dmc79

I’ve never played a short scale bass or even considered one before but it seems they are becoming more popular. I am a Fender P player and short scale only crossed my mind recently because one of the leaders in the church band I mainly in likes to play songs in ‘challenging’ keys like Eb & Bb. Whilst that in itself doesn’t bother me, I’ve realised that moving from first to fourth fret on my long scale P a whole bunch on a song is starting to kill my hand. So whilst I’m not sure I want to change, I kind of feel like I may HAVE to at some point. I guess others have made the change for this same reason. I’d like to hear from you, and I’ll read back through this topic too. I’ll wager that some went over to short scale and never looked back, but I’ve seen short scale basses for sale on eBay where the users have said that it was a failed experiment and they weren’t feeling the short scale love. I am also curious as to if medium scale is a good sort of middle ground, or if it’s so little difference from long scale that it’s not worth the change. I realise this is probably a stupid thing to ask, but I’m presumably the frets being closer together, hence easier playability, is the main reason for people to go to short scale? Are they often lighter too or does this make little difference? I love the thought of that first to fourth fret stretch being easier on the hand, but I’m trying to figure out if the sacrifice is worth the change. By that I mean that I’m yet to see an off the shelf short scale bass / colour combo that really leaps out at me. Also is short scale way different in terms of tone, sustain, availability & choice of strings, etc? Then what short scale bass to choose? I’ve been a Fender guy for years but really not keen on the Mustang bass (or Squier Bronco). Does that really only leave the Squier VM Jaguars, which have been discontinued? That could be a two birds with one stone thing as I’ve always wanted to try a Jaguar anyway. I’ve been looking at pics of G&L Tribute Fallout & Schecter Banshee, they look ok but I’m a still not a huge fan. The one that has me interested right now is the Sterling By Music Man Stingray. I’ve never played a Ray, in my head I have it marked down as a funk rock Flea thing and associate it mainly with slapping, something I have no interest in doing. But thinking about it some more, I have plenty of albums that feature a Ray and I always like the bass tone on them - stuff like The Cure, Ride, Fugazi, Slowdive, Isis, some Radiohead, etc. So perhaps I owe it to myself to try one. Without opening a can of worms, I am guessing that the difference between a SBMM Ray and an Ernie Ball MM Ray is similar to the difference between MIM & MIA Fenders, would that be fair to say? Also do you think the SBMM Ray short scales are good value at around £600 new? I’m sure I’ve seen comments here and there where players can’t tell much difference between SB & EB Rays. My only slight hesitance on them is the limited colour options. I’d prefer a darker colour, so of the current 3 options, I like Dropped Copper the best. If there was a black on black on maple option I’d get one without thinking. I am also interested if anyone can post in real terms what the first to fourth fret ‘stretch’ is on a short scale bass. Love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve said, and in particular about the Stingrays & Squier VM Jaguars. Thanks! Edit: I love the look of the Sandberg California Lionel too, some nice colour options there

Bought an EHX Bass Soul Food pedal from Colin. Arrived in good time, well packed and as described. Great comms throughout, deal with confidence

Thanks for the replies. I haven’t noticed any come up on here or eBay recently though haven’t exactly been looking for long. Not sure if that indicates that it was a limited run or that they’re so good that owners don’t want to part with them. Just been reading some threads elsewhere too and the popular opinion was that those who tried both would take a used American Standard over a new American Special. Oh well, just a bit of GAS / gear lust curiosity on my part.

Hi, Just wanting some thoughts from anyone who owns or has played one of the ‘American Special’ P basses from the 2010s. A bit of searching and it seems they were kind of somewhere inbetween a MIM and an MIA. Top loading bridge & a slimmer neck than a P normally has, but no rolled fretboard edges and not quite the usual MIA refinements. I saw a rig rundown featuring Mark Shue of Guided By Voices and he raved about the necks on the American Specials. He likes that neck so much that he went to the trouble of upgrading the tuners, bridge and pickups, and uses it as his main bass with an American Standard as a backup. Really curious about these, so thanks in advance for any input.

