Stub Mandrel

Typical scot! Won't even pay for a dog to hunt me down properly >ducks<

This thread is an interesting read. One of the hardest things to get is an honest, objective critique of your playing style. When i meet other bass players they tend to be awfully polite - I wish they would say 'have you tried' or 'your behind the beat'. I went to a teacher looking for 'refreshing' my playing. He barely asked me to play anything then shot into long exercises playing different modes along single strings. He seemed to want to turn me in to a jazz improviser. I wanted someone to spot my weak points and also help me get to grips with 5-string (where its across the neck that you really want to develop). Two (of many) things that have helped me... right at the beginning in my first band we did a few songs with syncopated bass lines and the guys really helped me to get the rhythms right. Second, one of my brothers watched the recording of my recent (and first for~ 23 years) gig and took it apart song by song - in the nicest possible way. With fresh eyes it was easy to see how we started off pretty loose then after a couple of songs 'clicked' into the groove and our timing got much better. There was the one where the guitarist and I were locked together but I'd got fractionally ahead of the drums. Another where the hi-hat pattern went wrong so what I normally play wasn't quite working. Silly things like me standing in the wrong place and my awful microphone technique for backing vocals - moving my head close in at last minute and pulling away too early - the only one that worked well was ironically when I was right back from the mike because I was unsure of myself and the sound engineer had bumped me up! Some good things - where I got lost, went to root notes for a verse and then slipped back in. Obviously the view we had wasn't really going to help with wrist position etc. but I'd love to get my technique dissected in the same way. the lesson I REALLY want is the one that helps me remember the structure of complicated songs quickly and easily!

LOL! I saw you post and thought you were recommending a coat of copydex to make a strap non-slip!

Music stands? I have a YTS trainee as a page turner.

"Quite progressive" - just a bit! Alan Holdsworth, John Wetton, Bill Bruford and Eddie Jobson 🙂

Added a re-speakered for 8-ohm Peavey 115. Seriously bigger than I expected. Now I'm getting BAD thoughts about having a dual stack rig with the Laney and two 2x12 cabs.

+1 I'm a sucker for a transparent blue burst. Best finish of all.

We can only lisetn to that for another four months, Then we have a diet of this...

Whooo that's very precise playing!

You get a better conversation with the Chinese bloke, but somehow it doesn't feel the same...

It's "don't let a drunk near a cassette recorder".

You can just record and MP3 on you phone and upload it here - it has to be downloaded to play it though. God only knows what this crap I found on my hard drive is, bu I think it dates from the 1980s... 😫 Pedwar_Random Bits.mp3 Should clarify this is not a bassline to be identified, it's just some random guitar and someone hitting a box. Done badly.

I thought that throwing acid at your bass was the latest 'relicing' technique...

Kerr-ching! I didn't think that would take long! Lyndon Johnson Bares His Scars - American Stars 'n' Bars.

Respectfully, I think you've missed the point. 1. No amount of digital conversion will ever completely replicate an original analogue master, whatever it's shortcomings. You can't get better than the original data, and in the future new techniques might let us get more out of it (like when they found it was possible to extract colour data from some old B&W TV recordings - you would not have been able to do that with B&W digital copies). 2. The quality of such unreleased recordings varies. Some are very good or at least tell us a lot about the songwriting/recording process and the artist's musical journey. In any case most of these tracks will be better than the likes of me will ever produce! 3. An original master is an important document. Anyone (even me!) who has played with their own recordings, however humble, will know you can get very different results from the same original material - only last week I listened to some recordings of mine and realised I could have done a much better job with some simple changes. I have the original 4-track cassettes and may have a another go! And imagine what could be achieved by going back to 1930s recordings of the old blues giants? 4. Of course released music has been lost, but out of 500,000 tracks I very much doubt all the unreleased material was crap.

Crikey, you lot need to get your phones out! I admit it, I'm addicted to this so I've done a quicky as a filler. Tell me to b***r off if I'm hogging the spotlight! This should be 100% easy to get!

LOL! Given the date, Wexler and Dire Straits connection and 'first track on the album' I thought it was Serve Somebody by Bob Dylan!

I cheated so I'm not going to do a reveal...

Reminds me of Bad Boys?

I got 10% off a Squier from a Nottingham music shop - how famous does that make me?

Get out a tape measure, it will all be clearer. As @BassBus says the 12 fret is fixed. For a 34" bass it's 17 inches from the nut. Typically the saddle for the E string will be somewhere around 34 1/2" from the nut. (The first harmonic's node will be at 17 1/4" rather than 17", but we don't notice that.) When fretted at the 12th fret the free length is 17 1/2" . That extra 1/4" of free length lowers the pitch of the string by enough to compensate for the increased tension when fretting. To prove the effect, just fret the E-string at the 12th fret, pluck it and bend slightly, by the same as the action, say about 1/8" to 3/16" (or 1/4" if you are Carol King!) The change in pitch you here is pretty much the amount the saddle displacement has to compensate for. It will probably be rather more than half a semitone on the E string. Bend the G string by an amount equal to its action. the pitch change will be a lot smaller, which is why the saddle movement is less.

Well that's got us flummoxed. And going all myxamtosisialodian on us!

He did have his moments, especially on the early albums, before his singing became a caricature of his real voice.