josie

Blackberry Smoke, Find a Light. First time I've heard it. Good driving groove.

No choice - long-standing RSI in the right elbow means I can't use fingers. So, you work with what you've got. This has led to an account with TimberTones and serious Pick Acquisition Syndrome :-) So many options in material - resin, wood, stone, metal - and shape - size, thickness, sharpness of the corners, thumb-groove or not - your sound can change dramatically with a change of pick. I've been using flat hardwood with my electrics, but for an acoustic gig today found a thicker, blunter-tipped, thumb-grooved resin pick was easier to play and got a better sound. Stone with sharper point for flat-wound strings (fretless). Ymmv, but definitely worth experimenting.

My first bass was a 5, and I completely agree with all said above about the hand-position advantages. My lead singer favours E, and it's easier rooted on the 5th fret of the B, plus you have an easy 5th below anything on the E string. Constance Redgrave (Spikedrivers) strings her 4 BEAD, and I'm thinking of doing that with the one 4 I love too much to give up. One of my 5s is EADGC, set up for my ex-band where a lot of the songs worked well with a high bassline. Again it's about position rather than range. I'd been playing above the 12th fret on the G, and it was much easier to move down the fretboard on the C.

Similar to some of the comments above - My favourite (by no means only) music to listen to is blues, especially live, and I'm in a blues band, so that fits. But I do miss the indie-pop band I was in before - not the music, all stuff I would never choose to listen to, or the people, or their attitude, but the opportunities it gave me to develop some really interesting basslines - snapping from ominous broody prog to bouncy pop and back within the same song, grabbing little bass solos to drive the changes in dynamics because the drummer wasn't good enough to do it - I don't have anything like that freedom now. But I have a lot more fun and satisfaction, overall.

Yes - the top range Michael Kelly acoustics have Fishman pre-amps and the difference in sound quality is striking. So is the difference in price.

Nice! Vintage make reliably good value for money guitars. My first acoustic bass was a Vintage - dirt cheap on ebay for good reason, but still good vfm including the cost of a guitar tech fixing it up. I only moved on because I wanted a 5. Enjoy! You look pretty good together :-)

I have a personal and useful GAS-limitation rule that I will never buy a 5 with a 4/1 headstock. They just look like the fifth string has been stuck on as an afterthought and not really thought through, and it bugs me. That rules out a lot of excellent basses that I couldn't afford anyway :-) I have one 5/0 (Fender Jazz Plus) and four 3/2s (two GMR electrics, two Michael Kelly acoustics). Must be enough surely? :-)

I've seen peeps with really ugly duct tape covering the soundhole - cutting out the feedback but completely ruining the look of a good acoustic guitar or bass. As above, the Fishman electronics in the Michael Kelly Dragonflies are superb, including an on-board notch, which worked well the one time I needed it, in a small space cramped close to the backline. (Fretless 5.) Don't want to start needing anything that isn't on the bass itself.

Not exactly as per the OP but - if someone offered to buy you, or go halves on, any bass you wanted - my son went for halves on a new white MIA Fender P. Which cost me more than the whole of my 2nd hand black Jazz Aerodyne. I wouldn't swap them for any money and nor would he. We're playing different types of music and both respect that. We're both happy :-)

Some of you may know whether this is true: there's a town in Belgium called Ypres, which was in the battle zone in both world wars. I've been told that in WWI most British soldiers only heard the name rather than seeing it written, and called it "Eeps". In WWII, based on the written name, it became "Wipers".

My friend Rowland Jones - an excellent blues man - plays with so many different local musicians from time to time that they're called "Rowland and the Moveable Feast". I'm now playing in the Plastic Mojo Blues Band - my idea, it was meant to be just a private joke taking the mickey out of ourselves, but the others all seem to share the same strange sense of humour and decided to go public with it.

My guitar tech gives them to a friend of his who makes jewellery with them. Walk down Broadway, the tourist main street in Nashville, and you'll see lots of street stalls selling guitar string bracelets. Mostly nothing like as well made or attractive as the ones here: https://yhoo.it/2HEwygW

50 is long gone... but on my birthday last year I had a little day trip up from Manchester to the excellent and dangerous Promenade Music in Morecambe, and came back with a Michael Kelly Dragonfly fretless acoustic 5, for half list price with a new set of chrome flats thrown in. I know there's not much love for acoustic basses here, and the look of this one is a bit Marmite (someone on BC at the time described it as "looking like a tart's handbag") but the build quality and tone are excellent, and I love the feel of playing it. https://michaelkellyguitars.com/en/products/view/dragonfly-fretless-5

The singer in my ex-band insisted on calling me "Ace of Base". Note the "ex". In my new band I'm "the groove machine" - completely acceptable :-)

Just testing whether our swear filter falls for the "Scunthorpe effect". Apparently quite a lot of them do. My mother once spotted a church calendar marking the saint's day of St Michael and All Angles. She insisted that made him the patron saint of geometry. I knew a law student whose spell-checker changed statutes to statues. I can't be the only one of us who's been described as playing base.

