mybass

This has all the hallmarks of a cheap bass that a complete novice would buy and be put off bass playing for the rest of their life!

I’m enjoying playing the Marcus Miller amp through my MarkBass 2x12 Ninja cab...several positive comments about the sound of it from punters who have heard me playing previous MarkBass amps.

bah foohey to the drummer, get another one in who doesn't complain.

To Spongebob...... They obviously never added ‘ but the way you play will also dictate the sound’. Don’t rely on a shop telling you these things.

Great dealing with ahpook, all straight ahead for the purchase of a twin set of D’Addarios, cheers Mark

Guitarist and myself flew a few EasyJets and carried on a bass and guitar. However, one jobs worth ‘I’ve got an easyJet badge’ at Gatwick persevered in stopping us taking them onboard. “They will go in a ‘safe hold” he said. That’s not the problem as I witnessed the Venice airport groudstaff throw the guitar a good few metres from cargo hold to trolley, luckily no breakage. i went back to using my SKB with wheels. Inform whoever is booking you that hold luggage is to be booked as well...( you can get a couple of days cloths in an SKB as well!)

Delano (Germany) might make you a set with radius magnets.

Some pickup manufactures made magnets with different height/cambered pole pieces to overcome it. DiMarzio have pups with adjustable height pole pieces and I think some of the later Fender ones have raised centre pole pieces, (maybe Lace as well).

It looks like you have a bona fide one so that’s good. Shure are decent all round mics.

I’ve recorded in studios where the older experienced engineers didn't ask if the bass was passive or active, they just worked on the signal they got given and made a great job of recording it. Then there are studios where more inexperienced ‘engineers’ got into compressing and adulterating the signal beyond recognition. Because a person says they are a ‘sound engineer’ does not mean they are reliable or experienced enough at getting a good sound.

Along with buying a mains safety trip plug....

Stick a Neumann over the bridge area

Well as you know Chris I build my own fretless basses. This started off because we were in a wave of not very good Fenders at the time and the bass I’d bought from Europe wasn’t doing it for me on stage, so I was dared to build my own, (for which guitar builder and author Melvyn Hiscox and I laugh about to this day). A recent festival I played had Ashdown which blew on the first song. An Orange combo certainly didn’t do it for me either on another gig. So MarkBass is a happy sound for me since the first batch arrived in the country. Maybe it’s back to HiWatt, though for some of us, lugging those big heavy amps and cabs is a bit too much these days!

David Dkye Luthier Supplies in East Sussex. David has been in the business for decades. Their website isn't totally all filled in but his stores are legend amongst many, wood everywhere! His postcode is TN21 0HR. http://www.luthierssupplies.co.uk All wood is damn expensive these days but I feel David's is still a pretty good price. Buying from some German suppliers should be good but I feel you'll end up paying the same in the end as for UK supplies. I like using European Ash for a slightly better 'attack' although I have a swamp ash bass on the bench at the moment for a fretted venture. Walnut is good too.

I’m sure I ve read somewhere about a recent addition to ‘bylaws’ for anybody moving into buildings near music or live venues that they can’t actually complain.....the Bulls Head in Barnes, West London went through this a decade or so ago. A block of flats was built right outside the load in door to this very long established music venue. A resident then complained, the pub built in £20000 grand of new staging, doors and sound proofing and that resident then moved out!

'F Simandl' Book 1....(publisher Carl Fischer Inc).....Simandl 'New Method for String Bass, (publisher International Music Company).....Simandl 'Eighty Six Etudes for String Bass (Carl Fischer Chord Studies for Electric Bass by Rich Appleman and Joseph Viola from the Berklee Press.......These are all books with exercises and scales, some get a tad boring but persevere. The double bass exercises can be used for electric bass and you will see in the first book listed a lot of 'advice' on hand/finger positions. These are not always exact and you wouldn't suffer as much strain on electric bass as maybe on double bass if you get them wrong. A simple ear exercise on each string...(no jokes you lot!) is to slide up from the lowest note on a string, even the open string to the upper octave. ie G to G octave then G sharp to octave G sharp etc.

