Doctor J

Most of my basses are Japanese, with a German and an American in there too. Amp and cabs are 1st gen English Ashdown ABM. For build quality in relation to price, I've found Japanese instruments impossible to beat.

Fantastic work as always.

Parallel is the classic J bass tone. Compulsory. Series is a nice extra to have as a bonus, but it's not vital. It's like being on 10 and having an 11 to go to, but you need to have the classic 1 to 10 first.

The curse of the internet age is too many of us overthink these things where, before, we used to just get on with it. "Key types" for genres just ends up with people trying to live up to tired and boring clichés because it's the safe option. @Delberthotis bang on the money. Find a bass you like and learn to play it. It's that simple. Be yourself, play like yourself and flip the begrudgers. Be interesting.

Yeah, they were stoppable after all. Despite everything they bring with them, I would always prefer to have a real drummer. Drum machines are ok in certain circumstances and certain genres but, really, live music is best served totally live. A lot of programmed are either too basic (i.e. programmed by someone who doesn't play drums and feels less is more and programs too little just because they don't really understand what good drumming brings to music) or too complicated (i.e. programmed by someone who doesn't play drums and feels more is more and programs too much just because they don't really understand what good drumming brings to music and because they can). Even getting the drummer in a studio to record their tracks so you can rehearse them would put you in a better position than you are now.

Or... The Seventies and Nineties Denunciation Band

And then the same again for sales based outside the UK so we know which ones are going to have VAT and import duties factored in

And then the same again for sales based outside the UK so we know which ones are going to have VAT and import duties factored in

I decided about 10 years ago that I would never pay over €50 for a gig ticket again. It took away all the anxiety over trying to justify spending huge money on 90 minutes of entertainment versus all the crap that comes along with gigs in cavernous venues. If it's overpriced, I simply don't go, that is it. I love gigs and still go to lots of gigs but, like @Leonard Smallssays, they're ones where you're up close and personal. You don't need superstar names to be a part of amazing gigs. Sometimes, I go abroad to a city for a cluster of gigs on sequential nights and get gigs and a holiday for little more (sometimes less) than some of you are paying for you and your spouse to see one gig in the Enormodome. The best so far was Hamburg a few years ago, saw Reef, Voivod, Lygo, Killing Joke and then Therapy? on successive nights and the most expensive ticket was KJ at €32, I think. Five gigs and a holiday beats one gig in my book 🙂

Personally, I'd dig up! 😁

I saw this and thought of you 🙂 https://www.adverts.ie/drum-kits/1963-premier-drums-all-original-vintage-drum-kit-with-snare/25150915

I got three clip-on tuners out of that scheme a couple of weeks ago. I use Elixir strings but you get points for Evans drum heads and ProMark sticks, anything in the D'Addario brand range, which all contribute to it. The free postage was a nice touch, too.

The only sig bass I have had, over the years, was a Japanese Geddy Lee I picked up in a trade and quickly moved on as I'm in a happy place when it comes to Jazz basses. I do have a very rare Tony Iommi signature Patrick Eggle, based on their tasty Vienna model, which I bought new 26 years ago. I managed to visit the factory in Coventry around 1997, when they were working on an SG styled model for him, and they said only 48 of them were ever made. I'm tempted to pick up one of those Lakland GZ models for the craic, I quite like the purple 😁

Tickets for some gigs are getting expensive. There seems to be a two categories of gigs now, those whose tickets are 40 quid and under and then those who are charging around 100 quid and more. There's a trend, though. The cheap gigs tend to be in decent venues where you can clearly see the band without having to look at a screen from a great distance and where the sound is good because it's a regular music venue with a good in-house PA. The expensive ones are frequently in sports venues where you can barely see dots moving very far away, where the sound is terrible as the music reverberates around an acoustically horrific bowl and you spend most of the time trying to see past infinite upheld phone screens for a glimpse of an even bigger screen to the side of the stage. I do not understand why people keep putting their hands deeper and deeper into their pockets for the expensive ones. It's a lot of money to pad out someone's retirement fund and frequently get crap in return.

Thanks. I wasn't sure what I was doing with it for a while but it'll do 😂

No. Unless you dream of playing a lefty bass, it's not the bass of your dreams. If you're only going to hang it on a wall and look at it in a mirror, even then it's a bad idea. If you plan on actually playing it, buying it would be an utterly terrible idea.

The other lads must be disappointed? They probably... can't stand losing you?

In we go. A cheery one this month 😁 The technical guff - Yamaha kit into cheapo Thomann mics and Behringer preamp. Bass is a Bacchus 24, guitars are Bacchus Strat and Tokai 335 straight into an Avid Eleven, all fed into ProTools. I've been pissing about experimenting with delay a lot recently and that carries over here. It turns out it's quite useful at times. I used an ebow for some of it too, as well as too much phaser for a swooshy, watery sound which I recorded with and, therefore, was unable to dial back afterwards 😂 About the music - This looks like the sub-aquatic future which seemingly awaits us on our unstoppable journey into oblivion. Do electric trains run underwater?

The Lakland 44-64 GZ is in that price range. Jazz nut width, if that's your thing, and comes with the Geezer signature EMGs which seem to be highly rated. It has a J pickup too, but you don't have to turn it up 😉

There are more than just Sabbath. It's more the production than the songs as so much in contemporary Metal is regurgitated and rehashed. Anything with a gated snare sounds trapped in the 80's, along with the mid scooped guitars and digital chorus but the songs can seem timeless despite this. For me, Reign In Blood doesn't sound dated at all. It could come out today as it sounded in 86 and still sound fresh. Focus by Cynic is still in a spot untouched by time or other bands. Jerusalem/Dopesmoker by Sleep, massively imitated but still stands alone and sounds current. The production goes a long way to trapping something in time. Mahavishu Orchestra, Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire don't sound dated to me. Aja by Steely Dan, same. Where the young 'uns are still copying, sampling, imitating or still trying to catch up, it adds life to that which they are trying to sound like.

Third: plectrums are for falsers, only fingers a real! 😉 I think anything which involves typing a link is doomed to failure. Get a QR code printed on beermats and leave them all around every venue you want to play in. Flyers are waste, beermats are functional.

Yeah, sign me up

Mine has gotten heavier than I thought it would, but not too heavy, I hope. With a bit of luck I'll get time to finish it tomorrow.

I picked this up today. It sounds just lovely. It's clearer, yes, but ballsier too. Top job from Giles Martin, I doff my cap.

Not even ska?