Beedster

Round here there's a shortage of bass players; always used to be drummists but now there seem to be plenty of those. Pretty much every conversation in which I mention I play bass ther response is "We're looking for a bass player/a mate of mine's band is looking for a bass player". I put it down to Brexit like everything else

The above resonated, thanks @agedhorse And 'true cost of ownership' extends from the individual to society and from there to the environment. The extraordinary volume of low price/poor quality/built to fail products being moved around the world to satisfy our retail urges will demand a high price (more correctly a high cost) from future generations. Music technology is far from the worst offender, but to compete many well known manufacturers have to join the low-price arms race, which results in the problem becoming worse not better. These days I nearly always buy used (in the context of the above post eBay and Basschat are forces for the good in most respects), aim to to buy gear that can be repaired and does not require replacement if it fails, and I look after my gear with all this in mind also. Oh, and in a dramatic shift, I only ever own one bass and one amp at any one time these days, leaving more of that lovely used gear from others 👍

Californication, I was 34 when it was released but it still feels like an album I first heard when I was 13. Takes me to good places. I’d love them to release a less compressed mix though 🤔

Yep, with all the hybrid Mesa amps when things got loud on stage a lot of the detail in the bass was lost, the para EQ helped as pushing low mids helped with the tone I wanted but the baked in tone of other amps works better for me, especially as having to push mids too far can leave the bass sounding a bit, well, unnatural. I always felt the mids on those units lack a bit of body, or dare I say heft 🤔

My Ampeg SVT power amp had a glorious tone with a Precision (no preamp) where it sounded very far from flat to my ear, but less good with other basses. But then I’m biased 😀

Ah, got you now, the baked in tone and EQ settings of the Walkabout didn't allow you to get the tone you wanted, even with everything theoretically flat. Yep, I found that with the whole range, M-Pulse 600, Venture, Big Block, Titan and Walkabout (I owned the whole bloody lot at one time or another). But is that about not doing flat per se? I know that I preferred the 'flat' or 'core' or 'baked-in' tone of the 400 and Buster ranges, but Re the OP getting a flat response, I'd ask why, is there some magic about something you 'know' to be technically a flat response that beats your ears and your brain's ability to identify the tone you want to hear?

Order is restored, all is as it should be, nothing more need be said

One that enables me to create the sound I want to create

No, it can't do flat in any simple way, sounds great with all controls at 12.00, but it ain't flat, it's that lovely baked in Boogie tone

Which means that you love it's baked in tone, which is why we choose the gear we choose. But it's not flat, if it was flat why would you love Handbox flat more than Ashdown or Ampeg flat?

I appear to live in a low end wasteland

Absolutely, play to what it sounds like to you, your bandmates and audience, the settings on the amp or bass are entirely meaningless. Certain neural signals trigger certain responses that we like or don't like. Flat perhaps suggests the latter but simply doesn't exist in any real sense. The 'baked-in' thing is as much product/market differentiation as anything else, as with all audio and instruments 👍

Human audio sensation and perception are very far from 'flat', and are also highly variable between different individuals and within the same individual over time (as is evidenced by audio fatigue in recording), so the rest is probably moot 👍

The Buster combos, even the more standard upright version, are the only time I've felt beaten by amplification, too big and too heavy for normal use these days, and given that I found an SVT-II manageable..... I think it's that they look small enough to be portable but they're just too big to be easily portable, and they are a one person lift but only just. They're just too close to the limit, and after a long gig getting one of them down one of those metal spiral fire exit stairs is just a little too much for even the most dedicated Boogie fan I suspect

I reckon you'd need to find something else to like! All joking aside, I think part of my initial reluctance with Yes was that EVERYONE who I played music with in my formative years loved them (mostly folks a few years older than me). This I'm sure meant that they were always going to disappoint just as I found with Genesis and a lot of the other bands at the prog/art interface in the 70's (e.g., Floyd). I found that I wanted to like the bands that the other (mostly rock) muso's didn't like, so I found myself listening to Kraftwerk and a few of the other German bands (Amon Duul II, Tangerine Dream etc), to Hawkwind, Man, ELP, all of whom seemed a little more accessible. I think it started some long-standing biases re Yes and Genesis

Questions here rarely define answers here

Absolutely, I don't think anyone's saying it isn't 👍

i used to wonder if they simply picked out the lighter and/or better instruments from the standard-run production line and allocated them to some CS treatment and price hike, but that theory was trashed when I bought a used CS Jazz about 20 years back, as it weighed a tonne and was about as resonant as a sponge. I have to say I quite liked it when I first got it, but as much out of a warped cognitive dissonance as appreciated of the instrument itself (it was after all an FSC instrument, it must be good, I'm just not a good enough player to realise it yet etc). When I sold it and replaced it with an early 90's MIJ Jazz I couldn't believe how much better the latter was, well over a pound lighter, sustained for hours and played, dare I say it, like butter 👍

Well it’s my opinion, others will no doubt not share it 👍

Since around the mid-90s 'Custom Shop' has simply been a term meaning 'our most overpriced items generally aimed at people who need to feel that the gear they own is better than the gear most people own'. It's the gear version of flying First Class, in real terms a high price for a small difference in process and emotions, but ultimately arriving at the same destination via the same process s everyone else 👍

And therein lies both the irony and the business model

Lovely units but monstrously heavy and my memories of the combo are of the most awkward shaped unit to move ever. Heavy, fine. Odd shape, fine. Heavy plus odd shape, nightmare

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