Bassfinger

I found The Eve of War monstrously difficult to play. Took me a couple of months to truly master it and left me with a deep respect for Flowers' skills.

Drugs certainly improve my playing. A quick snort of Vics Sinex and I'm a veritable Geddy Lee.

They're my new favourite tipple. After years of Tortes Triangle blue 1.0 I've switched to 0.73 Tortex Triangle on the advice of one Mr M. Dirnt and blowed if he wasn't spot on. I use the orange 0.5mm on mando and guitar. And the rest of the time I use two fingers and a thumb of varying thickness.

Tremendous player, friendly guy too. R.I.P.

Having a bit of a Cadillac Three week while the painters are in doing a bit of decorating. They seem to like it.

I love the Quo. What red blooded, meat eating, denim wearing specimen of prime manhood doesn't like a bit of earlier Quo up to the early 80's? Paper Plane? Yes please. RollOver Lay Down? Go on then. What You're Propisin'? He'll yeah! But after that they went off course a bit and a couple were real Grade 1 stinkers.

As a bassist, mandolin player, figerpicking guitarist and occasional banjo player I find I'm never happy with the nails on my right hand regardless of the length. I tend to go shorter on the basis that I play less guitar and banjo than I do bass, but the moment I pick up a geetar or banjo I then instantly grumble.

One of the many reasons I walked on my band recently was a similar lack of professionalism when it came to preparedness. I don't mind helping out for genuinely unforseen problems, new battery comes out of the box dead, a lead that was fine the previous night now U/S, etc, but routine lack of preparedness in others quickly becomes tiresome.

There's no technical benefit in having the strings directly over the poles, only aesthetic. Prompted by this illustrious thread I eyeballed mile yesterday. G is fractionally closer to the edge of the fretboard than the E, but barely enough to be noticeable and certainly not enough to warrant any rectification. Ditto the strings more or less evenly over the pups. I'm pretty easy going anyway. U less a string keeps going over the edge while playing such things don't bother me.

Has anyone tried Tone Y Fronts?

Indeed. There's still plenty of good new stuff emerging, even new genres and new takes on existing ones. Sure, it might not often make the charts, but what does that even mean these days? In Terms of sales, both numerically and financially, a number one "hit" today isn't remotely meaningful compared to that prior to the 80s. Just find the good stuff, the real music still played by musicians (or at least manually programmed by sk eine thwt understands music), and enjoy it. If the masses prefer listening to something that sounds like a car alarm falling down the stairs there their problem - it'll probably be gone and forgotten in five years anyway.

Spot on. No emotion, no bum notes, no fingers squeaking on the strings, no feeling...that ain't rock and roll to me. Technical excellence is a tool in the armoury, not the end in and of itself. It's great to have, but if that's all he has... I do, however, wish I was his age and wasn't arthritic and permanently injured and had a fraction of his dexterity. Fair play though. It's his thing he's good at it, and id never knock anyone who actually gets out there and does it.

Way ahead of you. I have a similar ungent on stand-by. Soon as it's time to slip on some Ernje Balls I'll be buffing like a 70's DJ at the underwear pages of the Grattan catalogue.

Yes, I own one. I love it. No neck dive issues, great sound, lovely feel. My only slight beef is the pau ferro fretboard looking paler than a pale thing, but there are several easy and cheap ways to sort that next time I cha ge the strings. Mines the red/yellow fade, but the Meteora is one of the few basses I think looks good in sunburst, IMHO.

You can't help but love Aerosmith. A shame, but better to bow out with dignity rather than try and plough on with a shredded voice and sully the legend, like Ian Anderson has been doing for 40 years.

The nature of your gigs is no different to mine or indeed most amateur musos playing. I always IEM up. None of the band (I recently resigned from) did, but their ears are their problem, not mine. Plugging the transmitter into the output on the mixer is no more difficult than plugging my wedge monitor into the same output, and in tight pub gigs it freed up valuable floor space. It's also less crap to lug from car to venue. The bottom line is any non-IEM solution loud enough to be useful risks cumulative hearing damage.

My daughter went to our local one for a while when they set up an evening proect at her school. Their bass tutor was decent but quite new to the instrument but a lovely guy. It ended up with the slightly weird scenario where I would turn up to collect my lass and would spend 10 minutes every time training the trainer, but by christ was he a quick learner. Young feller though, they just soak it up, As for non rock bass playing, I've been doing a lot more mando of late and this has led me down the rabbit hole of swotting up on country and folk bass playing. It pains me to admit it but I'm enjoying the country bass playing.

But pickups detect vibration of the strings, not the wood 'resonating'. In fact the wood transmits vibrations, it almost never actually resonates. How the strings vibrate is purely a function of the rigidity of the structure across which they are stretched. Theoretically a bass made from granite or depleted uranium would sound exactly the same as one made from mahogany, provided the design of each matches the rigidity of the wooden one.

I love it too, great song and old Tom hams it up marvellously, but there no escaping that in this modern age some folk get jolly upset by it. It's been banned from being sung at Welsh rugby matches.

Ooh, Delilah is a bit frowned upon now, domestic violence and all that.

We did a mashup, against my better advice, of All Of Me and Enter Sandman. Yes, honest. It went down like a mother in law joke at a WI cake sale.

One of the many reasons I recently quit out band was over song choice. They'd prattle on about doing what the crowd wants to hear, but then chuck in load of rubbish by James simply because our guitarist liked them...and you could see the boredom on the audiences faces. The only one I managed to sneak in was a heavy rock version of video Killed the Radio Star, which invariably got lots of claps and cheering, but other than that it was a song choice dictatorship with inconsistent reasoning that changed to suit the song he wanted to do next. It was doing my head in, the audience weren't digging it, so why bother?

Always been a Les Paul for me. I like the look, the sound, and the wide fretboard. In every other regard they're crap though but heart over rules head.

Walk by Foo Fighters. Took two plays through the song to master. Simple, but good fun - just like me

It was the singist in my case too! 😝