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A break can be good for you. I took a break years ago and it worked wonders. I came back refreshed and a became a better player. It also meant I continued to enjoy playing rather than getting jaded and put off by the exasperation I was feeling. Don't make the mistake I did of selling almost everything, though.

Playing bass for me has never been about being in a band. Obviously, playing with other people/live etc is the goal and I've been lucky in that regards..... but I'm also more than happy playing by myself, learning classic basslines from legendary artists and noodling around/creating for my own pleasure. That, for me, is foremost...... the pleasure of playing the instrument itself.... anything more is a bonus. This was particularly pertinent during Covid lockdown when I developed an even closer bond with my instrument and took the time to develop my playing...

Why? Are you looking for another excuse to not buy it?😂

I believe the tributes were the real money makers for them so I’m not surprised that Fender will keep those going. The L2000s and L1000s gives them a good foothold into Musicman territory especially compared to the Stirling by Musicman range.

Thank you Andy…. I think its going to be a short scale with 30” neck as its difficult to find one in a natural wood body and I don’t want to have any neck dive.

I no longer believe this. I have heard and played through too many good class D amps. The Trace Elliott mosfet power amps are good, solid designs but there's absolutely nothing special or innovative about them, they are very basic designs. A simple differential amp taking feedback from a push-pull ouput stage. All the 'Trace Magic' is in the preamp design and the fact that the output stages were genuinely powerful. Class D is ultra faithful to preamps and most have headroom and power way beyond Trace designs.

The pissed up people singing along to Wonderwall are not your audience and probably wouldn't have been Oasis' audience either before they became famous. Also most of them would be equally happy singing along with a playlist or DJ as they would with a covers band. That's just a fact of life. It's pointless worrying about them and the venues they congregate in. The fact that most musicians don't seem to have got, is that there is nothing extra special about live music per se. You are quite right that to typical pub goer wants something they know and if you are not going to supply that then if you want to be popular you have to be playing something reasonably catchy and give them something interesting to watch at the same time. Unsurprisingly that's not a bunch of middle-aged men staring at their instruments. You've also got to acknowledge that some genres are more popular at a grass-roots level than others and maybe decide if you want artistic integrity or popularity, and try a find a good compromise between the two. When I was starting out gigging, I deliberately moved from somewhere with an almost zero live music scene to somewhere that was far more healthy from both a band and an audience member's PoV. I know that other people have different priorities. As I said life is full of compromises.

If they offer a Tribute Asat bass and a Tribute Kiloton 5 all will be forgiven.

Great story.....👍 "After explaining I was considered medically complete...." 😂

Been there, as I’d imagine we all have. Opportunity will knock, I’m sure at the right time to get you out again. I know I once said never, sold up, but gradually……I was tempted. First a bit at home, and then…..back on the horse! 😀

Right now, I'm uninterested in playing irrespective of the circumstances. I don't think it's quitting per se, more just taking a break. I just find doing band stuff exhausting and exasperating in equal measure.

Love the idea of supporting a British manufacturer (hell my first proper bass amp was an Ohm GB60 combo back in the day), but no website and just a facebook page leaves me cold. The subs placement thing is a real thing. Of all the venues we play, there is only one where I can put the subs side-by-side in the centre in front of the stage and yes they sound measurably better when arranged like this. For the majority of our gigs, space dictates that we go one sub per side with a pole mounted top. I’m serious tempted by a pair of the RCF NLX24’s and single 905 sub as this will comfortably cover all of our gigs, and being a registered gear slut, I’d probably add a second 905 down the line just because I love chest thumping kick drum mixes.

I've never had a problem with either Royal Mail or ParcelForce. I find DHL are the ones who tend to @rse about, especially with deliveries. I bought a P Bass from Andertons, DHL brought it as far as Bristol, where they let it sit at their depot for three days, then they returned it to Andertons. I've just recently bought another P Bass, this time from Glasgow, again DHL, it took them 9 days to get it here. I phoned them after 5 days and asked them if it was being delivered by pedal bike.

We'd kind of spotted that... The nearest we play to home is Hereford (nearly an hour away) where we get a decent audience. However, if you just bimble a bit further into town there's a venue called Gordon Bennetts which gets absolutely rammed. And it's full of pissed up folks singing along to "Wonderwall" and the like. Those same people wouldn't dream of going to see a band they hadn't heard of in a grassroots venue because they wouldn't hear anything they knew, without realising that those same grassroots venues are the places that gave the likes of Oasis their first gigs.

Another thing I think about is that lots of great bass players are strongly associated with a single bass that they used for most of their career: Duck Dunn, James Jameson for example. If they managed with a single bass who am I to need loads of basses. I guess it's because instruments were more expensive back then, but did the gain anything from from having a single bass?

I forgot to include Sire/Marcus Miller basses. Boom.

The problem is one of phase. When two speakers are separated then the sound from one will reach you later than the sound from the other. If they are a substantial fraction of a wavelength apart then the sound may be in phase and reinforce each other or out of phase and cancel each other. This leads to power alleys where the bass is louder and other places where it is quieter. It's frequency/wavelength dependant so the distortion caused will vary as you move around. You can hear this quite clearly in outdoor events where there are subs either side of the stage. Indoors the walls reflect the sound and the multiple pathways the sound uses to reach your ears smears this effect. In the end practicality kicks in. Ideally you want your subs on the ground in front of a raised stage but this is rarely possible, and placing the subs together can be tricky. I've played a lot of venues where punters killing themselves by knocking the tops off stands are more of an issue than sound quality. It is a bit of an issue though as you point out when designers of systems seem not to know about sub placement . To be fair to them most of their customers would probably prefer the look of subs either side of the stage as that's what they would do in practice so their ads show what the customer wants. When I looked up BA systems the website has been taken down and sombody called Kevin has retired due to ill health with just a FB page remaining so I'd contact them before going this direction to check if they are still trading.

Nevertheless, there are only so many venues, days (evenings...) of the week, and folk wanting to go out and listen to/watch a live band, and a fair number of original and covers bands, or multiple genres, courting those ever reducing number of slots. It would appear that the butter is being spread ever thinner on fewer slices; this trend is not likely to reverse, in the UK, soon. Just sayin'.

My current band who are hardly a well-known Goth band manage an average of 2500 streams a month on Spotify alone. While that's split between 14 tracks about 75% of those streams come from our most popular 5 songs. I would suggest that we're not quite popular enough to headline without one or more other bands of at least an equivalent standing as support.

@Sibob B_ F_lt_r f_zz