josie

There seems to be more chance of the bass being damaged by the hanger falling out of the wall. There's an old thread here: It's advised not to hang an instrument on an external wall in case of temperature or humidity changes, but I'm not sure if that's still true with properly insulated walls. External walls are more likely to be structurally strong enough.

Backwater Roll Blues Band "Live at the Platform" – I discovered them at Scarborough Blues Festival last month. High-energy young guys with consistently good walking basslines. They’re playing at Buxton Blues in August, well worth seeing if you're into the blues and in the area.

These are not just random accomplished players - they're three friends whose faces I've seen light up playing those specific instruments, and also who I'm confident will value them for being mine. I'm lucky to have enough musician family and friends that I can be sure my basses and guitars will be cherished and not just sold off. Those three don't include my grandson, who at this rate will take over my Aerodyne long before I'm ready to part with it :-)

I figure a good bass guitar (or several) is better than money in a bank account, which only benefits the bankers. What I am less comfortable with is knowing that some of them should really be in the hands of better bass players. I do play them, but to a pathetic standard compared to what I've heard when some of my friends or teachers play them - a couple of times I've been tempted just to give one away to someone who would do it justice. I've named some of them in my will to be sure they'll be fully appreciated after me.

Well done! The answer to "when?" is "now!" if it feels right :-) My first and still favourite bass is a 5. I do have three 4s which are just too special not to love (a Jazz Aerodyne, a GMR fretless, and a Gibson EB2) but I miss the easy playing options from the bottom B. My lead singer favours E, and it's a lot easier to root on the 5th of the B than on the open E. Constance Redgrave (Spikedrivers) strings her 4 with B E A D. Mind you I'm now working on single-string scales to break out of how easy it is to play across the neck... :-)

Ok, to expand a bit: I have a very cheap 2nd hand Encore P, which I keep at work for odd bits of practice in lunch breaks and occasional drunken jams after work on a Friday. For that I do actually enjoy playing it, and it's easy to play and has a decent sound for the price. But it's nothing special. I can stop any time I want to :-) I first picked up a bass 45 years after my mother had beaten it into my head that I would never be able to play (anything). That's a pretty deep-seated demon; and it took months to develop my finger muscles and learn to control them - one way or another, for most of that first year everything seemed to confirm that my mother had been right all along and I should never have started. A lot of the credit for getting me through that year to where I am now goes to my excellent, endlessly patient and encouraging teacher. But it's also a lot of credit to the bass. This wasn't just something ordinary, that I could sell on and write off the experience - this was something special, probably unique, that felt "meant to be mine", and I had to live up to it. (It had come in to Promenade Music just hours before I walked in - Gary had to enter it into the stock database before he could sell it to me.) Sorry, that's a bit much about me - and I hope of no relevance to anyone else here.

Ages ago I started a thread where I wondered why so many guitar players have lots of guitars clearly visible on stage - and don't even always use all of them - and bass players almost never have more than one - and if they do have a second it's not on show at the front of the stage. Agreement was some of us do have a spare ready to hand, or maybe one is in a different tuning - but we don't seem to flaunt it. Personally I much prefer to be at the back or side and inconspicuous. As long as the audience can hear me, they don't need to see me. Imho, ymmv &c... (And if I did gig an obviously expensive bass, I'd just be asking to be hit on the head walking back from the gig :-(

Saw the current incarnation of Dr Feelgood last year - none of the original members - first time I'd seen them, so can't compare, but it was a very good gig. Also saw Fairport Convention on their 50th anniversary tour last year. Nothing can replace Swarbrick, but again an excellent gig - with Peggy on a 5-string fan-fret Ibanez, the only time I've seen anyone gigging a fan-fret! He is awesomely versatile - one song he'll be holding down a simple classic bassline, the next he'll be playing the melody, with fiddle and mandolin shimmering over the top.

