All Activity

I think sometimes attachment to certain basses is all about first impressions. Picking up a bass for the first time can be an inspirational experience. For me that has always been with either a p-bass or a jazz bass and more often than not a Fender derivative like a MIM or a USA Standard. Not everything is going to endear you to a particular brand but sometimes the feel, the playability, and the tone of a certain instrument is going to make you think wow! this is a keeper. Once that has happened, it's going to be difficult to pass an instrument on to someone else even if it becomes a case queen you still love but rarely play or use.

Charged Up - Drake

Well guys, gonna have to put the project aside for a few weeks. Family emergency happening so I have to get back to the UK ASAP. But we will pick this back up as soon as I'm back!

Basses 😄

Electricity - OMD

Well I'm another who wants to give it the benefit of the doubt. I'm quite looking forward to it but with realistic expectations.

Congrats on the new bass. You have my lusted 78 fender. Ash body maple fretboard. Man that must have some attitude . It’s going to be hard to compete with that as it’s sonically unique (Bart pickups 😍) with the added nut width and profile.

I’ve a set of chromes 50-105. They aren’t sticky at all. Very smooth to play. I’ve had them for a while and the brightness has tamed tbh.

Late August a stage was seen being set up at Stonehenge and there was much speculation as to who it was for. Apparently it was Spinal Tap and Shania Twain filming a performance, I guess this is promotion for ST2 but I've not seen anything online yet. With all the old rock bands out there touring these days, the Stones, Def Leopard and Metallica I'm sure the film will lampoon some of that geriatric rock scene.

In the 70's very few club players, even the well known ones were playing pristine gear. The drivers in the cabs, mostly 412's, could be any combination of replacement speakers. What makes me like those guys is what they played not how they sounded.

Looks like it will be!

Basses or kids?

Peter Gabriel Plays Live from 1983 - on a trip into the distant past - I'd forgot what a great range he has and the tones and colour in his voice. What started me off was a friend's tittle-tattle about Gabriels ex-wife sending a letter into some Genesis/Gabriel fan site or magazine - saying how upsetting she found seeing him in the video with Kate Bush for Don't Give Up and that there might have been a bit more going on between the two of them - I'd never heard of this before or about that letter but I have Spencer Bright's authorised biography of PG which is pretty old now - came out in 2000 and there is a bit about her being upset about the video but I don't think it was anything more than that - what does get mentioned is the chemistry he had with Sinead O'Connor which I also didn't know about. I also have Kate Bush's biography by Rob Jovanovic - also quite dated - from 2005 where very little is mentioned about PG... anyway - this is what sent me off listening to all the PG solo stuff I have. I remember thinking that the live version of Shock The Monkey off this Plays Live album was better than the studio version.

Interesting... Tried the new intro song... it was going to be solo acoustic but we thought we'd put in some subtle backing. It's tricky with some dropped beats, but with the vocals it makes sense. I swapped a bass riff (inspired by Cirrus Minor) to a different song so had to invent a replacement. I suggested a big tempo change that rescued another song. For my troubles I got threatened by a clown armed with a rubber sledgehammer, but the vocalist cut his face off with a plastic chainsaw... the gig will be memorable! True confession... I'm starting to enjoy plectrum playing (perhaps because the extra practice is making me better at it).

OC2 clone > mammoth clone > Alembic tube pre “clone”> tuner/mod/delay/reverb/everything else that I think I need from tone3000, mounted on a pedalboard riser powered by you know what.

From photos, I'd be pretty confident that Andy Fraser used 4x12 cabs with his Marshall 100W bass heads. I think his tone was mostly in his fingers.

That's kind but I'm better at theory than I am at tones. I'll do my best for Andrew though. I had a quick look and at the Isle of Wight in 1970 Andy Fraser was standing in front of a couple of full Marshall stacks and there seems to ba a WEM stack over there too. The only one I could see clearly was a couple of 4x12's with 100W valve amps on top. The nearest one seemed to be guitar cabs and the ones stage right looked a little chunkier and may have had different drivers in. However it was common in those days to split the guitar and bass stacks cross the stage so they were both sides of the drummer and guitar and bassist could hear each other. Something I used to do at the time when doing sound for bands. In 1971 Jim Marshall was still serving in the shop in Cricklewood and building amps himself as I found out when he remembered building the amp I took in to the shop for some spares. Yes Andrew I know what it is like to be 73 I suppose what I'm saying is that in those days there were very few purpose built speakers for instruments and free may have had things made up specially for them. Bassists were quit likely to use the same drivers as guitarists so that may be part of his sound. Certainly there isn't a lot of deep bass and not a lot of top end in the tne he has there. The studio tone is probably the result of a miked cab and DI mixed. Anyway i had a good time listening to the live tracks on the Free Story which was fun. So yes in general the tone you hear is that of lots of cheap drivers packed together in a big cab, lot's of 10's is really more of a late 70's early eighties thing and I think he might have used 12's for live work as above. In any case it's more about the individual speaker rather than it's size so you can get similar tones from 10's 12's or 15's. I suppose I'm saying buy a cab because it sounds right not because it has a 10" driver. You have two possible approaches. You could probably achieve something close to that tone in the studio taking the output straight from your bass and eq'ing it after it's recorded, maybe adding in some fx too. On stage you can do the same by using a neutral toned/flat response cab (FRFR) Nowadays you can get bass cabs that will do the same job as a studio monitor like the LFSys range and there are all sorts of tone settings you can download where someone else has done the work. You won't be the only Andy Fraser fan. It's even possible that someone has recorded the bass and used a computer to work out the response of the cab. You then feed that into your Barefaced which has a reasonably flat response The second approach would be to look for a cab engineered to give an old school sound. The Barefaced One10 mcomes to mind but I think that will be a bit warmer than the Free live sound. You can add in fx and tweak the eq to get closer to the sound you want. Other people will be better at guiding you then me. Apart from anything else I've got considerable hearing loss from standing too close to big speakers and even bigger drummers too often. Welcome to BassChat

Oh, ill probably try a ToneX one next, but not just yet.

But... does that tell you if it is good for metal?

Here in Aotearoa , the great Neville Claughton imported 3 x L2 in 1984 they were $3300 retail and all sold promptly Pound to NZD was 1/3 so sterling 999 to NZ $3300 sounds bang on

Plug In Baby - Muse

In my dreams they add a couple of more bass amps, SWR/eden type, or trace/ashdown, a couple more preamps with a console style and then a load of the moogerfooger effects. That would make me happy.