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Reminds me of Bad News. "I could play Stairway To Heaven when I was 12. Jimmy Page didn't write it 'til he was 22. I think that says a lot".

Playing music is not a competition. IMO instrument ability and technique is only important if the lack of it gets in the way of being able to play the songs. Ultimately it's the songs that are important, not any individual musician's technical prowess.

So. MASSIVE thanks to @Russ who has been an absolute legend; I found a B-Stock TE-1200 on Peavey’s ebay page but they’d only ship to the US. Russ kindly took it in for me, and then arranged postage to the UK. I owe him several beers, for here is possibly the first TE-1200 on UK soil (aside from John Taylor’s ones…)

Or maybe there have always been talented kids who until recently didn’t have a suitable platform?

Not necessarily, the likes of EVH, Geddy, etc. also had to compose those iconic pieces as well as play them (and in the case of Geddy sing over the top of them), so if people think those folks are the GOAT then that's still perfectly valid. The fact that new generations of virtuosos are coming through just means those legends will have competition in the GOAT lists in a few years.

Elenor Rigsby. You know whos

This is gorgeous and seen in the wild at Guitar Summit. DIngwall announces tomorrow the new electronics in it.

Have You Met Oooo Miss Jones? - Robbie Williams

I haven't read all the posts so someone may have already given this answer. Why not contact @Ashdown Engineering? They are just the most helpful people and they will know. I love Bass Chat but really; arguing about how flat 'flat' actually is probably wasn't helpful.

What it tells me is there are quite a lot of pushy parents in the world.

Yo Yo Ma is one of the very best cellists in history. No dispute about that at all. Has he written anything as good as Mozart's cello sonatas? Nope.

For festival gigs we crow bar as much in as we can. The penultimate song is usually the one that gets earmarked for the chop should there be any timing disasters. That way we can end with the song we want to end on.

I finished work yesterday morning at 7am and drove an hour to Bristol for a support slot as part of a cat charity gig. Amazed how on it I was considering my levels of tiredness. Pleased I brought the small rig as load in was a bit of a challenge but the whole night was worth it as an old mate I haven't seen for 20years came down especially for us.

I think lots of us are sleeping with your wife

I like a little banter. 3 songs then say hello, thanks for coming, then another 3 or 4, maybe say something again - 2 sentences sort of thing. No speeches. Ask them to join for the last tune.

Absolutely! I’ve got two Barefaced Two10 cabs so we can do decent A/Bs with any amp people choose

Nah... photoshop that like. They don't exist.

Grills Talk - Dave Edmonds

We played for a Hells Angels chapter last year, got to the end of the set and they asked for more. I started playing the riff to Love Shack for a giggle. Then they asked us to play it. We happily obliged. I recall playing September by EWF and Disco Inferno at another biker club in amongst the hard rock and metal. They enjoyed that too.

First band I was in played a biker rally - it was probably our 4th or 5th gig ever, acquired through a friend. We were naive and had a set of largely originals that with hindsight were not suitable for that kind of gig. We played, they yelled for heavier/faster/rockier songs that they knew. We put all the rock stuff we knew in but we were stopped after about an hour (it seemed like 20 hours 😃). We were expecting to be shown the door and, indeed, we were taken to one side. But they said thanks but it wasn't what they wanted. They got we were new and paid us in full. A decent bunch of guys and gals. 30 odd years later and I've played 'nice' venues with 'nice' audiences and had to put up with far worse behaviour and attitude than that rally.

For me the talent is more telling of the person who created the lines/music in the first place. Though I don’t for one second deny the ability of these kids who can play these complex basslines, I just wish I could!

Love this setup! What board is that? Si

If you avoid picking up a bass, ever, then you won't even have to shell out on a set of flats.

