Leaderboard

Played it live

BOOM! Got the job!!!! Band is called Fraudio btw. Absolutely stoked and in need of a beer or two. Now begins the hard work!

Not a bass - my first-ever 6-string guitar was a quite decent Columbus SG copy which I had in 1980. Aside from a bolt-neck & fake humbuckers, it was a pretty reasonable facsimile of the original, down to having a very slender, volute-free neck/headstock junction. Can't quite remember how it happened but it probably involved the enthusiastic execution of inept powerchords, playing along with Motorhead or somesuch, and a surprise meeting of Columbus headstock and bedroom wall. I do remember a sudden loss of string tension and very rapid de-tuning. And then the "plop" as the newly-liberated headstock hit the floor. I lacked the skills to correctly repair my newly decapitated guitar - but I didn't lack imagination: I've still got it now.

Hi. In no particular order....(brain dump) Sounds are obviously identical. Addition of headphone output and master volume is Awesome! loving the colour screen, all the info in one place! and color represents block type so its easier to see at a glance what the blocks are doing. on the HXFX there's a lot of info, but its all spread around, and in B+W. moving blocks around the chain is harder, and unnecessarily so as there's plenty of knobs. You have to use Cut/paste the knobs seem to respond better. i love that it shows the midi PC on the preset selection screen. this makes it so easy if your using a midi controller. love the form factor Its TINY!!!! i wish they had put the screen on the RHS as i tend to play notes with my right hand and change parameters with the left. doing this mostly covers the screen with my hand. still, better than the HXFX i will miss ability to turn off more than 3 pedals on the HXFX addition of HPF and LPF in the global is awesome!!! HXFX doesn't have this copying blocks to another patch is easier on the stomp ill come and edit this post if i think of any more differences

Did you know....I only found this one out two weeks ago!........ When using youtube....Bottom right there is a wheel/cog/settings sign next to the YouTube logo. Click on that and you will find Speed. Click on that and you can slow it down to 75 % which also keeps it in tune. I never knew this all this time and have spent many extended hours trying to catch micro snippets of something going back and forth. Learning things slowly really gives me a chance to grasp exactly whats being played. Once I really know it slowly, I find it a lot easier to bring it up to normal speed. I can learn something I find complicated so much faster overall using this. Probably a bit of stating the obvious for a lot of folks but its a new discovery for me so if that helps anyone who like me didn't know🤩

Sold it on eBay for £26

Adam Clayton managed two gigs in a row once without a new signature model for the third gig, does that count?

So a while back I fancied having a mess about with a foam mute with the flats. Of course, dish sponges got sliced up as one does. But to be honest, they always looked totally naff and we’re a pain to thread into the tiny space between the bridge and pickup on my two Wals. Fine on the single pickup Aria. Still looked crap, though. Then I spotted these mentioned on a thread here or on Talkbass... https://www.facebook.com/pattonmutepadbassmute/ - maybe it was @wateroftyne who got one and posted about it a few years ago. Unfortunately by the time I spotted them they’d stopped making them. ☹️ Fast forward a couple of years and a few months ago Amy from Patton Bass Mutes drops me a mail saying, I’m starting making them again. So I ordered a set, one for each bass - she makes them individually to fit the dimensions of your bass. They arrived a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been messing about with them at home to good effect. However, last night was my first chance to try them in anger - on my ‘79 Wal Pro IIE. It’s got a slightly more old school sound than my other one so was a great candidate. I was so impressed. It worked perfectly. The custom size and little loop meant it was dead easy to pull in under the strings and gave the perfect amount of damping - also to whip back out for a couple of tunes I wanted to play unmuted. Played a number of songs fingerstyle and with pick and it really did add a totally old school tone. Particularly liked the pick sound on a couple of rocky, funky numbers. Brilliant. And picking without having to palm mute was surprisingly freeing! The big surprise was that it changed the pitch of the strings by about a quarter tone but when you think about the change in the free vibrating length of the string that makes sense. I was doubly surprised that it didn’t completely mess up the intonation which was still fine. The mutes are beautifully made and several cuts above some scraggy bits of old foam both on operation and in how they change the aesthetics of a beautiful bass. If you fancy trying that old Motown, Wrecking Crew style muted sound then the cost of around $15 plus postage for a Patton mute is well, well worth it. And hey, Christmas’s coming soon! Here’s the mute for the Pro Bass in action. Tell me this doesn’t look better than a bit of old dish sponge from Tesco...

Don’t 👀

Here's my twin Stingrays....and my real twins 😍 They're my babies, all four of them.

Hence the forum name then, Bassassin?

