Leaderboard

I'm in the house band for the two Sunday for Sammy shows next weekend. I can't give too much away 'cos the line-up is under wraps, but with 5,000 people at each show, it's going to be fun. I'll take some pics and that, and try not to make any mistakes. Disclaimer: I fully acknowledge this is a 'boast post'. Apologies.

Me - Could I take a closer look at this bass please? Them - ** reaches it down and starts slapping 7 shades out of it ** Me - Is that hard to play? Them - Umm...?? Me - Cos it's f**king hard to listen to.

Me - Do you sell Rotosounds? Them - Yes Me - Why?

You do know that all this could be avoided if you played properly... with your fingers...?

You know that lovely feeling when a bass you've been gassing for years shows up, coinciding with having the cash? Just happened to me..I'm over the moon. I've been drooling over this bass for many years..picked it up a few hours ago. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1977-Greco-GOB-1200-Electric-Bass-Guitar/302609356900?hash=item4674ec5864:g:dUcAAOSwdTJaY0Vf It has many dings and chips, but all the controls seem to work. Not sure whether to play it as it is or restore to its former glory. What say you fine gentlemen? PS does anybody know of a source of spares for these basses?

I'll be adding to this! After lots of uhming and ahing, I saw a post on their Instagram which had me going to see them at first given opportunity. Went up to Alpher HQ for a few hours yesterday, and this morning I ordered myself an Alpher. Words can't describe my excitement! It'll be a 5 string Mako Elite 5, with a crazy burl top and matching headstock. Ebony 'board with a birdseye maple neck. Body is single piece maple (it looks amazing), pickups will be three Aguilar Super Singles, and an OBP-3 pre amp. 33" scale (because I'm a short derrière), not much weight. Oh, and some of the offcut from the cap (the electric blue bit) will be going into a 12th fret inlay. Untitled by Dave Butterworth, on Flickr Untitled by Dave Butterworth, on Flickr

You'll miss them when the interweb has killed them all off........no nipping in to solve last minute emergencies

Looks generic and values itself too highly; therefore it's a great fit for the Chapman name.

If only we could swap local shops, all would be well in the world

Papa Was a Rolling Stone - same three notes, same pattern for the entire song, and still fabulous after all these years.

I've always been quite enamoured by Stings bass lines, always tuneful but often very empty, so I'll offer up the obvious Walking on the Moon

Use wire clips to hold the power wires in place. Don’t use those double-ended connectors, most pedal enclosures have a slight angle to the sides and therefore the jacks... using those connectors can strain the jacks and also makes it more precarious to remove those pedals from your board.

It looks like a giant steampunk phallus.

Single knob compressors are the work of Lucifer himself....

I use a Variax and while the 8 and 12 strings are decent approximations, and will do the job in their own way rather than take another bass to a gig, that is all they are, approximations. As is that pedal above. None of these will ever have the sound of real multiple courses, that slight delay between courses, the characteristics you get from actually striking more than one string. This can't be replicated by modulating the sound of a single string.

In the UK and in the USA, but you had to be there, obviously. And, featuring Ritchie Blackmore on guitar and Chas Hodges on electric bass guitar, here's Joe Meek's production from 1962 of The Chaps also known as The Outlaws ...

I’m sure DFS will have one in their never ending sale.

Me - I'm here to pick up five Yamaha tenor saxes we ordered? Them - What the f**k? We're a shoe shop.

Buy a Trace V-type preamp. Does exactly what you want and it'd be a lot cheaper than having something custom built. They sound AWESOME too!

I'd miss the good ones, but I suspect they will last longer because they're good. I certainly won't miss the arrogant chancers though...

* whilst walking through Ashdown section * Me - 'scuse me, I don't suppose you have a light?

The Sadowsky aluminium items are pretty good imho. Two screws to secure plus sleeve for those slightly thinner pot shafts. They look and feel amazing and with the little white marker are dead easy to adjust. Definitely not a 'value' item though

I read the title of the thread and immediately thought of Tina Weymouth, was going to suggest "Genius of Love" (by Tom Tom Club) as an example but there's a number of others too.

First rehearsal today - six hours' worth. It was loads of fun. The show's being shot for DVD, so everything has to be spot-on. We've got a week in the rehearsal hall, so we'll have the monitor mixes pretty much there by the weekend, so hopefully the check in the arena will mostly be tweaking stuff. The band is great.. the drummer's from Lindisfarne, the keyboard player's from Dire Straits, the other keyboard player and sax player are from The 1975's live band, the guitarist was a touring member of The Arctic Monkeys, and one of our vocalists sang on 'I Would Do Anything For Love' with Meat Loaf. And then there's me. I daren't pinch myself. Loads of pics here: https://www.sundayforsammy.org/sunday-for-sammy-2018-access-all-areas

Guitar or player?