So this evening I have been doing some bits to the 'relic' From the picture below I'm happy to say that I have finally found out what it is, from slight sanding back the staining from the original make showed up just enough, it is indeed a Maya Gave the old lass a fresh scratch plate and put butterfly tuners on (maybe not to some people taste) they're squeezed in but I like it Cheers Royle

To help me "get my groove back" after losing my gear in the fire, the BC family was wonderfully generous in helping me out ... it's all about the bass! I've received a couple of older Zoom effects processors and they are going to form the core of my signal chain (All the elements of the Phoenix Rig were gifted to me by generous BC members ... I cannot express how grateful I am!) The Zoom units are quite powerful in the processing they can perform and can sound quite good, however there are a couple of "challanges" to the way I setup the effects and gig. Configuring patches This is done on the unit using the small display and controls. I came across a free application called Tonelib that makes the process of building and configuring patches significantly easier; it's a funky bit of software! Selecting patches when playing Sadly this is suboptimal! With one or two footswitches, it is hard to go directly to a patch, there is support for scrolling through a list of patches but it is not ideal. After some research I found that a few clever folks had figured out that the Zomm processors accept MIDI commands to select and reconfigure patches and effects. And so I am building Stompz. It will be based on the Raspberry Pi that did not get baked in the fire. Yesterday I went into my makerspace and spent several hours starting the physical assembly. The enclosure is the back of an offcast of an outdoor light a bit like this Is is almost perfect for the job. I drilled and filed a few holes for the foot switches and an expression jack socket. Stompz has 5 footswitches, an expression pedal jack input and a small OLED display panel (I've yet to figure out the best way to mount this so it's currently just sticking out the top) It will be based on a Raspberry Pi that did not get baked in the fire and, apart from the foot switches, is made up of items that I have been able to salvage from the flat or are offcasts ... super economical! The finished Phoneix Effects Chain will look like this At present the only thing in Stompz is a USB battery that is powering both Zoom processors. The foot switches are laid out so that it is easy to press two adjacent switches, so from a UX perspective it will be possible to have 5 x Switch press 5 x Long switch press 4 x Pair switch press 4 x Long pair switch press. This will allow for some quite powerful manipulation of the unit during a gig, either turning on/off individual effects, selection of preconfigured pedalboard layouts and snapshots. The OLED display (I might add another as it is quite small) will display what Stompz is up to and indicate what each switch will do. Stompz connects to each Zoom using a USB cable, which provide both power and will carry the MIDI data; The Zoom MIDI message format is not officially documented, but there are various resources on the web from which I should be able to build a full list of available commands. At present I have successfully been able to change patches on a Zoom but I believe it is possible to reconfigure patches as well as the various settings for each of the effects in a patch. I'm hoping that I can do this without killing any audio tails as it will allow me to drive some of these changes using the expression pedal. With the two Zoom processors connected in serial the rig will support a total of nine effects in a chain; I'm toying with the idea of running them in parallel which might allow for some splitting of frequencies for different processing ... not totally sure how I would wire this up yet. I'll be writing some bespoke code to allow for: Defining the action of the footswitches. Configure/manage/select "Pedalboards" (A collection of effects and their settings used in a particular song) This will let me configure which effects I want to use and their settings and (hopefully) link the expression pedal to the desired effects. Ideally I'll be able to treat Stompz as a single effects unit and it will decide itself which effect to place on which processor. Configure/manage/select "Snapshots" (A group of the settings for all of the effects in a pedal board) Access to all of this via a web interface (Or maybe also a smartphne app) over WiFi. The idea is that I can setup my pedalboards and tune the settings as I desire in advance and save them. During a gig I can use the foot switches to select a particular pedalboard for a song and switch between snapshots as I play, to load the settings for the verse/chorus/bridge/etc. All of this will be run on the Pi which will send the MIDI commands to configure the Zoom processor units. With my EffektLada project (Now put on ice) I had intended to run a MIDI synth and sequencer on the Pi which could be driven by a MIDI keyboard; this will allow for the generation of sophisticed drum tracks as well as being able to produce the occasional "special sounds" that we have used in some of our numbers (Like shakers, cow bells, xylophone ... even some horns or organ snippets). I've a couple of salvaged microcontrollers that can do button/motion sensing and send MIDI over Bluetooth to the Stompz allowing for small handheld battery powered units to produce effects. This will require the addition of an audio output from the Pi so is definately a Version 2 or 3 feature. Other possibilities are to use Pi based effect plugins in the signal chain and even record on the Pi. Now the basic physical assembly is complete I need to wire up the innards and start designing/writing/testing the software to achieve all of this. Hopefully I can make a start on this later today ... I am starting back at work tomorrow and I need to sort out some shoes that will help me survive the 12.5h shift on my feet (I am so looking forward to being back bedside nursing, it feeds my soul) so my time will be constrained. Stompz may not look as elegant as the all in one systems from the likes of Line6, Moddevices or the current gen Zoom units ... but it will get the job done and then some and I will be able to craft it to behave exactly the way I wish, which cannot be said of an off the shel unit which are generally very configurable, but only in the way the manafacturer determines. And the things that makes it all possible is that the cost is mostly effort, the various elements have been donated by the amazing BC family, have been salvaged from the fire or scavanged from castoffs ... no significant financial burden and the time I spend to bring it all together is free! More to come ... S'manth x

