TimR

[quote name='Les' post='601203' date='Sep 17 2009, 12:16 PM']Glad thats settled. It's the bloody drummer, isn't it ?[/quote] I'm not sure that it is. The guitar seems to be playing the first beat freely with 2,3 and 4 on the beat. Its then up to the drummer to come in strongly where the first bead 'should' be and hold the beat. The guitar is then shifting around the beat quite a bit. I think (without playing it) that the drummer might be getting confused by thinking the guitar is playing in time on that first beat, and the guitarist then thinking the drummer is comming in late and out of time. This is another song all about feel. You can either play it or you can't. I HATE songs where people go mad and jump around like lunatics, I played in enough metal bands to be bored by the whole thing. All that happens is all my gear gets covered with beer. I prefer playing strong dance tunes that fill the floor and have everybody dancing rather than rioting. We have a similar intro problem with Car Wash and the claps, which are on the off beat, but seem to mark out the beat. Confuses the drummer nicely. We count him in when were bored with the clapping.

The punters like it. Our singer suggested it a few weeks back. During the last song of the night at our last gig a rather drunk bloke came to the side of the stage and asked me if we would play it.

Its counter intuative, but adding the shim does not significantly raise the heel of the neck up. In effect it lowers the neck at the nut. I'm using simple figures for illustration. Pocket 100mm. Neck 1000mm, card 1mm. The neck pivots at the top of the heel, where the neck meets the body. The card raises the body end 1mm, but (using similar traingles and the demonstartion figures, imagine a lopsided see saw) this will lower the nut by 10mm and hence significantly change the angle of the string from the nut to the saddles. That is why you can then lower the saddles. In reality the card is much thinner so the nut is not lowered so much, probably around 3mm. With this in mind it is possible once you have settled on the right thickness of card that does the job, to actually plane a wedge OFF the back of the neck, equivilent to the wedge you would put in. Although the neck is no higher, the nut is much lower and has the same effect.

So are there any tracks you specifically avoid listening to because your band or another has covered them and completely destroyed them?

[quote name='witterth' post='597093' date='Sep 13 2009, 10:11 AM']2. When listening to the albums the songs came from I was struck by the amount of 'filler' on there. For every rock classic there was at least 3 rather predictable and tedious blues workouts that did absolutely nothing for me. Even bands like The Who, who had always struck me as making their own unique way through the 60s and 70s had a tendency to slip into the clichés of the time when they weren't writing hits. damn right, now you mention it !![/quote] With the advent of single track downloads, I wonder how long the album will last.

Lie your bass on your kitchen table. Pluck a string and see if the table amplifies the sound. If it does that is an indication that the table is picking up vibrations from somewhere. The only place it can pick them up from is the body of the bass as this is all that will be touching the table. If it didn't vibrate there would be no way the table top could vibrate. The length of time (sustain) and the resonant pitch of the frequencies will depend on the density of the wood. If you need proof of this clamp big bits of wood to the body of the bass and see how that chnages the tone. The pickups are embedded in the body and so will also vibrate. Alex. Are you intending to use Power Point at any stage? I think a blackboard and chalk would be more suitable.

I'm not even sure if we play any tunes that I would have on my iPod if we didn't play them. They're all great songs, good to dance to, the audience love them and great to play, but they're just not what I would chose to listen to outside a party environment.

Our singer complained she could never hear herself in certain songs and had difficulty singing certain phrases in others. We recorded them and guess what, eveytime there was a beak in the music to allow the vocal to stand out, the drummer would fill it.

I was going through my iPod library last night. I usually download songs we are going to play and drop them into a playlist so that I can find them easily if we need to reference them at practice and so that I can listen to them in the car when trying to learn them. It occurred to me that once we have learned them, I may listen again after a few months just to see if I missed anything, but in general I never listen to the original tunes again once we've learned them. So how many people actually listen to the originals of songs they play.

I've had a SR400 in natural mahogany for a few years. It has PJ pickups, is active, sounds and plays fantastic. I wasn't keen on the Bartolini soap bar sound. The only thing I changed was the strings. It came with Elixir and I've but Bass Centre Stadiums on it. Fantastic sound. Oh I've changed the battery a few times as well

Troll 1/10

[quote name='TimR' post='584406' date='Aug 29 2009, 12:20 PM']I've just designed ordered a shirt for myself. I'll report back when I get it. £14 isn't a lot for a t-shirt, I can always wear it round the house if it's rubbish.[/quote] T-shirt arrived today. 4 working days as it was bank holiday Monday. I used a jpg and it looks like they put it on the shirt at 150dpi. The design is printed directly on the shirt using the colours in the jpg. I used a picture with a black background onto a black t-shirt and as the black of the jpg is different to the black of the t-shirt, you can see the border. I didn't take a screen shot of the screen after I finalised my design. I did scale the image but not by much and I can't be sure that it exactly matches what I submitted. I'm happy with the result.

[quote name='Bassmonster' post='587871' date='Sep 2 2009, 07:57 PM']Great thread, i've been tasked with sorting the bands myspace page out, stumbled accross this type of [url="http://www.myspace.com/burnthesunset"]style[/url], this appears to be some kind of custom coding as far as i can tell, now how can i get mine to look like it, or do i need to be some kind of HTML ninja[/quote] google "myspace editor" you should get loads of how to guides and templates.

