Jo.gwillim

How about the shape of the magnetic field? As the string moves the field strength changes. This change in field strength is what's picked up by the coil and turned into a voltage. As the string moves closer/father away from a magnet the field from magnet is going to vary, so the output from the coil will vary. As ceramic and alloy magnets have very different shapes i would expect the way the field strenth changes in the area of the string vibration to be quite different. I could imagine this would affect the output waveform considerably.

Yep, I get that, i didn't want to buy another big thing that I'd only use occasionally. Power pack with inverter, small bass amp and barefaced midget works for me. I hope you find something that suits you, it must be a very common problem.

I'm more often than not playing through the house pa DI'd from my head with a BF cab as a monitor. Best stage sound deffo from 10inch cabs, but i can never be sure that the sound bod eq's to give a similar sound FOH. So still deciding for tonight's gig between the ten inch 210 or the 12 inch midget.

Always keen to natter to a bass chatter who's passin!

I learnt bass on a fretless, i gigged fearlessly with bad intonation for a few years , but then changed bands and went fretted when my new band mates winced. I love my fretless bass but have lost my gigging nerve. Would a ponytail help?

We've 2 more gigs to go before the band in its current form at least packs up. It's been ten great years, i think about 170 gigs, with time out for Covid. Last night we were so busy trying to nail a chrismas song for the gig tomorrow none of us stopped to realise it's the end of an era. Something else will take its place i know but i shall miss the old gang. We've had 4 big family deaths, cancers, niggles, more laughs on and off stage than i can possibly remeber for all of us it's been the band that has helped us through it all. What a privilege to be part of it.

Really hard isn't it. Concentrate too hard and i sound robotic. Not enough and make mistakes. Start enjoying the moment too much and forget where you are in the song, get too critical about the last mistake and play too safe. Very subtle balance that like you said nobody will really notice anyway!

I did a gig on Friday in a big old Welsh tabernacle with a 210 with an rm800 on top. Had the chance to hear another band from the stalls they used my rig. It sounded lovely. The sound guy switched off the pa feed.

Done that a couple of times , mortifying. Many funny looks!

Benefit gig in the local village pub, Corris in mid Wales, packed out as we've got 2 more gigs before we stop playing or regroup with a new guitarist. Graham bless him is fantastic but arthritis is making playing tortuous for him. Double special gig as our singer Beth's mum died unexpectedly 2 days before so she was singing for her dear mum. Such a buzz when the gig works, everybody in the pub singing and the sweat pouring off you.

What a great wealth of advice on this thread. For me it's Keep it fun Put itunes/radio/spotify on random and try to keep up. Sing the notes you want to play. Try to play what you sing rather than what your fingers tell you to do. Experiment with weird sounds and ways of playing let one thing lead to another just keep going. Something good usually emerges. I find this really helps me from getting stuck. Learn all the notes up and down the finger board. I've been lucky enough to play in more than one band simultaneously. Both need a very different style but what i learn from one really helps in the other and vice versa. So play with as many people as you can.

Sorry if the point's already been made. But been in exactly the the OP's situation. Really hard when you're the bass player being asked to turn the vocals up mid gig but know you can't. Most of the feedback we had is was coming from the vocalist's floor monitor rather than FOH speakers. When she switched to iems things got so much easier even though she was the only one using them. Our band took the decision to get someone else to do the sound even if it meant much less dosh for the band us. It takes that dual role off me and the sound bod can make subtle tweaks mid song that i could never do.

I must admit to being a terrible noodler in rehersals. But i do turn the volume down to zero. Our drummer is too. He doesn't turn his drums down at all!

Love that honeymoon period with a new bass.

This sounds like the break through we've been waiting for. Pictures please!?

One of my bands records all our rehearsals in my living room. Quite often I'll leap up and swap basses because the sound is all wrong and feel much happier for it. When I listen back it's very hard to tell which was the mike lull jazz and which was the £200 thrown together bitza jazz, so why did I feel so much better for swapping? It's obviously psychological but maybe many small changes like one piece of bent steel over one piece of cast zinc. Maybe this can have more of an effect on how it sounds or feels to the player than how it sounds to the audience. How you can ever estimate the size of that effect I haven't a clue, just musing....

Often tempted, added advantage of not clonking band menders on crowded stages.

All good comments. Seeing as the neck is tons more wobbly that the bridge or the body I'd say that's the most important bit, and that's been my experience. I'm wondering if the bbot bridge actually performs much the same as the badass at the fundamental frequency but at higher harmonics more energy is absorbed with the bent piece of tin. More flexes per second equals more energy loss. That might explain greater punch with the badass. For me, I hate neck dive so I put high mass Bridges on to help a little but there. My other thought is about contact area with the body. More contact area might make the body look stiffer hence more sustain. Like other contributors I'm an old codger with a physics degree that was never really used. Nice to exercise the little grey cells though!

There's a local pub we play in that had some horrendous electrics. The buzz that the stage lights were giving off was playing havoc with my single coil jazz. Back up p bass came out of the car and all was fine. Apart from 3 broken A strings when I was playing hard enough to blister my fingers after every gig no other probs. I've got a traveller bass for backup which doesn't take up much room on my back seat.