Dr.Dave

[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='487145' date='May 13 2009, 06:57 PM']Hey if we're talking about a gorgeous competition, then I've got bigger breasts than anyone else on this forum and I look good in a swimsuit.[/quote] Pah....looked tiny to me! Mine are like a dead heat in a zeppelin race

[quote name='spinynorman' post='487110' date='May 13 2009, 06:13 PM']My thoughts are a bit different. A Fender makes me think "this guy is a musician who just wants something that works".[/quote] I used to think that - but in recent years I've come to wonder how many just want the retro pose. Websites dedicated to relicing , companys responding to demand by making reliced instruments , that sort of thing. A Precision to me is the ref. because that's what I started on. It's what I started on because there was so little choice in 1978. Less so today. I hope - best word I can say truthfully - that if I were starting out now I'd make my decision based on things like value/versatility/build quality - anything but pose value.... there just wasn't the choice years ago - can't emphasise that enough.

Confession time. I must admit that any expensive bass guitar makes me think 'This guy is serious'. I'm embarrassed about it because that's totaly wrong on many levels and my better self doffs my cap to all of you with cheaper basses who are both hugely dedicated and bright enough not to think like me. I'm afraid too that if a guy picks up any bass - hangs it chest high , tucks his arm round the end and extends his thumb parallel to the strings I think 'here we f**king go' and do a runner to the bar. That's wrong too. I'm a dinosaur. Don't know why half of you put up with me.

I was very , very close to having a punt for the one Shaggy bought from Rayman. I had one of those 'I'll leave it til the morning and what we will be' moments. It wasn't to be. I can remember playing several as a young man as I wanted a different bass to my Precision , didn't fancy a Gibbo and couldn't afford a Ric. Trust me , there was bugger all else to choose from back then. Had quite a soft spot for them ever since though I never owned one. I liked the different look , I liked the brand as Guild were well known as top end acoustic makers , I liked the sound which was non-fendery but not as 'trifle in an old sock' as a Gibson. I liked playing them too. You will let us see your new aquisition I hope.

[quote name='Funkmaster' post='485877' date='May 12 2009, 01:18 PM']Harry's Bar with The Roosters tonight if you're out - and we're doing an unplugged at The Hop on Thursday (and I'll have my upright out for the first time in a long time (for a few tracks only though!)). Dave[/quote] I'll be at the Hop. Would your fellow Roosters , only really know a couple of them , be horrified if I did a number with the Triumph? Give you a good laugh if nothing else!!

[quote name='Funkmaster' post='483845' date='May 9 2009, 05:06 PM']Oh by the way - the Yardbird - great intimate little venue too. My first visit there.[/quote] And mine came 2 days after you - we did the DocB/Elim show there on Sunday. We were told the B W gig wasn't well attended - is that true? I didn't like to doubt the word of the punters at the Yardbirds because most of them were the size of Chile. Nice on-stage sound for us - very loud out front I think. it was a good venue to do because of the folk that work there and the facilities we were provided with. The corner stage is a little restrictive though. I saw Buddy with John Mayall about 3 years ago. I now know who ate all the pies!! The bassist at the time being Hank Van Sickle. Very solid , understated player. Has his own website and myspace if anyone wants to look him up.

My 73 Precision - no question. Amps mean nothing to me , tool for the job - I can hear the P unamplified so I'll swap my amp choice for Girl's Aloud thanks. I can use the lead to stop them wriggling too much.

Quality clip - made no worse by the 'warts and all' pitching of the fretless in my opinion.

I got an Epi Ex for the ZZ trib band - you'll have seen the pics , I'm sure. It sounds fine but it's awkward to play. Hell of a reach and easy to hit things (like guitar players and drum stands) with it if you move around. I gave £180 for it from Cash Converters. I'm glad to have a job of work for it but as I've said before it'll be in the classifieds the day after I stop playing in the ZZ trib.

Re. chequered knobs - I've searched all over the net and can't find bugger all. There's dice ones , but that's my gag so keep off the grass! Q Parts do loads that have coloured caps - enough colours to match your basses - not perfect but a thought.

Subtle tones from a traditional looking , understated instrument. F**k that for a game of soldiers. This is much more fun. Brilliant Wayne. Let those who thumb their noses stop a minute and realise that in this very visual game of gigging you'll be recognised and remembered from the individual look of your basses alone. Total thumbs up to you.

