leftybassman392

[quote name='thisnameistaken' post='580300' date='Aug 25 2009, 02:56 PM']Yeah I think it's possible, why wouldn't it be? I think there would be a lot of frustrating times in between though.[/quote] Dave Marks has an excellent YouTube video on pretty much exactly this topic: [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df0sFG7FqSQ"]Youtube vid[/url]

[quote name='EdwardHimself' post='579923' date='Aug 25 2009, 10:16 AM']doesn't posting about pming sort of contradict the point of a PM in the first place? Well whatever, that's a really lovely bass, i love jazz style basses with maple fretboards. Also liking the Peanut Butter and Jelly rig behind too [/quote] Thanks. PJB is amazing - I've got 3 different models from the range, depending on the gig. This thing pumps out volume at a level you wouldn't believe from looking at the speaker cones! - 300 watts of pure HiFi bass tone. Regenerate is a remarkable instrument. Got change from $2000, plus I brought it back from holiday so didn't pay transit or customs!

[quote name='whynot' post='579538' date='Aug 24 2009, 08:50 PM']PMd Andy.[/quote] And back..

[quote name='whynot' post='579349' date='Aug 24 2009, 06:28 PM']Lovely looking bass there Andy.[/quote] Cheers Alan. You wanna give it a go? If you're still up to buy back the SEI I can bring it with me when I come down. I'd value your opinion.

Recently came back from a holiday in the USA toting this little beastie. Made by Regenerate Guitar Works in the Seattle area (which is actually one guy by the name of Rod Banuch). I'm pretty sure it's the first one to be seen in the UK. Produced in tiny numbers, mostly made to order and normally with about a 4 month waiting list (which looks set to get longer if this is anything to go by!). This was one of two instruments he had in stock when I enquired. Pickups (Big Singles) and preamp are Norstrand items - actually the preamp has a clever little featurette: passive mode is a true bypass circuit complete with its own tone control, so if you want you can use it in passive mode and have it behave more or less exactly the way a passive Fender would (pickup blend rather than separate vols). His website address is [url="http://www.regenerateguitarworks.com"]HERE[/url] Here's a few pics - if you want more info click the Regenerate link above - it was still available to view last time I looked. Enjoy: [attachment=31463:DSCN0017.JPG] [attachment=31462:DSCN0018.JPG] [attachment=31465:DSCN0022.JPG] [attachment=31464:DSCN0021.JPG]

[quote name='Mrs Tinman' post='574598' date='Aug 19 2009, 07:12 PM'] [/quote] Hello again! Glad to see you haven't allowed the beastie boys to put you off. Good for you!

Traded my '84 Wal for his '77 jazz. Great deal - easy to deal with & a really nice guy - highly recommended!

Brilliant! Practical science at it's very best.

Got mine the other day in a very fetching shade of crimson. Excellent!

Thanks to those who responded to my offer of some insights into ancient music. I'm now very busy with the summer school followed by the holiday. I'll get back to you after the 15th. Cheers for now, Andy

Last time I even looked at one of those 'polls' it was for, I think, 'World's best Guitarist' or something. As I recall Noel Gallacher was about 9th, and Alan Holdsworth didn't make it onto the list. Told me everything I needed to know and I haven't gone near them since.

[quote name='Major-Minor' post='557655' date='Aug 1 2009, 11:02 AM']leftybassman - this is brilliant ! You put everything in easily understandable language - many thanks! Personally I would love to hear more of your knowledge on this subject (in small doses ideally, for my small brain) if you have the time and inclination. I would love to know more about: tetrachords / absolute pitch / scales in Ancient Greek music etc The Major[/quote] I love the Greeks! This kind of stuff bores most people to tears, but for me they represent the birth of Western civilisation - one of the most important cultures in the history of mankind. That applies to their music as much as anything else. This has the feel of quite a long discussion. If you'd like to PM me with your email address we can get things moving - won't have much time over the next couple of weeks though as I help to run a Blues Summer School at Northampton Uni next week, and then we're away on holiday. But we can get started at least. If anybody else is reading this and wants to get involved BTW then feel free to PM me as well. If enough people respond we may be able to set up something more formal. I'll have a bit of a think...

