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Here is my new part bass I finished recently and which make me proud of: Warmoth body, Musikraft neck, nitro paint, Fralin splitcoil. The design, paintwork and the printing I made with the help of my wife. Enjoy it!

During a break in the proceedings, Andy @Wolverinebass tucks into some chocolate cake while @Sean enjoys a coffee.

It's here 🤩

https://reverb.com/uk/item/93109785-atelier-z-zpo-4-jr-short-scale-natural

"I only told you to blow the bloody doors off...."

Some of you will have seen this on the ACG pages - my RSK 5/35. Picked it up from Alan in September after a 7/8 months build time from the deposit going down. I enjoyed the whole process of spec'ing my own bass - I specifically asked for the pickups to be pulled back towards the bridge and a little closer together and I'm pleased how that turned out. Still getting used to the wildly capable filter preamp! Definitely an experience I'm looking to repeat 🙂

We didn't practice this week, we started auditioning a new guitarist. It's the first time I've been the other side of the fence, and I was actually quite nervous. Lovely guy, lovely playing. We all found it easy to play with him. Good music theory knowledge (way, way better than my basic understanding). Great sound, he knows how to use the effects he has. I was a little apprehensive when I saw a 212 cab, a Marshall tube power and separate preamp, I thought my hearing was in for a bashing. But no, great tone but at sensible volume... apparently he doesn't do loud. Think we found a keeper.

This was another great Bass Bash. So, thanks to the organisers for their hard work and efforts. The venue was much better than I was expecting. With two decent-sized rooms and a stage, it was possible to make some noise without annoying everyone too much. There were plenty of familiar faces - some of whom also attended the SW Bash - together with some new ones and some members I have talked to over the years but previously never met. Put my name down for next year.

I couldn't not include a photo of some LFSys cabs, could I? Pleasingly, there were quite a few present. My thanks to the owners for bringing them along. I managed to try a few different amps through the cabs. Sean's Gallien-Krueger sounded nice, lean and punchy. I was also very impressed with the Handbox head that @wateroftyne has been praising all these years. Never heard one before, but is sounded really sweet.

Digitally printed direct over the body: MOV_3133.mp4

Gary is saying "Without a cap on, I get an extra three inches of headroom." Or Chris is saying "Am I meant to be on-stage?"

My Sandberg 'Wall of shame'!

Matt @neepheid demoing one of the many fine basses he brought with him. Not quite sure what this one is, but I'm sure somebody knows.

The Pedals 'R Us corner.

Here's Mike Brooks interviewing Matt Gleeson about his pickups.

FI4 sounds for comparison (these patches will be possible on v3 too): FI4 tease.mp3

Before @cetera jumps in… Big Horizon were fantastic at Pizza Express Live - Holborn in London last night. A lovely evening of Yacht Rock, 70s West Coast pop tinged music. These guys are absolutely top of their game (which explains why the spend most of their time backing megastars on tour). Great set, great playing and what a fabulous voice Iain Hornal has! They did a couple of Jeff Lynne’s tunes (an obscure ELO one - Four Little Diamonds, and Handle With Care by The Traveling Willburys). As Jeff Lynne’s backing band for the last 10 years, they paid tribute to him and the unfortunate way the tour ended with him being too unwell to continue to his big Hyde Park retirement gig. Wonderful evening! Lee Pomeroy was a highlight, of course but watching him mangles my brain because all the strings and fingers are in the wrong place. Fab to see Gary PB and Costas there too!

here's the latest version of my pedalboard, all inside the MOD DuoX Every purple line is an audio path, and every blue one is MIDI. It's one in (though it could be stereo) 6 out (three stereo pairs). The parallel audio paths include an ambient path that's all reverb/delay, one that's all pitch-to-MIDI, and one that's glitchy weird sh*t. it's all controlled via a Keith McMillen Softstep and Quneo, the MOD Footswitch and two Dunlop mini expression pedals. The only additional outboard at the moment is a Dunlop volume pedal, a Dunlop Wah (alternate between the mini bass wah and the Justin Chancellor), and a Nordstrand Starlifter.

Gary: I swear it was like biggest storm I have heard, it sounded like the lightning was this close! Chris: Never been to a Thunder gig before then?

"Wanna buy a Spector?"

@ceterais saying... "you can tell it's a valve amp, Chris, because I can even feel the heft all the way up here!"

By way of an update, I took this to a rehearsal the other night, in a large room, at pretty much gig volumes. The amp performed without issue, and sounded bloody great with my '73 P - huge tonal range just from the passive tone control, but I needed to back off the bass a bit because I was runnng through my BF Super Twin. When I kicked in with the Em riff of Steely Dan's 'FM' I got a big smile and a 'yeah' from the guitarist whose band it was! I'm rehearsing with them again next week and I'm going to take my Dingwall NG2 as well and see how that sounds (although I can kind of guess). I was trying to work out what it cost me - I'd say about £500 overall, not counting my time of course!

