Obrienp

I’m one year behind you and I drive myself, plus one of the PA towers and one, or two monitors that I also provide, plus my bass gear, loads of spare extension cables, the stage box/snake, loads of kettle leads, XLR cables, spare mic, emergency DI box, tools, gaffa tape, etc, plus sometimes a mixer desk and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Every so often I get a bit miffed about it as I have back issues, arthritis and lymphoma but then one of the guitarists is 72 with prostate cancer and provides the regular mixing desk. The drummer is only a year younger than me and provides the other PA tower, plus lugging his kit. Vocalist is much younger and I think should provide her own monitor but she works in the care sector, so really isn’t paid enough to be able to buy anything worth while. I do wonder how long I can go on doing this but I get such a rush from playing live that I really would miss it. We just got a new line up too, so a lot more fun to be had yet.

One band I play in tunes down a semitone to Eb, which I understand is 415 hz. It is much more friendly for the singers apparently. It is a bit of a pain as I tend to play short and medium scale basses and the third and fourth strings can get a bit flappy. Consequently, I have to keep a bass set up for Eb. I guess 432 Hz might not be such a problem with a conventional setup but does it really help the vocalists as much? Eb was good enough for Hendrix, so who am I to argue?

I don’t think they work that well with bass anyway. A stomp is much better IMO but maybe not the Boos Tu-3 which I find a bit disappointing, despite so many positive reviews. However, I agree with @neepheid, it’s none of the vocalist’s business how you tune your bass.

I seem to have become de facto band manager for one band I am in after the departure of the original BL. He was BL because he formed the band and, as an ex-RAF officer, he was very comfortable with taking charge. He was also younger than the rest of us and good with social media, etc. He handed the website, FB page, etc, over to me when he left because I used to be in the IT industry. Trouble is, for around the last 15 years of my career, I didn’t do anything remotely hands on. He wrote the web-page directly in a combo of html and JavaScript, pretty old school and in theory should be within my capabilities as an ex-programmer but when I say ex, I mean I moved on to other roles in the mid 90s. I still haven’t raised the courage to look at the files that make up the website after 5 months! I know I’ve got to set aside at least a couple of days and several weeks beforehand on a crash technical refresher. In the other band I have also ended up stuck with the FB stuff and a lot of the gig hunting but fortunately everybody takes a share in finding gigs and another band mate acts more in the BL role. It can be very time consuming doing this kind of band admin/management. I’m retired and I find it difficult to set aside the time! The trouble is these days you really do need to be constantly doing the social media, online stuff, otherwise the gigs dry up pretty quickly, as we have discovered. Almost worth letting someone take 20% of earnings in return for staying on top of this stuff and keeping the gigs coming. After all, I play in bands enjoyment as much as for cash and sitting in front of a screen, after 30 years in the IT industry, is not enjoyable IMO!

Pretty cool though, literally! 🤟

Thanks for the tip. My fix at the time was to move it on but I’ve had the same problem with my Guild Starfire 1 and the cure for that has been stick on foam edge protector: the kind that you can get to stop toddlers from braining themselves on tables, etc. I have seen adverts for full length forearm sleeves for classical/flamenco guitarists, which might also be worth a try.

Well he was good enough for Zeppelin to write a song in tribute: “Hats Off to Harper”.

Late entry for my worst is a Digitech Drop pedal. It didn’t do what it said on the tin at all. Very disappointing as I had read reasonable reviews of it elsewhere. Fortunately, Merchant City Music took it back without quibbling and refunded the money promptly. Great after sales service IMO and I will certainly consider buying from them again.

In Norfolk it’s any make of car, tractor, van, lorry, or other self-powered farm machinery regardless of country of origin. There is obviously a special spec list for cars bought here: most drivers save money by not specifying indicators. If they do use indicators, it normally means they are trying to trick you and will actually be turning in the opposite direction to that indicated. They will wait at a junction until there is a car coming and then pull out very slowly and drive at a steady 38 MPH in the middle of the road, regardless of the speed limit, whether it be a 20 limit in front of a school, or a 60 on what passes for an open road (there are no motorways in Norfolk and few dual carriageways).

