TimR

Laplace and Fourier. Not good bedfellows on a Saturday night. Love the negligible elasticity and horizontal displacement. They've not seen my playing then. I'm going for Dusk 'til Dawn myself.

[quote name='skej21' post='1247625' date='May 27 2011, 09:44 PM']... Back to the topic. I like slap done well, but the stereotypical 'RHCP - Higher Ground' root-octave stuff bores me senseless. Flea is a fantastic bass player when he plays fingerstyle![/quote] Have a listen to the original by Stevie Wonder.

[quote name='oksocialbass' post='1245197' date='May 26 2011, 08:53 AM'].. But wait.... Is he wearing two bowler hats at the same time ...[/quote] Don't know what drugs you're on but they look like Pork Pies to me.

I'm with Bilbo for Sibelius for transcription software. Goldwave for editing wave and MP3 files. I also bought something called Acoustica MP3 mixer. Which allows you to speed up and slow down and fade bits of tracks to mix them. I use it to make a seamless "mix tape" to play at gigs during breaks instead of a DJ. An early version of Cubase came bundled with my soundblaster soundcard and Cubase Lite came bundled with my Zoom recorder. I used it to record my band a few times but found it's quicker, easier and more professional to go to a studio and get someone to concentrate on twiddling the knobs while I twiddle my bass.

[quote name='Stag' post='1235856' date='May 18 2011, 03:35 PM']Make of that what you will...[/quote] Did he wear a black t-shirt, high waisted trousers and have the initials SC?

[quote name='Doddy' post='1235645' date='May 18 2011, 01:18 PM']There is a lot of talk about playing to people who wouldn't normally see you. On the few of these competitions that I've done (as a hired sideman-there's no way I'm paying),I've noticed that often the fans of the first band leave straight after,and the fans of the last band turn up late in the night. It's been rare that people have watched all the bands-they only go to see their friends and family.[/quote] That's where your networking comes in and the importance of approaching people you don't recognise (or everyone who comes through te door). [b]YOU[/b] have to make them interested enough to stay. Stay and talk to people who arrive later to see their band and doorstep them too with your CD. They may not see you live but hopefully they'll listen to your CD and come to your next gig.

[quote name='JellyKnees' post='1235200' date='May 18 2011, 08:34 AM']As a concept, they fundamentally suck. Music is not a competition.[/quote] When it comes to making money it is. Whether you are in a covers band competing for wedding gigs or pub gigs or in an original band competing for a record deal. How friendly you want to make that competition is up to you. There are plenty of gigs where you can play for fun for charity, for a mates birthday, whatever. It's battle of the bands, its a competition, there are prizes. Recording studio, cash or an audience made of people who wouldn't have come to see your band but are there becuase their mate is in another band that is on. If your music is good, these are the people who will listen to your CD (that you just gave them for free) and will come to your next (that you already have lined up and is on all your marketing material) To blatently dismiss them as a rip off is not understanding what you can get from them. How many people have organised their own gigs? Printed tickets, Hired a venue with bar, Security on door, Hired a soundman and PA system, Sold tickets (had band members run off with money or mates ask to pay on the door, girlfriends who want to come in free). Then pay venue, security, PA man, and go home having done a great gig and with a tenner left between the band. Venue still makes on the Bar and you pay them extra for the room.

Surely BOTBs is an audition in front of a crowd and an opportunity to get your music out to new people. The world doesn't owe musicians a living. The whole music industry is a scam. Imagine. Getting to number 1 in the charts is nothing to do with how good your music is or even how good a musician you are, it's all to do with how popular your music is and how pretty you are. Sorry folks it's the real world. BOTBs does what it says on the tin. If you don't need it then don't do it. If you do need it then do your own promotion, meet and greet at the door, give out free CDs, tell everyone when your next gig is at every opportunity and SMILE LOTS. oh... and listen to criticism. You are not the best band to ever walk the earth.

Check the [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=533"]Ear Plugs - sticky thread[/url] I have the er20s. Superb.

