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Depends what you are complaining about. Fully support The Snuts for this one:

Arrived this morning from Thomann, ordered middle of last week. Tested it out using battery (PSU coming tomorrow). Plugged in a P bass, headphones and an iPad and that was an hour gone playing along with some Bernard classics. Such a great little package, does exactly what I bought it for, which is silent practice. Had a play around with the cab sims and the overdrive/fuzz options, which sounded overdriven and fuzzy, with a variety of control of how overdriven or fuzzy you want. I’m unlikely to ever use them, as I have a bit of tube pre on my Ashdown, but nice to know they’re there. Handy as a stand alone DI box too with the eq/OD, and, I guess, you could take it along to a dodgy car park when you want to try out the bass you really shouldn’t be buying, but are compelled to as it’s THE one…definitely! A good purchase I’d say.

Travelled back to the States this week and coming home are a '73 Rickenbacker 4000 with ton's of mojo and a 2006 like new condition USA 60th Anniversary P bass. Man, that Ric plays amazing and sounds fantastic even with just one pick up. Can't wait to rock it with my band later this month.

Many amps have HPF's, mostly added in the past 15 years, once designers recognized how valuable they are to the performance. All amps I have designed over the past ~20 years have had them, between 12 and 24dB/octave, and in the Subway amps, all but the D-800 have variable HPF's. Differences in slope and alignment are representative of the specific task and character desired for the amp's overall goals.

I've played with too many dodgy drummers, over the years, and refuse to do do any longer. A band really is only as good the drummer.

All you need is eyes

Do you play on a bus often 😁

I think that is one of those commonalities with rythmn sections - people don't really 'hear' the bass or drums, they just hear the vocals / guitars but if the drums or bass are bad they don't really like it for reasons they don't really notice.

There are loads of things we can complain about after playing a set. Bad sound, faulty equipment, out of tune singing, drunken guitarists... sh*t happens, and it can make for a sh*t gig. It's worth talking about this stuff after the set, or better yet, at the next rehearsal, but one way to guarantee I have a bad night is to complain while we're still on stage. I'm busy trying to perform to the audience and look like I'm enjoying myself, like the whole band should be, and that's pretty difficult if you're b*tching loud enough to hear you over the monitors. Hopefully no-one on basschat is guilty of this, but if you are, give it a rest ay?

An unexpected NBD. So when I got up this morning I wasn’t expecting to head to Stoke on Trent to do a deal in a tree shrouded shady lay-by. I’ve been getting along famously with my stingray and modulus FU lately, the sound I’ve finally dialled in is the tone that’s been living in my head for many years so all my attention has been on that. But there’s the problem, my Spector LE 77 is a 24 fret and the stingray 21 while the modulus is 22. I found swapping from the stingray to the modulus not any issue but when I popped out the Spector for more of a precision tone It felt like the 12th fret was suddenly far far away. Trying to just pick it up and play a riff I was on the wrong fret due to muscle memory reacting naturally to where I know I should be. (Well it Was on my stingray) So enter the market place for a quick peek (just research you understand) And I saw this…. 😯 Oooer missus!! But it’s passive? It’s beautiful, but it’s passive? Musicman quality, but it’s passive? 21 frets, but it’s passive… Suddenly GAS which I’m sure started in my bowels and then spread out to encompass my body kicked in and I was sending a PM to @ribbetingfrogto see if he was interested in a Noel Edmonds type Saturday morning swap for my Spector. After a bit of nail biting and googling the stinky poo out of ‘Musicman cutlass bass’ he agreed the Spector was something he did indeed like the look of. What can I say, shes a beauty, after getting her home and extracting her from the case she feels like a vintage bass, I can’t explain it, comfortable, familiar but worn in. Punchy, juicy but also not a tone I’m used to coming from my bag ends, it is however a sound I’ve known from so many tracks over the years. With its split humbucking pickup, tone wide open it’s a rock machine, tone shut down completely ‘look at meeee, I’m James Jamerson’ What a cracking bass and through the full tube Mesa or my Ampeg SVT it’s straight out of the golden age. This IS a reason to have more than one bass. Completely polar opposite to anything I own tone wise, but being a Musicman completely familiar in feel and playability. If you’ve not tried one and are a diehard fender man then your missing out. If your a staunch fender man and will use nothing else then avoid this bass, it will spoil your boyhood dreams The build quality is i feel better than any modern fender precision, custom shop I’m not including but they cost ridiculous amounts. The neck heel is a sculpted masterpiece and the neck like most musicman basses plays like a dream. All in all what a great day to check the market place and thank you to @ribbetingfrog for the deal.