The Grafts are superb! fwiw my 'frostbite' finished Graft 5 has such strong sounding pickups - the bridge pickup tone is one of the very best I've ever had for that midrange percussive honk/burp/whatever you want to call it 😍

I've played in bands with non-human percussion for most of my musical career from when my first band bought one of the original Boss Dr Rhythms in 1981 to today where our drums are supplied by a MacBook running Logic. There are definite advantages. My current 3-piece band without a drummer or backline are able to travel to gigs with everyone, our gear, and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. We can be set up on stage ready to sound/line check in less than 15 minutes from load in. We have a small on-stage footprint which often gets us good support gigs where there is no room on stage for a conventional band's gear. How appropriate it is may depend on the genre of the music. I play in a goth/post-punk band and there are plenty of other bands on the scene using programmed drums as opposed to having a drummer and drum kit on stage. I probably wouldn't want to be using programmed drums with a more traditional rock band and almost definitely not with a covers band. There are however a number of things that you need to consider before deciding if it's going to be suitable for you. The main one is: how good is your drum programming? IME a replacing a drummer with a drum machine isn't about the quality of the sounds, it's about the quality of the programming. Crap programming will never make even the most authentic of drum sounds sound like they have been played by a drummer, whereas good programming can do wonders for less than realistic sounds. I've had over 40 years practice programming drums so I'm reasonably good it now. Also my current band has an overall electronic sound, so trying to be just like a human drummer isn't always important when it comes to writing rhythm parts. So if you've got your drum programming sorted out how are you going to do it live? Back in the 80s when I started using drum machines none of them had sufficient memory to hold a set's worth of drum patterns and songs. We got away with the simple Dr Rhythm with some creative programming to fit enough single patterns for 10-12 songs into the memory and the fact that we also had a human percussionist. The Roland 808 we had in my next band had enough memory (just) to hold all the patterns required for a single song, but only had a single song memory that had to be programmed in real time, so we recorded all the rhythm tracks onto cassette and used that when we gigged. Remember that for a typical song you are probably going to at least one pattern for each of the intro, verse, chorus, middle 8 and end and one or more fills for each, That's a minimum of 10 patterns for each song. I'm sure that modern drum machines are much better with memory than they were back when I was using them, all my programmed drums have been done on a computer since the mid 90s, but if you intend to use it live, check that you can fit everything in it. I used to own a Yamaha drum machine that claimed to hold up to 99 patterns and 99 songs, but the reality was that the memory allocation was dynamic, and complex/busy patterns with fast hi-hats in them ate up the memory. If I was lucky and used simple patterns I could probably get three songs in the drum machine at any one time. And now you've got all the drums for your whole set programmed how are you going to preform it? If it turns out that your choice of drum machine doesn't have sufficient memory to hold all the patterns required for all the songs you want to play, then you'll have no option but to record it and use that. Recording them will also allow you put some extra studio processing on the sounds which may well be an advantage. From the audience's PoV they won't notice whether the drums are being played back from a recording or performed "live" by a drum machine or computer, so it really down to what is most practical for you. Which ever method you choose make sure that you have a backup. The other important thing to consider is how you go from one song to the next. IMO unless you are a hardcore electronic band the technology being used to replace live musicians should be as invisible as possible. If you are using an actual drum machine selecting the program for the next song should be as simple as possible, ideally a single button press, or a turn of a dial. Anything that requires menu diving and peering at tiny LCD screens on stage is a non-starter in my view. If you use a continuous recording for the drums have some easy way of being able to pause it between songs to allow for guitarists to tune up and if the singer rambles on too long. One other thing is that now you have a machine of some sort doing your drums there will be a temptation to start adding other things to the backing track just because you can. If possible don't! My current band have made a conscious decision that apart from the drums the only other things that go on the backing are sound effects, traditional style sequencer parts and the occasional bass for when I am playing melody lines on my Bass VI. Our philosophy is that if there is an important melody in the song then we play it live. I see more a few bands with so much on the backing that it is impossible to tell what the live musicians are actually playing. Big sounding synth/keys parts are my number one complaint. If the synth line is an essential part of the song, have someone on stage doing it, rather than a bassist who is only doubling up the synth bass or a guitarist playing fuzzy power chords which add little to the arrangement. My previous band used to try and replicate the complete studio arrangement on the backing which had a tendency to make us sound cluttered, so being in charge of backing playback, I would gradually turn down the volume of any parts that I thought weren't adding anything to the live sound until they were either off or someone asked why they could hear it any more. Finally, monitoring. Without an actual drummer hitting things behind you, you are entirely dependant upon being able to hear the programmed drums for staying in time. Also as has been said the drum machine doesn't make mistakes, so you need to be as perfect with arrangements as the drum machine is or at least be able to tell where in the song it is so you can get back in sync. Even the sound of the sticks hitting pads on electronic kit will produce enough sound for you to be able to keep in time even if you can't hear the actual drum sounds. With a drum machine if you can't hear it clearly you can't play in time to it. Sorry for the long post, but there are lots of things to think about especially if you have never used programmed drums before. I'm sure there's lots of important points I've left out because I've been doing this for so long. Ask and I'll do my best to fill in any gaps.