Mine's a bar stool - nicked it from a pub in York. I've an office type chair too but I don't like it spinning around. tip - on no account use a Marshall 4x12. I sat on one once , missed , hit my arse bone on the knuckle corner and was laid up for a week with a broken coccyx.

John McVie was not in the original line up of Fleetwood Mac - the bass player being Bob Brunning.

[quote name='beerdragon' post='477250' date='May 1 2009, 06:51 PM']thought about some covers but i think they could get in the way.[/quote] Damn right - straight in the bin. Pups.....Wizard Thumper??? SDQP????? I like your reasoning - pub covers band , bass that does the job , give it the beans , spare just in case , leave me alone - thankyou and goodnight. Bang on , mate.

Couple of Slide players for you to check out - Derek Trucks and Sonny Landreth. John Mayall's best album for me doesn't go back to the Clapton/Green days but only as far as the 90s - A Sense of Place. Highly recommended. In fact it's where I first heard Sonny Landreth , though on acoustic slide on this album rather than electric. Paul Rogers 'Muddy Waters Blues' album is fun - all those superstar guitar guests - and bass playing from Pino.

[quote name='Geek99' post='476986' date='May 1 2009, 01:29 PM']I have a cij 62 ri jazz from 1994 and it "has mojo". I guess its painted in cellulose. If it gets a competent respray, does it matter value-wise on resale if the paint used is polyester with poly varnish/laquer? Its a sunburst[/quote] My opinion - I wouldn't go to the trouble and expense just to sell it on. No way in this world the cost of a pro respray would be anywhere near recouped. If you want to keep it and you want it shiny , an alternative would be to pick up a body on the bay and sell the mojo'd one on.

Nothing strange about being nervous in an environment that's unsusual for you. I think that now you're playing blues you'll have already seen how many patterns and runs are so similar and be coming up with some of your own - even if they're learned rather than improvised. Maybe slotting run A from song A into the middle song B that's in a different key. Mixing and matching. As you do more of this it will start to become second nature and leave you much more confident to jump up on a stage and improvise. Improvising will give you more confidence to start lobbing runs off the top of your head into the middle of your regular set. So the circle goes on. Groove comes from relaxation and confidence. You're confident enough to come on here on a public bass players forum and ask for a few pointers and , having met you a few times , I know you're intelligent enough and interested enough to learn. You also put a lot of effort into your current gig rather than just play the notes and not think about it till the next show. You went through a phase of buying and selling gear a lot not to show off but to find the right tools to use - what's that if it's not putting a massive affort into improving as a musician? The playing side doesn't yeild such instant results but you can approach it in the same methodical way and learn from your experiments. Go see 66 man again , steal his lines - adapt them , practise them - and watch them turn ito your grooves , not by magic but by your own efforts. All that said , then , I think you're in a newish musical environment for you and are worrying too much that you're walking when you should be running. Take it steady away ,Alan, and let your skills and confidence build more naturally.

Just thought - if you took your shades off you'd see ordinary dots better!!! There you go , I just saved you a fortune !!!!

Side LED's - no problem. I have them in my Shuker.Highly useful IMHO. A plus for me is that they help in light conditions as well as dark - floodlit stages , sunny outdoor stuff etc. I love them. I thought about - still thinking about - having some done in my Status and emailed Sims for a price. At the time it would have been around 300 brick (couple of years ago) BUT (answers a couple of your points) you can save a bit of doh ray me by sending them the neck which comes back with the LED's fitted , a simple wiring loom/battery clip and instructions as to how to finish the job. That was £180. There would be 2 small solder points in the heel of the neck. You just touch the self installed battery wires to them with a soldering iron. So - they must un-solder too , which would solve the problem of neck swapping. I suppose you could buy more than one batt set up and install them in as many bass bodys as you like and pop the LED'd neck on said bass as the mood takes you. Here's the website [url="http://www.simscustom.com/"]http://www.simscustom.com/[/url]

[quote name='EBS_freak' post='470664' date='Apr 23 2009, 01:16 PM']Nah - it's not the nut that unscrewed - it's the actual pin which you pull up. The strap attachment is still firmly attached to the strap! I screw those nuts on so so damn tight, there is no way that they are ever going to come off the strap. Top tip for fitting Scaller locks to a strap... hold a screw driver in the bottom fixing whilst turning the nut with a spanner...[/quote] Mine were tightened like that and with loctite on the nut AND checked when I set my gear up that night. If the pin's failed I'd be sending the fitting to Mr Schaller along with a grovel letter saying how you've used his products trouble free for a thousand years and asking for a free replacement set - which you'll get along with a T shirt..........then Ebay the new Schallers and buy the Dunlops!!! I'll have the T shirt if you don't want it!! Add it to my collection of similarly obtained clothing!!