Do you really need to strip it? Stripping a poly finish is a bastard. If you're doing a solid colour you could spray over the existing finish. Before you do, fill any dings, flat the surface down nicely and clean with de-natured alcohol before spraying. Household emulsion probably not ideal. Poly or nitro will work. Poly's easier, nitro's nicer to look at and to touch (but expensive, slightly more difficult to source and it takes longer to do the job). Yes you may use Halfords' rattle cans. Buy one of those rattle-can handles. They only cost about a fiver, comfortable to use and they give you much more control when 'sweeping' and working round curves. Not necessarily but it's always a good idea if the new colour's going to be lighter than the old finish. Loose rule: light top colour, light coloured primer / dark top, darker primer. Use a spray poly primer whether it's a poly top or a nitro top coat. Rule: Nitro over poly, not the other way round. Flat down with progressive grades until its nice and smooth, then clean everywhere including the cavities (use a vacuum cleaner for the inaccessible harness runs). Spray in a room at average temperature. Freezing cold garage not ideal. When the paint's hard you may wish to overspray with a clear top coat. When that's done, lightly flat it out with very light grade paper then finish with a rotary buffer and Meguiar's anti-scratch polish (it's f__king awesome for getting a mirror finish). Look up some 'refinishing a guitar' vids on YT and plan your steps in order.

What about if the venue keeps lighting the audience....

We used to rehearse on a weekly basis, even if we had 2 gigs that same weekend. Why am I saying this, well it’s so that if we got dodgy monitor mixed instead of that “can I have more upper mids from the hi-hat in my monitor” rubbish that I see many bands do, we’d be rehearsed enough to do the gig with no beaching & whining. I hate seeing bands, after every song complain about the monitors. I used to give the sound people a mic-chart detailing the line-up and what each of us wanted in our monitors as well to try and combat this. The other thing that really annoys me is bands complaining “why don’t you all move forwards/come down the front of the stage”. They would, except you’re shyte. Rehearse a bit more and focus on the songs rather than the backstage beers.

... and (wait for it) Mesa don't actually have their own valve factory. I feel cheated! 🙂

Well it did back then, as you "forgot" to quote me - it was my second ever gig, so I think I can be excused a little naivety 13 years ago. At least I looked at the drummer when I found something objectionable - I thought you were a big supporter of eye contact and communication between musicians.

Of course theyre so efficient because they pay badly, ruthlessly exploit staff, haven uestionable HR practices, actively resist unionsnin the workplace, use limited packaging sizes to save on time and storage, charge their drivers for the use of the vans they use for their work (imagine the outcry if posties, DPD drivers or dustmen had the cost of their vehicles deducted from their wages?) and shuffle profits around the world to favourable tax regimes. Their unethical behaviour is what makes them so efficient - the two are inextricably dependent upon one another. So I refuse to use them as I have some tiny vestige of a social and environmental conscience, and pay all my taxes without demur. Conversely, it bothers Mrs B not at all and she merrily orders stuff and marvels at how efficiently it appears on the doorstep.

If you knew how many tubes marked 7025's are in fact just plain 12AX7 in "different clothes" (counterfit), you might be surprised. If you knew how many tubes we reject because they are either out of spec, noisy or microphonic, you might be surprised. If you knew where these rejected tube end up, you might be surprised. If you knew how many issues related to a user or tech not understanding the concept of correctly biasing an amp, you might be surprised. Preset bias and "matching tubes for that bias level" is an essentially foolproof way of being able to change out power tubes without the need to re-bias, as well as keeping fingers out of the electronics. This way the bias is exactly as the designer intended. Your comment about "bullsh*t marketing" is uncalled for because it's based on your lack of knowledge of why these decisions were made. You don't have to agree with them, you don't have to buy our amps either, but calling it bullsh*t isn't right.

That would make a good phrase to have under your user avatar or something 😉!

No, for the same reason as Facebooks dominance in social media. There have been several companies that challenged their dominance, but they bought them all. Once you get to the level of income where your managing director can just make spaceships to take tourists around, anyone that does come in with a better product or a lower price can be just bought out or ground into the dirt. My wife has an online shop, she does lots of custom things and has great customer service, but people often ask for help with some product and then say 'oh thanks, well I can get it on amazon cheaper'. And they can, they can get it for less than she buys it wholesale sometimes, because she lacks warehousing. For me, those little companies have value and that support has value. There is no effective antitrust thing that can stop you know when there are companies that have the income which is higher than most countries. They can just relocate to another tax haven like the UK protectorites have, pay for some government people to lobby for you, and you stay at the top.

Bands can't carry bad drummers. As the other half of a rhythm section, bass players will find working with a bad drummer a pretty soul destroying experience. I certainly couldn't play with a bad drummer on a regular basis.

If I were looking for a fully handbuilt relic JB, I wouldn’t look any further than the Bravewood in the classifieds. If you don’t bond with it, it would be difficult to lose any significant money. I have had one, they are great. I have had CS - also very good, but the Bravewood felt more like an authentic original.

