thodrik

Essentially I love the ‘two amps in one’ idea. I’m guessing the Boogie channel is designed for those that think that the newish WD800 was a bit modern sounding and didn’t quite hit the spot for those old bloomy Mesa amp tones. Honestly I love the idea of fitting the 400/400+ tone stack in a modern portable amp. In fact I would actually buy it if it was a single channel amp over the D800/D800+ as it is more my kind of amp. I presume that you can set the Boogie channel as your ‘dirty’ channel and foot switch from the Subway ‘clean’ channel? Yes it will be expensive but this amp would probably be top of my shopping list if I was looking for a new amp.

I must disagree politely in terms of the travel time. I can't see how it would normally take five hours to travel from Inverness to Glasgow by car, van or bus. If you take the motorway from Glasgow to Perth and then take the A9 from Perth to Inverness the total travelling time is about be about 3 hours or slightly more depending on traffic and that includes observing speed limits. If you take regular stops or breaks of course the trip will be longer. Taking the Megabus from Glasgow and Inverness only takes about 3hrs 45 minutes and they definitely do not break speed limits. It would probably take closer to five hours if you were travelling up the west coat past Fort William via the A82 but I have never done that (though it is a lovely drive). In terms of John O'Groats, I always budget about 3 hours for the drive from Inverness in the summer or winter. Usually it takes a bit longer in the winter because the driving conditions can be awful. On a good day it can be done in 2 1/2 hours but a couple of HGVs, campervans and the odd tractor can really slow things up and if so there is nothing you can do about it as there are no dual carriageways once you leave Inverness and there are very few safe passing places on the whole route. I have been travelling between Glasgow and Orkney regularly for about 16 years. It is pretty much a whole day of travel (6+ hours on the road, one hour on the ferry, an hour and a half in the middle for shopping and lunch in Inverness etc). If the ferry crossing is okay though it is doable without too much drama or exhaustion, particularly if you are used to the drive. I can also confirm that it is possible to take the early morning ferry from Orkney and get down to Edinburgh or Glasgow to catch the 5pm soundcheck and then do a resulting gig. However I would not recommend that for the start point of an opening night of a week long tour! The only time I saw a Wal for sale in Orkney was in an Ebay listing about ten years ago. I asked if I could try it and said that I was actually going to be in Orkney the following day. Magically the location of the bass was quickly changed to the Isle of Wight. Either it was a fraud listing or the owner was a real island hopper!

Quite possibly, though it seems to be a useable explanation at present.

Unlikely, copious amounts of whisky though, and after a few of them a Wal might as well be a Whale.

Just say that you were testing your eyesight and you should be fine.

Exactly. Though you can drive from Glasgow to John o’Groats in about 6 hours if traffic on A9 is fine, so if you have a free day you can get to most places in the mainland and back. If the OP is based in Ayr though and someone has a Wal for sale in Orkney it isn’t much help. As far as I am aware though, there are no Wals for sale in Orkney.

As a V6 owner I am pleased to hear that!

We apparently are playing a festival In Inverness headlined by the Wildhearts in November. I highly doubt the gig will happen.

Mesa Powerhouse 6x10, one of the last series of the cabs before they were discontinued, essentially mint condition. £400. No other bargains, though a few of my instruments have gone up in value since I bought them which is nice.

Definitely a Gibson for me even though I hate the direction and Gibson's consistent ability to score consistent public relations own goals ('Play Authentic' ugh). I spent almost a year trying out 2016 and 2017 series of Les Pauls (Traditional, Classic, Standard). Most of the guitars I tried in the shops however needed a decent set up. I also tried a Les Paul Tribute and I thought it was a really good guitar for £1000. I didn't end up buying it because I had my heart set on a full fat 'proper' Les Paul. At the £1000 price point I would also consider an SG which has essentially the same electronics and pickups as a Les Paul, but is lighter and has better upper fret access. My brother already had an SG though so I 'had' to buy a Les Paul to be different. I ended up buying a second hand 2008 Les Paul Standard faded (so basically a Les Paul Standard with a satin finish) in 2017. The looks of the guitar are 'so so' compared to the new Les Paul Standards but in terms of playability this guitar covers everything I need. In terms of buying 'new', I think that the new Standard 50s and 60s series are a big improvement on the previous Traditional and Standard series. At £2000 they are pretty big investments, however of any guitar model out there, a Gibson Les Paul is likely to hold its value better than a lot of other models at the price point. The Les Paul Classic is about £1500 and has coil tapping features that the 50s and 60s Standards don't, so that may be worth investigating too. Irrespective of my love of GIbson guitars, the quality of a PRS S2 will be more consistent than Gibson from guitar to guitar. The SE and S2 series are really good guitars period, let alone being good guitars for their price point. However, for me the sound of a Gibson is what I prefer so I will generally buy a Gibson irrespective of the fact that a PRS guitar will probably hold its tune better, be easier to play, have more tonal variation (coil splitting options etc) and have consistent QC from instrument to instrument. In terms of you think you would prefer, outside of playing them I would recommend watching a few Youtube videos of reviews of the models you are looking at. Its a crap time to be shopping for a new guitar so my best wishes to the OP in their quest!

