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https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/395084-the-reggae-thread/

Long story short after a fairly long time not playing live and having not recorded anything in about 8 years I'll be recording shortly and (hopefully) gigging again soon. Previously I have been in bands that always played in standard tuning (BEADG for me but not using the B string much) and these bands have always been more on the RHCP side of things so fairly easy to cut through the mix. This band however tunes in Drop A but with a lower E string below it so I'm tuning in EAEAD. Using a Dingwall NG2 for this so scale length isn't an issue thankfully. Ive got a fairly decent tone for cutting through set up but would love to hear advice from others who have more experience playing in these (quite frankly absurd) tunings! Should say as well, gear wise I just put everything through a Quad Cortex.

Re Hartwood Delta arriving tomorrow.

Fender have instructed dealers NOT to I bought a new Fender MIK on a personal impurity from Japan. When I enquired about another I was told the had been stopped by Fender. Apparently not illegal in Japan.

Just also discovered this (but searched to see if anyone had it on the forum!). The fight about using a pick, and comment about active vs passive pickups for losing a girlfriend sounds scarily familiar to this forum! ..."and we all need to remember why we got into the bass in the first place" - "because the band already had two guitarists... because four strings is easier?"

To clarify, I mostly handled international acts on the “Americas” side of the pond, both touring but later as the A1 (lead audio) in several “higher end” venues. The only UK tour I did was in the 1980’s with Taj Mahal, and I never encountered any issues. I stopped working dive type venues in the early 1980’s, realized early on that it would be impossible to make a living and raise a family. I mostly worked venues in the 1000-2500 cap range, in part because there’s respect built into that type of venue, but also because they tended to be union or union friendly facilities with clearly defined work (and safety) rules. My crew made it ~40 years without a reportable accident or injury. During this entire time, I designed pro audio and bass/guitar gear for some of the largest names in the industry during my downtime. Now that I’m retired from pro audio events, I design full time for Mesa Boogie and Gibson, It all goes hand in hand, I met others who had design “side hustles” while touring as well. The touring experience helps make good, real world, player friendly solutions for players.

Bit of a rabbit hole, you can spend a long time finding out they don't do what you want, but the free versions of these will create video for audio. https://invideo.io/ https://pika.art/ More... https://audiocleaner.ai/audio-to-video-ai https://pictory.ai/audio-to-video https://wavel.ai/solutions/ai-video-generator/audio-to-video-ai

I think once we get into the realm of very high end basses like >£7k for a custom US NS-2, it gets really subjective and personal and goes beyond having a quality tool for a job. I don't think I'd order a custom NS-2 but I'd consider the right used one at the right price. Having owned a US NS5-XL in the past and gigged it a lot, I'm not convinced it's worth 3x what my Euro 5LX is as a gigging tool, or that it offered 3x as much anything but if that is my only measure, I'd be missing the point. Ordering a custom NS-2 would however be very low risk compared to going 100% custom. At least you know exactly what the recipe is and that you weren't going to be disappointed. What all this tells me is that my various Euros are phenomenal basses and extraordinary value and a few of them are really special. I played Gary's CST with the Legacy and it's fab, so I understand what you're enjoying about it. Have you considered the LHZ pedal? Whatever Spectors I buy in the future, they'll either be used private or I'd go through the import route for anything new. I think my point is, do what you fancy, especially after holding that fascination for 40 years.

Carol service this evening where along with all the normal ones we did a cover of the below that went really well, helped by a very awesome singer, equally good violinist and our lead guitarist trying out a new Irish Mandola - they did make me play Cajon though!

A long time ago I used to work for a business making t-shirts and selling them on eBay - the problem was that while we would pay our VAT and taxes and national insurance and run everything above board we were constantly being undercut by companies that would fire up, copy all our designs, flog them cheaper and then disappear - the only way you could do this is either slave labour, or avoid VAT by legal and non-legal means. Cracking down on this, and the likes small parcels of Chinese fast fashion avoiding taxes/import etc is really important unless we want to see a massive hollowing out of our society... So there is the likelyhood this might be rubbish for some hobbiests who flip lots of high value gear and don't keep receipts - but I kinda think the long term this is a good thing. It will protect jobs. Plus it's the data the HMRC are after for trends, going after Beedster who sold two Bitsas, or Dawn who chucked her cheating husband out and sold off all his precious fishing rods is hardly going to be cost effective... the guy flipping 4 cars a month, or the t shirt business turning over £1M+ a year and avoiding all taxes might be worthwhile their time...

Il est Ne, Le Divin Enfant by Dr John

I'm not sure if they're on Spotify, which I don't use either, but if Monk Montgomery's "Bass Odyssey" or "Reality" are there I would recommend them.

“Joys of Christmas” Chris Rea "December Will Be Magic Again” Kate Bush

Pros. Only 2 screws to slacken instead of 4. A few more grams of weight shaved off. Less chance some ham-fisted oaf can disturb components when prising the clip off the battery. Cons There is no universal standard size for 9v batteries. That can cause problems at a really inconvenient time, box was designed for Duracell but you're holding Eveready. Not an issue with a control cavity mount.

Regarding Mohini Dey, I wouldn't condemn her as being a bad person for playing unnecessarily complex bass guitar, or for trying make some money from it by endorsing AI, or whatever. I just think she's either made some bad decisions, and/,or been badly advised by someone on how to further her career via social media. In the Internet Age there's so many more opportunities to make bad decisions that can be instantaneously shared with the whole world forever. Everybody makes mistakes, I've made plenty of my own and then made more when I should have known better. It's important to keep things in proportion. No one has been irreparably harmed by Mohini Dey and whatever she does on social media. Myself, I couldn't care less about AI, it's going to do whatever it's going to do. Nothing is going to hold back that tide. To me it's more about Mohini as a bass player. If she can learn to play like that why can't she hear how incongruous the end product sounds? It could all be so different if she did.

I always bring my rig to gigs and then decide if I´ll use the provided backline or my own stuff. Since I´m a soundengineer, too, I never had a problem to communicate my needs to the local crew. In the end it´s just plugging an XLR from amp 1 to amp 2 DI out and backwards. I´ll do that for them and all is good, no more additional work for them, no complaints. In my own location I have a Boogie Prodigy top + Powerhouse 4x10" as well as a rack with Sansamp RBI preamp + KMT DC3 poweramp + 2x EV15L (TL606) cabs as 2nd choice. This is clearly a serious kit. We had a few bassplayers in that were not happy, though. It always turned out that they were idiots and had no clue about sound.

Myself and @Dankology on this little beauty written by me - Yousef did basses and knob twiddling with the interface and mac I did baritone, acoustic and used his wonderful Rickenbacker 12 string. we had some mates in on horns and strings and a couple of other singers in. enjoy.

I had used MMC's in a few builds prior but always had a soft spot for the dimazio model one as it was what was in my first ever bass, so decided to try it paired up with an MMC. It can be a bit too much soloed, but blended with the bart they sound great together. In that fretted one in the pic above the signal goes from the blend knob to a bart NTBT pre to give treble and bass cut and boost which it provides plenty of sonic flexibility. When I first built it I was considering parallel / series switches for one or both pickups but having played it for ten years or so now I don't think it is needed, plus it would turn an already busy control cavity into a spaghetti monster. For the new build I am aiming for a more tidy wiring set up built around an east filter pre amp, sourced second hand from the forum (pic below). A Question I have for anyone who might know is, what are the pros and cons of a separate battery box over mounting the battery inside the main control cavity ?