Jenny is super fit (in more ways than one), a half marathon runner and judoka. She should be ok. She’s rough - only time in 10 years of marriage (excluding Cesarean healing) I’ve known her to not be able to get out of bed. She’s in good form, considering.

Pick any bass tone and, no matter how successful the song or how great the tone is, there will be someone who doesn't like it.

Just the info I needed, thanks. Given that I’m the least ept person I know, I think even I should be able to manage this. Famous last words….

A long(ish) one, but worth it ...

Can you please stop pointing out all the great details? Worryingly, my Cutlass GAS levels are rising again 😉

Nice bit of Gregory

Sandberg.

Great info there Andy. There is also a trend to leave voids in the finished surface. Mayones and others do a ‘raw’ finish. I haven’t tried the slurry method as I don’t often use tru oil but sounds like a great solution.

Me too, it's like a nervous twitch thing. Like guitarists always tuning between every song, or having a quick bash of the main riff of a song before the whole band is ready to play. If you're well rehearsed to just don't do that cr@p.

I was bullied at school. You remind me of those times.

Clearly you haven't heard MrsAndyjr1515's opinion on such matters.... Anyway, second and major test - will it hold the neck relief under full string tension... So it will sit under tension for a full day/night cycle of house temperature change and I'll check the relief again this time tomorrow. The hex nut is on its way and when that arrives I'll have another look at the trussrod thread. I've noticed that when it has been standing a while and then you tighten or loosen the nut, you feel the rod twisting before the nut 'cracks' the joint and moves. In that I have three stacked and free moving washers between the rod and the anchor point, it can only be the thread itself that is binding. With the new nut, I'll use a teeny bit of PTFE grease and see if we can get it moving a little easier. This is with the narrower nut in the middle. I think (although MrsAndyjr1515 would tut and shake her head) this is what we should do, rather than offset to one side or the other. It also evens the bends of the strings over the nut which is no bad thing

In my last band myself and the vocalist (40+) were always trying to get the other two (drummer 50+, guitarist 20+) to play songs that were not necessarily ones we were desperate to do but tunes that everybody knows but hardly anyone does, things like' Bonkers' by Dizzee Rascal or some dance banger that we thought would get the room jumping, something a bit more modern. You could easily come up with an arrangement for this sort of stuff as we had done in a previous band with' Breathe' by The Prodigy which always went down well. But, no, let's just do another AC/DC track instead. Very frustrating. We even ended up doing 'Johnny B Goode', fer chrissake. On a personal level, It is with deep regret that I've never had the chance to perform one of the greatest noises ever committed to vinyl, 'Bikini Girls With Machine Guns' by The Cramps. However, I have played 'Another Girl, Another Planet' many times so it's swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The usual adage is that everyone in the band is responsible for time, and if you watch good bands in any genre then this is obvious. But sometimes guitarists, singers, horn players etc can get away with having timing that's a bit suspect, whereas bass players and drummers definitely can't. If you're in a band and you're the only person who seems bothered by a bad drummer then, apart from the drummer, it also might be a sign that the rest of the band aren't necessarily that good either.

