TheRev

Could be an old East German factory bass -hard to tell without better pictures. Old (50s-70s) ply basses that are still in one piece are usually good buys as they're solid as a very solid thing. If you can get this for less than £300 and (assuming there aren't any big seam splits and the bass bar is ok) then budget another £400 on having the bridge, soundpost & neck/fingerboard sorted out by a luthier, you'll end up with a very decent jazz/folk/blues bass for not a lot of money.

+1 on Gail Anne Dorsey [media]http://youtu.be/d5nYX-iuUFk[/media]

Take it back and have your luthier lower the action to what you want. Yes, it does mean that f you want a higher action, then that will mean a new bridge, but that should be your decision to make There's always the temptation that you should 'man up' and get used to a higher action, but if it's getting in the way of your playing then what's the point? It's not a competition, it's about making music. I recently had a new bridge fitted to my carved bass. The action on the G was 6 or 7mm, which was a tad on the low side, even for me, so I told my luthier that the action could ''go up a mm or two''. It came back with a G string action of 11mm! To be fair, he did say I could bring it back and he'd lower the action free of charge.

My band has taken a couple of minibusses of fans from Dorset to Lon-Don but we drove them ourselves. Because of the length of time involved (2.5 hour each way plus 4 or 5 hours at the venue) we would have needed two drivers for each bus, which made the whole premise uneconomical.

[quote name='fatback' timestamp='1406112695' post='2508386'] Thinking about all the angles above, I reckon the problem is not playing with other people. [/quote] Very likely. My band are taking it a bit easy this year due to everyone having babies, so we have around 50 gigs this year compared with 89 last year. This has meant that there have been a couple of points where I've had a two week break between gigs. Any sensible muso would be using this time to practice or write songs,but I generally find I just can't be arsed and end up standing holding my bass and staring at the wall wondering why I can't think of anything to play.

For rock'n'roll and rockabilly, Innovation's 'Rockabilly' strings could be ideal for you. Nice easy tension for beginners but just enough tension to give you a decent old school jazz pizz sound. I use Rockabillys on my working bass - you're more than welcome to have a go if you like (I'm also in Bristol). I can check your bass out for you as well - I'm not a luthier but I'll be able to check that everything's in the right place. Dave.

Try working on right or left had technique? I've been trying to focus on intonation recently, but little Rev isn't giving me much free time (and my brain is too fried to concentrate), so I've found that spending my free 20 min each day on just plucking with different parts of my finger or working on getting a nice tone from the left hand is enough to make me feel that I'm still getting some useful practice time without feeling fustrated that I haven't opened Rufus Reid's book in months...

I love playing in trios - definitely my preferred format for playing rock, blues and jazz...

I used the 'Canvas' theme from Woothemes -cost £50 IRRC. I haven't had the time since little Rev came along to tweak this as much as I'd like, so its pretty much as I set it up 18 months ago. www.skimmityhitchers.com I went for this theme cos it was recommended by Mrs Rev who was using for work at the time. I had to get a website up and running in a hurry and she felt this was the best option. Good points: I needed something that I could set up really quickly as our previous website wasn't being updated but the person we had paid to set up and maintain the site. It was very easy to set everything up, add pages and events/gigs. Setting the backgrounds took a bit of trial and error but was easy enough to do. Bad points: It doesn't seem to respond very well to different devices - which is quite likely down to my lack of ability/experience, so it looks great on a PC, ok on a tablet and gash on a smartphone. The contact plugin won't allow messages to be forwarded to a Hotmail account (again, it's likely I've missed something here). None of the gallery plugins I tried worked very well, so I ended up setting the images manually. This wasn't a major pain, but I was hoping for a better looking gallery page -as it is it looks a bit like a ropey holiday snaps album (according to our manager...). If I had to do it again, I'd definitley try some of the free, band specific themes as the functionality would be spot on. However, some themes don't allow the user to set their own background images and it was very important for us that we used our own artwork.

Oooh, gotta love those original 600 series, bare wood capped models... still make me go a bit gooey after 20 years.