They really do. So far it seems to prefer passive basses but that just needs a bit of tweaking and I haven’t really got enough time for that right now. It’s a good start, the natural tone is more musical to me than the “EQ at 0” on the Glockenklang but it will take time to work out if that’s just “new amp syndrome” kicking in.

Oh my goodness!!! Congratulations 😍. We await your thoughts with some excitement 😬😅

There seem to be a lot of ... ... sour grapes out there.

I think aside from one song I play in one band I could easily use a 3 string bass and forget about the G.

I love playing bikers rallies. We were first asked to play one about 5 years back, we said we didn’t think 70s glam rock would work but did it anyway. We wuz wrong and the cheesier the better. 5 years on we normally do 3 or 4 per year to packed ‘houses’. Nothing like a couple of thousand bikers singing along to Shang a Lang 😂

When I put a set of flats on my P bass I noticed I avoided picking it up

I'm a bit late to this party, but here's mine for what it's worth: tuner - limiter - unichorus - l/hpf with a Harley Benton power supply and a homemade base.

Yeah I've wondered if there isn't a little bit of HPF filtering of the lowest frequencies as I've not had the low rumble at any of the venues I've played recently. I'm hoping to do a bit of response measuring of amps at the SW bass bash in a few weeks' time so I'll check it out then if possible. Ha ha it does look a bit silly perched on the 112, just about acceptable on the 110T I suppose it could go on a pedalboard

Yup. Plus they don't have to keep rewinding a cassette tape to try and nail the parts. Also there are more tools such as Guitar Pro etc. where you can mute other tracks, loop, speed train etc. I am grateful, however, that some kids are actually still learning to play instruments.

That’s the one 👍

Dude. I'm in a hard rock band and an indie band. Every summer both bands play (and I'm choosing my words carefully here) 2-wheeled-transport rallies. The biker rallies with the hard rock band would look terrifying to the casual onlooker, but they are the best people. The scooter crowd are all far too cool for you, like corksniffy bands that you've never heard of, and are always starting drunken fights.

Saturday night with Train To Skaville, a wedding at a mahoosive posh house outside Frome. Got there at half six, originally told that guests were arriving at 8 and we'd start at 9... turns out the guests were already there and the speeches were still going on. And then, as we thought we could load in, this 'singing waiter' starts up with half an hour of All Your Favourite Karaoke Hits. Then once we'd set up & checked, we had to wait till the happy couple were ready for their first dance... and wait... and wait... Anyway, we finally started at 9.45. I'd been a bit apprehensive, you know what wedding gigs can be like and a ska band seemed like an odd choice. I needn't have worried. I think it was the bride & groom's second time around, so they and their guests were all of the right age to have been into 80s second-wave ska, and my god they loved it. There were three or four blokes in particular who knew every word of every song and they were dancing like eejits all night, with the exhuberence and energy that only lager & champagne gives you We sounded good and played well, and I drove home with a smile on my face and wedge in my pocket and crawled into bed at 02:30... was asleep by 02:31

All of my favourites have been mentioned , but how about a shout out for these guys? All great players on some fantastic recordings. Herbie Flowers Mo Foster Russ Stableford Alan Spenner Klaus Voorman

I just found a video I thought might be handy here. I think our drummer filmed himself with his phone or something, but it’s happened to have caught a pretty good impression of what it’s like from an on stage perspective using a single Headrush 112, you can even see the cab for context. Yes it’s Mr Brightside at a lively festival, but just ignore that 😂🫣😴 Thought it might be handy for those wondering. Was certainly easier than lugging a full rig through the crowd. Headphones will get you pretty close to what I hear And here’s the FOH perspective.