adamg67

I’ve got the Markbass Multiamp which does a pretty good impression of several MB amps, and I've had a couple of MB cabs as well. For me the MB amps work best when I like sound off the bass already and don't want to change it that much, like my P style bass with flats. I also have a Stingray, which I don't think sounds great with the MB amps and is currently going through a Darkglass Vintage Microtubes.

Yeah, we managed to get in there before it shut but not by much. Not an ideal music venue on paper as it was basically L shaped, from the stage the left hand half of the room was really long and the right hand side was not, with a nice flat wall to bounce the sound back at you. I don't think anywhere else ever managed to get the kind of up and coming bands that the Duchess did. We liked Joseph's Well too, but you very much had to take your own crowd for that one.

We've had the topics for people who were inspired by the bassists on the tracks of their youth, but who else just didn't really pay much attention to the bass on stuff they were listening to and got into it in other ways? I didn't play anything until I was 18 or so and then learnt a bit of guitar from a mate and carried that on at uni. I didn't claim to be any good but people said nice enough things about my playing that I kept at it and was in a just for fun bands. After uni I joined a band in Leeds, the other guitarist / singer wrote the songs and I liked them. Put a bit of work in getting the songs together, then was sat down in the pub one evening for a chat about how my playing was a bit clichéd and not what they were after so I was out. Same thing for the bass player. When I thought about it, I reckoned they were probably right, so just to mix things up I went up to Northern Guitars on vicar lane and traded my Fender HM Strat and Orange Amp for a Hohner The Jack headless bass and a Peavey TNT 150. There was really not much thought went into it, it was pretty much on a whim. A month or two later I bumped into the same guy that had sacked me as a guitarist and got chatting. He was still writing the songs but had got a singer in so he could concentrate on guitar. They were stuck for a bass player though. So, I rejoined on bass and it just worked really well, I liked his songs and he liked the basslines I put to them. Did a few pub gigs and the Duchess, and only didn't play the Cockpit because he fell out with the guy who booked bands (which also meant we were well out of the way when Sound City was in Leeds which was a shame). He spent a fair bit of time drunk and fell out with quite a lot of people in fact, and then moved to Australia. But by then I was bass player and no going back... Well, only for a bit, but that's another story.

I can elaborate / qualify one answer, last band I was in we got contacted on FB by Nutjob from the US saying we had used his band name, he had it copyrighted (not possible) and that he even had a tattoo of it. So not really a fan. Looking on FB he clearly wasn't even in a band. I sent him a ridiculous long Joe Lycett style reply about copyright law etc just for fun, and he got even nastier after that. Apparently we'll never gig in the US again. We were playing small venues in West Yorkshire so weren't all that worried. For upcoming projects I'll be more careful checking that there aren't any slightly unhinged Americans who think it's theirs, even though they've never used it for anything.

Aren't they all yes/no questions? no, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Feel free to ignore this as I've never owned a fender bass (I do have a fender g**tar though, weird), but isn't a reasonable answer to worries about minor differences in pickup positioning on a JJ bass just to have them nice and wide apart and have a blend control? My not-a-P-bass and my not-a-J-bass (Maru..yk Jake and Elwood) both have blend and when the two pups are similar enough it feels a lot like being able to slide the pickup from the bridge to the neck.

New or second hand? You get more for your money second hand, but on the other hand you need to know what you're buying. I've got 8 basses & guitars of various sorts, and only one was bought new (and that was built to my spec, not off the shelf). Same with my amp and pedals as it happens.

As mentioned above, you'll need something that makes your Multiple inputs looks like a single input for Skype. The other thing you might get away with is two mono inputs used as a single stereo one. It will depend on your interface, If you've got a pair of mic inputs and a mic level DI for the bass that might work. A software mixer will probably be simpler and more flexible. The key is that it has to give you an input, not an output. If it didn't, you need to use something like loopback to turn output to input. Bear in mind that once you've faffed and got it working, Skype / Zoom etc will compress the crap out of the audio and make it a bit worse again, I think it's still worth it though. You can test it with the Skype call testing service, or by having a meeting with yourself and recording it in Zoom. I use Windows for various reasons, and I do it a different way as I wanted the output from my DAW (my piano is virtual anyway), so I can't offer any more specific help.

You really really did, I like that. Sadly I didn’t pay enough attention (I’m still working ATM) and missed the voting thread, sorry!

