Stub Mandrel

Try using a volume 'expression' pedal to soften the attack of each note.

That arrangement will more faithfully simulate an amp that distorts as you drive it harder. With the diodes in the feedback loop it's a much more compressed 'always on' effect.

There have been a surprising number of albums recorded in Lockdown, what had YOU come across that's worth a listen? Let's be positive and concentrate on those that seem to have worked! I know Hawkwind are not everyone's cup of tea but the response to the lockdown album Carnivorous seems to almost universally positive in that it's being praised as a high point. It's actually just three of the guys - Dave Brock, Richard Chadwick and relatively new recruit Magnus Martin. I like it, although personally I don't rate it as consistently good as The Machine Stops which I think was their best in a long time.

I would have responded to that quote with "I'll have everything, please, except the EZ490."

Will I bring total humiliation on myself by sharing this? It came with ten reeds, all the ones I've tried seem to sound different. It says to choose the best reed, how should I test them? I've been dipping them in water then trying to play high and low notes*. *I can sort of play penny whistle and recorder, my hope is that this won't be much different aside from the blowing bit...

I've never been disappointed buying an album with a Roger Dean or Hipgnosis album cover...

I like that style too.

I've played with one of my brothers as a one off, we might do some folky stuff in the future. My other brother is way above my pay grade, long ago he did jam with my first band and it was epic, but logistics made it impractical for him to join (he lived 30 miles away and didn't have a car). We might all be living in the same town again for the first time in 40 years... anything's possible.

Hi Ray Make sure you are signed in. When you can see a page of your tunage, select 'share' and the box that appears will have a copiable link. Or right-click the name of a song and copy the link. Then just paste the link here...

No I have no averseness to using Hertz, but I applaud the use of subjective explanations to help people understand what that means in the real world - after all the aim of the diagram is to relate real world instruments and perceptions to objective frequency bands. I'm just befuddled by the suggestion that the use of a subjective approach in order to aid understanding and make the subject accessible is wrong by default. The Beaufort scale, Mohs hardness scale, most market research and a large part of medical research into areas like pain, physical disability and mental health all depend on subjective scales and there is a huge literature on how effective such approaches can be and where they fall down. All that's missing here, I feel, is the research to validate the subjective descriptions. Perhaps you could give people a vocabulary to choose from (ordered randomly) then play them (randomly ordered) pieces of music and individual sounds and ask them to choose the word that applies to each. Done well and carefully controlled, this would give an objective idea of what subjective terms people associate naturally with different frequencies. It's worth noting that colour descriptions have a strong cultural bias (some rainforest people make no strong differentiation between 'blue and green'. Newton's 'blue and indigo' were closer to what we call cyan and blue) so essentially they are learnt even though we tend to think red and blue (for example) are pretty objective concepts. I suspect it would be much easier to 'train' your ear to associate a given frequency band with a mnemonic like 'honk' than directly with a range of frequencies, the relation between mnemonic and frequency can then be learned to facilitate the use of things like graphic equalisers and parametric equalisers. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this is the way it works already - we don't instinctively recognise 'honk'* but we develop an understanding of it by listening to others use words describe sounds. *Actually a poor choice because I think true 'honk' suggests a mid-range sound that varies in harmonic content, dynamics and maybe even base frequency.

But so what? How else do you explain what its sounds like to someone who hasn't got a Fourier analyser and the knowledge to use it?

"But that's your job!"

I'm not convinced string length makes any overwhelming difference when we are talking such small differences. Whether I play Bb on the e-string sixth fret or a-string first fret on a standard bass the difference in sound is very subtle. Yet the difference in the vibrating string length and gauge are significantly bigger than between a 34" and 28" scale basses. The short scale bass may be lighter, but it's also going to be considerably stiffer (stiffness varies by the third power of length, other things being equal) so with the right choice of string gauge it could actually be brighter sounding. After all, who has noticed guitars (or mandolins) that lack brightness...

Basically, yes.

How do I 'learn the frequencies' as I don't have perfect pitch? The only practical answer is some sort of subjective guide to how sounds translate into frequencies, which is what that graphic tries to do. Every book I've read on sound engineering (OK only two) and most websites uses similar terms to try and help you translate what you hear into what frequencies to adjust. Put it this way... would you think your Lighting Engineer was being more objective if he said 'Increase the 550nm light source' if you asked for a green spotlight?

Technicians of Spaceship Hawkwind. Followers of Dr. Technical! (one of Brock's many aliases). Back in the early 80s the audience was split roughly into three, leather, labcoats and afghans 🙂 Sadly my afghan got attacked by rats and my labcoat is no more, so when I went to see Hawkwind for the first time in over 25 years last November I bought a NOS one from the 80s and used special fabric crayons to draw the cover of Warrior on the back. To my amazement I was the only person in a thousand or more wearing a labcoat!

Presumably the extra harmonics caused by that style of playing are in the honk-zone?

Yes... but ears are subjective. No point telling someone 'if it sounds like there's too much gain around 500Hz try -3dB at 500Hz.' Subjective descriptions let them put the sound in a ballpark, and even a pro engineer will know what frequency to tweak from a learned skill and listening to the song. If you want to be objective you can look at a Fourier analysis of the music and apply corrections until it matches the ideal profile for the genre... Yes, I know there are websites that will do that for you but hand's up who thinks they do a better job than pro engineers and their subjective ears?

Changing to a different one of my basses.

Those are by far the prettiest, IMHO. Basic price seems reasonable for a custom build too. Did you go for any extras?

Someone will be along to advise why you shouldn't play one finger per two frets...

Pale blue: Death metal. Grey: Heavy metal Brown: Rock Beige: Pop Purple: Prog I think blue is the basic range of the instrument, red is the range of significant harmonics.

I'm worried about the bits at top right. What are they? Interchangeable codpieces or tongue armour?

Cricket jokes? Douglas Adams barely pulled it off, not sure mere mortals can...