this is about attack and swing, rather than being literally ahead of or behind a beat. With a digital multitrack recording you could see whether that was the case or not, by lining up the drum and bass tracks and seeing where the hit is on both.

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]The way the bass interacts with the drums is where the beat is pushed or pulled. Pino sits right on the back end of Questloves drums, he's always behind it. Flea on Give it Away is leading Chads drums, he's ahead of the beat.[/font][/color][/quote] I must have cloth ears then, because I listened to both as carefully as I know how and I didn't hear either bass player playing a note ahead of or behind where it 'ought' to have fallen. Flea sounds totally locked in to the drummer; although Pino is playing a more free-range baseline, each note sounds to me as though it sits bang on the rhythm. Am I wrong? Which notes in the phrase is either bassist putting ahead of or behind where it should go?