I could, if I were a better technical player, play everything on a 4 that I do on a 5. But it would be a lot harder and I'm not that good yet. I had the privilege 10 days ago of talking to Constance Redgrave from the Spikedrivers, a fine professional bass player of many years experience. She confirmed that her 4 is strung B E A D for the same reasons I value my 5 - for example anything in E (which I spend a lot of time in) is far easier rooted on the 5th fret of the B than on the open E. That of course is not an argument against a Squier 5. As for "high end", or "bedroom coffee-table", or whatever - I'm not sure my beloved GMR counts - she's a bespoke bass (3rd hand to me), and her build and tone quality are stunning, but not a big name, so not a big price tag for the quality. But she's just felt right from the moment I picked her up looking for my first bass, like a detachable body part, and she has a lyrical melodic sustained tone that has not only shaped how I play now, but kept me learning to play through the first difficult frustrating year when it was just all too hard and I wanted to give up, but she was just too perfect and beautiful and made me keep trying. So - to answer the OP - from where I am now, yes most of the time I could play a Squier, but if I had started with one as my first bass, I would have given up, and my current role would still be what it was for most of my life, sitting in the audience crying because i wanted to play bass and I couldn't.

Have you ever been to a Bruce Springsteen gig? I've been to two, 3.5 - 4 hours full-on and I was rivetted to every minute.

No, that won't do. My 1966 EB2 is a dream. Unless you mean "nice" isn't good enough... :-)

No. Not even a Squier Jazz 5, which would be the closest i could get. My GMR 5 has 24 frets - which I do sometimes use all of - and, more importantly, superb sustain and an overall lyrical melodic feel which even my Fender Jazz can't match. Mind you that's in the indie-pop band I've just left - next port of call looks like being a straight-up blues band where a Squier would be adequate.

Thanks for your honesty. I work in mental health support, and am angry that so few people understand the difference between normal healthy "anxiety" and crippling clinical anxiety. So many of the young people I support are made to feel even worse by people saying "Oh everyone gets a bit anxious", or "Why don't you just stop worrying about it" - as if they wouldn't if they could! A bit of alert raised attention makes most people play better, the demon can make you stop playing altogether. Much respect to you for managing your demon and carrying on gigging. The first time I played in public - solo bass and vocal at my very supportive local open mic, where I was well known and had been encouraged - I could barely manage a note. Looking back at the video all you can see is a battle with sheer terror. I had spoken at international research conferences to hundreds of people with complete confidence - that first om is still the scariest thing I've ever done in my life. But their response was purely huge support that I'd done it at all. These days the nerves are usually just a buzz that raises my game. Froggy - I walked out of my Grade 2 literally in tears, convinced I'd totally ****ed it up, and got a distinction. Hope you will too :-)

Lucky you! I missed the Mcr gig as it clashed with Scarborough Blues Festival :-(

If it had only been that, I'd still be there. There were differences in musical standards and in attitude, and failures of communication, that went too deep. I won't go into the many depressing details. But when the drummer booked us two gigs without checking with anyone else, and the band leader saw nothing wrong with that, it was the last straw. Played a one-off gig with a scratch blues band on Weds which was simple high-energy huge fun. Cleared any doubts I might have had. As for length of pub gigs, the standard around here is a three-hour slot with 3 x 40 minute sets. SpondonBassed is right that I'll take what I can get, as long as (1) I can stand up that long and (2) I can remember that many songs :-)

It was fun (for a while), and I learned a lot. As Marc S said above, getting outside one's usual groove is good experience. And (because nobody else was playing anything very interesting for me to get in the way of) I got to develop some slightly mad ideas, two-octave jumps, a bit of high bouncy pop, a bit of low broody prog... using pretty much all the space on a 5-string 24-fret fretboard. I don't regret it for a minute, and life in a straight-up blues band may seem a bit boring by contrast.

When someone is learning to play new material, especially if they're a relatively new musician, a certain amount of staring at their hands is understandable, and I can be as guilty as anyone. For an experienced musician leading a band playing his own material to stare at his feet is not, imho. I could never see the point of shoegaze - why would you want to be in a band if you didn't want to be connecting with other musicians?

