Stub Mandrel

I would avoid playing 6/8 songs unless you are auditioning for a prog band...

Such things are exactly what all this China-America trade dispute is all about. I see eearches both Bangood and AliBaba auto fill 'rickenbacker electric guitar' and 'rickenbacker bass guitar' but don't show any results, which suggests that some things have been taken down.

Its OK, don't panic. @wrinkleygit stole it.

I had a go of that too - I found it very easy to play (just like @Jabba_the_gut's) but it tends to make me use three fingers and go all guitary. The one thing I noticed with both styles of very short bass is that they get very brittle if hammering on, the 'clack' is louder than the subsequent note. Oterwise, they sound great.

Of couyrs real bass players woudl never stoop to such gimmicks... I tape sticks to my fingers and hit the strings with them ... and people pay me to do it! I sewed soft toys all over my trousers to distract from my playing. Watch me play bass and vomit fake blood at the same time. My bass is a flamethrower.

Rehearsals are about getting better at playing together, and sorting out arrangemens - "OK, which of the four different ways the original band played this do you want me to do?" 🙂 The second band I was in we wrote all our songs together as well - somone would bring a riff, progression or even a vocal line and we would take it from there. The third one, the guitarist wrote lots of original stuff and we leahd to learn and arrange these together as well. But you shouldn't be learning covers at rehearsals, unless you need other folks to help with some parts.

I stuck mine in chromatic mode and intend to leave it there!

I've got a guitar with a Floyd Rose copy bridge set to be floating - go round six times to get it in tune!

When I took singing lessons I was told my relative pitch is spot on; I don't have perfect pitch but I could sing a song to a note on a piano and hold the not at the end and it would be dead on. Plus, I did a hearing test recently and went up to nearly 15KHz, which is apparently as good as the average for someone 20 years younger than me. 🙂

I have used various tuners; my first one was a Vox, it's about thirty years old. I just put a new battery in it and then struck and 'E' on a bass tuned to the built in tuner on my Orange combo (the needle seems to 'step' in ~1-cent intervals). I'll be honest, it's very picky, easily losing the note unless the battery is fresh, so until the advent of digital tuners I always relied on a 440Hz tuning fork and then by ear/harmonics. I have not been able to find any differences between these and my Guitarman clip-tuner (which is horrible as it reacts very slowly to drops in pitch), the previous fender clip-tuner (which was pretty good) and the built in tuner in my Vox guitar combo or my TU-3. I got the TU3 because I can use it with other amps and it reacts almost instantly unlike most clip ons. I was handed a freshly tuned bass at the Midlands Bass Bash and it sounded terrible - I though it was me being crap until I realised the D-string had been tuned to d# - the guy was using a tuner he hadn't used before. Moral - trust your ears!

These tuners, without exception, use a quart crystal oscillator to generate the comparison frequencies. These typically have stabilities and accuracies measured in tens of parts per million, far greater than is needed to tune to the nearest 'cent'. The nature of the circuits used may affect their responsiveness or frequency range, but not the basic accuracy.

Yes, if the criteria for digital is that something that works by having only an 'on' and 'off' state is digital, it is a fair point. Actually class D amps switch between three states you could call 1, 0 and -1. Personally, although class D amps lend themselves to direct digital control, I wouldn't class them as any more digital than PWM motor controllers (in fact I am sure you could use them as voltage controlled motor controllers if they are modified to be DC coupled).

That makes my light switch digital control... I suppose I work it with my finger!

Back in the day Purple, Zeppelin, Sabbath and Heep pretty much defined heavy metal, it wasn't until the 'NWOBHM' came along that metal lost its blues edge. <edit> "I know 'cos I was there".

After a conversation yesterday I'm seriously considering sticking a generic class D module in my ancient Laney Pro-Bass together witha an SMPSU to lose a lot of weight and gain a lot of headroom.

Surely Flora is the Middle Age Spread?* *I'm allowed to laugh having fought MAS and won a sensible cholesterol level as a result...

To be honest was first and foremost an exercise in seeing if I could concentrate enough for two hours and play a random selection of songs accurately on my fretless. Plus, we are covering not duplicating and there are one or two songs where I think it fits. One is Crazy Little Thing Called Love where I also turned the tone right down (p-bass) and might even stuff some sponge in the ashtray just to max-out the original rock & roll feel. I only found myself short of dynamics on one song, so I just switched my compressor off 🙂

Did our rehearsal last night on fretless to see which songs sounded best on it. Saturday Night went fine but Stay With me was challenging - on the main riff I normally just 'pop' my middle finger to lazily go from e-string to d-string, but it doesn't work very well without frets, and I kept forgetting to move my fingertip across! Also had a discussion with our lead guitarist about a potential covers band 🙂 We have similar musical tastes and both want to learn songs quickly and get gigging, not be forever 'trying out new material'.

Just missing smiley, I fgured your list was trying to be as 'out there' as possible 🙂

Last couple of visits to Cardiff - PMT crammed to the gills, Cranes, a few doors away, almost deserted. From, the Street Cranes looks like a shop for 'serious' musicians - "please show your Grade 8 certificate to the attendant before approaching the instruments". But out the back, loads of nice guitars (not many basses) and knowledgeable friendly guys. OTOH, PMT sucks in all the wannabees and djent-merchants and has killed off most of the competition.

Allow me to correct that for you...

Just about any combination of the musicians on Stephen Still's first solo album?