Sadly no. Virgil could shred, but it was his his slow mode that made him so outstanding. You had to see them live - I wept helplessly through a 20-minute instrumental at one gig. Matt Long of Catfish comes close. http://www.catfishbluesband.co.uk/home.html

My 60th birthday party was a charity gig with Kyla Brox opening for Virgil and the Accelerators, both European Blues Awards finalists that year, in the Garrick Theatre in Stockport. Buffet in a side room for family and friends. Honestly even if I'd been HRH I wouldn't have asked for anything else :-)

The same thing just happened to me - fret buzz just on the G string of a 5 - I've changed the strings and it's fine now. I've re-strung it E - C (using a set of strings kindly donated by Spondonbassed, so I don't know exactly what they are) and I did wonder whether the change from G to C might have something to do with it (different tension perhaps??), but it sounds from the above as if it was just an old tired string.

They're lovely to play. Correcting myself though, I'm sure was told 1992, but in fact it's 2002 - one of the first batch of serial numbers.

I was reminded of this thread on Saturday at Sheffield Blues Festival, when 6 of the 8 basses I saw were tobacco sunburst Fender Ps with tortie scratchplates. All mediocre heavy blues-rock bands, I could no more hear any difference among their sounds than see any difference among their basses. Does it have something to do with the width of the dark edge as well as the subtlety of the shading? Or the flatness of the central colour? Looking at the pics above and from memory, if the center looks flat and the edges are wide it's very different from if it's natural wood grain and narrow. I'd have said I don't like bursts, based on the Fender cliché, but thinking about it, my first and forever true love is. She's stunningly thin and light, but looks much thicker / deeper (and heavier) than she is. And under lights the red glows, surrounded by the black. (Note to self: I should read my own .sig :-)

Blues & jazz jam at the Old Abbey in south-central Mcr (sort of behind the Whitworth Art Gallery) this Thursday https://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Manchester/The-Old-Abbey-Taphouse/Blues--Jazz-Jam-/13176047/ Some of the Plastic Mojo Blues Band will be there mob-handed, including yours truly. (We're not the house band, just doing a slot from the floor.) Please ask him to come and say hello if he's there. It's a fun place, run as a community social enterprise, the beer and pizzas and staff are all excellent. Thirsty Scholar on Mondays definitely still happens, we're planning a mass invasion of that one too but haven't done it yet so can't say what it's like :-) More generally, Matt & Phreds in the Northern Quarter have jams on Mondays, mostly jazz, but blues on first Monday of every month. Crowded, noisy, and not easy to get a slot if Franny Eubanks who runs it doesn't already know you, especially as a guitar player. http://www.mattandphreds.com/

I admit to being a serious serial customer of TimberTones: https://www.timber-tones.co.uk/ Their 2.5 wood picks feel a bit slim to me, but have a lovely soft tone that suits a Jazz or similar. I also have some 2.5+ sharp-pointed stone picks for a harder brighter sound. I've been to guitar workshops with a tin full of wildly different picks and seen more experienced bass players amazed at the difference. If you want to experiment with your sound it's a lot cheaper and easier than changing strings - or basses :-)

That's a useful point - if jamming it works, and you do listen to each other, then that's fine. My new band is making a point of original interpretations of classic blues songs with tight arrangements - breakdowns, call-and-response sections, &c - and we have to all know exactly what we're supposed to be doing to keep it together. My ex-band - indie-pop originals - I felt should have been doing that, and the music had a lot of potential if played that way, but it wasn't.

This isn't actually a music reference but I can't resist. I've long been convinced that many books for young children include double entendres to amuse the parents reading them. (Postman Pat, lost in the dark with his cat Jess, "reached out and felt something furry..." ) There's a Ladybird Early Reader about Richard and Jane (honestly!) in which they go to the river hoping to catch fish. Some of the letters are blanked out in some of the key words so the children will learn to fill them in. "Richard and Jane love to f _ _ _"

A question for peeps in gigging bands: when you're working on a new song and developing an arrangement, how do you record what you've agreed on? Do you all just scribble down notes as you go along, or does someone write down what's agreed and email it round, or record the final take and share the recording, to be sure you'll all remember it right? I ask because one of my main reasons for leaving my ex-band (not the only reason) was a disagreement over this. I was recording our practice sessions, spending time every weekend trimming out the best take for each song and sending it round - meanwhile the singer was changing the lyrics and leaving the rest of us with out-of-date song sheets - knowing that I was trying to develop basslines that reflected the lyrics. When I mentioned this to the band leader as an example of my reasons for leaving, he said "You're supposed to takes notes as we go along - that's how bands work! I'm not going to type up a whole new song sheet every time something changes." I'm sorry, but if it was my band, that's exactly what I would do. This overlapped with my new band - at the time just a blues workshop project - developing complex arrangements for blues classics and communicating really well, including between workshop sessions, all making sure that everyone was sure of all the details we had worked out for every song. I'm not looking for "right or wrong" answers, or "should have done..." - I'm just interested to know how other bands handle this.