PMd thanks!

I've just told the band I've been playing in (I've never been able to think of it as "my band") that I'm leaving. Two reasons: complete lack of communication, while playing or between practice sessions, and difference in taste in music. It's an indie-pop originals band, not my favourite style, but I was grateful for the offer to play with them, I liked the freedom to develop interesting original basslines, and I've put a lot of effort into it. But it just hasn't gelled. I've played open jams where I felt more musical connection with people I'd never met before than with this band after many hours over many months of playing together. Earlier tonight I talked to the guy who put this together to play his originals, and told him I was deeply sorry but I had to leave, that I respected what he was trying to do but couldn't remain part of it. He accepted "musical differences", but became very defensive when I tried to say - as I've said many times before - that I can't play in a band where nobody makes eye contact while playing. That he didn't thank me for the time I've put in on the arrangements I've developed for his songs confirms my decision. One good thing is that I handled it through a couple of phone calls followed by a carefully under-stated email rather than turning up for a practice and throwing a hissy-fit halfway through. So now I have to find a Manchester-based blues band... :-)

I know, honestly, that what will make me a better bass player is spending more time playing the wonderful basses I already have, not buying another one. They'll give me the full range of sound I want if I can only figure out how to get it from them. I know the bass I still somehow most lust after (a black Stingray 5) just doesn't feel right when I pick one up. Last year I did suddenly *need* a Gibson EB2, which seemed fair enough as it's so different from all my others :-) I have no GAS for any brand-new bass. But I do find myself sucked into guitar shops on the off chance there's a second-hand bass for a silly price that wants to come home with me. I do enjoy the hunt, and the process of choosing and buying an instrument - musician sons and budding musician grandchildren come in handy as excuses :-) I'm starting to experiment with strings, which is a lot cheaper than experimenting with basses, and when I'm really broke I splurge on picks from TimberTones - fairly harmless and satisfying retail therapy :-)

Cost or value? My six working basses cost me just over £3k altogether. A couple are unreplaceable, but replacement cost for comparable quality would be about £7.5k total. Not that I expect my insurance company to believe that if it came to it. Then there's my beloved vintage EB2 living with my son in Nashville, which Mr Josie will never know about - £2k. There's only about another £1k in other stuff. Can't justify the MarkBass rig I really want, and firmly resisting getting into pedals. So, pretty modest really, and (apart from the MarkBass) all I want.

Pleasantly I had an opposite experience last night - I've been getting increasingly fed up with the others in the band having lower standards and saying we'd "nailed" a song as soon as we could mostly play the right notes at the right times, always at the same pace and volume, and because there was no communication - none of us were even looking at each other while we were playing. I thought we sounded clumsy and boring, but the others seemed to think it was good enough. I've had words about it, gently, a few times to no effect, and last night I was ready to say if they didn't raise their game I'd be off out of it. What I actually did was to pick one song that was crying for a dramatic change in dynamics in the middle, and asked them to give me a short bass solo at that point - just the main riff played twice high and staccato, and then twice low and slower with sustain. Nothing fancy - but because it was my solo, the others didn't have to worry about making the change with me, they just had to pick up the slower beat when they came back in after it. And they had to watch me so I could cue them. As soon as we tried it, they got the point, and we ended the night with everyone happily agreeing that we'd taken a step up and would continue that way. Very glad I didn't throw my toys out of the pram. And credit to the others for understanding and agreeing quickly and positively.

Imho it's easier to reach the range of notes I might want around the 5 to 9 frets on a 5. The left hand fingering is so much simpler that it outweighs the right hand having an extra string to land on. My band's originals often suit a high bassline so I'm planning to re-string one of my 5s E-C - please don't let this lead to GAS for a 6... :-)

That was probably me, I made a comment like that recently. Would love to be in a better band than I am, but doubt I'm up to the standard the OP is looking for. +1 to Victoria Smith and Constance Redgrave, although that doesn't help.