Are they genuine humbuckers now, or still the single coils pretending to be? Not really a problem: the singles sounded good but a lot of people got upset at them being passed off as humbuckers in the specs. The main problem with these for me was the slab body; the edges really dug into my forearm to the point that I started to get tendinitis. Other people’s mileage may be different and I guess it’s not much different to a Mustang in that respect. If they haven’t changed the rest of the hardware fixings, it’s an easy bass to upgrade. Tuners, bridge, etc are fairly easily replaced without modification and there are umpteen choices depending on your budget. Postscript: I just enlarged the picture and the BBOT bridge is different: a screw on each corner, rather than the previous 5 screw Fender fitting. That might reduce the range of drop in replacements available.

Are those humbuckers? The spec doesn’t say. Expensive for a (presumably) Far Eastern made instrument! I suspect the street price is going to come out a bit less than that after a bit.

I do occasionally play the standard tuning songs a semitone up on my detuned bass but I get confused sometimes, especially in the more complex songs, so I find it less risky to keep a bass in standard tuning for gigs.

This thread has landed at exactly the right moment for me. It’s reassuring to know others get it wrong. I had a band rehearsal yesterday and I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t keep up with the pace of some songs, I hit wrong notes (worse than missing a note), I forgot stuff, I couldn’t get the bass to stay in tune; on it went. It came to a climax/anti-climax in “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” when I did the B flat major scale run down wrong (ended on A) and as for the two little three note chromatic run downs, I just couldn’t get the timing right. It threw me into a complete depression about my playing, fearing that age was causing a decline in my abilities and I was contemplating suggesting they get another bassist today (after 5 years in this band). Anyway this has cheered me up. I think I’ll postpone any self-destructive decisions until I’m absolutely sure I’m crap! 😀

Just regurgitating this thread. I read it and decided to try the Digitech Drop that looked perfect for what I wanted. One band I play in does a lot of songs detuned a semitone but also a few in standard tuning. I find I need two basses because even one semitone difference seems to cause all sorts of tuning stability issue, if I try to use one bass. However, a second bass on a stand can cause overcrowding problems on the kind of “stages” we tend to get (5 piece band), plus delays between songs. Well my experience with the Drop has not been good. My main gigging bass with this band is a Guild NS Starfire 1 (the one with the P pickup) but I also use a custom shortscale P/J. I tried the drop with both basses, plus another partcaster medium scale P bass and a medium scale Maruszczyk Elwood (jazz copy). The Drop just didn’t work well with any of them. On lower strings the drop was either flat or sharp and on the upper strings it started doing a sort of octaver thing with both a dry and pitch altered note, which sounded horrible! The only feature that worked OK was the actual octaver setting. That tracked well on the top two strings but got less accurate and more laggy as you dropped to the lower strings. That seems pretty much par for the course with octave pedals, so no worse than most. I have sent the pedal back and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. I am now contemplating whether it is worth trying the more expensive EHX Pitchfork. That seems to get mixed reviews and I have a feeling it doesn’t do semitones, so I suspect I’m going to have to stick with two basses.

Thank you for the comprehensive response @stevie. A second Monza is on the list but it might have to wait, as one of my daughters just got engaged. They are looking to buy a house and I think the Bank of Mum and Dad might have to step in, not to mention wedding costs, which I understand average around £30K these days!!!😱😱😱😱 Looking at the price of prestige 800 watt plus amps (even used), the Monza looks like the best value option to get more clean headroom. The 4 ohm load will double the output of my current amps. Although, as @Phil Starr pointed out, that is more than I need for the kind of gigs I’m playing, it would give me plenty of headroom (as I understand it).

That’s a shame! I know that arthritic thumb problem ☹️. Matter of interest; did you think the Precision pickup was better, worse, or about the same as a pucka Mustang pickup?

What @chris_b said but I would also check out LFSys cabs. They punch well above their weight, literally and metaphorically.