I loved the video. It seems that the amp is very much a modern, slightly more flexible hybrid between the HD350 and TD650. I love the idea of the two mid controls, which is actually a feature I would really like on my old Fafner. It is a shame that the amp is being released in the middle of a pandemic when people are not exactly going to be flushed with cash. It looks like a truly awesome piece of kit, especially with the matching 4x10. I'm still

I thought that he was pretty good at voicing the part of Dougal in the The Magic Roundabout film.

I heard that Robbie WIlliams wrote Rudebox while playing bass...

I love it, but I love the Nickeback one even more.

All Right Now by Free, played in full, including counting out the bars in the verses out loud when there is no bass but then stopping before the bass solo on the basis that ‘I have played enough of that one.’ No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age. Mostly because playing it accurately involves tuning the bass to C standard. Doing that, playing the riff and then saying ‘nah mate, this one ain’t for me’ would surely result in lots of annoyance.

I did say ‘for home practice and recording’. When I tried to use my old SMX for home practice it sent tremors through the whole tenement I was living in at the time!

The Little Stubbys are great amps! You can’t go wrong there. I would have that over a second hand Trace Elliot for home practice and recording.

I was meaning the later series of Trace Elliot amps that were released around 2006 once Peavey bought them from Gibson. You can find them second hand. However an old Peavey, SWR or Gallien Krueger amp might be more what you are looking for.

An Ashdown ABM has some similarities to a classic Trace but is capable of a good amount of dirt. However it is not a Trace The Peavey era 12 band series had a drive circuit that could get very dirty indeed. Is it a classic Trace Elliot amp? No, but they are nice amps. Myself, my main amp for the last ten years has actually been a Mesa Walkabout. It isn’t all valve but it sounds like it.

I had a GP7 SM300 combo for about 15 years. Never let me down. I also had a GP12 SMX 300 for about 6 years. It was a more flexible amp than the GP7 SM300, just for the extra EQ features alone. The dual compression was nice but I didn’t really use it as I felt it sucked out the low frequencies a bit. The valve feature on SMX added a tiny bit of warmth but there was no real drive or grit to speak of so I needed a pedal for that. Great amp though and was my main backup amp when I was touring. I got a V6 in 2013 though which I preferred to both the other Trace amps so the other Trace amps were sold. Nothing wrong with the amps but I had barely used them for years. The V6 does not deliver any of the classic hi-fi Trace Elliot clean tone and the EQ features are very limited but it is a fantastic amp for a deep valve warmth. So it is probably my favourite Trace amp as a result.

I have an NYC 5 which is chambered. It is very very light (about 8lbs) but perfectly balanced. I don’t think that the chambering on the 5 results in an inherently more scooped tone vs non-chambered. I say that as I also have a Metro 4 string and the basic tone of the instruments are very similar. The NYC just looks a lot more ‘bling’ in the flesh and as a result feels a bit more special in hand. Saying that the Metro has been my workhorse for ten years or so covering genres from jazz, indie rock and stoner/doom and has never let me down.

I love that book. So many amazing basses in those pages.

2008 Les Paul Standard Faded. Bought in 2016 after I preferred it to any of the current Traditional/Classic/Standard line. The Standard Faded line is essentially a Les Paul Standard in a satin finish which was seen as a cost saving measure. Costs were also saved in the fact that no effort was made in terms of applying the finish. I think that my finish is ‘tobacco burst’ but I think of it more as ‘half arsed burst’. The Standard Faded line are a bit sought after in that some folk (i.e Larry Corsa) think that the satin finish has more resonance than the usual gloss finish. It may or not be nonsense but even so I really like the satin finish on the neck and body. I also like the ‘is it pretty or is it pretty ugly?’ finish. It also sounds great and is pretty light thanks to the weight relief (about 8.5 lbs). I used to have a Fender American Deluxe Toronado but sold it to buy the Mesa Rectoverb last year.

I follow them on Facebook and I think that their output on there is pretty good and varied. They do frequently do historical posts but they also post up and coming artists, as well as their long term endorsers. I mean, their packaging on their strings leans on their history rather than on anything current, but I prefer that rather than a bunch of pseudo-scientific marketing bollocks with regard to the technical specifications of their strings. In any event I still tend to use D’addarios...

Welcome to the forum! I have a 1974 Gibson EB3, the tone knobs are essentially worthless and the volume pots effectively act as on/off switches. I haven’t tried too many other EB3s to comment on whether the circuits on the older or newer models have the same issue, but it sounds like they do. In my opinion you can’t really blend the volumes of the pick ups on an EB3 like you can with a Fender Jazz bass. The front pick up tends to dominate the mix when both pick ups are on. On each pick up selection point you basically get ‘that’ initial sound with little opportunity for fine tuning outside of additional EQ. You can try raising the height of the pick ups so that the ‘both pick ups on’ setting are more balanced, but this might negatively impact the sound and balance of the other pick up settings. I’m still trying to fine tune my EB3 to find the optimum set up for the pickups, bridge, action and intonation. I have owned the bass since 2001 and the best thing that I have done is replace the original bridge with a Babicz bridge which is a massive improvement on the old Gibson 3 point bridge which continually drove me mad over a fifteen year period. I have devalued the bass but the playability and sound has improved massively.