[quote name='EntropicLqd' post='580835' date='Aug 26 2009, 12:00 AM']These guys seem pretty cheap/decent. [url="http://www.t-machine.co.uk/"]http://www.t-machine.co.uk/[/url][/quote] I've just designed ordered a shirt for myself. I'll report back when I get it. £14 isn't a lot for a t-shirt, I can always wear it round the house if it's rubbish. How many shirts do you need? Small runs (<20) work out more expensive per shirt. Ordering more makes it more cost effective. Our Sax player's husband runs a print business. Very good quality shirts and print. We only wanted 6 shirts, but due to the way the set up costs v t-shirt price worked it was more cost effective to get 12.

Put them on an MP3 player and listen to the songs until they're embedded in your head, don't over-think them counting etc Get he feel. Then get your bass out.

When we play we now tell the the person booking us before the gig when to serve the buffet. ie not when we are playing. We've also been booked purely on the strength of our performance as "it gave the guests something to watch and talk about rather than being deafened and blinded by a disco because the guests aren't the dancing type of people". The only person on the dance floor all night was a 9 year old kid skidding across the nice polished dance floor on his knees. The Bride and Groom loved it and we received lots of compliments during the break and afterwards while we were packing down. As an aside: Two years ago this September we played to an empty room until it got dark, everyone was outside smoking (the ban had just come in). I think there are less smokers now because that is happening less and less and even in pubs people wait till our break to go out for a fag. I also know bands who would refuse to do gigs if the bar is in another room.

Golden Left Hand Rule #1: No sharp angles at shoulder, elbow or wrist. You appear to either have a sharply bent elbow or a sharply bent wrist depending on where on the neck you are playing.

[quote name='The Funk' post='564733' date='Aug 10 2009, 10:12 AM']The recording was multi-tracked and my bass track was EQd by the recording engineer (not the live engineer) in my absence. The feedback I have for him is that on one song one note of the bassline is too quiet compared to the rest. The rest is up to him but I'd like to have an idea of how best to deal with it for when I engineer demo recordings myself.[/quote] If it was just a case that you played the original note slightly quieter and if it's a digital recording then you can just open up the WAV file in whatever wave editor you use, find the note and increase the volume of that one note.

[quote name='TimR' post='564491' date='Aug 9 2009, 09:38 PM']Breathe and make sure the rest of your arm stays relaxed.[/quote] I'll expand a bit: The theory is: There are no muscles in your hands, just tendens and ligments. The muscles that operate your fingers are in your forearms. Tendens and Ligaments have fairly poor blood supplies. You need to build up the blood supplies to these but you can only do this slowly they don't adapt as quickly as muscles do. Queue lots of practice By making sure that you are breathing properly you will help oxygenate the tendons so it should be longer before they 'cramp' up. By tensing the rest of your arm you are using oxygen in the large muscles that you don't need to be using. I had the same problem, but on my left hand on a couple of gigs a few years back. It only happened on a couple of songs near the beginning of our first set. I worked out that the common factor was that I had freinds in the audience and I was tesnse and not breathing properly. You can still be relaxed and dig in, just back off with the pressure, see how much you can dig in with a lighter touch.

Breathe and make sure the rest of your arm stays relaxed.

[url="http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm"]http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/re...ain_display.htm[/url] Is it just one note played once, or one note played several times? If it's buried in the live recording mix it's likely to be buried in the live sound too. You may be able to hear it from your cab on stage, but will the audience? If it is very important to the song, you might have to play with the arrangement or more specifically what the other musicians are playing.

[quote name='Moos3h' post='563066' date='Aug 7 2009, 09:03 PM']I make no claims to have tried every string in the book, but I find Elites (Stainless Steel) are just fantastic for me. Yes, you might get 1-2 gigs extra out of a set of Elixirs, but that doesn't justify the huge jump in costs. Oh and a dab of Fast Fret as and when they need it. Cheers, James[/quote] +1 Absolutely superb strings. [url="http://www.basscentre.com/4-string-bass-sets/elites-stadium-series-iv.html"]http://www.basscentre.com/4-string-bass-se...-series-iv.html[/url]

[quote name='paul h' post='560020' date='Aug 4 2009, 10:59 AM']But I think it's more down to inbound links now.[/quote] Given that Basschat signatures only appear when we are logged in, and Google analytics has not picked up on any inbound links from Basschat for my site. Do the links in our sig lines get picked up by anyone other than reqistered users of Basschat?

[quote name='charic' post='562266' date='Aug 6 2009, 09:22 PM']One of my favourite lecturers once said: Pessimists say the glass is half empty Optomists say its half full Engineers realise that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.[/quote] Then the marketing department say "Make it half the size it needs to be." Then sell it for twice as much as it should be while telling everyone its 4 times as good as the old one.

[quote name='Pete Academy' post='562161' date='Aug 6 2009, 06:55 PM']Another thing I've noticed is that when younger people, especially, try out a bass or drumkit in the shop, everything is played as fast as possible. I just want to say 'slow down! It's harder to get the feel right on slower tempos. And I NEVER hear anyone play a fairly slow slap line.[/quote] That's just their hormones. 'Young' people do EVERYTHING too fast. I did when I was young. Again this brings to the table the idea that feel is a maturity thing. When we hear a musician with great feel I guess we sometimes say that they have a very mature aspect to their playing. While the drums and Bass may lay back on the beat, someone, possibly the Vocalist or another solo instrument, maybe even the hi-hat needs to play on or ahead of the beat so that the beat is marked out, otherwise the laid back feel is lost. It takes a lot of skill to lay back all the drums and not slow and even more skill to leave a soloist to carry the tempo