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My old vinyl Hawkwind album warriors on the edge of time has a track called the demented man on the cover, but the inside of the actual record says ‘the demented king’ . Dunno if they are all like that but still enjoy listening to it. Used to love playing the album with a few cans and smokes back in the day… x

Eventually I will do the individual buffers for each string.

It's amazing how much can be missing and it makes very little difference. I saw a video once on YouTube (so clearly doing my own research and am now an expert in this) about a American who kept removing bits of his electric guitar to see the effect. Most of the guitar had gone and he was down to strings between two tables and pickups. Being realistic, had he cheated, I simply don't know, I do know that my 3d printed guitars sound to me, fine, a slightly different tone, but I suspect that the cheap pickups may have something to do with that. I have zero wood in the body of my 3d printed basses and guitars. I try to use a decent wooden neck, a decent bridge and decent electrics but that's it. I don't spend a fortune (or even a large amount). At the SW Bass Bash 2025 @Phil Starr did a great blind listening test with a range of speakers from a 6" to a 15" in various cabs. They all sounded very good but the 8" was very well liked. Perhaps somebody should organise a blind listening test of a range of basses at a bass bash, I have no idea what the criteria would be but it might be interesting to hear. I'll happily put my home made basses in. Rob

None. The 66 slab sounded huge and recorded better than any bass I've used. The Jazz is wonderfully resonant. I can't compare to the original, of course, but neither bass is/was deficient in any respect.

Im just wondering if missing such a large chunk of wood would have an effect on the sound/resonance?

I saw the video of this on your IG and wondered what was going on with the seated bit in front of the main crowd. I’d of felt so awkward if I was sitting in that bit with a big crowd of people watching over my head! Sounded good though 👌

pickups - blend (or vol) - vol - tone stack - output Any single part in this most common signal path can be hi-Z ("passive"), or lo-Z ("active"). Two most common solutions are that everything is hi-Z, or the tone stack is battery powered. Quite uncommon is to use lo-Z mixing (see: John East, Noll Mixpot, some preamp sets). Many basses may cost an arm and a leg, but if the chain is hi-Z, two, three pots and a cap cost under £2 to the manufacturer. (Some like that option, I don't.) All in all, consider something that works for you. There's a variety of possibilities available, so if the preamp thing isn't your cup of tea, there are other schemes than just VBlendT, or VVT. Add a suitable switch, and you may have a set of sounds that please you. Remove everything and go the Anthony Jackson road: a big mixing board sure is a powerful tone shaper.

PS - the bassist for the Shania Twain UK tribute act which played after us had a 5 string Wal, sounded ace. If he be on here, say hello! Would be interested in your thoughts on the organisational side of things 😆

Permission granted.

repeat posts... 🙂

I once bought a Sire V7 off someone on FB marketplace. In the course of the short conversation he called me Pal bud Dude Buddy Bro Man Lad Mate. Irrational I know, but I didn't like that at all, he knew my name.

Loud. A bit too loud tbh. Katy Hurt was booked to play the Country Roads festival in Southampton; a bit odd for a festival in the end of a October but thankfully we were under a massive marquee just outside the Southampton Guildhall so the cold and wet weather didn’t dampen the mood too much. Organisation was pretty … lacking. In the 48 hours preceding the event we had 3 different arrival times/stage times/set lengths, and when we arrived for our soundcheck at 3.30 were told in no uncertain terms that soundchecks were not on the cards at all because no-one had told or prepped the crew for anything 😕 The “green room” was a tiny tent outside the main marquee, hemmed in by a giant concrete bench, and the “backstage area” also doubled as the fire escape, except the marquee flaps were tied together and they led to metal fencing which was all bolted together. This “backstage” area became a nightmare as we finished and the next band were prepping; trying to get off stage with our gear as they were setting up theirs in this tiny space and also trying to get onstage whilst our guitarist was still packing down (always a bugbear - f**king WAIT for us to be completely clear) was carnage. Plus the floor was soaking wet so we didn’t really want to put our gear directly on it. Anyway, organisational issues aside, we managed a loud, raucous 45 minute set (which we’d been told by the organisers as we arrived was 60 minutes…) and, on the whole, had fun. Katy’s acoustic kept feeding back and the onstage volume was blisteringly loud but overall actually I had a good balance of all the instruments. We sang, rocked out and enjoyed ourselves, then ate our token free hot dog and left 😃 Photo to show the daft “VIP” area directly in front of the band which meant all the crowd behind the barriers were miles from us and a bit annoyed they couldn’t be closer…

