Leonard Smalls

We've just worked out our first-ever cover... It's a mash-up of Penetration's "Don't Dictate" with Cameo's "Word Up" - punk lyrics with funk groove and Hendrix-ey guitar. I've even squeezed the guitar line from "Come as you are" into the verse bassline...

Only bass related purchases were amp stuff... I got a Crown 1502 power amp with 6u rack and rack power distribution to replace my 28 year old Marshall. It weighs about 1/2 of the Marshall, puts out 1500W against the Marshall's 300W. And the difference is that I get much more bass weight, even when using sub octaves - the whole thing is clean right down to 20Hz rather than the slightly indistinct bass-amp tone I used to get. Now I dial tones/effects in via pedalboard and rack BBE pre and know that I'm getting exactly the same sound from my Precision Devices/Markbass speakers as I'm sending to the desk. Anyone want to buy a Marshall Jubilee?

Amazing how different people's tastes are... I know folks who love Californication as well. Each to their own! But then I'm a fan of Urban Dance Squad, 24-7 Spyz and Infectious Grooves.

I like the 1st 2 albums... Got into them after I heard "Hollywood" played on John Peel which I bought as an import 12". A friend brought the 1st 2 LPs back for me from the US in late 1985, and I finally got to see them at the Clarendon in Hammersmith in October '87 (their unofficial tour history page says this was cancelled - it wasn't. 5 of us went and paid £3 each to get in and it was much, much emptier than when we'd seen the Guana Batz!). We saw twice in Feb '88 at the Mean Fiddler on successive nights (Hillel Slovak was "indisposed" about halfway through the 2nd one and the other 3 had to continue without him - it was surprisingly awesome!), then again in the Electric Ballroom. All of those gigs were amazing, despite some of the occasionally very dodgy lyrics - it was like seeing a punk Defunkt, which I guess was their plan. I'd never seen anything like it, with the possible exception of James Chance...

Proper cover, with proper bass playing...

Red Hot Chilli Peppers were excellent back in the day; from the first time I saw them, at the Clarendon in Hammersmith, they completely blew me away - I'd never seen anything like it. They stayed just as hard-hitting, funky and rockin' until the success of BloodSugar, then there was a rapid demise into stadium-tedium and little pop songs. Don't begrudge them - they'd done the ground-work and deserved some money! But it seems that it's rare for creativity and big bucks to go hand-in-hand...

Here's a mobile phone one of my old band playing at an excellent venue in Whitchurch - Percy's. Unfortunately, it's effectively outside and this was March...

Certainly in the topsy turvy world of rock and roll, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is quite often useful.

Just popped into my local guitar shop and they had a Mooer ge200... It looks solid, it's got lots of stuff on it, but just wondered if anyone's tried one with bass? Unfortunately I didn't have time so I'm wondering if it's at all worthwhile.

Anybody's work with Hiromi is usually pretty darned excellent... Tony Grey is brilliant on the Sonicbloom stuff with The Fuze!

Bootsy!

Always liked Jonas' Wal slap sound on this: And Gary Willis gets the max from a fretless - especially in his solo (3'30ish)

I see your puny 4, and raise you 11...

I remember playing the Marquee many years ago. 3-400 had come to see us - it was Christmas and the crowd were quite lively. We did a few songs, then our singer announced that we'd hired a stripper, who was going to perform while we played pne of our crazier numbers, "Curtains". The crowd whooped and hollered in excitement, the band launched into the song, and out came the stripper. Funnily enough, the rest of the band hadn't known about the extra performer, and were just as surprised as the audience when a very overweight Santa staggered out. None of us knew where to look as he disrobed rapidly and cavorted very nakedly... The singer realised quite how far his joke had backfired when his girlfriend started flirting outrageously with Fat Santa.

I dig too, Daddy-o! 😀 I was pleased to guess who the winner would be...