[quote name='Major-Minor' post='557395' date='Jul 31 2009, 08:03 PM']This is most interesting. Thank you for your contributions to this discussion. I was always under the impression that the Greek names for modes actually came directly from that Civilisation so to hear that they are medieval in origin is fascinating. It also makes sense when one listens to Plainsong and other church music (not that I do it regularly you understand!). My academic music study was rather enforced by Music College requirements as I was always more interested in playing, so there are gaps in my knowledge. You say that the Greeks didn't have our understanding of harmony. Surely that is an understatement ? I have always believed that music in Ancient Greek times was purely melodic. The playing of more than 1 note at a time (apart from the drone) surely came much later. What is your understanding on this ? The Major[/quote] Thanks for the compliment. I remember it as one the most enjoyable things I did in my whole degree. Just to spin the mode names out a bit more, the names we currently give to the modes actually correspond to early Greek tribes, which roughly speaking had scales intended to convey their tribal characteristics (opinions on exactly how this worked differ). The scales had no harmonic connection to each other in the way we like to think of modal structures today. I'm not really as well up on medieval music, but as far as I know the formalisation took place during the Middle ages - how they came to have the specific names assigned is most likely to do with diatonic approximations of the tribal scale structures the Medieval musicologists had available to them handed down from antiquity. So in a sense the modes are descended from Greek antiquity, but not in the way most people would imagine. As to harmony, it does seem to be the case that music from early Greek history was essentially melodic in character, although there is some evidence that the simultaneous playing of multiple notes was beginning to be observed by Plato, which basically dates it to the 4th century BC. What is worth noting is that although harmony in the modern sense was rare, the Greeks had a very sophisticated understanding of scales (which however looked very different from modern Diatonic scales) - actually scales in Ancient Greek music is quite a decent sized topic on it's own. The concept of a drone note is an interesting one, as it implies a tonal centre - the early equivalent of a modern musical key. Very common in (for example) Indian music, I'm not sure that it had much of a place in ancient Greece. Without getting into too much detail, all music was most likely restricted to a single octave (the Greeks had a good understanding of the notion of an Octave, a fifth and a fourth - their music was based on Tetrachords - but the mathematics used to construct the scales pretty much precluded any notion of multiple octaves). Because of this, and because Greek music put such a heavy emphasis on the concordant notes, the tonal centre would probably have been fairly obvious from the musical sequence. Also bear in mind that the Greeks had no notion of absolute pitch the way we do. As if all this isn't already hard enough, many of the words we use to describe music are modernisations of Greek originals - filtered through the Latin scholars from whom we get most of what we know. Trouble is, with few exceptions the original meanings of the words as understood at the time were different from the meanings we give them - in fact one of the hardest aspects of this whole area of study is being able to unload our modern musical training sufficiently to enable us to properly grasp what the ancient Greeks were actually on about! Hope this helps.

If you're really interested in modes as a topic there's loads of stuff on Wikipedia. Just type 'musical modes' or 'Ecclesiastical Modes' into the search engine. A related topic is to do with the intervals - if you try to construct scales the way the church did in the middle ages, it doesn't actually work all that well. I won't bore you with the details, but the method involves stack ratios on top of one another to create the notes of the scale. Problem is, however you do it you don't quite get an exact octave note (and there is a s**tload of stuff on this in Wikipedia - or you might want to try out Grove's dictionary of Music & Musicians at your local library). That makes it much harder to generate multi-octave harmonies 'cos they sound increasingly 'out of tune'. There's a bunch of other problems as well - modulation between keys, for example. Many people have tried to square the circle in different ways. The equal temperament scale we mostly use today is only one of them - Bach, for instance used a method called Well Temperament (hence 'The Well Tempered Clavier'). Equal temperament sacrifices some of the sonic purity of the intervals as generated using ratios for much improved utility. To achieve this it uses a mathematical formula that pretty much guarantees consistency across the entire range of your instrument - which is important when you start discussing modes because modes generated using the Ecclesiastical method (also called the cycle of fifths) are not interchangeable. Equal temperament makes that kind of thing much more manageable. I'll be happy to talk about it some more tomorrow but can I go to bed now please? -_- -_- -_-