Nordstrand Acinonyx 5 string prototype, sporting what looks like a humbucker:

That’s a very pretty thing!

Wow, quite a while since this thread was active. Just thought I would post a pic of the guts of my Nordstrand, which may be of interest to owners who haven’t opened their bass up yet. I decided to change the strings on mine after over two years! The original D’Addarios were still going strong but I had a set of Labella flats lying around, which I wanted to try. I decided to augment the shielding with some copper tape, as there was a bit of hum (not that bad). There was a small piece of copper tape already, which was bridging the graphite paint shielding to the foil on the pickguard. My efforts haven’t really made it perceptibly quieter TBH. I probably should have covered the whole cavity but I was about to run out of tape. A few points to note: the wheel to adjust the truss rod at the bottom of the neck is retained by a cross head screw. I didn’t know it at the time I had the guard off but there was no movement left to tighten the neck, which became necessary with the extra tension of the flats. When I reassembled everything and put the flats on, I thought the rod had jammed. This led me to take it to my local luthier who discovered that by loosening the retaining screw, you can get loads more adjustment in the rod (phew, relief) but you have to remove the pickguard to do it, which is a pain. There isn’t enough room to get a cross head driver in there without damaging the pickguard and the front pickup cover. Unfortunately, the StewMac Tele neck adjustment wrench won’t work because it’s for straight slot screws. Point two: the luthier told me he has had a number of Acinonyx in because the pickup height adjustment would no longer work. If you look at the picture you can clearly see the underside of the pickups. The screws go directly into the metal base of the pickups. This quickly loses its thread apparently and in the worst cases, the pickups just drop down under pressure from the springs. It hasn’t happened to mine but I have hardly touched them. Larger screws could work as a fix for a while, before the fault repeats itself. A permanent fix involves attaching captive nuts to the base plate, which is very fiddly, or rebuilding the pickup with a new base plate. The luthier makes his own pickups and he was not very complimentary about the build quality of the Acinonyx examples. That said, I like the way they sound and touch wood, I haven’t had any issues with mine. BTW, said luthier has also had one case of the switches failing. Again I’ve been lucky so far but I think, if it did happen, I would be inclined to replace the pickup selector with a 4 position Strat/Tele style switch (I don’t need a mute) and the tone with a rotary Varitone switch but of course, I would need a custom pickguard to be made.

Thomann seems to have magicked all this away. I have bought several items from them since the dreaded Brexshit and they seem to take care of it all. I guess they have the size to handle the extra admin. I notice that the price does go up marginally when you confirm that you have a UK address. I guess that is allowing for the slightly higher UK VAT.

I promised a couple of pics of my Sire U5 SS fretless. I’d forgotten it has a string through option. Correction: BTW controls are VVT rather than VBT. Sorry got my abbreviations back to front first time.

No worries. It did make me realise I’m commenting on something I’m never going to get my hands on, at least until it falls down to the bottom feeder level of the used market. Don’t forget to take the Fodera to the gig 😀. Enjoy!

I feel put in my place. You are right. I should use more of my time practicing and less time worrying about features on my gear. That said, for the kind of money the GR will sell for, I would have expected a bit more: it’s a crowded market but I don’t know why it bothers me, I will never be paying that amount for an amp. Everything I have is well secondhand and pretty low budget, with one exception. As for the 20 person audience, the way gigs are locally, we will take anything that is going, even if turns out to be a paid rehearsal. I think classical musicians would consider the price of a Fodera pretty low rent but everything is relative and I get the point you are making.

That is definitely on my wish list but before I went there (money permitting), I wanted to know if I was getting the most out of the one I already have. I just wondered if I would be better off with an amp with more output and therefore, more clean headroom. Consensus seems that I should stick with what I have got. Also I was wondering whether I should keep saving and stretch to a Monaco instead of another Monza but then I would be mixing 10 and 12” drivers. Just that a mate, who recently got a Monaco, was saying how much more he “felt” the bass than with his two BF One10s. I know it’s not comparing apples with apples but I can’t help but wonder if the size of the driver has something to do with that.