....another latest today.... New York Times publishes list of over 800 artists potentially affected by Universal archive fire As Universal Music continues in its attempts to cast doubt on recent reporting in the New York Times about the 2008 fire that damaged its Hollywood-based archive, the newspaper has published a list of more than 800 artists who allegedly lost recordings in the blaze. Based on internal UMG documents produced in the wake of the fire, the Times says that, of the "many tens of thousands of tapes" covered by the list, "nearly all [are] original masters". The newspaper adds that this list is not even complete, rather it's an amalgamation of a number of lists put together by Universal in 2009 and 2010 as part of 'Project Phoenix', the music firm's attempt to work out what had been lost and then try to source alternative copies, where possible. By the label's own estimates, it reiterates, over 100,000 tapes were lost, containing up to 500,000 individual tracks. That the fire happened on a Universal Studios backlot in 2008 is no secret, of course. It was also known at the time that the Universal music company still stored archive recordings at the Hollywood site, even though it was no longer in common ownership with the Universal film business. But the NYT's recent articles allege that the music major greatly played down the severity of the damage caused at the time, and has continued to cover it up to this day. Although current Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge recently admitted to his staff that "we owe our artists transparency" on the status of their archive material, he and the company's archiving exec Pat Krauss have both said that the original New York Times article on the fire is not accurate. For a Billboard article, Krauss even pulled out a John Coltrane master tape said to have been destroyed in order to prove his point. In its new article, the New York Times says that it is likely that some of the tapes listed as potentially lost are indeed safe. It estimates that the aforementioned Project Phoenix was able to source around a fifth of the affected recordings - either original copies that had been out of the archive at the time or back up copies of reasonable quality stored elsewhere. But that still means a lot of masters were completely lost. Following the publication of the first NYT article, several artists whose recordings appear on the lists commented on how they'd attempted to get hold of their masters at some point in the last decade, only to be told by Universal that they were lost. However, that they were destroyed in the fire was rarely explained. Speaking to the newspaper for its latest article on the fire, Bryan Adams recalls how in 2013 he wanted to put together a 30th anniversary release of his 1984 album 'Reckless'. "I contacted the archive dept of Universal Music", he says. "I called everyone, former A&M employees, directors, producers, photographers, production houses, editors, even assistants of producers at the time. I can tell you with 100% certainty that I couldn't find anything at Universal that had been published to do with my association with A&M records in the 1980s. If you were doing an archaeological dig there, you would have concluded that it was almost as if none of it had ever happened". In the end, he discovered a tape in his own vault and was able to produce a remastered release. However, he says that throughout his conversations with UMG staff "there was no mention that there had been a fire in the archive". This despite his name appearing on the label's own list of artists whose work was thought to have been lost. Last week, a group of artists named in the original article, including Soundgarden, Hole, Steve Earle, and the estates of Tom Petty and Tupac Shakur, filed a class action lawsuit against Universal in relation to the fire. As well as claiming that the label breached its contractual duty by failing to keep their master tapes safe, they are also seeking a portion of monies Universal seemingly received from an insurance claim in relation to the fire and a negligence lawsuit it brought against NBC Universal. While publicly playing down the extent of the fire damage in 2008, the artists' lawsuit claims, the label received large pay outs based on its own internal estimations of the damage. It then failed to share this with affected artists, or even to inform them that they had been affected. The lawsuit is demanding $100 million in damages. It's thought that other lawsuits specifically relating to the 2008 fire could as yet follow. Meanwhile, other ongoing litigation could also force the music company to reveal more about the extent of the damage that occurred. A number of heritage artists in the US have already gone to court to test the reach of the so called 'termination' or 'reversion' right that exists under American copyright law, and whether this applies to master recordings. The termination right says that 'authors' who assign their copyrights to another entity have a one-time opportunity to terminate that assignment and reclaim their rights after 35 years. This particular termination right comes from a piece of 1970s copyright law in the US, so only really kicked in earlier this decade. On the songs side of the business songwriters reclaiming their US rights in this way has become routine. On the recordings side, however, many corporate rights owners have resisted efforts by artists to reclaim assigned rights. This is based on an argument over the nature of record contracts and the status of the artist in copyright terms. Many labels insist that record deals are so called 'work for hire' agreements that basically make artists employees, so that the default owner of any copyrights they create is their employer, ie the label. Lawsuits were filed against both Universal and Sony earlier this year attempting to gain court confirmation that artists are in fact able to regain their recording rights by employing the termination right. If they are, that would include the return of their master recordings. In those circumstances, the label would have to admit what tapes it does or doesn't have. The potential outcome of the reversion rights cases is just one black cloud hanging over Universal parent company Vivendi's plan to sell up to 50% of its shares in the music company. The fallout from the NYT's articles on the big fire is another. Although last week, Vivendi CEO Arnaud De Puyfontaine told Variety that the new scandal surrounding the 2008 blaze was "just noise" and would have no effect on the share sale plan. However, it seems unlikely that "noise" is going to subside anytime soon. Responding to De Puyfontaine's comments, Howard King, the lawyer leading the first lawsuit to be launched off the back of the New York Times' report, told Variety: "The likelihood that their life's works may have been destroyed by the gross negligence of Universal Music is far from 'just noise' to any potentially affected artist". He went on: "It wasn't 'just noise' in 2009 when Universal Music sued NBC Universal, claiming that hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable masters had been lost in the devastating fire. It wasn't 'just noise' when Universal Music collected tens of millions of dollars, or more, in compensation for the lost masters. I believe that Mr De Puyfontaine wishes this would all disappear and not interfere with his financial planning. This wish will not come true". Universal has not yet commented on the fire-specific lawsuit. However, with the publication of the extended list of affected artists by the New York Times, it seems likely that many more artists will now be asking questions, and potentially going legal, in the coming weeks.