Pitch to CV or MIDI for the bass guitar is just not feasible unless you have the world's cleanest and precise technique and are playing downtempo music. The laws of physics are always going to be against you. The theoretical minimum response time has going to be one complete wave cycle for the device to have a good guess at detecting the pitch. The open E on a bass is 41Hz, that means at the very, very best you are looking at 24ms between playing a note and the device working out what pitch it is. That's slap-back echo territory (i.e. noticeable), and in reality the actual response time is going to be closer to double that. Notice how in the demo in the OP you never get to hear the controlling signal in combination with the synth output except when it is making random glitching noises along with the drums. Also notice how the controlling signal is always something high-pitched like guitar or another keyboard. You can't blame the manufacturer for wanting to show their products in the best possible light, but I think a lot of purchasers are going to be very disappointed when they try and use these in a real world situation. There are various tricks that you can use to make the tracking quicker and more accurate but all of these take the expressiveness away from the controlling instrument, and IMO the whole point of using something like a guitar to control as synth is that you can make full use of that expressiveness. Otherwise you might as well use a keyboard and the standard synth performance controls. Also while in theory a monophonic device might be fine for bass parts, in practice one of things that makes the feel of a bass line played on bass guitar different from one played on a keyboard or other monophonic device is what happens when you play parts that swap between the strings. And once you've lost the feel of the bass part from that of playing on a bass guitar you might as well play it on a keyboard (or sequence it). There are players that can make pitch to CV or MIDI work for them. What you will find is that they are mostly guitarists and that they have spent years honing their technique and modifying their instruments to get around the inherent limitations of using pitch detection to control a synthetic waveform. I found very quickly that it was far easier for me to develop enough of a keyboard technique in a day or so that enabled me to play synth parts than it was to modify my guitar playing style to get the tracking to work well enough to satisfy my very basic requirements.

If such an inconsequential thing as pop-ups annoys you to the point of driving you from the forum you must indeed lead a charmed life. Heaven forbid anything important happens to you!

Probably best to avoid those people in future.

I thought there was just one, the key of bass

It’s standard. I love having the choice between Bass Clone, Vortex and Small Stone. Small Stone is smooth, Bass Clone thickens things up and the best word for Vortex is swoosh + crunch. YMMV!

Top advice from the dudes above

Speaking as someone who used to own a pub and therefore had to buy the bloody things I'll pretend I didn't hear that!

The wattage of the VT Bass 200 is about 150 watts with its internal speaker. With an 8 ohm extension speaker it's 200 watts.

Bill Black in the mid 1950's with a singer called Elvis something or other.....

Plus one for the Harley Jaco Jazz thing. Bang for buck.

What a shame, I had amazing dealings with S&T a few months ago. The guy I spoke to said they don’t sell direct to public anymore but asked what I needed and got it ordered for me direct with EB as it wasn’t a standard item (white pickup covers). They got held up with Cities basses in transit but I wasn’t in a rush. Got updates and then he arranged for me to pick them up from my local dealer to pay for them, amazing!

I'm 5' 10" and not very good at bass playing but it has nothing to do with my gender! I was surrounded by female bass players when I was first getting into bass, gender didn't seem to matter then we were all just punks! My first experience playing bass through an amp was at a Rubella Ballet rehearsal, thanks Gem.

There seems a certain kind of idiot who who has a mental image of a woman as 5’2” and either on a violin or piano. I know a local bass player who was asked by a (sober) punter how she could play bass on account of him not thinking her arms would be long enough. She is 6’2”, arm length Is NOT an issue. We spent a few minutess suggesting various things she could have wound him up with, her actual response was ‘are you f’kin serious?’ Which is unsurprising.

A very underrated player and capable of much more than the VHs allowed. By all accounts they weren't the easiest guys to get on with if you weren't family, as DLR, Sammy Hagar and MA might testify

I have to admit I'd not really heard of him till the gig. Hadn't looked at Kate's album notes for a few years and was expecting andy seward to be holding down the low end. I'll be keeping my eyes and ears open for more of Duncan in the future though.

I thought this was Alex and a co worker applying the Tolex?

You practice?

Nice. Hope it works for you. As a few people have asked, here is my 8 string. 😊