This should be a caption competition photo. Gary @cetera saying something to Chris Childs (or vice versa).

Nick trying out a relic'd G&L, which attracted some interest.

I left Facebook over 10 years ago. It never really worked for me to just promote gigs. I did try sometimes, but because I rarely posted and probably didn't have the right people as "friends" it didn't seem to gain much traction. I sometimes thought that I should post some important life events on there, like passing my driving test, completing insurance qualifications, getting Grade 8 Classical Guitar, moving house etc. but couldn't bring myself to do it. It just felt narcissistic to me as I wondered why anyone should care. I'm not saying Facebook users are all narcissistic, but that it didn't really work for me as a means to share important things with people. I'd rather tell them in person or not at all. I also detested what many people would post on Facebook. Opposing political views that I don't care for, or attention seekers, or irrelevant and uninteresting information. I can't remember when I joined here, but I didn't start using it until quite a while after quitting Facebook. I much prefer it here.

Ooffftt! 😍

Right. Got my numbers for tonight’s lottery, and picked out my spec on the mar… maroosh… public peace configurator: £2.5k! Looks damn fine though!

I'm saying "I'm taller than you, even without a cap on...."

My youngest son (15) just overheard me playing ‘funky mellowship in B major’ by RHCP and commented “well, you’re better than Homer Simpson”. I’ll take that.

I think I may have played this bass when picking up one of my ACGs from Alan. There was also a lovely green Graft Plus 5 string there that day as well. Fantastic looking Graft you have - I think this colour is called Purgatory iirc

Yeah, we’re pretty lucky most of the time, playing original heavy rock to audiences who often don’t know the songs, we go down pretty well a lot of the time. However sometimes it just doesn’t click, and on a wet Tuesday night the folks that came to see what was on just didn’t seem to be into us. Cest la vie! The band before us went down pretty well, playing kind of indie rock, and they were great, but our 80s style heavy rock just didn’t do it for them. All part of the fun, and I’ll take indifference over hostility every time! lol, because we’ve had both down the years! Thankfully the days of having stuff thrown are long gone! 😆

Bye bye....

Fretless Sterling Ray 34... Don't see many of these available. I also think this one was professionally defretted, I can't remember the lefties being available fretless. It has only arrived today but so far my thoughts: the fingerboard feels lovely, I think it's some kind of ebony. The neck profile is a bit slimmer than my US Stingray. Flatwounds sound great on it, I thought I'd need rounds of some kind but there are decent strings on it right now. Bad points: The machine heads feels a bit flimsy, will need to see how it settles. Also the preamp and pickup is nowhere near the league of my US Stingray. More discovery to be made after work

The female vocalist in a functions band I was in a while back had also been a pro dancer. She just used to drag people off their chairs and get them up dancing. Funniest time was at a rugby club do when she did it to a six-foot-plus prop forward guy much to the hilarity of his mates. There's no way that guy was gonna move so she just wrestled him to the ground - at which point he had to stand up. Lorraine was 5' 5" and no more than 8 stone.

@Chimike testing his Ampeg 12-watter through an LFSys Goodwood. "Not loud enough" was the verdict.

Chris Childs trying out @rwillett's printed headless bass through a Monaco stack - watched closely by Mike Brooks. Look out for a video review of the LFSys Monaco and Goodwood on Mike's excellent YouTube channel Brooksy's Bass Corner. It should be out any time now (he doesn't hang about).

A couple of bass players chewing the cud.

I've got one of these and agree. Great little amps. Not sure if they're a bit heavier (watt for watt) than some of the other suggestions above. They're compact and a one-hand lift, but not featherweight.

My EUB / Guitar set up as of last week, a friend made me a silly offer on the MOOD so there's an empty space at moment, been thinking reverb maybe (after Echobox). Starts at the MINI on the top right and works left, then Onward to Meris X (bottom right). Some pedlas may look a bit wonky, only 3 have velcro at the moment. Its desk top use rather than floor, makes editting easier on the fly. Sounds f***ing awesome!

My circular saw proved capable of cutting a triple layer sandwich (once I set the cut height right). I used a different cutting pattern as I was cutting a maximum of 610mm - first a cut across at 300mm, then a second and third at 376mm. After that, I stacked the three pieces and cut at 276mm twice, so a total of five cuts. First, I made the sled - I'd glued and screwed a length of batten across the panel, and just cut across using that as a guide. Then I clamped up for the first cut, and found that when I'd just nipped up the fixing bolt for the blade that my definition of nipped up and the instructions definition of nipped up are different. Once rectified, off we went. The first cut is the shallowest. After that first cut, I was able to use the piece I'd just cut off to rest the other side of the circular saw base on. Another cut the same and then I stacked the wood. And at last got to the final cut. I still have to cut out holes in the front and rear.

Nice little venue in Manchester, good sound and engineer, and we played pretty well, but the audience weren’t into it. I wheeled out the Yamaha RBX A2 5, which sounded fantastic, ace low B, so I’ll defo use that again. My TCBQ500 via a house Warwick 4x10 sounded decent, and so easy to walk across town with just the bass and head in a rucksack.