WinterMute

There on the stair?

Bass related, I got the Amphion FlexBase25 system for my studio, it's a stereo sub with bass management that turns my One18 near fields into a full range monitor system, it's spectacularly good, solves the LF issue in my small room studio. Not cheap, worth every penny.

er... that's not a Fender bass...

You'll probably need them in .jpg format, not .heic. Try importing your pics to Photos on the Mac and try dragging from there, if that doesn't work, export from photos as .jpg then drag. I've noticed airdropping pics from my iPhone results in an .heic file, functionally useless. I've sync'd my iPhone library to Photos via iCloud, this works well.

Best stage sound I ever had was the Barefaced Big Twin T, vertically stacked 12" with an 8"mid and a tweeter, exceptional dispersion and reproduction. almost didn't need bass in the front monitors.

You only need to punch the information into a drum machine once... ...I'll get me coat. I prefer the experience of playing with a live drummer, and will always try to record with a live drummer whenever possible, however an awful lot of modern production is done with programmed drums (not necessarily a drum machine per se) and it's often difficult to tell if you have someone who can programme in BFD or Slate Drums. Entirely contextual I think.

End of season 1 of Sons of Anarchy, the funeral scene with John the Revelator playing, bloody excellent choice. I had no idea it was Curtis Stigers till a while afterwards, who knew he was really quite good?

Fine work, sir.

No, he's right, Warwicks shipped with a particularly aromatic wax that left the bass smelling very distinctive.

Production sounds dated, yes, but the songs? Some of those early metal albums were just godly, even if they sound a bit weedy by comparison with modern recordings. Take a listen to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours on a good system, or Dire Straits first 2 albums, properly brilliant production and recording. I think the more original an artist is the slower they date, Jeff Buckley's Grace is timeless.

I had an 87 Thumb 5 with the single-piece Schaller style bridge, it was a monster, balanced, powerful, beautiful to play, not a hint of neck dive, they changed the body shape and the headstock design quite a bit over the years, the curved body went slabby and the woods changed. I'd still say that was worth a look at though.

I don't think songs date, per se, I think production techniques date massively, to the point that you can nail a production down by a snare drum sample sometimes. Songs get endlessly covered, some poorly, some extremely well, but music can be adapted into almost any other style, and so can be presented in a "modern" idiom fairly easily. There are some timeless productions, Sgt. Pepper, some of Joni's work, particularly Shadows and Light, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love and Sensual World era, some of the iconic metal bands best work maybe. I'm sure there are timeless jazz recordings too, but I don't listen to much Jazz. B*tch*s Brew sounds like it was recorded yesterday.

Like the triple dots, not many designs carry the width of the 6 string neck well, for instance I've always though 6 string Thumbs look odd, but Alan's body designs seem to scale up and down really well. That's going to be a proper looker.

I love watching Alan's work progressing, regardless of wether it's my bass or not, he does some cracking basses.

Latest from Alan today, Neck ready for mounting.

I've been struggling with the sub 120hz content in my studio for a while, the problem is that the room is too small and the nodes interact dramatically in that band. In order to combat that I've bass trapped all the corners and put absorption liberally at the ER points. The room sounds pretty good above 120hz, a little HF tweaking but otherwise reasonably even, but the LF drops off a cliff at 120hz and the software room equalisation can only do so much, basically the Amphion One18's just don't carry the weight in such a heavily trapped room. I'm going to lose a couple of the bass traps on the front wall to see if I can't open ehLF up a little at the listening position. So, enter Amphion's FlexBase25, a single pillar stereo bass management system that controls the amount of LF in the main speakers and adds 1400w of seamless bass amp and speakers. Essentially it turns a pair of very capable near-field speakers into full-range 3 way monitors with bass management. It's going in tomorrow, I'll let you now how well it does.

For sure, but that's how impedance works in the different states.

Depends if you go series or parallel of course, in series it's 16 ohms, in parallel 4 ohms.

Fingers for me, haven't used a pick for decades, I find the control and articulation I get offsets the extra attack from a pick, and I get plenty of attack from the way I play in any case.

Mine was MIJ I think, it's long gone as I went back to 5 string. Lovely bass though.

They use different IR's if I remember rightly, the Stomp shares the models with the whole Helix range and has more in common with them architecturally and sound-wise, the Go is a it like the old Pod XTs. The Go will be easier to use live, but a decent MIDI pedal and you're sorted. I replaced a Pod XT Pro rack with my Stomp, it's a much better sounding unit.

Overall, probably the Jazz in that context, but the Ray will cut in a mix much better.

My Geddy Lee Jazz needed occasional tweaking seasonally, but none of the MM SR5's or the Bongo ever seem to move. My wenge/bubinga Thumb got set up once a decade...

That fellow had the air of someone who has had to do that exact thing with that exact woman many, many times...

I picked up a bass for the first time in 1980, I'd done a bit of singing in school bands but my mate Steve Wilson (no, on that Steve Wilson) said he could teach me to play bass and we could start a band, then he played me Permanent Waves, and I wanted to be Geddy Lee... His playing changed the way I thought about music and bass, so that was a big influence on my life generally. Playing in bands led to engineering and producing, which led to lecturing about engineering and producing which led to designing and building studios for people to engineer and produce, and that's where I am today, whilst I imagine I'd have got there without Rush, the way I play and the attitude to music as a driving force for a professional life definitely comes from that hour is Steve's house listening to Spirit of Radio and Freewill... There are others too, Zeppelin's grandeur, Pink Floyd's lyrical and thematic pretensions, Tony Levin's invention, Leonard Cohen's humour, but Rush has been an enduring presence in my life and for the better.