All Activity

I have Musicman basses with lacquered maple necks, painted maple necks, oil and wax finished maple necks, oil and wax finished roasted maple necks and one with a graphite/phenolic neck!! My main player is a 2018 Stingray Special with the roasted maple neck (it has an ebony board). I have found over the years that all of the basses may need minor adjustment when the weather changes significantly (such as into summer, with higher ambient temperatures) and into winter (where the ambient temperature may fluctuate significantly) especially if, like my Stingray Special, the bass is left out available to play and is out in the centrally heated/non centrally heated home environment, and gets transported to/from gigs quite regularly and is exposed (in a gig bag) to in car temperature and the temperature in a venue/during the gig (where the neck gets exposed to sweaty hands)! My observation with this main player bass is that the roasted maple neck currently varies very little. It did require a minor truss rod tweak when the weather changed after the summer (to be fair it had a very low action as well). However it doesn’t even go out of tune from one venue to another currently. So I have no problem with the roasted maple neck in this context. I don’t think the other basses I have exhibit different characteristics than this. From my observation, ultra low action will exhibit buzz at the end of the summer/beginning of the winter, requiring a minor tweak of the truss rod (which is, of course a very simple activity on a Musicman). I don’t think there is any difference exhibited between painted, lacquered, oil and wax, or roasted oil and wax necks with Musicman basses - as someone has already said, if the neck’s wooden it will exhibit to some extent the standard effects of temperature/ humidity on wood - AND if you have a very very low action this is likely to become noticeable through minor fret buzz at the start of winter.

Haha no - it's was my mic for my occasional BVs and audience chat! I just swapped mine with the lead singers - obvs for BVs the SM58 can sit lower in the mix than you would want your lead vox mic to be set at. As mentioned a little earlier in the thread, we measured the difference and the AKG D7S gave an additional 6dB headroom (in terms of desk settings at least) before feedback kicked in vs the SM58.

Possibly. I carry all sorts of spares and never need them myself.

Is this a bassist thing, carrying spare mics for the rest of the band

The only time I've sacked anyone from a band was when one of the guitarists was a bit of a perv to the female singer. I had a thing for the singer myself, so took great delight in kicking him out 🤣 But other than that I've never sacked anyone, or been sacked. The classic situation is that the other members go off and start a new band.....without the member they all dislike (we've all been there).

I think it depends on what the ambition for the band is, and also what stage of development it's at? If it's established and a purely "for fun" project then I agree, it should hopefully be relaxed e.g. my previous band which was a more "for fun" project and had a very stable line-up for it's final 6 years with no-one leaving. which was lovely. And when two key band members left back in 2022-23 (one emigrated, the other just felt it was getting too busy for him) it did lose quite a lot in terms of comradery. My current crew is a more semi-pro outfit and I'm very conscious that gig fees are a significant source of income for several of my bandmates. We have a crew of 7 on rotation, going out as a 4 piece, so if particular individuals weren't willing to put in the time and effort to make it work then they'd be asked to leave 'cos it wouldn't be fair on the rest. I guess I'm lucky that, 4 years in, we've got a lovely bunch of musos and gigging/working with them is a lot of fun. We're defo still not 100% free from occasional band angst - but your point about being able to have a grown-up chat is 100% spot on. It's not something I've always got right in times past, but hopefully something I'm getting better at.

If you want me to nail one long piece to some pallet box wood and throw some strings on top, it can be. Happy to help

Yeah you can't stack too many on any particular pair of rows without it having a moan at you

Just to throw another option into the mix - consider a cheaper multi-effect unit (like Zoom or others). Useful if she wants to try out different sounds - may not be quite as nice sounding as the options above, but in the context of a band mix, probably close enough (and gives more flexibility). Then when you know what you want, there is always the infamous basschat marketplace Phil

Don't forget the ultra-light Rotosound Funkmaster strings!

Agreed, I've been in a lot of bands, and have fallen out with a lot of people in them - some of who I'm still great friends with and with who we still occasionally have a damn good laugh about it all, a couple of others I never spoke to again - and as the result have left a lot of bands over the years and also seen many others leave. But I've never been sacked and never sacked anyone, just seems an odd thing to do in a band....

Sweet Sticky Thing — Ohio Players

I guess I'm fortunate with my lead vox then, haha! The two of the three female lead singers who have been using SM58s were both completely sold on our live performance experience of Set 1 being plagued by feedback, and then Set 2 being feedback-free with just one change to the set up at the interval: swapping-out their SM58 for my AKG D7S!

I'd find a D,E and F and start a new band with them. Maybe get a horn section in with G, H and I and find a couple of backing singers (J and K). While you're at it, decimalise the music scale and create two new notes, H and I. Sorted.

Yeah, I think asking someone who has used the SM58 to change mics would be like asking Brian May to change guitars I have to say though that if anyone is going to spend a digital mixer is probably going to make a bigger difference to the sound than changing the mics. My mixer is pretty basic and I've got four band parametric eq, compression, gating, reverb delay and detuning on every mic channel, plus a lot of stuff I've never even looked at. The pre's are audibly better than my old Yamaha MG desk too. Tweaking eq is much more intuitive and best of all I can save anything that works well. I'm intrigued by the Shure SM86, it's a lot cheaper than I was expecting, cheaper than the E935. I'm wondering if I should have looked at that first.

The new SVT models are killer and the new cab IRs are much more characterful, much like the best of the 3rd party captures that you can find on the cloud. The GED2112 models are cracking too, I had the pre-amp for a while, really captures the tone well. Looks like a very good update all round but I do wonder at the significant DSP overheads of these new models, even in a unit with processing to burn.

Yeah probably semantics? If someone's asked to leave a band against his or her wishes, by their bandmates that's a "sacking" in my books, even if it's done in a civil manner. But, as you say, it really should start with a grown-up chat if at all possible.

The monosynth is pretty silly: