Russ

Literally just saw that. Did what he loved right up to the end. RIP.

So the current consensus seems to be that the Ventures are apparently reliable, and get the V12 because the V7 is potentially a bit underpowered. Got it.

I'm not at the point where I want to quit anything at the moment, but frustrations are building. I'm in a band with a guy who has the absolute worst luck in the world - if something can go wrong for him it does, whether it's with his work, his health, his family life or whatever. Seriously, it's like he has been cursed or hexed or something. And, when things go wrong he tends to wallow in it. We ended up having to take most of last year off because he couldn't get his s**t together. And now he's just discovered he has a fairly serious health condition. The band and I always support him because he's like family, but it's frustrating. We're all in our 40s and 50s and aren't dreaming of rock stardom or anything any more, but actually being able to get together and play music and maintain at least a modicum of momentum is important! Also, our recent recordings were done in a way that I don't find particularly satisfying. We did an album a few years back and it was (IMHO) how it should be - started off with the whole band performing the songs together, then sprucing them up with overdubs, etc. It had that vibe you only get when you put people in a room and have them play together and play off each other. The last couple of recordings we did earlier this year were done a very different way, with a different engineer - we all recorded separately, and it was all done piece by piece. It was "assembling" music rather than "performing" it, the process had no flow, and I really didn't like working like that. The end result was decent, but it was missing something - it came out maybe a bit too "mechanical" for my taste (judge for yourself - the Bandcamp link is in my sig). Our singer loved working with this guy, and the other two found it a bit frustrating but thought it was worth being "stretched" to try something new. I just flat-out disliked the experience. Our remaining time over here may be limited so I'm reluctant to chuck it all in, especially when one of our number isn't in great health and needs our support. But, bloody hell, it's frustrating. Andy - best of luck with whatever you end up doing. The struggle is real!

I like baritone sax, and tenor when it's played well. The higher-pitched ones hurt my brain!

Really good, driving line that grooves hard. All the FGTH stuff has great bass on it though, thanks to Trevor Horn. Here's a live version of The Buggles playing Two Tribes, with Horn playing bass: Best P-bass tone ever though? For me, that's Eric Avery on Deconstruction, the project he started with Dave Navarro in 1993 after Jane's Addiction broke up the first time around.

Yep. Lots of melisma and impromptu scatting these days. Thanks, Mariah f**king Carey. If you've got a horn section, you'll have a tough job getting the sax player to actually play the song. Seems like they're all aspiring Sanborns, Coltranes and Parkers. The two sounds I despise most in music, and that sound the most like small animal strangulation, are harmonica and badly-played alto and tenor saxophone.

I'd love to be convinced that the Venture range is everything that the Portaflex range should have been, and I may get there eventually as long as their long-term reliability proves to be good. But we need valves. I think the new Trace stuff is excellent (as the owner of a TE-1200). But there's a lot of people out there who refuse to even acknowledge that a good Trace amp could have been designed and built outside Maldon - a Trace users' group that I'm in on FB is full of posts from owners of 89s/90s Trace gear ranting that the Peavey-era stuff isn't "real" TE. It's as real as any post-Kaman Trace gear, and they all seem happy to play through those.

The SVT-7 had that special sauce, complete with as much power and weight as you needed. When it worked. When my old one died in the middle of the first song of a set (wasn't even turned up loud), that was it for me.

I'm wary of Ampeg now after having had two of their more recent heads that have crapped out on me on gigs (an SVT-7 and a PF-800). Love the sound, hate the patchy reliability. I've heard good things about the tone of the Venture series, but I'm still not prepared to drop a big chunk of money on one. Once bitten and so on. I might be more enthusiastic if they had a replacement for the SVT-7 with a proper valve preamp, rather than the emulation circuit that's in the Ventures.

Depending on dates, I might try and make the trip over for this. Overdue for a visit anyway, and I can use it as a recce! #1 - Paul @NancyJohnson #2 - Paul #2 @prowla #3 - Martin @Merton #4 - Matt @Wombat #5 - Andy @Wolverinebass #6 - Stevie @stevie #7 - Lozz @Lozz196 #8 - Matt @neepheid #9 - @bassace97 #10 - Robert @bass_dinger #11 - Christopher @chyc #12 - jaco @Geek99 ** #13 - Alan @WalMan #14 - Trevor @TrevorR #15 - John @jonno1981 #16 - Gary @cetera #17 - @MacDaddy #18 - Steve @Stingray5 #19 - Russ @Russ

Extremely tempted to put together a bitsa-Jazz just to go with the neck. Any choice of inlays (blocks plz), maybe a 22-fret fingerboard extension?

Regi Wooten (Victor's guitarist brother, who's probably even more of a monster player than Vic) is well known for using a Squier Strat as his main guitar. Granted, I think it's supposed to be a JV - basically a Japanese Fender, and, as enlightened people know, that makes it better than a US Fender. I don't play a lot of guitar, but a couple of years back I did buy a Squier RH Contemporary Telecaster. I'm not likely to ever gig with it (mostly because I'm not likely to ever gig on guitar, because my guitar skills are ordinary at best ) but it sounds great, plays well and does what I need it to do.

Watched the SBL video over the weekend. Freddie is an understated monster. His time is perfect, as is his feel. The basslines themselves are, on the whole, pretty simple in terms of notes (pentatonics, box patterns, etc), it's all about the phrasing and the groove, and he absolutely nails it - it's a stark lesson for the "more is more" crowd. A P-bass, four strings and the knowledge and experience of how best to serve a song and get people up off their collective @rses.

Meet Scarlett - my Maruszczyk Frog 6-string fretless: She sounds as good as she looks... if you go to the BC Bands thread, there's a live video of my band in there, and I play it on a couple of the tunes. You can see a bit of her sister, Skye, next to her there - same, but fretted and with a blue colour scheme. I was the first person to specify a Frog with the ceruse-stained quilted ash, Delano Xtenders and coloured hardware. Based on what I've seen on their FB page, Adrian & co have made quite a few other ones since - I need to have a word and get him to call a Frog with that combination of features the Frog RW or something. Make it a signature bass.

I'm intrigued by the idea of some kind of modular setup - the neck itself could be full graphite, and you could have a P, a J, and a couple of 5- and 6-string options with different widths, but then have neck pocket adapters enabling these necks to be bolted onto a range of bodies, and some way to make switchable headstocks or just go headless. The headstock and neck pocket adapter needn't be full carbon fibre, but could use some other strong but easier to mould composite that doesn't require all the same tooling and setup as making bespoke carbon fibre components. Something where the moulds could just be 3D-printed or easily CNC'd. Not sure about the feasibility of any of this, but it might be something worth exploring. EDIT: The other advantage of this sort of approach is it might make the neck "portable" - if you get another instrument with the same number of strings but with a different headstock or neck attachment, the neck could come with you, and all you'd need to get would be the new neck pocket adapter, and maybe a new headstock. There's also the possibility of switchable fingerboards - fretted/fretless. I know this has been tried before, with the old Novatone necks, but nobody's ever really progressed the idea since then, as far as I'm aware.

I'm wondering if someone has modelled it for one of the multi-FX units that's out there - Line 6 don't have it and Zoom don't have it, wondering if the likes of Fractal, Headrush, Neural DSP or one of the others out there might have tried.

They're kinda fragile things, and not something I'd want to be carting around with me, especially since I do the whole lightweight thing these days. It would be nice to have one for home though.

A few years back, I was very close to buying a graphite neck for one of my MM Bongos from Moses (complete with fibre-optic inlays), right before they made the decision to stop making graphite necks. Gutted I never followed through on that! So yeah, I voted MM necks, but *all* MM necks. Oh, and (this might sound a bit weird) Status necks, for those out there who have a wood-necked Status but who can no longer get a graphite upgrade directly from the source. Maybe it’s worth reaching out to some of our BC luthiers to see if they’d be interested in offering a graphite neck option for their instruments?

I was listening back to some old recordings from a couple of bands I was in back in the day, and the best bass sound I ever had was at one particular studio where the engineer always put the bass through an old Drawmer 1960 valve compressor. It added a lovely, valve-y, chewy resonance to the sound that I've never been able to get by any other means, including any other compressors. Has anyone come across a pedal, or a multi-FX that models the Drawmer 1960? I know there's a plugin for DAWs from Softube, but I haven't come across anything in a pedal...

Juan can definitely still play, and he still is, although it's all studio stuff now and at his own pace. It's pretty much everything else around playing and being in a band that he struggles with now after his accident, and his life has had to slow down considerably. It sounds like a lot of the money he's hoping to raise will be going to various charities, and I'm sure he'll be hanging on to a few favourite bits of gear (noting that none of his Nordstrand Cats, his old Racer X Ibanezes or any of his vintage Fenders are among the mentioned items).

Earthbound AD. Female-fronted original metal. Based in NY/NJ, USA. Been playing with them for 6-odd years at this point, we put out an album a couple of years back and have been recording tracks for a new EP. We're pretty much a band consisting of immigrants - I'm from the UK, Mark, our drummer, is Indian, and Joe, our guitarist, is Guatemalan! Only Jackie, our vocalist, was born in the US! Haven't done much gigging as of late due to one thing and another, but hopefully going to throw ourselves back into it on the back of this EP release. Here's a live vid from a gig we did at the end of last year. EDIT: New track, "Ashes Of Paradise", now out on Bandcamp - will be out on Spotify, Apple, Tidal, etc in the next day or two: https://earthboundad.bandcamp.com/track/ashes-of-paradise

If you put the RM heads into their little woolly gig bag, that switch inevitably gets pressed. I love my RM800, but that's a definite design flaw!

Obviously you could hear Rob during the For Whom The Bell Tolls intro, etc, but otherwise I found his tone a bit indistinct... kinda blurred into the guitars. Rex was playing his fretless Spector during Planet Caravan, and it had a nice deep tone. The Pantera set was spoiled by Wylde's frankly horrendous guitar sound though - sounded like it was being played through a crappy Bluetooth speaker. I forgot about Mike Inez - he always sounds good, although he was using maybe a little more distortion than was necessary. That Would? intro sounded fuzzy.

Frank's bass was one of the few you could actually hear, apart from Geezer's (with his massive purple Ashdown rig, which I now really want ) and Josh from Halestorm. Poor Rudy Sarzo deserved better in the all-star segments, he was completely buried in the mix.

Been working my way through videos of the show. Haven't watched it all yet, but Gojira slayed, Tool smashed it (loving Justin's "bohemian caveman" look these days), Halestorm were fantastic, loved Jack Black's video contribution with Scott Ian and Tom Morello's sons, Metallica were, well, Metallica. Good, but you know exactly what you're going to get, and the two superstar jams were probably the highlight outside of Ozzy and Sabbath - Nuno Bettencourt didn't miss a note the whole day. There's a man who's done his homework. Sammy Hagar and Steven Tyler both sound amazing for 77, and the tune with Whitfield Crane, Nuno, Scott Ian, Frank Bello and II from Sleep Token was probably my highlight from the whole thing (Frank's new Spector sounds the b0llocks). That Yungblood bloke was pretty bloody good too. The only set I couldn't get through was G'n'R's - was not impressed. More to watch, but what an event. Jealous of those of you who got to go.