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Fantastic sold out gig at Sudbury Quay Theatre last night with Leather & Lace! Crowd were well up for it and we had a great sound. 👍 I was especially pleased when the Sound guy told me that mine was the best bass tone he's ever been presented with!😲 Had a few more compliments on my sound from punters after too.... 🎸🎶😎

Telebass, sorry to hear your situation buddy…. I can relate…. I have a condition called Ankylosing spondylitis which has left me with an awful lot of similarities to you in regard to fusion, surgeries and just general spinal nightmare… Im sticks all Time and a wheelchair for anything outside of my limited capabilities to stand, walk or like you say , just be upright. What I’ve come here to say is that for a long time I stopped playing, packed in and accepted it……. But after some time i found a way to make it work. that did seem impossible at one time and believe me sometimes I still have major difficulties , but with a band that values my input, they’re willing to help fetch and carry if it means I just sit and play. with the right bass , playing sitting (even at gigs) , even if I’m curled up over my bass, I can still pull it off and be right in the pocket. morphine 3 times a day helps with that but joking aside , its kinda become my thing to be hunched over my bass looking like I’m in the groove…. Know one needs to know that that just the shape of my spine now ! Hahah my band rehearsals are once a week for 2 hrs, gigs are no more than 1 or 2 every 2 or 3 months…. It’s enough for me…. We enjoy it….. take some time pal, find a way and don’t let it take away the last thing in your life that makes you you. I’ll be thinking of you buddy…… take some time…. edit: just re-read and realise this is an age post with a positive update ! Which is great to read. a note on the DVT, I also have that in my right leg…. and blood thinners for life (apixiban) ….. my legs are absolutley ruined too after a terrible bike crash around 18’years ago i which I shattered both femurs…. seems we have alot in common hahaha

Looking back through the last four pages, I can only conclude that when you said "discuss" what you actually meant was "agree with me or else".

Private party last night. In my home town though so that was easy. An impromptu set as our own support, then I stood in for a band comprising the birthday boy and his son's for a few tunes and then a full blown Bandeoke which descended into good natured drunken chaos. Great fun.

Basso = Grimalkin with a new account. Different name, same old boring shite.

Indeed - that is why there is only one correct size of shoes. Everyone else is wrong.

New multi fx day! Got a headrush gig board this week. Been looking at a whole range of mfx and the headrush units seemed to have a good mix of power, decent sound and out of all of them seemed to have the easiest interface by far. Not a lot of bass models but all sound decent. Some really nice sounding guitar models too. All in all a good bread and butter starting point.

There are three types of necks: fat ones, slim ones, and those that need winding in

And then she looked at me with those big brown eyes and said…………

tell the guitarist to turn the f@ck down...

I took the time to take a pair of pics after following this thread for ages - this is my pedalboard, a Nano+ powered by a TRex Fuel Tank JR underneath (with feet lightly raised) I use this one on various projects and give it a few add-ons for specific gigs The base/main shape/main band version of it is this one: Polytune2 noir mini EHX Holy Grail EHX Bass Clone Fairfield Circuitry Barbershop Fairfield Circuitry Modéle B The Pedaltrain itself, the power bank, the TC Polytune and the Barbershop have been together in this since 2016. Once I found the Modéle B (which is an always on Barberhsop) I stacked them resulting in a distortion grain i love. The chorus and reverb are bridged with a modded Ikea tool for some parts of my main band and I love the tone they get together. When I play with another act I stick a loaned B7K, and when I play in my acoustic duo I add a Tech21 for clean guitar and the Boss DD-3 for a guitar part also. This is the largest board I had, at the time (2017-2020) I had a post-rock/desert instrumental trio and I knew no clean at all.. good memories (I still have all the gear, it's just... in drawers. Sigh)

I've built/assembled/constructed tons of guitars & basses. Obtain the necessary bits, nail them together, some mild fettling might occasionally be required. However I lack the necessary skills (or time & motivation to learn them) to actually make/create a functioning musical instrument from scratch. Projects like my headless Rickish mess and, for example, @Andyjr1515's incredible Psilos bass are on completely different planets. I am in both awe and envy of the creativity displayed in BC's' Build Diaries folder.