Blame it on Woody's tip off about the 10% discount. PMT had two delivered to the store on Friday morning and they had both been sold within an hour of the store receiving; I paid my deposit and they kept behind the counter for me to collect today. Look on the bright side, at least you got a £46.50 discount...not to be sniffed at! And in my case it was third order lucky so I'm not feeling too guilty at having finally got mine

Late 1970's - The roadie of the band I was in somehow managed to leave my '63 Precision (in it's case) overnight leaning up against his gatepost at his house after returning home after a Sat night gig - we were playing the Sun lunchtime and he'd agreed to leave the gear in the van but take all the guitars indoors overnight. Two little boys had knocked on his door about 10am on the Sun and asked him if he wanted the 'old guitar' that he'd left outside and 'was it for the dustman ?'.....

Took a bass off over my head onstage in Derry and smashed it straight into the lighting rig above me. About 25 years ago after seeing a Mr Big gig I decided to try supergluing three picks together like a clover and sticking it to a drill. Too impatient to let the glue dry properly I fired it up, splattering the bass with little beads of superglue which I never managed to remove. Oops. If anyone out there owns a black Charvel model 1 bass with mystery little bumps all over the front, that's the reason....

Here we go. All cased up for recording tomorrow, so the expression pedal is elsewhere. Compressor >. ES5 > Hall Fame. All the rest are in loops, so I can run the PS6 as a detune chorus after the filter or as an octave down in front of the Rat, with clean in parallel or bitcrush in parallel with the Okto etc etc. Game changer. The only downside is needing to bench the Mastotron because the Rat is so big. A mini clone will fix this problem for about 25 quid. Sorting the patch cables won’t be cheap though. I have a bigger board waiting, but this is the practical limit for band gigs.

You'd think that people like Sting and Bobby Vega could afford a decent re-fin, wouldn't you?

We've been looking forward to this one for a while: We were so grateful to be asked back to play the John Peel Centre. Shortly after arrival the exited manager tells us its sold out! We knew we were in for a good one! Sound was awesome, crowd were awesome, no technical hitches. Why aren't they all like this?

Major update. Stomp replaces Hxfx and the Es8 is back. I missed the loops

On Saturday we played a breakfast gig (8:30 to 11:30) for an investment company and its clients and staff.Our jazz quartet has done this gig for about six years now and although it is essentially playing "wallpaper music" we do get some occasional applause and a lot of comments from individuals.Over the three hours about 300 people came and went while we played some lighter jazz and some Christmas songs and we view the gig as a good rehearsal and play some songs that we don't play too often on our regular gigs. It's always fun to hear our singer/keyboardist do "Santa Baby" and we do some "jazzy" arrangements of Christmas songs and we all enjoy "Everyone's Waiting For The Man With The Bag" and "Baby,It's Cold Outside" which the singer and I do and is a lot harder to sing while playing a good bass line that it sounds but we nailed it.I used my DB and had fantastic sound straight into our Bose PA using just the Schatten Mini Pre for volume control and the EQ on the Bose. I know it sounds like a dreadful gig to some of you but it is held in a beautiful venue, we are fed well from a huge breakfast buffet, easy load in/out, nice friendly crowd including some young kids who dance up a storm and we are well paid and can pretty much play what we want.We are booked for next year already. Downside...I leave home at 6:30 for a snowy one hour drive for 7:30 load in.

Nah - he bought it relic'd by some guy in Denmark Street to make it look like he knew what he was doing.

I do it because I've seen other bass players do it, and I think it will give the illusion that I'm quite professional. 😁

Fair question, but despite four decades of trying, I haven't killed a bass. Yet.

Never thought I'd be in the market for a microphone but we did a rehearsal at the weekend and I was persuaded to do some backing vocals. Just some oohs and aahs as a kind of harmony with the singer but it turned out not too bad. I have always thought I had a terrible voice; well I do actually. But, with a bit of practice, I could get used to it. Not sure about the audience! So, seeing as I haven't bought anything music related for over a week, I just dropped £99 On the 935 plus stand and cable. Should be here by Wednesday.

Mine has just been delivered. The colour is very close to my Daphne Blue musicmaster bass and the roadworn job is natural looking & not too severe. It doesn't look grimey like some of the pics I have seen of this model, and the back of the neck has a smooth even matt finish. I was surprised that it came with a gigbag suitable for a precision or jazz which is several inches longer than the 'Fender urban shortscale' gigbag I use for my CIJ mustang & squier jag SS. The neck is a little chunkier than the CIJ mustang and the hipshot lollypop tuners are lovely. Straight out of the box it really doesn't feel like a spanking new bass - the set up is almost perfect and it feels like the bass equivalent of a comfy worn-in jumper. I've had a quick blast though my Roland Microcube bass RX amp and it seems that the pickup is louder than the one in my CIJ. Not sure how I'm going to break the news to the missus.

