All Activity

NBD - Sire U5 fretless! (ok it was actually 10 days ago, but hey.) TL;DR - £380 short scale fretless bass is surprisingly decent if not without a couple of flaws. Been planning on getting one of these for a while, being the only really viable affordable shortie fretless on the market. Thomann is literally the only place that sells them, so knowing that Sires have a reputation for being weighty, and my shoulder being incredibly sensitive to my 7.5lb limit, I eventually ordered it expecting it may well have to go back, but thought screw it lets have a go. Also ordered a set of Gotoh GB528 Res-o-lites at the same time from https://tonetechluthiersupplies.co.uk while they had them in stock. First the good - it's a smart looking little bass, scaled down aerodyne jazz shaped body, burst flame maple top with binding, and the weight isn't too bad at all - about 7lb 10oz, brought down to 7lb 5oz after fitting the GB528's which are drop-in replacements. The jazz width satin neck is very playable, I love that the fret lines curve around the side of the neck so I can see them while playing (see photo). The PJ config pickups are definitely noiseless, bridge is decent enough and the finishing is generally very good. It sounds *fine*. Not amazing, but certainly very usable, but this is the first budget level bass I've bought in a while and I think I may have just been spoiled with better quality pickups now. If I intended to use it more I'd certainly think about swapping them out. The passive VVT controls work well, feel pretty solid with a good range of usable tones. My preferred tone is J up full with P between 75% to 100% depending on how tubby/burpy I want things. The P on is own is nice and full bodied, but has to be said the J on its own is pretty thin and unpleasant. The two negatives that do stand out to me though, are the nut which had 3 of the 4 slots cut too wide for the stock D'Addario Chromes causing them to rattle when played open, and the lack of forearm contour on the body. The former I worked around by wedging tiny blobs of silicone in the nut slots to take up space and also improved after switching the strings to EB Cobalt flats. The hard corner on the body is just a playing technique thing. The body is pretty slim (tried to show the body width and offending corner in photo), so as far as sharp awkward corners go it's certainly not the worst offender out of basses I own (looking at you Hofner Club), but it's still a pain and something they should have designed better on a modern bass. If it costs more to produce a forearm contour I'd really rather have paid the extra to have one. Anyway, it may not be perfect but at the end of the day I'm really very happy with what I got for the amount I paid for it - £380ish for the bass, plus another £100 for the Res-o-lites. It's easily worth the asking price, and it's achieved the main goal of giving me a lightweight short scale fretless I can comfortably play for hours at a time. Given the lack of any competition in the price bracket, I'm grateful that Sire is making something this good.

Sure about that? Just spend ... A Night in Langney.

I can't help, it's not familiar.

Nobody will make much money from AI music, as you can't copyright AI created content (and spotify only pay $0.003 per stream anyway) but the streaming companies will save from having to pay out to record companies and artists, when they stream AI created music. Hopefully AI music will eventually be tagged as non human, and that means I won't need to listen to it. I suppose artists can incorporate the fact that they are human in the art that accompanies their music (i.e what used to be album covers). So that, if you listen to a track on Spotify, or whatever, and if it doesn't have the word human in the album art, then it's obviously AI generated.

Controversial but I thought Sergio was the better bassist

Thatn genuinely is absolutely superb. Hysterically wrong in so many ways, but superb. No human, however stoned they were, could come up with that!

Whoa...Amazing job!! 👏👏👏 Well done sir!

Dirty Love - Motorhead I'll see your FZ and raise you a Motorhead...

Design transferred and traced onto the headstock... Not starting painting tonight though - that was hard work, plus I only have black paint at the moment - need white and dark grey. The plan is to hand paint it with model paints and tiny brushes, flatten it a tad with very fine sandpaper, then lacquer over the top to protect it.

Ah yes we discussed this a few weeks ago (link below) when I made the following in about five minutes: Dancing With Shadows.mp3 I'm not ever so impressed by the songwriting, it's more the fact that if you have both the lyrics and a rough tune you don't need a studio or musicians anymore to get something recorded. Likewise the singers AI can produce are a lot better than the majority of people I know!

Yes, it always comes across as a soupy noise live. Or at least it seems to, YMMV. They're really just a cover band live now anyway since their most important member has effectively become a recluse. Too many years of smoking weed and reading conspiracy theory nonsense on the net has fried his brain. Interesting to see Chi Cheng mentioned again, because he always struck me as a functional player who could have been replaced by any jobber at short notice. Could anyone point me to something remarkable he has done or a moment where he really shines? I've been listening to Deftones for over twenty years and I've never been moved by what he played other than to say he played the bass part on the tracks.

Dirty Love - F.Z.-

It looks like the kind of heatsink that Gauss used to fit. As it's an American brand, Bill will no doubt have more information.

Well, it's happening and from now on it will always be happening. I foresee a time when, eventually, most humans will step away from the Internet and leave it alone to amuse and lie to itself as it will be of no use to anyone anymore. I should write a sci-fi novella about that at least 🤔

Good point!

Two gigs again for me this week. Wednesday as usual at the rock n roll club. Plenty of dancers in, but very hot though - think the club have stopped using the air con till next year! I did ‘ Memphis Tennessee’ in my now regular Chuck Berry spot, and went down well. Always a bit knackered next day after playing mainly fast songs for nearly two hours, fingers / hands in particular a bit achy. Sunday afternoon saw our duo performing at our favourite pub in Beverley, The Sun Inn. With it being a bank holiday weekend it turned out to be almost ridiculously busy, all seats & tables taken and little standing room before we even started playing. We had the usual wide range of requests, ranging from ‘Guantanamera’ and ‘He’ll have to go’ ( Ry Cooder style) to ‘Dead Flowers’ ( Stones ) and even some Coldplay ( following their recent Hull gigs!). I used a Squier Jaguar shortie into my Rumble 500, leaving the PA for vocals and acoustic guitar. Our PA only just coped with things TBH, so we will be needing to address updating it soon I think, especially as whilst packing down the landlord offered us a series of monthly gigs for all of 2026.