Yep, just make sure it’s 1/4” TRS to XLR male balanced cable.

@tvickey I went for the Palmer Daccapo, their gear has always seemed pretty solid to me. I've checked the reamped signal against the original and it sounds spot on to my amateur ears and has the volume trim pot so you can get the signals the same level with your setup. It does take XLR in but adapters are cheap enough - I just made a cable for it, helps justify buying my soldering station 🙂

But... but... too many questions!

I know we have emojis and acronyms and all that, but... that really made me laugh out loud!

Funnily enough, I said to the mrs yesterday that the best thing about my stingray 5 stealth black is that it has a black pickgaurd on a black background - perfect colour combo for that design

I just had this happen to me, literally a couple of weeks ago! Modes seemed a bizarre way of looking at things until I saw how it worked on piano. I think learning another and quite different instrument (I'm currently a comfortable Grade 0 on piano, but improving a lot ) has really helped my theory, and my bass playing.

Laptop-wise, spec will come down to how many tracks you want to play & record, and how many plugins (effects etc) you want on them. It sounds like you won't need lots of either, so no need to go crazy on the spec. If you want something that will definitely do the job, my guess at a safe bet spec would be: Quad core i5 (doesn't need to be latest gen especially) should do it easily, don't worry too much about clock speed. Avoid i3, no need to spend money on i7. Avoid things like Celeron. I'm not up on the current crop of AMD chips so can't comment. 4G RAM, but 8 is better and shouldn't cost a lot more nowadays Plenty of disk, but if you can get SSD that will be much better than a traditional hard drive - it's not vital but SSDs are getting cheaper now anyway. probably not worth getting less than 250G given prices, more is better. Obvious I know but make sure you've got the right ports for the audio interface you want. Get one with a decent motherboard and chipset. Cheap motherboards can screw your I/O. You can do definitely do it for less, but the closer you get to a minimum spec the more you risk latency issues etc, so it's up to you how far you push it. Lots of the DAWs will have a published minimum spec as well.

It's really not the A/D conversion that's adding latency for jamming online, it's sending the data across the network. Go in a high end studio and they will be using A/D when tracking, and often A/D then D/A if you've got any effects on the monitoring. The latency for that is tiny with modern hardware and what latency there is comes down to getting the data in and out of whatever is processing it, not doing the conversion - that's why thunderbolt is lower latency than USB. Digital multi effects and pedals do A/D and D/A so fast that no one even realises it's happening, and that's been the case for years. Domestic broadband isn't optimised for very low latency, you might be lucky and get it good enough or you might not, with a bit of luck you'll get it good enough for a jam. Using a wired connection instead of wifi can help a lot.

For screwing things to walls, I work on the principle that the screws are there to pull the things tight to the wall, if they're flush and being pulled against the wall it's the friction that stops them moving downwards. That's what screws are for, for pulling two surfaces tight to each other. I wouldn't use a guitar hanger that wasn't pulled flat to the wall with some nice tight screws. The last ones I put up werent' flat on the back so I sanded them down until they were.

I got straplocks on my Jake and they were fitted fine, but I noticed over time that they stuck more than my others. I checked them out and they are fake Schallers, I had to replace the strap ends and then everything worked okay. You can see the difference as the real thing has the writing on the instrument side of the strap bits, if you see what I mean. You could see they weren't quite the right shape either. Shame on a bass which is otherwise just excellent

I've got an Elwood that I bought second hand which has Haussel J/J pickups and a Delano preamp and that sounds great to me. it's so hard to describe tones and it's the only J style bass I've had, but I was really pleased with how much low end it can do and with the character it has.

How do they make those isolated bass tracks? I'm assuming they're not from the original multi track, and done with some kind of processing of the whole song? If that's true I doubt the original tone has survived intact. Edit - the Flea one sounds much too clean to be anything but the actual bass track.

@SpondonBassed That's a good point, if the aim is to keep water off something WD40 is indeed a good call.

*engage pedant mode* Just while it's been mentioned: WD40 is not as good for freeing and lubricating things as lots of people seem to think. For loosening things, penetrating oil is much better, for lubricating pretty much any lubricating oil is better, like some basic 3 in 1. https://lifehacker.com/when-should-i-not-use-wd-40-5891936 https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how-to/a6064/wd-40-vs-the-world-of-lubricants/ *disengage pedant mode*

Now that is smart thinking.