Whoops, today is a day off, and our journey from Manchester to Oxford went dangerously close to Leamington Spa, where this happened...

I’d personally never tighten a truss rod with the strings tuned to pitch, otherwise as you say the rod is actually fighting the strings, loosening however the string tension can help bring more releif to the neck. Glad you got it sorted ok. Enjoy your bass!

Yep, the medium stages sported the 500w terror bass and the main stage had the ad200b aloft the matching 8x10 all of which sounded great. I've owned the ad200b which was great for the period that I had it and I've been semi interested in getting a terror bass so that experience by no means put me off Orange.

Thank you everyone for your input on this. I took the bass to an excellent luthier here in Bristol. He took the tension off the strings and the truss rod - said the neck looked good, with a slight back-bow in it when under no tension. We then set it back up again with the same strings, then loosened the strings again before a final tune up. When he tuned it back up we were actually able to release the truss rod quite a bit - he said sometimes they can work better if you do it this way - so you're tensioning the strings against the rod, rather than the rod against the strings.. if you know what i mean. Also, he was impressed with the bass. Liked the weight and the slim neck. And how easy it plays. Anyway, I've currently got a good bit more adjustment in the rod, which I'm happy with. It also does seem sensitive to small tweaks. Might change to lighter gauge strings to see how much more that gains me, will update if i do.. but for now i'm happy I've got a good bit of headroom if i need it. I'm keeping the bass! Thanks again, Ben.

It depends what problem specifically you're having. If you're missing the lower string try to include a little more arm motion perhaps? Maybe you're catching the skipped string accidentally? I guess I'd practice string-skipping leading with each RH finger. Rotating the hand at the wrist slightly when passing over the skipped string can help a bit, you can see Altesa doing this in the video Mudpup posted. Altesa uses the anchor point of her thumb as the center of the rotation.

Herbie Flowers and his blue jazz?

Paid not to play:

My Wals are still my Wals but it's another (very cheap) toy to play with. So much less expensive than some sort of fancy "Motown-in-a-box" miracle pedal or something! LOL!!!

I hit the wall some time ago. I just sat down and leant against it with a pint. We are friends now, me and the wall, comfortable in each other’s company.

Nice job, getting a job with a band with paid gigs is not easy. Blue

Yeah Spalted Ash

No problem. Ref your options, if it is a modern 2 way trussrod (which I'm pretty sure it is) there isn't a removable nut like on a Gibson / Fender so the option of adding a washer probably isn't one you can consider. When you tried to adjust the trussrod further, did you loosen the strings and add some medium pressure to aid the backbow as you adjusted?

I have recently got myself a new 'winter project' to fiddle about with on those dark evenings while the current Mrs Rubis watches "I'm a celebrity" etc I've always fancied a 12 string for a bit of jingly jangly Johnny Marr action, and I spotted those Gear 4 Music kits online, which seem to get quite good reviews for the low cost involved, perfect for tinkering with! The problem is, they look to be maple fingerboards, and I prefer rosewood, but I did see an assembled one (they have the rosewood board) which was advertised as B stock or returned goods with £20 knocked off, so for the very reasonable price of £79 I snapped it up. It arrived very promptly, all nicely double boxed and still with the cellophane on the scratchplate, the allen keys, strap, leads gig bag and even the plectrums were all still in there. No signs of damage at all...………..better than a Black Friday bargain! Excellent service from Gear4Music, I might add. I must say that for the money, the quality is very good indeed, the body is ash (European I should imagine) but it's not heavy, the neck is nice and chunky, which I prefer, the fretting is all good and the neck joint is better than on a very expensive Strat I once owned Obviously it's not perfect, at this price I would be foolish to think it would be, but I was happy to note that all the little things which would need fettling are the ones I was expecting to find, having read reviews of them before buying, mostly set up and minor cosmetic things, such as (oddly) one of the string ferrules doesn't match the other 5 on the back! As I said at the start, this is just a little winter project, to see if I could make something decent playing and looking out of a cheap online bargain bucket. My intention is to turn it into something which looks more like this...……. ……....continuing with my love of Fenders' pastel colours, I will be respraying it in Surf Green nitro, with a matching headstock and amber neck tint. At the moment the finish is all clear, a thick poly on the body and a very anaemic looking satin on the neck, and although the finish quality is excellent, I want it to look more retro. So that's the plan, I shall try to sort out any little issues I find on the way, although having had it for a couple of weeks, I must say there is nothing wrong with these guitars as they come, and if the other stuff is like this I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them....check out the double necked Tele Jangle on Wayne !

