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mcnach

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Everything posted by mcnach

  1. The one piece saddles can 'easily' be cut to allow each saddle to be independedn from the others. I haven't done it but the videos look easy if a bit fiddly, indeed. It involves lifting the saddles and carefully cutting the thin plastic between saddles. The good news is that those one piece saddles with the piezo sensor are pretty cheap, so not too scary to do.
  2. Feedback is a good point. I have used both the solid body and hollow body basses at band practice, and I did have some trouble with the hollow body one. Nothing too serious, I just had to avoid a couple of orientations in the room, but yes it can happen. The more rigid the top the less of an issue it would be, so I imagine it will vary from bass to bass. No issues with the solid body, of course.
  3. It's easy to find strings for both scale lengths, and different kinds too. I find the 20" harder to play (I have a 20" and a 23" both fretless) in tune, the fingerboard is tiiiiny when you come from a regular scale bass, but both require a bit of concentration for a while until you sort of 'internalise' the intervals on the neck. The hollow body doesn't really add that much to the sound, and it's still very quiet. I'd get a solid body. I really like my GoldTone 23" fretless one. The 2-band onboard EQ is decent and while still small it doesn't feel like I'm a giant when I play it. I first bought a 20" Batking fretless, just to try. It was cheap (around £100) and looked nice so I figured if I ended up not playing it at least it would look nice on the wall I enjoyed playing it, tuning is far more stable than the old silicone strings on the Ashborys used to be, but it still requires retuning frequently initially until it settles. Then I got the 23" fretless GoldTone after hesitating for a while, as it seemed a lot extra money for something that would likely do the same job as the Batking. Soundwise it's not very different with the stock strings, although the GoldTone still sounds a bit nicer and less boomy, you can make a pseudo acoustic type of sound, or soemthing that in the mix would not sound far off an electric bass with flats. But the playability is much nicer, with those extra 3" really helping me find the right notes where I expect them to be. Another thing I liked about the GoldTone (and possibly many other solid bodies) is that they make other strings (nylon wrapped in steel?) that sound more like a 'normal' bass, if you get bored of the other kinds, but I haven't tried them. Check them out on YouTube, there's a few demos of different strings. IN short: I'd get a solid body and preferably 23". I'd also favour fretless, as intonation can be tricky to set right with some strings and fretless allows you to adjust easily.
  4. I bought one of these earlier in the year, after having bought a 20" fretless bass uke. The extra 3" don't make it that much bigger, but I find it a lot easier to play accurately. I love it.
  5. I'm afraid so I had to downsize and it was a great bass, but that supernarrow neck that made me love it initially became the thing that made me not play it anymore...
  6. Literally, if you add a mop head to the headstock, as every one I've tried had terrible neck dive.
  7. That's easy for you to say, you already have a couple!
  8. Originals band, playing a mix of ska/funk bouncy stuff at a busy local venue. "Play Wonderwall!" kept yelling the special brigade (you know the type, upturned collars etc). Finally our singer acknowledges the loudest guy and indicates we will next. Next song is inroduced as Wonderwall... but we play another of ours. It was funny to see the guys face turn from happiness to confusion. He protested and singer motioned "next one, really". Next one... he did the same thing. Ah, was the boy whizzed... and his mates making fun of him...
  9. I ordered some back in April, because I wanted that look and didn't find the same anywhere else... expensive for what they are but if they must look like that... At ordering I found that they did not deliver to the UK (bite tongue, don't mention the B word) so I had them sent to my parents in Spain. If they haven't changed their ways, that will be another problem.
  10. A few months, or 'a few months' BD style, I wonder...
  11. Yeah, there's only so many pens you can carry but they will hold string cutters etc, so it's nice to have a handful of those. Look at different bags, some are a bit longer than others, and the compartment number and type do vary.
  12. Keep what you like, of course. At one point I had 6-7 Jazz basses, 4 of which were Fenders. I only kept one, a '94 Korean battered Squier (no, not for deep frying, I just meant it had a lot of little marks and scratches)
  13. You are right of course, but I suspect I'd get tired of having to answer questions if I used it live. To you it's just a design, to many others it's a lot more. Same reason I would not use a bass with a swastika or (name your political party) or football team emblem. As long as you aware of the attention it'll attract...