Hi again @Stub Mandrel Normal stuff - this is just the thought process and method I would personally go through and methods and pitfalls that I've come across along the way. So OK - there are a number of aspects here that tend to interact with each other. Quite what the best combination of methods and materials is going to be does really depend on the actual piece of timber and what you are wanting to do with it. First a couple of questions: 1. If you wipe the burl part with a damp cloth (assuming it is freshly sanded and has had no coating of any kind) then the maple (lovely piece, by the way) will darken. The question is whether this is dark enough without a stain? 2. How completely do you want to fill the holes? The reason for question is the first interdependence: Filling vs staining Basically, many of the common methods of filling will reject both water based and spirit based stains. So, depending, you can end up with the areas where the stain soaks into the surrounding wood at one colour, and the fills remaining the colour of the filler. For the less 'holey' outside area where you are thinking of sunbursting, I have a couple of suggestions but, for the more holey area in the middle, it is a bigger challenge if you really do want to stain that too. Rather than going into the detail of all the permutations and combinations of methods, I'll come back to this when I know the answer to the two questions. But in the meantime, and ignoring the complication with stains, my preferred methods of achieving a satin finish: Method 1 Tru-oil Slurry and Buff - used to both fill and produce a wonderfully organic silky smooth finish I actually personally use this method for all of my non-stained preparation, whether I intend to stay satin or even gloss coat (but I only use polyurethane varnish which I know does not react with the Tru-oil. - Basically, wearing disposable gloves, I get a bottle of Tru-oil (a small bottle is plenty) and I wet and dry sand, with the grain, using the Tru-oil as the 'wet'. It quickly turns into a slurry of oil and sandings which can be used to fill both the grain, splits and even large holes. Personally, I start with quite a coarse paper (I use 120grit emery cloth to start) and then move to finer grits through the process. - First go I create the sludge, then use an old credit card to scrape it into the holes. - I let it dry overnight, then repeat. I repeat this until the holes are filled. - Then I move to finer grits - I usually go to 300 grit sandpaper, then to 400 grit wet-n-dry (a multi pack from Halfords is ideal), sanding with the grain but this time wiping off the sludge across the grain and, again, let it dry - Then to 800 to 1000 and sometimes to 2000, but with these, after wet sanding with the oil ( by now you won't need a lot of oil) and wipe immediately dry with a non-lint cloth (again, Halfords do some great non-lint polishing cloths) - The final one or two coats, after wet sanding with the oil, now not only wipe off the oil but then vigorously buff. You should be left with something that is satin, still feels like wood but is silky, silky smooth. It is also the way I do all my necks because I love the organic and silky smooth feel (and why I would never, ever, buy a Gibson Les Paul again because I can't stand sticky necks!) This is some bubinga on my fretless bass done the above way - 6 years later, it still looks like this: This camphor burl - a very figured wood - was also done this way and then varnished on top: Method 2 - Osmo Polyx Satin (tinted or clear) Osmo Polyx is a trade product that has relatively recently come onto the consumer market in smaller tins. A teeny tin would happily do a couple of guitars. Once you have filled everything and got the wood to to final dry-sanded finish, you apply it with a cloth, thin coat, leave to dry overnight. You then give it a second coat, leave it to fully harden (generally a week) and then it is usually done! It is a VERY easy product to use and produces a great finish. They do a range also of tinted versions - the stain will be much lighter than a spirit stain straight onto wood - including a decent amber. This is fleabag's rebody in Polyx Satin: Both Tru-oil and Osmo Polyx are pretty unreactive and so you can prepare an unstained body as above and then give is a couple of wipes with the Polyx - or you can actually slurry the Polyx itself. However, I don't know how well slurried Polyx fills cracks and holes. Might be fine, and worth experimenting although, personally, if I want a slightly tougher finish I would still use the Tru-oil slurry method first, simply because I know it works. So the complication is just if you need to fill AND stain a sunburst (otherwise, Tru-oil slurry and buff + tinted Polyx or just tinted Polyx would both work) Hope this helps

When I ran a music venue a bad drummer would bring down the whole band. The audience probably couldn't tell you why they didn't like the band, but on the occasions the drummer wasn't up to scratch, they always reacted negatively. Being a bassist I seemed to be the only person who noticed this. A good drummer makes our lives easier but more importantly makes the band better.

Our new drummer (if 7 months is new!) wears industrial ear defenders due to tinnitus; however, he's right on time and listens to the rest of the band enough to produce fills and grooves that are actually musical, as opposed to neanderthal!

Use the right tool for the job (i.e. a set list app)! I use Piascore which is just like forScore, but free. I do have a paid version of forScore - but prefer Piascore. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/piascore-hd/id406141702

May I be the first to apologise for using Amazon and indirectly forcing you to work in appalling, victorian workhouse-esque conditions. Here my brother, let me carry that p!ss bottle for you and help shoulder your burden. 😉

This could put paid to a 10th (10th!!!) version of the status kingbass. Hope springs eternal.

Good gig last night at a well known biker clubhouse with the 70's punk band. No pics allowed. Was weird playing for an almost totally male audience. Great feedback at the end of the night and some guys had travelled up from Leeds to see the band. They came over after the first set and congratulated us on a well played set. They were heading back home at that point. All good and several rather large bikers even offered to help load the gear at end of the night. Have to say it was a good night and not as much of a worry as i thought it might be. The guy that booked us said we played a 1st class gig. That was good as it was my 1st full gig with the band. Few mistakes but nothing i couldn't cover. Other comments at end "bass player is the best in the band" put a smile on my face along with a very loud cheer and applause when singer announced i was the new guy in the band. Also put a smile on my face. Dave

Last night - charity fundraiser gig for armed forces veterans. Unpaid, but it was just so good to get out there again after 20 months!

With the arrival of the B-stock TC Ditto x2, the pedalboard is - for now at least - complete. I still need the power supply which should be here next week. I went for a Cioks DC5 which will attach underneath the Pedaltrain. I’ve used EBS flat patch cables to connect it all together, they’re really nice quality with a low profile plug that doesn’t take up too much room. The first pedal is a Darkglass B7K, used primarily as a preamp, the distortion settings are fantastic though. Then a TC Electronic Ditto x2. The stereo signal from the Ditto goes into the fabulous Mod Devices Dwarf, which is also stereo and allows for each side of the signal to pass through a different chain of effects. The next two pedals are a Neunaber Immerse V2 reverb and an MXR M300 reverb. These two pedals are also stereo. There’s also an Ernie Ball VPJR volume pedal too, that’s not in the photo.