Doctor J

Covers and tributes have never interested me in the slightest. I did play in a mate's blues/rock cover band for a while, on and off whenever he was looking for a new bassist or drummer, just filling in until he got a proper replacement but it was purely because he's a mate and needed a hand. I found the whole process of half-arsedly learning what they thought the crowd would like to hear to be soul destroying. Unless my heart is in it, there's no point in me being there. I want to play what I [i]want[/i] to play, not just playing some tunes I have no passion for. I can't see myself just sucking it up for cash and doing the wedding and function scene, I think I'd rather not play at all. It always depresses me to see lads on a stage playing covers and just going through the motions, where you can tell they're on autopilot and another little piece of them is dying inside as the grind through Mustang Sally for the thousandth time. The joy I get out of it all is the creative process, writing music, coming up with something new. Since the last band ended I've just been writing and recording myself and loving it, honestly. That looks like the way it's going to stay for the time being, at least. My brain's default setting is to find a band and gig but it's not going to happen unless I uncover something which stimulates me.

[quote name='Shade' timestamp='1333576728' post='1603922'] No slap on Blood Sugar (Aside from chorus and bridge on Power Of Equality), and it was recorded with a Wal, not a Ray [/quote]Uh huh. That album was the catalyst, it made hundreds of white men mistankenly believe they had the funk.

Gold star for you

Might be Soviet in part at least

Slap, when played with taste (work with me) and in context, can be tolerable. The problem is not slap itself, it's the rampant and tasteless abuse of slap by people who need to move on and become the attention seeking lead guitarists they secretly yearn to be. Most of us can think of more than one occasion where it's been clumsily dropped into the most inappropriate songs and used as little more than the four string version of a Malmsteen clone showing you how quickly he can play a monotonous scale. What turned me off slap, back in the early 90's, was when Blood Sugar Sex Magic came out and, within a couple of years seemingly every bassist over here was playing a poxy Stingray and firing their thumb at everything. From the soppiest ballad to the heaviest of Metal, you just couldn't see a band without experiencing "Look at me" syndrome. I kept away from the technique because it just annoyed me to hear it. Even recently, I went to see a Texas blues style guy on tour from England and it was all going well until, three or four songs in, the bassist whipped out his thumb and started boink-a-dinking away. Texas blues + slap? No. Stop. It doesn't work. Why would you think there's a place for slap in Texas blues? Enough, I say. It's time for taste to make a comeback and the showboating to slip into the mists of time where, hopefully, our children and our children's children don't have to feel embarassed for the guy trying to compete with the singer and guitarist and that drummer who is clearly at the wrong gig. I can handle Flea or Larry Graham doing it because they've written their music around it and it fits the lyrics are about gittin' it on and it works and that's great. It just doesn't work when you're playing a folk gig in the local boozer and you're trying to impress some boiler who's only giving you the eye because it's glass. Slap has become like an embarassing mate who, no matter what you did, has done it better, done it sooner and wants everyone to know about it and still thinks his Timmy Mallet glasses are still in. The tragic thing is, it's probably due a comeback any day now

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1333557414' post='1603553'] I think you answered your own question. Larry Graham doesn't play at 1000mph. Those players that get in as many notes as possible (the so-called 'virtuosos') gave slap a bad name. IMHO the bass guitar is not, nor should be, a solo instrument. *hides in shed with colander on head* [/quote]You only need a colander if it's to collect contributions for your newsletter, which I would like to subscribe to.

Good luck Linus, it'd be great if not everyone from BC was a failure

Take your time, go to shops and try loads of basses and try to find out what kind of bass you want first, because it sounds like you know you want a bass without knowing which bass. Time is on your side here and you have a healthy budget. Once you whittle it down to a model or two, then try playing loads of that type and find the bass you want. Personally, I don't think I could ever go back to one because I enjoy playing with the variety of different sounds, feels, etc and I don't see any virtue in purposely restricting my options to one in the same way I wouldn't want to eat my favourite food every day either. If you like a bass or two you already have, keep it I say. What have you got to lose by having more than one instrument?

I think Bart use blades in everything edit -> [quote]CNC machined blades on all of the 4 string bass pickups listed below allow them to cover string widths from 50mm to 59mm on medium curvature fingerboards with excellent string balance[/quote]

A lot of what you do with your tone in metal will depend on what the guitarists are doing as it is, unquestionably, a guitar driven style. With my last gig I was playing guitar so left the low end to the bass and had quite a mid focused guitar tone without too much gain on it and, surprisingly, frequently got compliments from other guitarists. We were tuned to B with some tunes in dropped A so keeping some sort of clarity was important to me. We had recorded quite a few tunes before getting a full time bassist so I played bass on several recordings too. I just went straight into a first series Ashdown ABM, on the solid state channel but with the dirt from the valve turned all the way up and bypassed the EQ, instead using a tiny bit of low and high end boost on the bass, a Bacchus 5 string Jazz, no effects or anything other than the dirt from the amp and hitting the strings rather hard. I kept the action low to get a bit of fret grind in there which I find helps the bass cut through. As I said, the guitar was, on its own, quite a weedy sound, but the bass and guitar tones were set up to work together and the overall effect had a nice punch to it. You really need buy-in from your guitarist to be able to do it that way though, the bedroom tone just doesn't work in a band context and they need to embrace this [url="http://www.justinmaloney.com/anbd.zip"]http://www.justinmaloney.com/anbd.zip[/url] [url="http://www.justinmaloney.com/anbwt.zip"]http://www.justinmaloney.com/anbwt.zip[/url] That chug tone you put up there sounds ace with the kit, I'd like to hear how it works with your guitarist and an acoustic kit.