Bought an EHX Bass Clone pedal from Andy. Great service & a credit to the site. Deal with confidence

If I get sent a 7 minute YouTube video of a song to learn, I’m generally bored 3 minutes in. Whoops, Freudian slip there, I meant to say I’ve got the hang of the song by then

Over reliance on technology and the presumption that people have their phones surgically attached to their hand does my head in. Call me old fashioned, but I’ve never been keen on having my phone by my side in church. Perhaps because I grew up without one and because I hate seeing people staring at their phones during a service. If I’m playing, my phone is often off the back of the platform behind me. Once I got home after playing and there was a Whatsapp from the worship leader saying “We’ll do this song at the end.” Honestly I was a bit taken aback by the presumption that we’d all be looking at our phones during the message, especially as they’ve never stated “Watch your phones in case something changes during the message.” The final song is generally set in stone. Back on Sunday, and back to masks. Great.

@Sardonicus Hilarious post and very bizarre happenings for you this week. I must admit, even before seeing your smoking comment, I was thinking ‘It sounds like this guy is having some sort of crisis and has taken some mind bending drugs’. I am fascinating by the thought of how this “entire service off-the-cuff, un-rehearsed,un-scripted, all ages nativity play” would have panned out. A total car crash I expect. Also the expectation that a worship band will learn 7 new songs overnight in time for rehearsal is absurd. Thanks for keeping us entertained!

Thanks. I wasn’t sure if it was an App too as I just use the website. Most of our team uses iPads and ‘On Song’. The set gets emailed out and those with iPads just open the set and can drag songs up and down to change the order as needed. They get emailed out as ‘Praise Chart’ PDFs too for those who prefer to use paper music. Possibly just me these days! I must say I really like the Praise Charts. I think they cost about £1.50 per song. When you’ve bought one I think it can be changed into about 5 different keys. They are well set out and generally the whole song fits on one page. One of my pet hates is songs going across multiple pages, so on my printed songs I’ll just hand write anything that goes onto a second page, so it’s all on one page.

So this is how we set up our worship team rota: For the last couple of years we’ve used a website called Church Suite to host our rota. We do a 3 month block at a time. With around 5 weeks left of the current rota (Oct to Dec), we are asked by one of the main worship leaders on our Whatsapp worship group chat, to input any dates we are unavailable for during the forthcoming 3 month block (Jan to March). As far as I know, the main 2 worship leaders then sit down and create said 3 months’ worth of weeks based on who is/isn’t available each week, then input these into Church Suite. Once the new rota is setup, we will be told as such in the group chat, and can log into the site and view it. By default it only shows up the weeks when you are on team, but you can make it show all weeks too. I normally then take a screen shot of this, showing the next few weeks I’m playing. One good thing about Church Suite is that it auto generates an email on I think Monday morning, reminding everyone on team that they are down to play the following Sunday, and also reminding them of the midweek practice. So for both practice and service, there should never be a no-show from anyone on account of “Sorry I forgot / didn’t know I was meant to be playing.” I see that the guys on that video when talking about rehearsals, do a whole year rota at once. This seems a bit over the top, but I guess it works for them, and they have several distinct teams which I imagine not many of us will have. I sometimes wish ours was 4-6 weeks at a time, but 3 months it is. The obvious down side to planning a few months ahead like this, is that not everybody knows what they are doing on a given week in 2-3 months time; they may not get their work shifts that far ahead, may want to book a weekend away, etc. It is accepted that with the best will in the world, things will change and some people will end up not being able to play on weeks they are down to. So, once the rota is published, if you can no longer play on a week you are down for, you can mark yourself as unavailable on the site, and a red line appears through your name for that week. We also contact the worship leader for that week to tell them we are no longer available. Another thing you can do if you can no longer play one week but are happy to play on another week that you weren’t originally due to, is organise a swap. You need to select ‘show all dates’ to see who is playing on the other weeks. I’m not certain if Church Suite contacts that other person for you when you click on ‘organise swap’’, as I’ve never tried to do that, I normally just ask them via the chat group. But once you’ve arranged it, you can just swap the names over on the site. It’s a good system and I’d recommend it to anyone getting frustrated with arranging worship team rotas. So, we’ve had our Monday reminder that we’re playing the coming Sunday. Then normally on Tuesday night, the setlist gets sent out. The only exception is the odd time it may end up on Weds or at worst Thurs, that is rare and then only because the leader that week has had to do long hours / bad shifts at work and couldn’t do it any sooner. But Tuesday for songs is normal. We rehearse Thursday night from 8 to normally no later than 9:30. There’s normally 2-3 songs more than we need but generally we rehearse them all. The leader mostly decides which songs get dropped. Some may face the axe on practice night or we’ll just be told when we are setting up Sunday that we’re not doing a couple of them. Sometimes it’s the songs you really enjoyed at practice that get dropped, which is a shame! We mostly know exactly what we’re doing by Sunday, but there can at times be an either/or, we just have both songs ready and of course the guys behind the desk have the words for both ready too. One might be a backup song depending on what ministry ends up happening. Practice night is mostly when any key changes needed will happen. That said, most leaders have their own preferred key so we kind of get used to what keys (and songs!) they will choose. We sometimes get an email between practice and Sunday along the lines of “The speaker wants us to do this song after the message”. It’s normally one we know well anyway, but we still have Sunday to go through it anyway. We have one more run through the songs on Sunday in good time before the service starts. We’ll also go over the endings of songs & transitions between songs, ie some like to do a couple of songs that seamlessly transition, or even a bit of a medley (this word used to make me cringe, but it’s not as bad as it sounds!). We’ll often play the opening song again at the end of the final practice as we’re all warmed up by then, and just to really cement it as it’s usually a loud, upbeat number that we wouldn’t want to fall flat! Not that we’d want to mess any song up of course. All in all we are pretty well prepared from rotas to Sunday mornings, so nothing should throw us out too much. This does not mean we have got it all right, but we simply do our best to avoid the most common pitfalls of worship teams, namely poor organisation!

