jazzyvee

Tonight's rig

Is there any reason you couldn't take your existing bass with you?

I have one of the old Zoom 2QN recorders which sounds good but the battery life is not enough to do even a 40 minute set and also the socket for external power supply does not respond when plugged into a usb power supply. 😞

I am doing a rare guitar gig at a jazz festival in Birmingham tomorrow and on the 30th i'm playing bass with Musical Youth at the Milton Keynes Reggaeland festival.

I have seen Alison Raynor Qt a number of times and they are a great band. Mostly Jazz festival is a more representative of what I would consider a Birmingham Jazz festival. Shame it is only over a long weekend. Actually my band has played there a few years ago. The Birmingham Jazz festival is not put on by the organisation called "Birmingham Jazz". Birmingham Jazz put on smaller gigs which I have been to over the years and occasionally have a small festival. The Birmingham Jazz festival now called (Birmingham Sandwell & Westside festval) is put on by an organisation called Big Bear Music which i think is based in wolverhampton. Here is this year's lineup. http://www.birminghamjazzfestival.com/calendar/ Let me know of any hard hitting jazz funk or fusion bands in the roster.

I'm a brummie through and through and a lover of jazz but I am embarrassed by the Birmingham Jazz festival it's a joke compared to any other jazz festival I have been to around the UK. Every year that festival is on i'm put off because most of the bands are the trad jazz and little of the modern jazz and rarely any kind of fusion or jazz funk. Anything that has Tom Hill, Art Themen or Chris Bowden playing in is worth going to see. Both are extremely good players. One year when it covered Solihull, i went there for and there was not a single band playing jazz music at all. There was a bands playing country, ska and other non jazz genres. There are a lot of superb jazz musicians and younger jazz musicians with new slants on the genre in and around Birmingham but they don't seem to fit with the theme of the Birmingham "Trad" Jazz festival. If i'm honest i think it needs to be scrapped until it can provide a more diverse range of music. Let me have a look at the lineup for this year and see if i can be pleasantly surprised. 🥱

I play quite a bit of reggae and hence need a lot of bottom end at fairly high volumes. And I have found that to get the least noise/distortion and risk of farting out from my rig (rack), I put the power amp (class D) on full or virtually full and set my bass to about 3/4 full volume then start to increase the gain on my preamp till I get to the volume I need for the gig. That way I get a clean sound, lots of clean headroom and less chance of farting at low volume from my cab. If I do it the other way and set the pre-amp high and then use the power amp to set the stage volume i tend to get more hiss from the preamp and more chance of the cab farting out at low or high volumes. It i'm using a standard type of bass head, the ones i have tried are too hissy if i turn the master volume to full and then bring up the pre-amp gain. That said my Mesa boogie Walkabout has never made my cabs fart out but can start to be edgy if it's up to loud and it is quite hissy if up loud. The worst for causing farting out I have found are those heads with a sub/octave button, i turn those off.

I agree and I also used to play harder with the result, sore finger tips. Generally that was for tonal reasons or if the band was playing loud and I needed to hear myself clearly. During the lockdown I took the opportunity to work on my technique and play with a lighter more even touch and dig in only when I needed that dynamic dug in sound rather than for volume. I now don't have any sore fingers.

Hmm, most likely the drummer. 🤣. Seriously though, maybe the pre-amp in the rig is overheating and clipping??. Maybe try a lower pre-amp setting and open up the master volume a bit more to get the same overall volume and see how that works out? Having not had many bass rigs I most likely understand far less than you do. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable on these things might offer some insight.

I've had my BTII for just over 4 years and if anything happened to it, sure i would buy the most up to date version of that cab. I did a lot of reading about cabs when I went looking for a new one and mainly due to the good reviews of owners here, video reviews and a few conversations with Alex I realised this would be the best cab for me and so far I haven't played through anything else that makes me think otherwise. 🤑

I have a few large gigs coming up this summer and the latter part of the year, and I am looking for a video camera that will fit on to the headstock of my bass so that I can record and film what i'm doing on stage and what's going on around me. Also that has over an hour recording time. Can anyone recommend such a camera that has both good quality sound & vision and not heavy enough to pull my headstock down. Thanks

In equal measures, Aston "Family Man" Barrett && Stanley Clarke they are so different and their playing represent the largest influences on my taste in music. They are joint No:1

Alembic F-2B was based on the Tom Walker design for Fender Preamps. https://club.alembic.com/index.php?topic=288.msg1116#msg1116

I have never weighed it but it certainly feels a lot lighter.

Thanks. The gold coloured knobs are a recent addition. i thought they were a bit blingy at first but i've got used to them now. 😂🤣🤩

SUPERB!!!!!!

My main gigging rig. Alembic preamps and Synq power amp into the Big Twin II

Most of the bands i have seen on the festival broadcast, i have never heard of. I have heard of HAIM only just because of on-line comments about the bass player's expressive face. But she holds it down on the bass so I Will have to find some of their stuff on spotify or youtube. 👍🏾

I have a 1980 and a 2003 series bass and the op amps look different, the older bass has spider legs whilst the later is a plug and socket. They may be the same internally, but at least one of the reasons for the external power supply was because of the current draw which flattens the internal backup batteries in around 20hrs, so using the Psu gives full 36vdc to the bass so it's always operating at design spec voltage.

Cut a long story out with a combination of new bits from Barefaced, chopping and changing various combinations of amps, preamps and speaker parts to try to work out where the issue is. I have traced it to the Synq 1K0 power amp. I contacted the company and the only thing the suggested was to check the input capacitors, so i presume they are aware of that issue. It's now at a repair centre and the BBII is back with it's original innards and working fine with my other setups. Thanks for your input and Phil Starr, your first sentence is clearly correct. But I had to go through everything I could to see if it was a combination of other things in the chain or just the cab. Thanks everyone for chipping in to assist.

I have had one of these in my plugboard for decades and so far it's not detected any faults. I do check it fairly regularly by plugging in at home just to be sure it's working ok.

My other half doesn't object either in fact she is really encouraging, probably because she knows i don't buy on a whim and take my time when deciding to get another bass. She probably knows more about my basses than she realises.

In my experience of insuring instruments and other high value items outside the home on a household policy, there is usually a clause that excludes cover if the items are used for reward. For example gigs. This was pointed out to me when i tried to include my instruments on it. when i joined the MU, i took out instrument insurance through them. Remember insurance company will often try to find any way to avoid paying out if they can.

HAHAH I had the same look when I turned up for an audition with my fretless electric guitar. Didn't get the gig though because the drummer thought my playing was too jazzy. Which to me was a compliment, as jazz guitar is something I have always struggled with. 🙂 A few years later we were in the same touring band for about 4 years, he still had the same attitude so I deliberately brought the same guitar to some of the early gigs and played as jazzy/bluesy as I could since he, like me, was also a hired as a session player and played to order.

I got fed up with the cost of inkjet printer cartridges since the number of prints you get from them before the solvent in them evaporates is really low. I bit the bullet and got a colour laser printer and the current cartridges were bought pre-covid and still going strong. I get refillable cartridges also which saves a few quid.