At the moment that's me. I put the band together with lots of help from the singer but I'm the one who pushed it over the line. I'm really not sure I know what I'm doing and it's all very cooperative. Organisation is very 'loose'. This is a covers band and everone is pretty experienced. We've set ourselves the target of getting 30+ songs up to gigging standard with 33songs on the initial set list. We're attempting to learn 8 songs for each rehearsal. Some are simple enough to learn quickly and some we've all played before, some a bit more tricky or only a couple of us know them and others are new to us all and need a bit more preparation so I've made sure we don't overload any one rehearsal by mixing the low hanging fruit with a couple of songs to work on. I send out the list of songs as early as possible to give people a chance to prep them at home, Rehearsal is for re-hearsing what you've practiced not for learning the arrangement or chord sequence. We've settled into a kind of routine, we start with a song we all know well as a warm up, Then run through the 8 msongs to see where we are with them, we'll play each song once or twice and move on if we get bogged down but it gives us an idea over which ones will need detailed work and which ones are working out of the box. We will also play through any songs we had concerns about from the week before, usually as part of the warm up. Then we take a break (there's a bar in the place we practice) and talk though which songs we want to work on. Second half we'll work on the things we've discussed. It sounds pretty workmanlike but we're all pretty sociable and there's lots of chat whilst we are setting up. I've been in quite a few covers bands, I think it's all in the preparation. Rehearsal time is precious particularly if you have a young family or are holding down a full time job. People need time to prepare so I'd expect a list of songs with keys and a few notes to go out at least a week before rehearsal. Ideally for a covers band you'd be clear of which version of a song you are covering with lyrics and a chord sheet. It's easy with a covers band as you have original recordings and I've sent out cassettes, CD's and now Spotify Playlists. There's no hope of learning My Way if everyone expects to do it their way, so it saves time to plump for one version and do that at the first run through. You can add your own touches once the basics of the song are secure. One band I was in started brilliantly. The band leader arranged for us to learn four songs a week for 3 months. We had the full list up front in the order we were to learn them. Three weeks in we were running through four songs for the third time and used these to warm up. The songs from the previous week we'd fix any issues and work out starts and ends and then address this weeks new songs. A gig had been booked at the end of the 12 week cycle so nobody messed around. It's kind of the pattern I'm repeating with my new band, we took the decision to attempt 8 songs collectively given that we all knew some of the material and were experienced enough to find Eight songs manageable. Plus 12 rehearsals would have been excessive with our other commitments. A third band was an established band, I was expected to learn 30 songs , contacted them when I was ready , one run through and we gigged a week later. We only rehearsed when we added new songs and you were expected to get it right. I loved that.

We rehearse in a low cost hall and we set up as a gigging band using our normal gear. Always done it like this so we get familiar to what we sound like live. We agree in advance what songs we are working on and play through them a few times. It’s also a social get together so it’s fun and as enjoyable as gigging. We also kick around new song ideas and try them if we can in a basic format and if they look like they will work we add them to the set

Having given this some thought, the honest answers to this are, IMO, it depends and it's something of a compromise. Because of what compression does and how it works there are several variables at play so it's almost impossible to give some specific settings that will work for you or anyone else. Realistically we're talking helpful guidelines rather precise settings. It depends. Depending on what style of compression you're looking will have a significant impact on your settings. Something fast and modern sounding to keep the transients in check, for example, requires pretty much opposing settings, certainly for attack and release but you may also want to adjust the threshold and ratio etc, to a gentle smoothing with a slower attack. So if you we're thinking of using the former with a plectrum and the latter for fingers, then you're going to struggle with a single unit without changing the settings every time you change technique. This is why I mentioned it's something of a compromise. Assuming you want to stick with the Cali 76 - and why not, it's a great compressor - you'll need to play around and hopefully find settings that work with both fingers and plectrum. A good place to start would be to play exclusively one technique and dial in precisely what settings work for that. Make a note of them. Then do the same for the other technique and make a note of those settings. Then dial in settings that are somewhere in the middle of the two. It may not be as precise as each lot of individual settings but it may prove an acceptable compromise between the two. If that doesn't work another option is to get another compressor and switch between them but there's obviously cost, power requirements etc. to consider. Or a multi fx that means you can switch between settings quickly and easily. I appreciate that this probably isn't the answer you were hoping for but having spent many years nerding around with compressors, there isn't a one size fits all load of settings, it's figuring out what works for you. You said you're keen to learn more about compression so I'd suggest keep reading, try different settings, differences that may seem imperceptible when messing around at home can have a noticeable affect on how the bass feels in the mix - and it is as much about feel as it is control. I think I've said this in other posts about compression but you're more likely to get more objective information about compression from sound engineering sites rather than bass specific sites like this one where the subject tends to be more decisive 😀

take the headphones out signal from the amplug and run it through an attenuator and then from that to the PA /amp ?

There's no manufacturing defect; the geometry on Squier headstocks is always different to the full-fat Fender models. Always been the case.

It’s worth an ask! I think I know the answer, but I suppose it’s just how many ‘offs’ I get that matters.

Red Light Spells Danger - Billy Ocean