I think I have worked it out, combing this thread with other similarly proscriptive nonsense. Thin, shallow necks are fast, but only if you use a pick and a music stand and play once a month. If you wear a hat you can play a narrow but chunky neck finger style every other weekend as long as you only take occasional prompts from an iPad. But it is only wide, chunky necks that allow the correct technique employed by proper, regularly gigging musicians who either sight read or memorize 300 songs, with or without a waistcoat. Did I miss anything out?

W/ gig bag!!😄 This thing needs a body bag.

Yes - your nipples are exactly the same distance apart as your earlobes. Not just yours, I mean everybody's. Relatively. 👍

The Thighs of a Cow ～ The Wonder Stuff

To me, the most disappointing thing is that there are some really thoughtful replies that had to take a backseat to the op’s issues. I’d love to revisit this topic. There’s lots of meat left on the bone…

Ain’t spleen nuthin yet. BTO

yep he did a few songs for me that i was trying to learn. Gem of a guy and here's hoping he's ok. Dave

Bilbo helped me out with some transcribing I was having difficulty with last year , he took the time out to help me which was much appreciated , really nice guy, I hope he’s just taking a break from things and nothing is wrong 🙂

I looked at downloading some of the transcriptions from his archive thread but I was unable to all the links seem to be broken from back in the day, is there any chance we can restore? Also hope Bilbo is well, being new to community and reviewing his contributions he seemed invaluable to many.

Tweeters don't hiss. Amps do.

Finished build 1/5 Pedal PCB…er PCB clone of the Fairfield barbershop in a 1590b the barbershop is fairly picky about the ldss of the Jfets - the SMD jfets weren’t too hard, getting a batch and measuring the ldss of them all was! The decal was a pain, it ended up as a metallic sticker - Some of the other pedals I’ve been building I’ve spent a bit of time on the graphics - by the time I got to this I kinda wanted something stupid. A talent pedal would have been ideal but I couldn’t think up cool visuals … so we ended up with a homage to the best carbonated soft drink around. the labels were a bit high up, and the knobs aren’t deep enough but it works. Adjust sugar and caffeine to taste…

The/your problem is not your eq per se. If all your bandmates stopped playing you'd be able to hear yourself regardless of how your eq is set. you'd still be able to hear your self if you turned your volume down by half. In fact you'd still hear yourself if you turned off your amp altogether. My guess, based on having no idea what your band is, is that your guitarist(s) have waaaaay too much low end in their sound. if they took this out, (good luck suggesting this) you would have so much more bandwidth to fill the low end yourself and fit in and around the drums much more satisfyingly and as a result your drummer will have a nicer time and may well be able to play quieter or with greater dynamic swing. I've been in this exact situation in bands before. Having had to boost mid eq (regardless of the bass I was using) and still only just being able to hear my attack. Upon inspecting the guitarists amp the bass knob was always maxed, producing a huge amount of low end that in reality I couldn't "compete" with. Have a chat with your guitarist about what they can do for their eq FOR THE BAND (a lot of guitarists struggle with this) and see kf you can sculpt a band sound everyone is happy with. Good luck!

I have read the whole story. My background in some research shouts me: we need absolute numbers instead of relative talk. So @Basso what thickness is thick, what is thin, where are the limits, and what is optimal? Or had Leo it right in the first place with his bass playing friends? Shall we move to scale lengths soon? So sorry, I forgot string spacing, gauge and material, # of strings, neck profiles et al. I think this discussion will last some time.

Personally I associate building a bass, or anything else, with assembling a bunch of pre manufactured parts, but making a bass, or anything else, with actually making the body, neck etc from a raw material, ie wood. As the body and neck could be made but all of the hardware will (usually) be off the shelf then I can see why it may be referred to as building a bass.

