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The AI stuff is obviously polarising and a lot of people understandably won't even listen to it, me included.....until..... I accidentally dropped my phone while listening to Spotify and must have accidentally played this (I assume it was a recommended one) below. I don't think it is a reworked cover, so may be "original" in the fingers of the person that put the parameter in for the AI? Hopefully someone here would know but Google is not bringing up much. I love this track though, sorry!

I've got a V7 Mk 2 in swamp ash / maple - it's a heavy beast, but with a little extra setup I did it's become a go-to bass. The preamp does have plenty of capability of unusable tones, and the sweepable midband is probably way too complex for most, but in terms of playability it's an excellent bass, and as a first 5-string, I'd recommend it. Hardware on that bass is good if it's like mine (it's a 2020 model secured new for what now seems like a ridiculously reasonable £463) - build quality great, and those rolled fretboard sides are incredibly comfortable. The only mod I made was replacing the plastic knobs with silver metal knurled ones - I'm not a fan of those black plastic ones. The colour on that bass is killer, what a gorgeous finish! I'd go for it.

Could be done. In fact one of my patches does this: velocity is mapped to pitch with a hard curve so that note above a certain threshold transpose an octave up. This can further be regulated by a CC so you can turn it on and off at will.

Many people aren't aware of me who would otherwise have been if we were still using forums for some of my other hobbies, and many invitations never get to me. It's a price I'm willing to pay to not use a service owned by people I consider beyond the pale.

Watch the John entwhistke vid

This, 100%. Unfortunately, even a small amount of glitching on this renders the effect useless IME. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sounds on the F.I. but in the case of Ain’t Nobody it’s simply not usable.

Breaking it down with the example of playing in F. The VI chord is Dm (DFA) The I chord being F (FAC) By playing the I triad over the VI you’d turn it into a Dm7 chord. The II chord is Gm (GBbD) The IV chord is Bb (BbDF) By playing the IV triad over II you’d turn it into a Gm7 chord. Therefore this shouldn’t cause an issue as it’s common to incorporate the 7th in a blues and both the original chords are minor.

My experience is that Ain‘t Nobody is kind of the one that got away. 16ths this rapid and in octaves, which are very tricky to play cleanly with no overlap whatsoever, tend to cause glitching.

It's a DeArmond Jet Star, with added Peavey T-40 pickup.

The first Chameleon one of the two is much better to my ears. There's some good videos on YT about making that exact patch on an ARP - uses distortion I think.

^^ What a great post!^^

In my experience your technique for that one (and possibly your strings) would have to be absolutely flawless - the quick octaves are the thing it finds hardest. The tracking is (very) good though but that song is a bridge too far. I don't know whether it'd be possible to setup a patch that played alternating octaves from a single trigger note as a sort of cheat, but obviously that's not as fun or as versatile, might get you through a straight cover though.

Interesting. My first run SL TT4 is Cedar. My Lionel SL is paulownia. I haven't noticed a lack of bass on either one.

Morning Folks just wanted to ask a question about the 1 6 2 5 turnaround if I was on a Blues jam playing a standard 12 bar blues if when it comes to the turnaround on bars 9 to 12 could I play the 1 6 2 5 turnaround or would the Guitarist or other musicians need to play it too? Or if they was playing the typical 1 4 5 blues progression would I have to play this too? Just asking just in case I wanted to step out of the usual and spice it up a bit, thanks in advance.

If that was a 5 string I'd be very tempted

Wet Leg at the Royal Albert Hall Cracking gig, loads of fun, slightly marred by the return journey taking an extra two and a half hours due to unscheduled emergency engineering works on the mainline to Brighton. Still, worth it 😀

