The Guitar Weasel

In fairness it's often easier to play stuff fast than slow If you try and think about triple and quad slap syncopation rather than 'feel' it ... you will probably foul up.

Weird shaped bass bodies that look more like random ink blots than instruments. Anything short scale except a Hofner Beatle bass ... Rickenbacker bass pickups ... love the sound ... would hate the fact they die more often than old Hofner ones ... If part of my living wasn't rewinding guitar and bass pickups They keep me fed ... so hey. EUBs ... work of the devil.

My normal string of choice is the Rotosound 4000 set bumped ... But when I had the chance to try out a set of of unused Superior Bassworks Dirty Gut Deluxe strings (normally £75+) for nowt, I simply had to bite. So my normal style is pretty frantic rockabilly slapping bordering on psychobilly insanity. My Rotos are great for that amplified - they only need a light touch and they have quite a nice slap (using my Shadow Rockabilly pro preamp). You do have to be a bit careful however, as the very low string tension isn't brilliant for bridge stability - and you can easily hit them a bit hard in the heat of the moment and get a bit of unwanted farting 🙂 As a matter of fact one of the reasons I rebuilt the old Czech bass that became 'Frankie' the Freankenstein bass ... was because I had this set of Dirty Gut strings to go on it! The strings were in fact worth more than the original purchase price of the headless wreck that became this slick black beauty! I'd tried green Weedwhackers on my Stentor 3/4 back when I was starting out and they were atrocious. Or at least the E string was ... only capable of a tuneless bloop of indeterminate pitch below A. To me this was absolutely useless ... I might as well have a three string bass! Anyway, on to the Superior Bassworks strings. Like Weedwhackers they are nylon with a Kevlar core and to say they are chunky is a serious understatement I have to say these strings only just fit through my tuners ... and I do believe that it's pretty common to have to ream out your holes (oooer Missus) to take these chubbers. Naturally the whole string path has to be widened to accommodate the girth of these hawsers ... but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs (or as one famous Shakespearian theatre director once said to me 'you can't make a Hamlet without breaking legs'. Now purely on looks these are stunning. Proper old timey and they really set off the looks of a black bass ... though I believe they do them in blood red, which would look even cooler. You get six strings in the pack allowing you to bump the gauges a bit to find what you like. Now other folks milage may vary on this, but I found the thickest 4.3mm 'E' had good pitch all the way down ... even though it felt like a chunk of HMS Victory's rigging in diameter! However the 4mm used as the E was simply not under enough tension to produce low 'tuned' notes - succumbing to 'bloop' syndrome like Weedwhackers - so personally I wouldn't bother with bumping. The string tension is a la fair bit higher than with my bumped Rotos, leading to a little bit more physicality having to be thrown in to slapping - but the results tone wise are truly lovely to my ears. To my mind these sound about as close to old recordings of early rockabilly as I've heard. The main note is big and round and warm, while the slap has more of the 'wood blocks' than the 'metallic snare drum' about it. The surface 'texturing' of the string gives a very firm grip for triple slaps and drag triplets, and the acoustic volume is good enough to play with other acoustic instruments unamplified, unlike weedwhackers ... or indeed my bumped Rotos - I don't think I have quite the raw speed I do on those, but for more old time rockabilly ... and probably country too these are a keeper for me I think. To be fair I haven't tried them amplified yet, as it's a huge faff to swap over the Shadow kit to another bass. I may have to bite the bullet and just buy another Shadow rig though ... these really make me want to play ... what more can you ask?

It's called the 'saddle' ... okay ... clean off all that PVA 'polar bear snot' with warm water and and a cloth ... blurgggggghh = Never get that stuff near a double bass on pain of .... well let's leave it at serious pain. Isopropyl alcohol will got off any that hot water won't ... then let the area dry thoroughly. Now go and buy some proper glue if you must use a 'chemical' glue use Titebond SPARINGLY Better is Titebond liquid hide glue You don't need much clamping with hide glue ... probably even get away with taping it down while the glue cures ... the forces once everything is back together will tend to keep the saddle in place even if the glue joint isn't the strongest. Now go get the person who did that gluing job to write out 100 times on a blackboard ... or an interactive whiteboard as you are at a college I MUST NOT USE PVA ON MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

East London me

it's such a crap thing to have happen ... hope they can sort your bass pronto

This ... 100%

A you mentioned the B word ... the 'horse's bum hair of brilliance stick' I hear bass players took to using it after hearing Jimmi Page playing his Les Paul with one ...

Welcome ... may the groove be with you!

Depends what you mean by real 'real' bass player. To me that means providing a groove and a framework that the music hangs on like a dress on a beautiful model. Working with a drummer to weave the underpinnings of something greater than the sum of the parts. To be able on occasion to launch out and play a blistering run, sure ... but to be the rock and the foundation that gives folks a good time when they listen to your band. Bass playing to me is a strange combination of joy and discipline. Utterly intoxicating when you are all in the groove. Personally while I listen to the odd bit of Mozart first thing in the morning to calm shattered nerves when I see what's in store for another day in the workshop - that's as far as it goes - even though my wife was a production manager at the Royal Albert Hall for over ten years, and I had the opportunity to both hear top notch classical music for free - I mostly took a pass on it. It has very little relevance to my experience of music growing up - with my mother a jazz/dance band pianist and my aunt a 'teddy girl' who played me all her rock and roll and rockabilly singles while she babysat me as a toddler. My experience from my wife's time at the Albert Hall was that while most professional classical musicians are lovely people and hugely dedicated, a great many classical music fans are snobbish bores who see no further than the ends of their noses. 🙂

The chip on my shoulder is that the state of private music tuition in this country is appalling. I will explain: for longer than I've been any sort of woodworker or instrument builder - or in fact, what I do say to day now - owner of a pickup winding company - I've taught music. I've always been foremost a musician - but to supplement that income I had a music shop in the 80s/90s and after that worked at a local FE college where my role required I become a qualified teacher. This opened my eyes to the fact that a great many people teaching instruments privately are a. a waste of money for the student, and b. creatively stifling for the student unless the want to learn the teacher's 'pet' genre of music. To many so called teachers, it's about money and no more (or a bizarre ego trip). They don't take time to find out what the student wants to learn, they don't put in the effort to prepare course work tailored for the individual and the type of music they want to play - they just apply a 'cookie cutter' one size fits all approach and take the money. Frankly students would be better seeking out the right sort of YouTube lessons and perhaps even paying for one to one tuition or small group (usually via Patreon ets) from someone on that platform who has a style they admire or want to learn. I hate to see folks waste money - and a huge amount of personal music tuition today is just that, a waste of money. If you are going to go to a tutor then go to one who teaches what you want to learn. Ask the right questions, seek out other students that have been taught by that person ... but don't just blindly go to someone who is supposed to be a good player ... because they can be that and a crappy teacher at the same time.

Steel double bass strings only really started to become the norm from the 1950s onwards. During the majority of that 300 years folks were playing lower tension strings ... ie gut ... similar to the lower tension strings you are dismissive of.

Yep there is a trend amongst some double bass players on here to be 'gatekeepers' ... 'you must suffer to gain enlightenment like we have'.