Very interesting topic! I suspect much is also down to what's happening on the sound desk, because the sound engineer can pretty much negate/change anything you do on stage by fiddling around with the EQ on the desk, probably some compression/limiting back there too. I've also always thought that "mids was where it was at" but I had the pleasure of seeing Incognito at Ronnies a week or two ago, and the bass was positively pumping through with seemingly hardly any mids at all - just a nice deep "thump" but cutting through over the kick etc. It reminded me of why I'm a bassist ! As an aside, I was playing my new (to me) Spector NS5H2 last weekend, and when we came on at the end for a final song, by mistake I maxxed the neck pickup and mid tone (thinking I was turning both pickups on - damm those vol/vol setups!) and thought "wow, this is very jazz fusion - Jimmy Haslip" before noticing my error and pulling the mids back and the bridge pup on - back to smoothness ! (well as much as you can with a Spector!)

As mentioned in my post above, its to do with the size and weight of the collection - the larger and the heavier the items they collect, the less other items they can collect and thus the less they get paid. They're system will show the size and weight, so they pull up, get out, then don't knock and get back in the van and drive away. That way their trackers show to their bosses that they were there and then they can go on and collect 3 or 4 smaller parcels instead of your one big one. It's a shìt system and it promotes a terrible service.

@fleabag If it's growling it is either coming from your bass configuration/attack of the strings, or it's distortion. I can get all kinds of growly with round wound strings if I pluck it like I mean it just so in the breadbasket between bridge and neck. Distortion can come from too much gain applied to a circuit or too much power applied to speakers. Distortion of low mids is very audible in the upper mids. Instead of boosting mids you could cut the bass and treble and up the volume. Less chance of too much gain or power overall.

Even setting aside preferences, to me it does not make sense the idea that if one compares necks that differ in depth by normally some 1-3 mm and hands that differ in lenght and shape by more than that, one can argue that "bigger is better" in absolute terms. Besides, I am sure one can achieve "correct" technique on a violin.. I tried to think of my own experience. I would indeed agree that I do not find shallow necks "faster". In fact, I would agree that with shallow necks I tend to bend my fingers less, which puts them in a more relaxed position and makes it more likely that I won't play with the tip of my finger (note: I tend to, I don't have to, nothing in them prevents bending my fingers). So while I certainly do not find deeper necks slower, I notice that my thumb gets tired earlier. Looking into it I believe the reason is that, the deeper the neck, the more the "base" of the thumb (metacarpal, according to google) is necessarely more perpendicular to the forharm. That is just a geometrical necessity, assuming the position of the other fingers is the same and that the tumb rests on the neck in the same place. Hence, the thumb makes more of its work through muscles. Again, to me this looks like basic phisics. If you push it to the opposite extreme, and assume an implausible situation with the metacarpal parallel to the foreharm with a straight thumb, and perpendicular to the fretboard, there would be almost no hand muscles involved, much of the resistance would come from the bones. Because of that, especially given my background of tendinitis at the thumb, I can definitely say that a deep neck would not be my optimal neck for sustained fast playing. On a similar note: as I am experimenting a bit with learning some funk stuff (I have no background with it) I find that I am constantly using barre-like fretting to play notes on different strings and the same fret in sequence. Because of that, my fingers are obviously often straight. Moreover, my fingers are mostly flat on the fretboard most of the time when I slap as I cannot mute with the plucking hand's thumb. Judging by videos on youtube, this is quite common and maybe not wrong for the style? If there is a need to keep fingers straight a lot of the time to play in a certain style, then I would think the faster neck for that style would be a neck that allows to keep that "incorrect" position with minimal strain Edit: just thought of Rocco Prestia. I doubt one can play his music with "correct" hand position as he's muting all the time

Haha! Glad to hear man. Best enjoyed in moderation. Those lead sounds are coming from the Meris Enzo running in parallel to the C4; but pretty much all of the C4 patches are from @Quatschmacher and are on the Neuro app. 😊

Let me get my patches worked out and I'll see what i can do.

Yeah, I have a Peavey MiniMax and the sound out of the box is just as you describe the Minimega, the fx controls are well chosen and intuitive so it is relatively easy to get the sound you want. the only downside are the noisy fans, not a problem in a rehearsal room or at a gig

Desiccated Follower Of Fashion The Kinks

We actually need some video of this.

It's a toss up between that and the recently released gold foil Fender jazz.

Installed and looking great.