I've played in bands with non-human percussion for most of my musical career from when my first band bought one of the original Boss Dr Rhythms in 1981 to today where our drums are supplied by a MacBook running Logic. There are definite advantages. My current 3-piece band without a drummer or backline are able to travel to gigs with everyone, our gear, and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. We can be set up on stage ready to sound/line check in less than 15 minutes from load in. We have a small on-stage footprint which often gets us good support gigs where there is no room on stage for a conventional band's gear. How appropriate it is may depend on the genre of the music. I play in a goth/post-punk band and there are plenty of other bands on the scene using programmed drums as opposed to having a drummer and drum kit on stage. I probably wouldn't want to be using programmed drums with a more traditional rock band and almost definitely not with a covers band. There are however a number of things that you need to consider before deciding if it's going to be suitable for you. The main one is: how good is your drum programming? IME a replacing a drummer with a drum machine isn't about the quality of the sounds, it's about the quality of the programming. Crap programming will never make even the most authentic of drum sounds sound like they have been played by a drummer, whereas good programming can do wonders for less than realistic sounds. I've had over 40 years practice programming drums so I'm reasonably good it now. Also my current band has an overall electronic sound, so trying to be just like a human drummer isn't always important when it comes to writing rhythm parts. So if you've got your drum programming sorted out how are you going to do it live? Back in the 80s when I started using drum machines none of them had sufficient memory to hold a set's worth of drum patterns and songs. We got away with the simple Dr Rhythm with some creative programming to fit enough single patterns for 10-12 songs into the memory and the fact that we also had a human percussionist. The Roland 808 we had in my next band had enough memory (just) to hold all the patterns required for a single song, but only had a single song memory that had to be programmed in real time, so we recorded all the rhythm tracks onto cassette and used that when we gigged. Remember that for a typical song you are probably going to at least one pattern for each of the intro, verse, chorus, middle 8 and end and one or more fills for each, That's a minimum of 10 patterns for each song. I'm sure that modern drum machines are much better with memory than they were back when I was using them, all my programmed drums have been done on a computer since the mid 90s, but if you intend to use it live, check that you can fit everything in it. I used to own a Yamaha drum machine that claimed to hold up to 99 patterns and 99 songs, but the reality was that the memory allocation was dynamic, and complex/busy patterns with fast hi-hats in them ate up the memory. If I was lucky and used simple patterns I could probably get three songs in the drum machine at any one time. And now you've got all the drums for your whole set programmed how are you going to preform it? If it turns out that your choice of drum machine doesn't have sufficient memory to hold all the patterns required for all the songs you want to play, then you'll have no option but to record it and use that. Recording them will also allow you put some extra studio processing on the sounds which may well be an advantage. From the audience's PoV they won't notice whether the drums are being played back from a recording or performed "live" by a drum machine or computer, so it really down to what is most practical for you. Which ever method you choose make sure that you have a backup. The other important thing to consider is how you go from one song to the next. IMO unless you are a hardcore electronic band the technology being used to replace live musicians should be as invisible as possible. If you are using an actual drum machine selecting the program for the next song should be as simple as possible, ideally a single button press, or a turn of a dial. Anything that requires menu diving and peering at tiny LCD screens on stage is a non-starter in my view. If you use a continuous recording for the drums have some easy way of being able to pause it between songs to allow for guitarists to tune up and if the singer rambles on too long. One other thing is that now you have a machine of some sort doing your drums there will be a temptation to start adding other things to the backing track just because you can. If possible don't! My current band have made a conscious decision that apart from the drums the only other things that go on the backing are sound effects, traditional style sequencer parts and the occasional bass for when I am playing melody lines on my Bass VI. Our philosophy is that if there is an important melody in the song then we play it live. I see more a few bands with so much on the backing that it is impossible to tell what the live musicians are actually playing. Big sounding synth/keys parts are my number one complaint. If the synth line is an essential part of the song, have someone on stage doing it, rather than a bassist who is only doubling up the synth bass or a guitarist playing fuzzy power chords which add little to the arrangement. My previous band used to try and replicate the complete studio arrangement on the backing which had a tendency to make us sound cluttered, so being in charge of backing playback, I would gradually turn down the volume of any parts that I thought weren't adding anything to the live sound until they were either off or someone asked why they could hear it any more. Finally, monitoring. Without an actual drummer hitting things behind you, you are entirely dependant upon being able to hear the programmed drums for staying in time. Also as has been said the drum machine doesn't make mistakes, so you need to be as perfect with arrangements as the drum machine is or at least be able to tell where in the song it is so you can get back in sync. Even the sound of the sticks hitting pads on electronic kit will produce enough sound for you to be able to keep in time even if you can't hear the actual drum sounds. With a drum machine if you can't hear it clearly you can't play in time to it. Sorry for the long post, but there are lots of things to think about especially if you have never used programmed drums before. I'm sure there's lots of important points I've left out because I've been doing this for so long. Ask and I'll do my best to fill in any gaps.

This was another great Bass Bash. So, thanks to the organisers for their hard work and efforts. The venue was much better than I was expecting. With two decent-sized rooms and a stage, it was possible to make some noise without annoying everyone too much. There were plenty of familiar faces - some of whom also attended the SW Bash - together with some new ones and some members I have talked to over the years but previously never met. Put my name down for next year.