I'll tell you how it happened. Pound to a pinch of sh*t the 'locking' (!!) nut unscrewed itself off so the rest of the fitting fell out of the hole. It happened to me mid gig in York , dumped my Status on my foot. Since the following morning all my Schallers went in the bin and were replaced with Dunlops - far superior IMHO. They hold the strap further off the bass as the pins are longer which makes me wonder about too much stress on the screw and pin - but you can get versions that 'flush' fit too , though that means hacking the bass a little. Never had an actual issue with the Dunlops , they've been great , my comments above are only me worrying/wondering aloud. Were I you I'd be on the blower to whoever you've ordered the replacements from and change your order to Dunlops toot suite. Cost you a couple of quid more but if you're interested in the security of your bass enough to invest in any form of straplock -are you bovvered?

[quote name='Ou7shined' post='469688' date='Apr 22 2009, 03:51 PM']Firstly, beauty is in the [b]ear[/b] of the beholder.[/quote] Hallelujah , brother. What's a 'good' sound? What's the 'best' gear? If me and Linford Christie get down on the blocks and somebody shouts bang - 10 seconds later he'll be across the finish line having a non-dodgy cup of herbal tea and I'll still be 5 yds from the start having grown a third testicle and suffering a heart attack. At sprinting - he's better than me. He's good , I'm not. We can measure it. So - kind lads that you all are you organise a benefit concert for my funeral and one of you plays a Wal through a Boogie and one of you a Squier through a Carlsboro. Which one sounds 'best'? Is one good and the other not? How do we know???? How do we measure it?

Moaning old git content follows........ Anyone here below the age of about 35 doesn't know what cheap tat gear is. When I started out if you didn't buy a Fender or a Ric the chances are it would be a plywood plank with a neck that would exhibit distinctly musatoid (look it up) behaviour in 6 months. Ray's were just coming in , Yamaha were making the only real effort from Japan and Mr Alembic was starting to make expensive boutique basses. Miserable sod that I am I don't count Gibson so other than what I've listed you got rubbish to an extent many of you wouldn't believe. How any of us older blokes managed to learn on some of the stuff we had I'll never know. Bass amps - by and large - were bass versions of guitar amps with the only exeptions being high end stuff like Ampegs. Now - you can buy a Jazz bass cheaply - maybe even one that says Fender on it - and gig/record/whatever with it. It's decent quality for a weeks wage. Big names in bass amplification manufacture proper bass amps - GK , Ashdown , Trace etc and they are nothing like the cost a pro's amp would have cost you 30 years ago in terms of how many hours overtime it would take to buy one. I buy the odd fancy bass because I can. I'm middle aged , no kids to support and I'd fall off a motorbike. If I had to I could gig quite happily with a Squier bass and a mid range combo that would cost me way less than 500 spots if I went with used gear - not much more new. We do this thing to make music - not to sit back admiring our aquisitions. Joe punter in front of you doesn't know a vintage Fender bass from a Vintage brand bass - and more to the point doesn't give a sh*t. Neither does Mr Music Industry exec. , Mr Promoter or even Mr Producer. They care about interesting (saleable?) music and sounds - not what it costs to make them. As with any tool - it pays in the long run to buy the best bass gear you can afford , esp if you've made a decision to take playing music seriously. It will give more control over sound and will last longer if looked after. (my own tip would be if money's tight - spend the majority on the bass and don't worry about the amp as long as it works) But - I guarantee the lad or lass with the crap bass and rubbish amp who knows how to play it beats the clueless rich kid on every level , every time. Edit - re. para 1 , last sentence. That was a lie - I do know. We wanted to be musicians more than anything so we took what we could get/afford and made it work for us.

I think this is very generalised bias but for what it's worth. Trace used to build things up to a quality in the early days - slowly they started building down to a price. By the time anything came in a furry cabinet it was utter rubbish that WILL fall to pieces in a gigging environment. I hear better things about the current range but I'm loath to bother trying it. I'd much rather pick up some old series 6 stuff - my fave - for a good price , have it checked out by a sparky and proceed with confidence. I found sounds I like easy to get , functions I actually used and I couldn't break it. That's all I require from amplification - to do its job while I crack on with mine.