I've always fed my lead through the strap (and through a handle on the amp/cab, the idea being that if the lead gets caught, it puts on the strap/amp handle rather than on the plug. Even when learning new material at home, I do this, just a good habit to get into.

Hello! I have recently moved to Exeter and I am hoping to find some people to play/jam with. I have been playing guitar for many many years and my longest stint in a band was with an 18 piece jazz (jazz/funk) big band. Which was great fun but I have played everything from jazz to country and rock and everything in between. I’ve even been going back to classical recently! I’d love to find some like minded people to play with who might be interested in noise rock, post punk and interesting rhythmic exercises. Any thoughts, please drop me a line.

Dude, that's a monster board! Like some of your choices. I've just completely reworked mine as well - I got a Ditto X2 and wanted to alter the routing to make it easier to use, as well as having a space for my wireless on the top right - The Mooer bitcrusher is excellent - the FCB1010 is actually controlling patches on the Future Impact and the envelope filter, as well as providing midi expression pedal control into both. The two boss expression pedals are plugged into the filter and the boss SYB-5 - so my filter pedal actually has 2 expression pedals - mad flexibility while stood up. I can't tell you how good the SYB-5 is with the expression pedal, it makes it a supremely expressive synth. This board was constructed for a synth based project, but it's going to get use in a funk context as well - I've got a lot of flexibility in here. The FunkFace has great retro funk tones, with the valve filter on board, the FI is supremely flexible, the MarkBass has the best tracking for faster stuff, and combining valve fuzz, octaver and bitcrusher sounds pretty synth as well. All with a final mini wah onboard as required. The Ditto is just for my own creative fun.

My maple Mk3 4 string in the group picture above got sold. Then a Mk2 fell in my lap to replace it.

Hi all just joined so go easy, owned my first bass at about 12 yrs of age felt it was the instrument for me, I own a 1987 Ernie ball music man , fender precision, and an Ibanez Sr 500. Currently not in a band but gigged for 20yrs plus, with various cover bands. Still enjoy the instrument no finer way to release the stress. Looking forward to reading the topics , picking up tips etc . cheers

Ash over mahogany? The grain is lively (I meant to type “lovely” but that works too, lol!). I hope it’ll be a nice translucent finish.

The capacitor determines, in conjunction with the pickup coil, what the hinge or rolloff frequency will be. Generally, the higher the value of the cap, the lower the rolloff frequency, and vice versa. The volume potentiometer, since the third leg is usually grounded, determines the loading to ground, which can affect the resonant peak of the circuit. Generally, the higher the value of the potentiometer, the higher in frequency and amplitude of the resonant peak frequency of the pickup. But this is usually only subtly audible at best, especially on a bass. Because a typical tone cap circuit brings the capacitor off the wiper lug and grounds without the use of the 3rd lug, using a 500 kohm pot turned down to 250 kohms (with an audio or log taper pot, that means turning the knob down from 10 to about 7 or 8), has an identical effect on the circuit.as using a 250 kohm pot. The difference is only which number on the knob, or degree of rotation of the pot shaft, gives the same tone. Using the 500 kohm tone pot will decrease loading to ground when dimed, and may result in the bass being subtly brighter. I don't think anybody has run frequency analyzer traces on the same instrument with the same pickup but with the different value pots and caps, although a few have run them on just the caps. Since historically dual coil humbuckers have greater inductance than single coil pickups, and/or more intra-coil capacitance as well, it has been traditional to use 500kohm pots in order to raise the resonant frequency as high as possible to get more presence when desired out of a humbucking pickup. The main exception to this is the traditional split Precision pickup - the factory continues to use 250 kohm pots as standard for this pickup. The point being is that you would probably use the same value capacitor irrespective of the volume and tone pots used. Standard is .047 microfarads. .033 will keep more mids in the mix as it is rolled off. .022 is for those who want guitar-like brightness. .068 will be darker, and the darkest commonly used for dub tone, and which was the original value used in the '51 - '56 P-basses, is .1, giving huge thump when rolled off completely. With the tone pot dimed out, the 500 kohm volume pot will give the pickup the slightest bit more presence, but that goes away as soon as you start rolling off the tone knob. So after all is said and done, most folks still come back to the traditional 250 kohm audio taper pots and .047 capacitor for a conventional bass pickup circuit. I do like a little more mids when rolled off, so like the original J-bass stack knob bridge pickup circuit, I use a .033 for my tone control cap. Hope this helps.