Took me a while to get used to them as well - bass did seem quieter than it was with my Etymotic plugs. But that was because the Etymotics filtered much more at higher frequencies. I turned up my amp a bit - and funnily enough the rest of the band have said things like "I didn't know what you were playing before", the drummer is actually drumming to my bass line and the singer is writing lyrics that follow the bass... So everybody's happy!

I've been attempting to work myself towards this sort of bass sound. Perfect in a funkin' No Wave band! Might need a 2nd bass player plus keys to pull it off...

I've only been playing bass for 35 years, but I wouldn't go for any... Firstly, I don't want to do covers, unless it's in a Spinal Tap tribute band... Secondly, I don't want to play in a gothpunkgrunge band - I've done 2 of the 3 before and want to be funky and crazed now, as opposed to just crazed. And thirdly, I don't sing.

Funnily enough I've had absolutely no problem running Ableton and many different VSTs together with Novation keyboard controller, Scarlett interface and separate touch screen monitor from my Windows 10 laptop... But I once had trouble working out how to use ProTools on a Mac Pro, so obviously I have sufficient experience in it to say all Macs are rubbish. Or perhaps I don't, which would maybe make my wildly sweeping statement a bit daft.

Bear in mind it's brand new, with octacore i7 9700K processor, over-specced 450W power supply, 500Gb solid state drive, coolermaster cooler and a 23" monitor and wireless keyboard/mouse... You won't get much new for anything like that price; for example, this similar, but only quadcore i7, HP machine is £1500+ https://www.ebuyer.com/738034-hp-z240-tower-workstation-j9c07ea-abu A similar spec new Mac would be at least 2.5x the price of that!

As I said in my first post on the subject, best value in Macs, and PC for that matter, is to buy a 10 year old one with Xeon octacore (or more!) and 96Gb RAM - the Mac towers for editing/graphic use are very similar machines to, say, an HP Windows high end server of the same era... You are, however, buying a 10 year old machine, with all the potential problems (or not!) that may entail. I've just specced a decent PC, including monitor, mouse and key board from PC Specialist - this is what you get for £1153 all in: Case PCS 6003B BLACK CASE Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™ i7 Eight Core Processor i7-9700K (3.6GHz) 12MB Cache Motherboard ASUS® PRIME Z370-P II: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs Memory (RAM) 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB) Graphics Card INTEGRATED GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR (GPU) 1st Hard Disk 500GB WD Blue™ 3D NAND 2.5" SSD, (upto 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW) DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 16x BLU-RAY WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW & SOFTWARE Power Supply CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY Processor Cooling CoolerMaster Hyper 212X (120mm) Fan CPU Cooler Thermal Paste COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD) Wireless/Wired Networking 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED) USB/Thunderbolt Options 2 PORT (1 x TYPE A, 1 x TYPE C) USB 3.1 PCI-E CARD + STANDARD USB PORTS Operating System Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KUK-00001] Monitor AOC 23.6" E2470SWH LED - 1920 x 1080,1MS, D-Sub, DVI-D, HDMI Keyboard & Mouse LOGITECH® MK270 WIRELESS KEYBOARD & MOUSE COMBO

It's a bit unhelpful! You have to click on the date, which gives you a link to the .zip file. And you're right, there's nowhere near as much as for mac and Windows - which is why I use Windows... But if I was just starting up, and being a bit techy anyway, I'd go for a Linux OS with Ardour - there's options for just about every type of effect and virtual instrument, just not the ones you or I may be using already.

If you're starting from scratch there's quite a few that'll work on Linux... Many Windows ones will also work if you use WINE (windows emulator), though this can be glitchy and/or crashey for certain plug-ins. But this is a good source of quality paid-for and free open source VSTs, all of which were developed for Ardour/Tracktion/QTractor etc for use without WINE: http://www.airwindows.com/ And here's a list of suppliers: http://linux-sound.org/linux-vst-plugins.html

Indeed. RIP!