Leonard Smalls

Shan't need panpipes this month... I have members of the Borborygmus Eructation Ensemble camping in our garden so I shall record their beautiful dawn chorus. Through Future Impact and Fwonk Beta pedals it should sound identical to a fretless bass!

My ears are the £50 type... I use 2x5m Van Damme studio 6mm... Extremely low resistance and capacitance, so definitely electrically sufficient!

Don't even think of looking into Machina Dynamica... And anything that boasts a quantum mechanical explanation for why it actually makes a difference is ripe for sniggering at. Just ask James Randi! As for Cryo treatment 🤣

Funnily enough the only bits of Les I don't like are with Lennon... Sounds like a re-hash of Sergeant Peppers with a good bassplayer 😁 Here's some Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains, odd, whimsical and killer bass:

I'm currently using my studio set up more to make my own music, but I do have a hifi - here with the Leema Xavier speakers - also have some Ditton 66 series 2. Kit is Clearaudio Revolution/SME3009/AudioNote cart into EAR 834Pdeluxe phono, plus Advantage CD player, Denon dvd all into Bow Warlock Pre-amp and Bryston 14bsst power amp. Sounds alright!

Not strictly funk or soul... But still funky!

Having just bought a Lightwave Saber bass (fretless to boot!) I'd say it's distinctly un-fender like... There's a huge range of tone controls, sustain to die for, weighs 2/10 of sod-all and no annoying pickups to get in the way. And they're relatively cheap in the US!

It's new fangled to me! But then I've just graduated from a single string attached to a broom handle in a tea chest 😁 And it's a Lightwave Sabre fretless. I'm hoping it'll make me sound just like Remco, though I've failed on the hair already!

I've done it... Bought one of those new-fangled optical pick-up fretless thingies. It's arriving tomorrow and should look like this: Now our band will be able to do proper punkfunk versions of all those Paul Young hits of the 80s!

I've had a bit of a fiddle, and just to keep Douglas happy I've done a fuzz-wah bass disco punk song containing lots of deep and meaningless shouting...

We had compulsory music lessons only in years 1-3 at secondary school, and they were largely a waste of time - definitely for me and most probably for the rest of the class. Firstly, as my mother was a piano teacher I'd had lessons from about age 7 or 8 and had done grade 5 practical/theory at about 13 so the music teacher gave me different end of year exams from everybody else (!). Not only that, but he was very poor at imposing any sort of discipline so everybody just messed about, taking absolutely no notice of the rudimentary theory and multiple record playing of Peter and the Wolf and Jesus Christ Superstar... It was only in 6th form when we got a one-off band together to play very average versions of our RE teacher's favourite Crosby Stills and Nash/Dylan songs that I realised, thanks to @lurksalot's brother, that playing keyboard was for losers and that Bass was actually The Place. 😃

Lyrics are invariably angry, and by (mostly) Sam!

Our streamed set from the Punk 4 The Homeless benefit last Saturday... Drums programmed by me!

Me too - and I was born there! However, I don't mind Kraut at all; it's as derogatory as the French calling the English Les Ros Bif, or Americans calling British Limeys. It's nowhere near as bad as people shouting "Nazi" at you while doing the raised arm salute - as I did when aged about 6 growing up in rural Cheshire!

You found it then! I found recently that just one open Bias FX caused cpu loads of 120% and horrible glitch distortion... The problem was the buffer was set at 64kbits - I'd set it to this a year ago to get latency down to less than 8ms... Changing to 512 gave a 5% load with 4 bias, 1 mixroom 1 bassroom and 4 neutron elements!

Not forgetting the rather crazed Amon Duul:

And here's one that espouses all sorts of terrible things

Here's one that will annoy Doug - it's got rap and everything! 😁

Is you buffer size set too small, or perhaps too large?

This Saturday at this online benefit:

There ain't no-one funkier, or cooler than William Collins. That's why the SI unit of cool is The Bootsy!

Wouldn't dream of it.... That's only for folks who don't know how to play! 😃

Perhaps there'd be more interest in Basschatters attempts at their own music if they'd disclosed the use of a relic-ed bass, or perhaps wondered if a P or Jazz bass would have sounded better? Personally, I used a 2nd hand custom ACG with drums programmed by me with guitar and vox DI-ed into a Focusrite Scarlett 6i8. I'll bet if there was a Rush or Clapton covers Basschat compocompo we'd have 100+ voters and 8+ pages of circular discussion about the relative merits of Wal vs Fender vs cheapoSquier! 😅

You're probably right- I've got some crazy records I bought having heard them on Peel between those years (and many from later!). There's very little that's completely new, but it's nice to find things that are different and stand out with their own sound. Even if you can spot all sorts of other influences in it.