  14. I would consider something like the Zoom B14: small, cheap, programmable, and sounds pretty good! You can have a preset for guitar and another for bass easily. Or many of each. It looks like you can import FX from other similar units online, so if you get the B14 (bass) you can still import guitar-oriented models, and if you get the G14 import bass oriented models, but you can get decent guitar sounds from the B14 for sure (I've got one). About £70-80 new, but often found used around £50
  15. I have an ABS case for my amplifier, one of those with pull-off foam inserts so you can cut it to fit. That carries my amplifier and cables. Sometimes it's more convenient to use something I've seen described as a 'technician's tool bag' or similar. Big central compartment, with full side pockets (come in different sizes) and various subdivisions, pocket on the top... Mine is not this one but it's the same idea: I put a layer of hard foam at the bottom, and it fits my amplifier and a laptop, or my Zoom R16 recorder, or a multiFX, or... you get the idea. Lots of space for a folder with music, and cables, tools, etc. Quite handy those.
  16. Brilliant!!! It almost looks like ffmpeg would make me a coffee too, I haven't checked all the docs yet but after a quick scan it looks impressive, thak you! as simple as: ffmpeg -i whatevertrack.mp3 -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 1 -ar 41100 whatevertrack.wav and I can easily add tags etc as well... great!
  17. I happen to have one of those Joyo Orange Juice pedals, so I checked. When vertical, the end of the cable is exactly at the same level as the floor of the pedal, so it can be used but it would not be a great fit as you can't rotate it. Best using one of the others 👍
  18. I love the Dimarzio Area J for something that sounds much like the classic single coil Jazz, but they're humbuckers. Not expensive either.
  19. As the title says. I need it to be able to take a stereo mp3 (or wav) and convert it to a mono wav, 16-bit. If it can offer things like volume normalisation even better but really not necessary. Happy to use Windows or Linux. If interested, this is why, in case some people may find this useful too. My old band reformed a few months ago and added a couple new people, and we're taking this opportunity to write new material. We tend to meet at the guitarist/singers place out in the middle of nowhere (almost) as he's got a nice setup with drums and PA and various amplifiers permanently set ready to go. We record the sessions with a little recorder in the middle of the room. Sound quality is suprisingly good for what it is. We're trying various ideas and generally messing around with things, as we go, and I'm finding very useful to do the following: Take the mp3 recording, and feed it to an app called Moises which does an amazing job at separating 'tracks' (it also recognised chords, song sections, and even transcribes lyrics... the lyrics part is not 100% but it's pretty good, you can also change key and various other things, it's an amazing app). I then export the individual tracks (as mp3, but could export them as wav too, sound quality is not crucial, considering the source). Now, I like to import them into a Zoom R16 multitrack recorder. Yes, I could use Reaper or whatever on the PC, but I really like the R16 for a number of reasons I won't go into). I convert each track into a mono wav file, and it's got to be 16-bit, and the file name has to follow a particular convention too. Then it's ready to be shuttled into a new project in the R16. I use the R16 to practice: multiFX for bassguitar go into it, and I can use headphones or external monitors. That way I turn off my original bass (but can check it out for when I had a few cool ideas that I want to keep) and I can just jam along and work on various ideas. I'd like to streamline the process by writing a little script that will take care of the file renaming, conversion etc. I just don't have an audio converter that I could run from the command line. A quick google reveals that there's quite a few options, and I don't mind at all paying for the right one. I'm just wondering if anybody has experience and can recommend a particular one. I don't need anything fancy, it's the conversion from stereo mp3/wav to mono wav 16-bit (44.1 KHz preferably) that I really need. Anything else like EQ, normalisation, FX could be interesting but not really in the 'must have' list.
  20. I was going to suggest these. Nice and thin and they seem to last, I've been using them for a few years.
  21. Or even better... that time could be used moving away from that horrible fluid and get something tasty instead (I tried... but I just can't stand whisky, boo )
  22. Oh yess, they are quite something. I had the good fortune to be supporting them a few months ago. The 'backstage' was a huge space at an old converted church where they have a piano, an organ and a kitchen with some very tasty chilli (thank you MacArts!). I was very tired so I was trying to snooze on one of the sofas, but I couldn't sleep... not so much because of the noise, but because they sounded amazing and were goofing around so I had a huge grin all the time. They are really really good. The horns sound sooo tight!
  23. Great band, uber-cool bass player and really nice guy too. They seem to start gaining some traction, well deserved!
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