Leaderboard

This has been a useful thread. I appreciate all the comments. For those that care about such things, this is what I'm getting.

As an update to this topic, I had a belated birthday gathering at the weekend and my wife had arranged for a birthday cake that hit the centre of my Venn diagram of pedals, basses and Star Wars. It's one of the more over the top things I've seen but loved all the more for it. The bass even has the Dingwall logo on it!

Saw this on Coda Musics website, favoured maple neck whereas the majority of Mustang basses are rosewood, and pretty much spot on 7lbs, two major factors for my choices nowadays. Plus I can add some Hipshot Ultralite tuners and shave off a bit more so a 6lb-something bass, result. Out of the box the set up is nice, good even, and though I don’t usually like Fender strings it both plays and sounds good. I’ll have no use for the Jazz pickup on its own but the Precision pickup and both pickups together are difficult to choose between, each being really nice. Just have to make sure my arthritic thumb is ok with the neck, at first try it feels slightly thicker than my Japanese Mustangs so next few days I’ll be putting in the hours to make sure. Am sure I’ll keep it, intention is to swap the pickguard to black, and replace the string tree with a Hipshot triple retainer to encourage a better break angle for the A string. I was thinking about the bridge as well but it’s perfectly solid enough and given that I now play with a much gentler touch I’m not fussed about it not having any guiding grooves so it’s staying.

It’s got a dedicated input for me in the top corner

Well if you took any notice of some opinions towards Mr Clayton on here, anything with one string will cover it.

Who?

He does. And I think he blames me for it. But it does sound bloody good!

No, active pickups were created so that you could use a smaller magnetic field which would have less drag on the strings, giving you a more pure sound of what the strings were doing, but doing that creates less power from the pickup so you amplify it to bring it up to the output level of a normal pickup with a strong magnet. active preamp (on passive pickups, like most basses) was made so that you could control the output impedance of the bass, without the output and frequency response of the bass being governed by the output cable and whatever you plugged into, to give it more consistency between amps / effects. As a side effect you could then also control EQ better, but that wasn't the point. Ultimately all basses are active if you plug them in, it just depends if you want the amplifier before or after the jack cable.

As you’re in England I’d be looking local , both BF and LF Sys make world class cabs.

Remove the J pickup, that'll help with the weight! 😁

My economy pedalboard painted in Trace Elliot colours (nearly) to match my rig. After lots of shopping around it's probably cost me around £250-£275 all in. Best pedal of the lot? Boss NS-2 Noise Suppressor. Cures all ills. Close second comes the Sonicake Levitate Reverb/Delay. Magic for about £20.

Just how I play. One note at a time

The Blend control basically mixes between your un-effected signal and the SansAmp signal. This was implemented to emulate the type of signal chain that bass guitar was usually recorded with. In the studio or live, they would usually mic the bass amp and run a DI from the bass and the two sounds were mixed together at the console. The mic'd amp would be the main tonality and the DI'd signal would add punch and definition. If you put all the controls at 12 o'clock and engage the pedal with the Blend off or fully CCW, you will hear that your signal is the same as when bypassed. The Drive and Presence are the amp and speaker emulation. Ay you turn the Blend up to 12 o'clock your signal is 50/50 un-effected and SansAmp. The presence control is similar to the same control on a vintage tube amp. It adds high frequency content and also the attack envelope. Drive and Presence only work on the SansAmp portion of the circuit.

Nah - that's exactly why phasers are so good.

I have the birdcage version of Monique. When I bought it , I mentioned one was on the way (in another forum) and Jule contacted me to say he wasn’t aware of my order but he would make it right. I immediately told him I had bought a used one , he told me I could have kept him going for a week or two. I’ve since had several keyboard contacts with Jule , and he seems to be a wonderful character. I like him. Monique is truly a thing of beauty. I was running a Bergantino Forte amp , something that’s renowned for having clean transparent power , it’s a good back end for Monique. I use the effect return channel rather than the regular input to bypass the Forte pre and tone stack. Monique gives me that tube warmth and saturation , and there is magic in the sensitivity knob. Yes indeed. I want a rich old school thump , with warmth , and some serious slam. I want things to feel deep. I love what Monique does. I am a believer. Paid more than I wanted to , and today have no regrets whatsoever. Knowing what I know today I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

No, flanging isn't the same as phasing, it's more closely allied to chorus. https://producerhive.com/ask-the-hive/chorus-vs-flanger-vs-phaser/

Droomer, to be accurate

Just wanted to say thank you to all at BC who have helped me with advice over the last few years on here All my main bass gear is now sold and gone and the final small bits are slowly going or advertised on here. I feel very happy with my decision to quit playing especially live and I will enjoy playing my acoustic guitar at home and concentrate on enjoying a non gigging life. Once again thank you to all of you who have purchased gear from me and to all my BC buddies on here

All ( I think) of the new album played live November 1st + most of their best songs in a 3 hour long concert. They certainly give their fans the money's worth, and posting the concert on YouTube is ace too. (edit: posted it in the "what are you listening to now" thread but thought it belonged here too.)

