josie

How long can you go on being good at what you do best? Sports-people have this the hardest imho. How many cricketers / footballers / <your favourite sport> have you seen retire at their peak, or go on "too long" - or carry on playing in lower leagues because that is what they know and love? I saw Albert Lee when he was 68 and he was awesome. Two years later, on his 70th birthday tour, he was still superb in his best moments, but I was shocked at how frail he was, and how much more of the initiative and drive of the gig was down to the other band members. He's still touring, but I won't go to see him again. I saw John Mayall open for B B King a while back. JM was awesome, but B B was so far past his best that I actually wish i hadn't seen him. Last year I saw JM headlining, and again wished I hadn't. It was just sad. Both of these are nothing about number of years, it's just the sorrow of seeing someone you respected as a fine musician performing so far below the standard you respected them for.

GMR sisters

Quite a while back I had a Strat on a wall hanger directly above my Jazz Aerodyne bass on a floor stand. Great crashing noise one day and the hanger had fallen out of the wall. The Strat somehow missed the Jazz by an inch or so and neither was damaged. There was a thread at the time about hangers falling out of flaky walls, and the need for longer screws than hangers standardly come with. I've never damaged a bass during a gig, but I've hit a headstock hard enough against a wall to need re-tuning. (In my extremely small local venue.)

Welcome!

Really sorry I missed you in Manchester, but Sunday public transport is pants 😞

https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/24669/lot/147/?category=list&amp;length=10&amp;page=15

Last summer we played a few Sunday afternoons in the garden of a fun south Manchester pub which is also a community centre where all sorts of interesting things happen. One afternoon we had two young people practicing circus skills with hoops and streamers in front of the stage. Lovely.

Sometimes a break is what you need. If you're building up frustration and resentment around your bass playing, do something else until you miss it enough that you really want to go back to it. Just a thought kevvo, is there a seasonal pattern to this? A lot of peeps who are short of a medical diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder still go down a bit as the daylight gets shorter. I'd suggest getting outside during the day as much as you can and make sure the lighting in your house is bright... maybe vitamin D too. Be easy on yourself for the next two or three months and it's possible all your musical knowledge and experience will come back as the days get longer. Just a guess but something a lot of peeps don't recognise. Hope this helps.

There's an interesting point here imho. The op, and most of the discussion, is about musicians who have been good and successful all their lives - indeed, why should they stop if they're still good and successful? But @StringNavigator is talking about the joy of coming to it late, or at least taking it up seriously late, and finding that it still flies. In my case - as said before on other threads - I wanted more than anything to play bass when I was 14, and my mother beat it into my head that I never could. For 45 years I would go to gigs and glue my eyes and ears to the bass player and go home and cry because I wanted to play bass and I knew I never would. It wasn't until I was about to turn 60 that on one of those nights instead of crying I got angry - life is too short not to do the things you really want to! - and went out the next day and bought a guitar and soon after my first bass. Thursday night I played a fairly high standard local blues jam. The three other bass players there were all very experienced, semi-pro and much better than me. But dâmn it, for 20 minutes I pretty much nailed some simple but adequate basslines at high speed and high volume to a packed (small - maybe 70 people?) and very appreciative popular local music venue. Joy. I'm re-training at my own expense for a new career in mental health care, and I'm seriously looking forward to at least ten years work (I hope) doing that, but to be honest if I was to be offered the choice between that and ten years in a real gigging band I'd choose the band. I wrote a song for my first bass - I was drifting through life like I'd lost my way / Had no original words to say / Road was empty and the sky was grey / Praying Lord, get me home tonight I was drifting through daytimes, not even trying / Long bitter nights of drinking and crying / Cursing myself for wasting my time / Praying Lord, let me sleep at night Now I'm playing 12 bar blues on a 5 string bass / Finally know I've found my place / Electric adrenaline, state of grace / Singing Lord, let me play all night Blessing 🙂

Grace Slick called it the other way: "Following the Jefferson Airplane reunion, Slick retired from the music business. During a 1998 interview with VH1 on a Behind the Music documentary featuring Jefferson Airplane, Slick, who was never shy about the idea of getting old, said that the main reason she retired from the music business was, "All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire." In a 2007 interview, she repeated her belief that, "You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you're 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out", and, "It's silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have." " (Wikipedia) I wonder if it's still different for older women? Although Elkie Brooks is still touring and has a great voice and stage presence at 70. But four 50th anniversary tours in the last year or so - Yes, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Fairport Convention - all men.

