josie

Plastic Mojo Band - classic blues, from our origin as a "Blues Roots" workshop at Band on the Wall in Mcr with the excellent Mat Walklate and Paulo Fuschi. Now out on our own, with a couple of newer songs, and probably some of my originals in the pipeline, but definitely still "good-time blues".

In my case it's the keys player who is always, always too fast. I keep telling him I can't keep up with him. I try playing the bassline I've practiced as fast as I can, and asking him to slow down to match it - he means well, but gets carried away. It's not just me, we all rib him about his "quickies" 🙂 He's a good keys player, and a great bloke. I'm now threatening to play standing next to him and "accidentally" brain him with my headstock if needed 🙂 Otoh the one song on our setlist where I take lead vocals, at our last practice I kept begging everyone to slow it down, but listening to the recording I realised it was far too slow to suit the song - I just have to work hard on playing it faster while singing at the same time!

My GMR 5 has 5 and my GMR 4 has 4, all slightly offset so no two are on the same grain-line of the wood of the neck, so distributing the strain. My Aerodyne Jazz has four set in a square (and is also stable as a rock). Stability - this is OT, but most spinning wheel designs have three legs so they would be stable on the uneven floors where they were most often used. German "castle" wheels have four legs, suggesting that typical German homes had level floors centuries before the rest of Europe and North America. I'm sure you really wanted to know that 🙂

The Ramonas. Although not exactly as per the OP, they are as good as the name. Including one of my mostest favourite bass players on the current UK scene, Victoria Smith.

Welcome both! My 4yo grandson much prefers my basses to his Dad's guitars, I'd be over the moon if he was up to your son's standard 6 years from now! 🙂

Welcome! Vintage basses definitely punch above their weight, noted on several threads here - good choice!

Beautiful. Wish I'd had a chance of a closer look at the time. I liked the band enough to buy the EP btw: https://www.emilyfayemusic.com/about

I can see some point in having edge markers, the bass I saw had steady red ones on the front. I do think of them as a cheap gimmick I'm afraid, out of place on something as reputable as an Alembic. There are some pretty impressive examples on the thread above, but I'm afraid I still think if I saw one at a gig it would make a poor first impression and I'd be distracted from actually listening to it. Purely imho of course! This is the best pic I could get on my phone from a long way back.

Welcome! Not classic, but Virgil and the Accelerators were my favourites - sadly now split up, but there's stuff on BandCamp and YouTube.

Nice 🙂 Stay on the roll!

Just back from a full day at Buckle and Boots country music festival. Not my usual taste, but it's 15 minutes bus ride from home and the atmosphere is wonderful. Lots of peeps dressed up in cowboy boots and hats, lots of children running around laughing, everybody with big smiles on their faces. You can tell the bands love it, the musicians they bring over from Nashville all seem to be pretty much blown away by the reception they get (and by the fact that it's still light at 10:30!) I already can't remember the names of any of the bands, but it was a fun day.

Welcome! Nice to see a wide range of taste in music, you won't be getting into a rut any time soon 🙂 Hope it goes well for you.

This morning I saw a good new British Country band with the bass player playing what looked and sounded like a pretty good through-neck Alembic - from the body shape I think it was a Stanley Clarke - but with red LED fretboard markers. Why? Strictly imho, it looked garish and distracting and completely inappropriate. Had a chance to chat to him later, and succeeded in having a pleasant conversation about Alembics and through-necks without mentioning the LEDs. Has anyone else seen one of these at a gig, and what did you think? Some peeps must like them enough to buy them, or Alembic wouldn't make them...

Plenty of t-shirt designs out there with two bass clef symbols with one flipped so they look like either yin-yang or 69 depending on your mindset...

Welcome!

I had the opposite experience in a way. My ex-band played indie-pop originals which gave me a lot of scope for experimenting with interesting, slightly crazy original basslines drawing on everything from prog to pop, at a cost in personal frictions. I'm now in a blues band, with much less freedom, but great pleasure in playing together. Experiments are mostly limited to making sure I play a different walking line for every song in the set. I am getting better at walking lines as a result, so that's some improvement, but the breath of fresh air is playing with people who communicate well and like each other. Mind you at tonight's practice we somehow turned one of my favourite contemporary blues songs into dub reggae, so it's not entirely predictable! 🙂

Guitar straps - nice wide comfortable ones?

Welcome to the low end! Sounds like great first gear (probably not the last 🙂 ) and good decision to go straight for lessons. Let us know how it goes!

The Aerodyne is such a distinctive (and wonderful) bass that imho you really do have to keep the look as close to the original as you can. Its only fault imho is that it does have a slight head dive, so lighter machine heads would have the advantage of reducing that. Good luck!

My brother used to run his own company producing merch for bands. (He tells a story of Radiohead's tour manager phoning him up saying they needed 500 t-shirts in Madrid the next day. He did it.) He insisted on everything he supplied being top quality, and would turn down orders from bands who wanted cheap flimsy stuff. His view was that when peeps buy a t-shirt at a gig they're going to cherish it and the memories that go with it, they'll want to wear it to that band's gigs for years, and to sell them something that's going to fall apart or lose its print after three times through a washing machine would just be unacceptable. Admittedly a BassChat t-shirt would probably have less emotional value and be easier to replace than one from the only time in your life you got to see your very favourite band 🙂 but the principle holds imho.

I was lucky enough, when I went to buy my first bass, to be offered a 2nd hand GMR stupidly cheap, and fell in love with it with no idea just how good it was. I now know... and now have three (fretted 5, fretless 4, and a single-cut fretted 5, which is too heavy for me, but I sit at home and play it in my lap with the biggest grin in the world on my face). I wouldn't swap any of them for a Maruszczyk for love or money. Any other suggestions for really good makes that aren't as well known and respected as they deserve to be?

Little-known makes that deserve to be better known? (Speaking as a hard-core lover of GMR basses 🙂 - I wouldn't swap any of my three for a Maruszczyk any day.) Now that I've thought of it I'll start a thread in Bass Guitars.

Personally I would make a huge effort to find a better match. You might need a full set of four, which aren't cheap, but on a bass of that quality with such striking looks - I wouldn't skimp on my Aerodyne, and if I saw one with a different shape of tuners it would just scream "Wrong!" (Mind you, normal people wouldn't notice. 🙂 ) You could get away with chrome if they're the right shape, that's what mine has. It might be worth looking for a good local guitar tech, as they usually have boxes full of odd bits and pieces, and you might just get lucky and find one of the right thing. If not, he or she will know the best sources of unusual spare parts.

My first and still favourite bass, a GMR Bassforce 5. I knew when I bought it that it was good, but I had no idea how good. I'm not sure what I was expecting - I had never so much as picked up a bass before when I walked into Promenade Music to buy one - but certainly not something that felt so perfect and sounded so beautiful right from the start. And not surprisingly I had never heard of GMR, so I had no idea just how special a thing I had found until a few better informed bass players told me. Still the one I'd keep if (heaven forbid) I could only have one.

Seeing as the recent thread on playing with a pick became pretty popular and interesting, how about discussing that, with sound samples? There are plenty of other threads too where peeps are describing differences in sound, and having actual audio would be a real advantage. Even something as basic as comparing the characteristic sound of a P and a J, and explaining why they sound as different as they do, and suit different types of music. (And therefore why almost all Fender bands play either Tele and P or Strat and J.) It never hurts to hear simple things that you sort of know, explained well.