I can't see it anywhere

[quote name='ikay' timestamp='1332690026' post='1591648'] This video gives a direct tonal comparison of similar bolt-on and neck-through basses and may be of interest: [url="http://www.theguitarcolumn.com/2010/03/bolt-on-vs-neck-thru-tone-difference.html"]http://www.theguitar...difference.html[/url] [/quote]Apart from the different body woods, neck woods and strings, of course

I think most people can't hear the difference using their ears alone. Neck through never did Stanley Clarke any harm.

Oooh a new colour. Great to see the torch of Leo's innovation and creativity being carried with pride by FMIC, on the anniversary of his death. That price is absurd. Still, if you need a brand name that badly, good luck to you.

I much prefer them to Schallers, have never had a problem with the screw coming out and have them on most of my basses for years. I have had that strap nut frequently loosen after time on Schallers, however.

I've got a couple of Streamers with MECs (one set active, one passive) and an Ibanez which I fitted with EMGs (reverse PJ config in all). To be honest, I haven't heard anything in either set of MECs to suggest they're inferior to the EMGs in any form at all. You tend to see quite a few people who swap them out so if you keep your eyes on the classifieds here you shouldn't have to wait long to pick up a set but, to my ears at least, they sound great, I'd definitely consider installing MECs if I was swapping out pickups in another bass - just wouldn't buy them new, they're perjaps priced just a smidge unrealistically

If it's not fun do them and yourself a favour and remove yourself from the situation.

After giving it a little more thought too, you've most likely got Gotoh hardware on there already so leave it alone

That's a keeper Linus has nailed it pretty much, they were made during those years and, in the absense of any records, there's no way of really telling which year exactly. The Tele headed Precision was a genuine model though, there was one on chrisguitars for a while which I had my eye on but stupidly never bought. I don't think anyone out there is really making copies of the 400. Given the prices they sell for it's not really worth the bother, though if you had the big F logo on the headstock I'd say you could triple the asking price and still sell with ease. Please don't change anything, that thing is gorgeous please My ESP is as stock as the day it left the factory and I'm a hoor for modding, but anything I change will not improve the bass, only take away. Give it a bit of time, get to know it, these basses are the real deal, you don't need to soup them up to get a great bass. Some day people will see past the headstock logo and cop on to the quality of these basses and you'll be the guy who gutted a pre-CBS in ESPworld

I had a 200 mile round trip for rehearsals with my last band, which I did without complaint for four years. Things weren't going well though, poor communication and a bit of tension as a result, so we had a meeting after rehearsals one day, got a few things off our chest (surreal comments aired like "I don't really like local Metal bands, I wouldn't go and see any of these bands if I wasn't in this band" - [i]what are you doing in a local Metal band then?[/i]) but I drove away thinking maybe we had a future after all and was looking forward to our gig the next day, which was a festival in Limerick - a 90 minute drive for me and a two hour drive for the rest of the lads. By the time I got home, two hours later, I had received a text message: "I don't fancy doing this gig tomorrow. Too much pain for too little gain" That was the moment I decided to quit.

They should be throwing a few free sessions your way as an apology.

I like everything about that except the price.

I'm very particular about how I setup my basses and, as a result, very rarely go to shop to try them out because I'm more likely to be put off. Like neepheid, selection is thin where I live so I've bought a lot of basses from abroad without having ever played them. I'm generally comfortable with any 34" scale bass provided there's a forearm contour, so I don't worry about not getting on. The first thing I do is strip them down, clean and oil as appropriate, string them with my preferred brand and gauge of string and set them up the way I like. Once that's done, spend some time getting to know it, see what it can do and, after a few months, I know if it's a keeper or not. Within the same style of bass you do find some are better (to me) than others. I've had a few other Jazz basses pass through, like Sadowsky and Fender, but nothing has felt or sounded better than my ESP. When I got my Godlyke it became clear that my Stingray wasn't going to see a lot of playing time any more so I moved it on, despite liking it a lot. Even within bass types you like, there are individual ones which stand out and they're the ones you keep,

Never had a problem with that before. A D'Addario B I once had did the same thing and it was fine, strung up the same way I do for every other string.

Tell them their guitars look to small, like toy guitars and that, as men, they should play bigger, manly guitars - like you.