[quote name='JayPH' post='1232967' date='May 16 2011, 12:55 PM']Thanks for the input chaps. The Vox amps were loud enough really but very distorted. They have lots of presets and I think there's too many variables on them and I also think you are all right about the levels being too high. Not sure what the PA is Tim. I'll get more involved next week and see exactly what we're working with. Having a separate bass amp can only help. The best way I can describe it was disorienting. I was finding it very difficult to keep the rhythm and it just sounded very muddy, distorted and confused. Hopefully once the drummer gets on board we can iron out these problems. Cheers[/quote] Missed the bit that you had no drummer. You're probably hearing the sound of the bass reflecting off the walls rather than direct which will disorientate you and sound muddy. The guitars will be trying to keep in time with (the delayed) sound that they are hearing and you will try to pull back to stay in time with the guitars. Result timing all over the place. If you have to play like this again you need to be close to the PA speaker as possible. Drummer will sort. Assuming he is solid

[quote name='Vibrating G String' post='1232651' date='May 16 2011, 01:37 AM']I think it would take decades to take down a reputation like Harvard's.[/quote] I agree whch is why later I posted an ammendment. Maybe this is an Arts and Humanities thing. In Maths, Engineering and most Sciences you have only right and wrong answers. Maybe that is why students are studing less of those types of subjects?

Where the Vox guitar amps loud enough? What was 'all over the place?' What PA are you using? Once you get an amp you'll get a better idea of what it sounds like out front. I'm guessing you had the bass through a 'band in a box' PA. Something like this: [url="http://www.imuso.co.uk/PA-Systems/Power-Mixers-and-Amps/Powered-Mixers"]Powered mixers[/url] in which case the Bass will be 'all over the place' and possibly the Vocals will suffer too as a result of the mixer trying to do Bass and vocals at too great a volume.

In my case I've gone for both. Each has a different influence on the sound. I could consider the amp to be the most influential as it has a fair amount of adjustments that can be made in order to get the end result sounding what I want. Especially since the cab is fixed unless I buy another one. or the cab could be the most influential. I listened to a few before I bought it. So I know a different cab will sound um.. different. I wouldn't get the sound I'm after with a different cab even adjusting the amp controls. If you are using a cheap amp and a hand built cab designed and produced by a bass player, who felt that the most important result of building his cabinet was to ensure the best quality sound he could get (not just to ensure he lined his pockets), then I am not suprised that the cab is going to be the greatest influence. Chicken and egg. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The sum is greater than the parts. etc etc..... I think for most of us changing any one item would affect what we hear. Maybe you could get even better results from a different amp. Depends what your version of better is.

[quote name='LawrenceH' post='1232056' date='May 15 2011, 02:59 PM']None of this actually matters that much when we're talking about music though, career success in music doesn't come from degree qualifications. If people learn something when studying you hear it in their playing, not on a piece of paper.[/quote] It's the same in all subjects. The paperwork will get you the interview/audition. You still have to demonstrate you can do the job. People turn up to interviews/auditions with qualifications as long as there arm and don't have the knowledge or skills to back up the paperwork.

Maybe instead of the word soon I should have used eventually. It's becoming fairly evident now that you need a 1st Class Hons degree to stack supermarket shelves. Not because more people are better educated but because more people have degrees. There will come a time when it will all change. I believe we're already rapidly approaching a time where the number of university places is dropping and then the number of students will drop. This will make it even more important that standards are upheld. If universities continue to under-perform compared to the people who are getting vocational qualifications, people will stop paying the huge fees.

Interesting sound bite. I wonder what the rest of it was like. If Harvard gave everyone Bs pretty soon the employers would stop employing people from Harvard and word would get round and their reputation would suffer. It's always been true that the best teachers are those that give words of support and encouragement. Is that blowing smoke up people's Ars*s? This is why examinations should always be externally set and marked. Then it doesn't matter what the student thinks or how lenient the teacher is. He is talking about Americans though.

The floor should also be on a 4x2 or 2x2 frame otherwise the bass will just transmit straight through whatever you use into the concrete and this will transmit into the walls and instead of having a soundproof room you will have a big garage shaped bass speaker.

[quote name='lojo' post='1230184' date='May 13 2011, 05:29 PM']... hang DPM down the walls and tuck wall side of floor DPM coming up , create 2x2 studwalls (use larger if your not worried about losing inches) to create a small cavity off the external skin ...[/quote] This has triggered something in my dim memory. I think we may have hung roofing felt from the frame in the air gap.

