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Hey, you must be somewhere near me! I'm based out near Newbury after many years near Maidenhead and I gig up and down the M4 a lot.

The Letter - The Box Tops

Exactly. One of the many reason why I no longer use a bass amp and cabs and go straight into the PA. The big rig might have looked impressive on stage, but for most of the gigs I played it was at best a personal monitor and a lot of the time simply a big, heavy and expensive stage prop. It seems completely backwards to me that the bass players who benefit most from having expensive amps and cabs are those who are technically on the lowest rung of the gigging ladder playing pubs with a vocal-only PA. That's an observation and not a slight on those playing pubs, but from experience the bigger the venue and stage the less important the personal amplification for the bass player becomes (see my experience above). Only when you get to play really big venues where there is room for acoustic screening around the backline and the cabs can be isolated and mic'd up, do expensive rigs start to make sense again. For me any spare cash would be better spent on studio time for the band with a great producer.

The wide ones look really comfortable. What's on the other side? Would it grip a little and counteract neck dive a little?

The Numbers - Radiohead

It's antiques, and if you think second hand car dealers have some dodgy practices, you should look into the antiques world, in which the seller is often able to capitalise on the buyer's strong emotional need for the item to be authentic, as well as the fact that - given antique purchases are as much about bragging rights as owning a piece of history - buyer's sometimes don't care about authenticity if they are able to pass it off as authentic..... And if you think the antiques market is bad, wait until you get into the religious artefacts market, how many fingers can one saint have had, perhaps their saintly powers allowed them to keep growing new ones.....?

The Final Countdown - Europe

I agree. So many guitars also wood with some tenuous BS connection to a “star” as well. It’s a very odd marketplace indeed.

Beat the Clock - Sparks

caught somewhere in time - iron maiden

I'd like to thank you, the people (wipes tear) for your unswerving support and I love you all! Thank you!! etc (Falls to his knees in floods of tears). 😁 however, as I did last month, I feel someone else should have a go... Who hasn't done one for a while?

Poster for our next gig:

Well, in an ideal world, free from constraints (for example monetary or physical space) then I'd be trying whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Life's not like that. Limits exist. As I said before, the reason I won't touch 15" cabs with a bargepole is mostly because they won't fit in my car. It has nothing to do with them being 15s, they just don't fit into my life and the way I want to live it. Also, frankly I'm just not that excited about amps and cabs. To me, they're a necessary component in order to make noise and that's about it. Apart from the 30W practice amp I started with, I've only owned 4 amps and 4 cabs in about 20 years, and almost always one at a time. Amps. Cabs. Eh, I'd rather buy another bass.

I don't think anyone is getting ripped off here. Unless there's a BC kids TV show starting featuring all of these puppets...

I need to re-line a cable trunk. Opinions on what to use? Carpet? Underlay? New foam? I read that yoga mats are a good/cheap/tough foam option.

Another Jeff Berlin performance, this one achievable by us mere mortals, this is the tune Andre from the 1988 Kazumi Watanabe album 'The Spice Of Life Too'. No solo, just great part playing. One run that is challenging but you can ignore it without any detriment to the performance. https://bilbosbassbites.co.uk/andre-kazumi-watanbe/

...and as variables go the overall sound of a band will be far more dependent on the muppet (or not) running the PA rather than the bass players choice of 10s or 15s! Someone above mentioned only ever using 12s as the sweet spot. I can see merit to that argument (merely becasue 12 falls between 10 and 15) but I think to say you ONLY use one size of speaker is a bit limiting. At the end of the day half the fun of playing electric instruments is trying different things be they pickups, pedals, amps or cabs. It's just interesting that certainly on this forum the choice of speaker size raises so many passions (there's possibly a rude joke in here somewhere... 🙂 )!

And here it is... Original and Not-a-Muppet-but-something-similar Interesting how it's changed my jazz to a precision. It's repaired my jeans, and made my stubbly facial hair almost beard into the lush kind of beard I can only wish for.