Depends on where I need to go after the F#. If I was stopping the Bb with my first finger, I'd probably use the same finger and lift off to drop down to the F# , but I was following the F# with an Eb, I'd probably use my second finger for the F# so that my first finger was ready for the Eb.

Whereabouts in Bristol are you? I have a Hartke HA3500 amp head that I've been hanging onto for sentimental reasons and on the off chance I'll ever play electric bass in a rock band again. You can have it for £50 and I'll even drive it to your house. Then all you'll need is a nice little 2x10 or 1x12 cab to get you up and rocking. PM me if you're interested. Dave

Well, they seem to be around the £750 mark new but how much you can get for it will depend on how much wear and tear the bass has, whether there is any structural damage to the seams, neck or scroll that will need repairing and what model of pickup is included.

Having finally got around to listening to the tune on your website (which is rather good) I think you would be a good fit for Mother's Ruin, Mr Wolf's, The Stag and Hounds, the Cat And Wheel or the Blue Lagoon. The Cat and Wheel and the Blue Lagoon have the advantage of being slap bang in the middle of student land, with good passing trade [i]and[/i] you'll get paid - the downside is that they do tend to book up well in advance, so you may only get in if they have a cancellation. This does happen (I get 4 or 5 calls per year form the Lagoon looking to cover cancellations) so it's probably worth dropping them an email anyway.

Great, isn't it? I'll be playing at the Newt beer festival in Devon this coming Friday. Unfortunately it's my turn to drive...

Would it be rude if I had another bang on the Ultra Blacks? I never gave them a proper run on my main gigging bass.

[quote name='Wil' timestamp='1404324432' post='2491639'] Sadly The Croft, once a thriving music venue, has been replaced by a craft beer bar. [/quote] The people who ran The Croft opened the Exchange. They also put bands on at Mother's Ruin pub. You could also check out Mr Wolf's but I reckon your best bet is The Exchange.

I use a Roland Micro Bass Cube (the 4 x 2.5" one). The battery life is pretty impressive and it has the interesting property of sounding louder 15 feet away than it does when you're stood right in front of it. [media]http://youtu.be/Vgjs0JLCyC0[/media]

[quote name='thisnameistaken' timestamp='1403127954' post='2480150'] Edit: You will be lucky to find one that hasn't had the neck broken off it at some point. Don't worry about it. They've all been broken, they still work. [/quote] Yarp. The neck on my Musima was broken sometime in the 80s according to the bloke I bought it from. It's been glued back together and it's been solid as you like ever since. You can see where it's been pegged through the heel into the block in the photo. I'd also agree about these bases being pretty loud - I have a couple of nice videos from an acoustic gig in a cider shed where the bass is much more audible than I thought was actually possible.

There's an East German Musima bass in the for sale forum at the moment - these are very solid, well made ply basses that work very well for jazz/blues/folk etc. a few quid on a setup to set the soundpost/bridge or whatever and you will have a very playable and decent sounding bass for less than 1K. i have a late 60's Musima and I feckin' love it. I'd buy another if I didn't already have 3 double basses. IMHO of course....

Only just seen this post. Were on the Maurice Hanham stage for the whole weekend? My band did 5 sets over 3 days on that stage last year so we must have crossed paths.

[quote name='Monckyman' timestamp='1402148858' post='2470454'] Sorry but it doesn't matter. It's over with that mixer,for the cost of the repair you are definitely better off replacing rather than repairing. Have you at least tried PFLing any channels on headphones and checking the signal path? Sounds like a power stage problem to me, but you wont know till you check the signal path at least. [/quote] I haven't tried anything other than the main inputs and levels. We're going to email Thomann and see if they'll take it back as its less than 2 years old.

[quote name='Moos3h' timestamp='1402151082' post='2470478'] Where are you? I have a battered old Peavey you can borrow for as long as you need if you wanted to pick it up. [/quote] Thanks for the offer, but we've managed to borrow a PA for the next few months.