I fell down there as well. The plaster board sizes were quoted as 2.4x1.2 m but when they arrived were actually 8x4 ft. or the other way round. They did fit the frame but with gaps. It was 20 years ago but check whether the plaster board is imperial or metric before you build the frame 24inches(600mm) stud to stud sounds fine. We used single layer. The garage is stand alone you are not trying to sound insulate it from an adjoining property. The distance and neighbours walls will do that. They should be able to put up with a [b]small[/b] amount of noise in the summer with their windows open. They'll complain more about the noise you make when you come outside for a break. Yes 2.7x5.0 would probably mean inside dimensions of 2.4x4.8 to make it all slot together nicely. Cool!

If you make the walls 8ft high and the frame has studding at 4ft intervals you only need to cut the plasterboard at the ends and posibly the actual ceiling pieces. Cuts down on a lot of work if the space you build is 12ft by 8ft. Plan the frame well.

'Ours' wasn't sound proof. The fact that its isolated from the walls and floor is important or the concrete garage will just turn into a huge transmitter. The underlay will be good to reduce the reflections. A plastic damp sheet between the insulation and the concrete wall sounds like a good idea. The air gap between the insulation and the concrete wall was important for a few reasons. Thermal and acoustic but I can't remember all the physics at the moment. Electric points: As many outlets as you can afford around the walls. Avoid pendulum lights as they will be too low and avoid recessed down-lighters as the sound will just go through the holes and you need to provide to let the heat escape from them. If it's an outside building you'll probably need to be on an RCD. If in doubt get a sparks in.

We did something similar with a prefab garage in the 80's. I'm guessing materials have come along a bit. We made a frame out of 4"x2". This was effectively a box within the garage. Left a gap of about 2" between the frame and the garage walls. Then filled between the uprights with loft insulation (I'm guessing that the panels that you can get now are better). Then plasterboard over the top for walls and ceiling. The floor was just ordinary ply. I suppose chip board flooring is best now. It got very hot and humid in the summer end they guy ended up buying an industrial dehumidifier that he ran after the practices and a couple of hours each day in the winter to stop his drum kit rotting. The door was a bit of a nightmare as it had to be insulated and ended up about 5" thick. We had a friend block the 'garage door' end with block work. It may be better to find some way of making huge soundproof doors that open instead. Loading drums through the insulated door was quite tricky. It worked really well. Bear in mind with all this internal frame you will lose about 6" off each side of the garage so a 6' wide garage will end up being only 5' wide. We moved the garage in the back of my car. We did many trips as we could only get about 4 slabs in the car before the wheel arches started rubbing. I think there were about 50 slabs in all.

It's all to do with confidence. If you're not confident with your ability to play the song you will probably be staring at your music, fretboard or feet. If you are not confident that your singer/band or song choice is going to entertain the crowd you will be worriedly looking at the band or crowd. You won't be able to help this, your body language will show it. If you and your band are confident and relaxed you will all naturally move with the music in an unforced way without thinking about it. The moves will be determined by the style of music. The more times you play music in front of a crowd the more relaxed and confident you will become. You don't need to practice your moves, you need to practice playing in front of an audience.

The instruments that usually take solos are the instruments that usually play melody. The bass is traditionally a harmonic (or even bass) instrument so traditionally it doesn't have that quality. When you switch to playing a solo or melody do you need someone to cover the bass or harmony parts? There is a difference between bass solo and solo bass. If you listen to Marcus Millers albums he has two bass parts. The bass playing the bass and the bass playing the melody. I think if you don't support the solo with harmony or bass, a solo can lose direction.

[quote name='stingrayPete1977' post='1225553' date='May 9 2011, 08:56 PM']Tim you claim to have good ears in your sig yet have strapped a box to the back of the headstock to stop the tuners moving a quarter turn at most [/quote] Well he asked if anyone had a solution. I'm never one to resist a challenge. No one spotted the deliberate irony that it was the tuner box then? I play with a guitarist who will play for 20mins while the drummer sets up. We'll play the first song and at the end of the song I ask him if he has checked his tuning. Every week without fail he is out. It seems alien to me not to tune up as soon as you have put on your strap. As I said, I was just surprised at how far out the bass goes when it's in a bag compared to a hard case but now I've experimented and seen how much you have to turn the machine head to raise a semitone, I'm not so surprised. I suppose I'd never noticed how much I turn them. Just do it unconsciously really. I wonder how many people here could have said how many turns it takes to raise the pitch a semitone?