Only just seen this topic. I’m not all that active on the forum, I guess I’ve mainly used it for buying and selling stuff. Good to find a chat for worship bassists though. . . Wanted to also quote the frustrations of @Sardonicus from the previous page, but it seems I can’t attach quotes from different pages. I will post further soon about how we do things and share some of my own frustrations, but after reading through the whole topic, I’m enraged at the attitudes of some of the leaders / musicians / singers / PA team members that posters have mentioned about here: The late sending out of songs for Sundays, late picking of musicians & singers, people forgetting they were down to play, turning up late and/or wanting to leave practice early, not familiarising themselves with songs before practice, not turning up in enough time to setup & practice on Sundays, etc. I’m quite astounded that this stuff goes on. This all seems very disrespectful, and some of these people need to have a word with themselves and question whether or not they can fully commit to the team. I appreciate its not always easy tackling these issues, but it seems like a few Team Leaders need to (re)instill some discipline in a few cases here. Also everyone surely must have a personal responsibility to give their best and respect the other team members. I feel our discipline is very good, but I’m certainly not saying we’ve got it all sorted, and some things within the team do grind my gears. But, I’m not sure I could be on team with people who are so slack, as described at various points in the topic so far. Finally for now, I’d like to give a shout-out and some respect to all of you who contributed to and/or edited lockdown online services. Personally I kind of enjoyed taking a year off playing, and didn’t take my bass out of its case the whole time, until we were back playing live. I’m not that tech-minded and wasn’t asked to contribute (that’s probably why!) so just saw it as a chance to take a break after playing regularly for about 20 years. But I appreciate that the online services were a lifesaver to many people who were stuck indoors and isolated. Whilst you were doing it for the glory of God, I think it’s good to honour people, so fair play to all of you who helped make those online services possible during such a difficult time.

+1 for the Boss TU-3. Never let me down. I don’t plan on ever straying from Boss tuners. Board space isn’t an issue and I love the soft hinged footplate or whatever it’s called on Boss pedals. Hearing / feeling a button click under my foot every time I tune, kill or mute would do my head in as I’ve got so used to Boss tuners. I have also finally caved in to my major GAS for a Boss Waza Craft TU-3W after a mint condition one came up on eBay. Never felt I could quite justify the full new price for a tuner I didn’t actually need. I guess a tuner is an odd thing to get GAS over, as it must be one of the most boring things we have to buy. But when I saw that badass black enclosure and those blue LEDs, I HAD to have it! I am strangely excited about its arrival even thought I suspect it will go away til Xmas. @Supernaut did you make a choice yet? Edit: It also supposedly has a really good, switchable buffer, though i don’t really understand what that means!

Bought Sam’s VTDI. Arrived next day, well packed & as described. Thanks! Deal with confidence