Like him or loathe him, he’s the reason that I started playing bass. I admit he’s not Michael man ring but it is “in the pocket, in time” bass which is what most people expect to hear

IIRC the original line to The Real Me was played in a single take which JE was sure Townsend would reject as being overly complex and disorganised Man, what a take......

Whats really extraordinary here is if I was to ask a question or make a statement about 'practise'.. it'd be lucky if it ran to a couple of pages yet this subject of 5 v 4 strings appears to occupy so much thinking? My moneys on practise..,Practise enough and you can sound great playing anything and forget about how many strings you have.

JE's a player I understand. If I had those songs put to me, those are the lines I'd play, at least the technically simpler ones. I'd love to be able to think like Flea or Zender or many of the great funk players, or play fretless as lyrically as Bakithi Kamalo or Mick Karn, or just hold it al down like Deacon or Macca, but I think at heart I'm an ill disciplined rock player, and the sheer joy I get from playing JE's lines makes this bass 100% worth it, one thing I am sure of is that it is going to have very little trouble finding its way through the mix 👍

I pronounce it 'Flanger' - never heard it pronounced 'Flanger' before.

I think a BC Bash at Duxford and Cosford in in order? We tend to hit the Folkestone show each year as my wife's Mum live's right under it, and two or three years back they had a Victor. Man, it was impressive, not Vulcan impressive, but up there. Those Cold War designs were extraordinary

Next question. Which haircut?

... or make a run for it. Point over their shoulders, and shout 'Oh look..! There's Lord Lucan..!' and leg it. You never know, you might get lucky.

Nailed it. This one.

This

Just to note I am still reading the thread and taking onboard the breadth of solutions. Also to the kind people who have PMed me to gift me a solution, I really appreciate it, but I am unable to accept a Gift/Charity, for personal reasons. But I definitely do appreciate it!

Zoom B1on or B1 Four...

Go and watch the video from the Bash. We had 15-20 basses that we put through my old rig, playing the same piece on each. Active, passive, flats, rounds, various makes. It was quite sobering given the - and I want to say nonsense, here (oops, I just did) - rhetoric that circulates here about tone, pickup selection, grunt, grind, ponk etc. I'm fairly certain that many Basschat members thought identifying basses would be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. If nothing, this exercise really shaped my opinion on all this nonsense (damn!) about the perception of how certain basses are supposed to sound and what they actually sounded like. All this idiocy that just because a £120 bass looks like a Stingray, that it sounds like a Stingray. If we get a Bash in next year, I'd love to repeat this.

As an addendum to Satdy night's thoroughly Meh gig, I witnessed one of the most extraordinary shows of indifference I've ever seen; I've played for a very long time in all sorts of venues and, like most of us, have experienced many types of indifference: the Working Men's Club Institutional indifference(1), the Wrong Band In The Wrong Pub Indifference(2), the Wrong Couple On The Wrong Night Indifference(3), the Passive Aggressive Offended Indifference(4) and many others, but this bloke was something else: he sat off to one side, on his own, drinking steadily but not quickly, looking across the room. No paper, no book - at one point I had to check he didn't have earbuds in and an audiobook on the go - nothing to entertain him but his own company. He'd glanced at the band as we were setting up, and then completely ignored us for the rest of the evening. It got to the point where I was trying to catch his eye to give him a thumbs-up or something, anything to provoke a reaction, but nope, nothing. As we were packing down he finished his pint (possibly his third or fourth, it's not like he was there for a session) and left. Very odd. (1) The one where everyone yaps incessantly to each other all the way through the first set, and then if you drop a plectrum during the bingo you get shushed and tutted as they concentrate on winning that late-dated hamper that's been dusted down especially...they might get up for the last song for a stilted dance if you're lucky, and then bizarrely at the end tell you at the bar that they thought the band were great... (2) You can feel this one coming a mile off from the clientele's dress sense/age, and they've made the same assessment of you at the same time. Works at both ends of the age spectrum. See also 'That NYE the agent booked our semi-acoustic trio as a 7-piece Soul Band' (3) That couple that sit at a table right where the PA speaker's being set up, but refuse to move and spend the rest of the night alternately rolling their eyes and hollering across the table at each other... (4) OK, this one's fairly specific, but I had a bloke come up to me before a gig and tell me my bass was 'All wrong; it's got the wrong neck' - this was the Shukerbird, and he wouldn't hear about Leon Wilkeson or John Entwistle, he went back to the bar and spent the rest of the evening standing sideways to the room, except when people were applauding, when he turned to face the band and didn't move...

Weird isn't it? Technically a good on-board pre-amp should be little different to the pre-amp in your amplifier. In fact I would go so far as to say that a very good on-board pre-amp such as one designed by John East will probably be sonically superior to a lot of pre-amps in the actual amp.

J all the way! He must be a drummer.