33% off at Timbertones - their picks are horribly tempting. But I already have a glut of the ones I most use, I've run out of people to give them to as presents, and the titanium and green abalone ones which I most covet are £17 each even with the discount 😞 Most of their designs can come in gift tins of 4 which are really good small presents. Although, oddly, not the 18 carat gold at £3,700 or the platinum at £5,000. They seem not to be in the sale either.

My father's mother, Maxine McGee (née Levinger) was apparently a fine singer and - I'm told - had her own radio show in New York city singing opera arias. This would probably have been in the 1920s, before my father was born, so in the earliest days of commercial radio broadcasting. Or maybe 1930s? There are fragments of family oral history - or myth - which don't actually make complete sense when you try to piece them together, and no-one still alive to ask about it all 😞

Same as before, in BC/Off Topic, today at 15:40: The back button on the browser took me to this: The back button from there took me back to BC. Malbyteware and Sophos both say everything on the Mac is ok. It hasn't happened on any other sites, or in Firefox. Strange... I'll ask my IT people at work to have a look at it on Monday.

Thanks Ped, shall do. I've never believed Macs don't need protection - thus have been running Sophos for a long time - we all need to share information on this stuff.

Thanks - yes, this is Safari. And I'm clean. I've just run Malwarebytes and it's found nothing - as I expected - not sure if it would pick up anything that Sophos missed.

I've just clicked on a BC post (can't remember which one, sorry!) and instead got a page asking me to update my Adobe Flash Player. It looked genuine at first, so I followed it. I became suspicious when the name of the downloaded file didn't match the name on the page. Sophos detected it and cleaned it up. (See screenshot attached.) ' "Bundlore" is an installer which bundles legitimate applications with offers for additional third party applications that may be unwanted by the user. Such third party applications are typically installed onto users’ computers by default, but may include an option to ‘opt-out’ during or after the installation process.' (Sophos website) It's the first time I've seen anything like this - not sure whether the bug is embedded in a BC post? If so it would be whatever I tried to look at at about 10:25 or 10:26 tonight. But thought you ought to know.

I had flats put on my fretless when I bought it - the standard bronze rounds just felt and sounded too harsh. Love them. A while back I heard a good young jazz-trained bassist playing a fretless Dragonfly 5 with black tape-wounds - a lovely double-bassy sound but still better defined than the "rubbery" sound one often hears from tape-wounds. As soon as I can afford the eye-watering price of a set of 5 tape-wounds I'll put those on the fretless and move the flats to the fretted. (Not that I'm ever likely to sound as good as he did.) Also the Dragonfly has a rosewood fretboard, so rounds on a fretless will soon start to make it show wear. It's the only design detail I can fault - any fretless needs something harder, like ebony, or a hard protective coating, to resist the wear of more contact with vibrating strings than on a fretted bass. I've gigged the fretted quite a few times when we've played gigs with no amplification, and the fretless a couple of times when I wanted that specific sound, which is different from my fretless electric (also strung with flats). What you won't get from an acoustic bass - which took me by surprise - is something that's quieter to play than an electric, if you have to think about noise bothering the neighbours (as I do). The quietest sound I can get is from an electric with a very small practice amp. Acoustics need to be played hard for the body resonance to kick in, and sound twangy and weedy if it doesn't.

Welcome!

Welcome! Excellent basses 🙂

Michael Kelly, if you can find one. This is the only one I can find for sale online atm: https://www.guitar.co.uk/michael-kelly-dragonfly-4-string-acoustic-bass-smokeburst I have a Club fretted 5 and a Dragonfly fretless 5 - both excellent build quality with good attention to detail, good sound, Fishman electronics, and absurdly pretty. (Some peeps find the Dragonfly too ornate, ymmv.) A real pleasure to play.

I'd say it's more like this. You come back to where you started, but at the same time you've grown and moved on.

Any update on the advice already given please?

And thank you for removing the duplicate! 🙂

Welcome! As said, lots of good stuff on 'tinternet, but imho a good teacher - a real person who will know what you want to do and how you're getting on and will give you specific personal motivation - makes all the difference. Grade 3/4 after 3 months sounds a bit ambitious to me - I've been playing for about 3 years and I'm planning on RGT Grade 3 next spring. But trust your teacher! Sounds like you have better aptitude and / or practice habits and / or relevant background than I do 🙂 But also as @T-Bay said nothing is as good as playing with other people. That's what bass is for. And "less is more" - as soon as you can play one root note per bar you're a useful member of a band, and you'll grow from there. Hope it goes well, let us know 🙂

Welcome! Congratulations on taking up DB 🙂