51m0n

Crickey, memory wracking on full power (owww)
Piccies - you must be joking, we used crayons when I started...

Crap Carlsbro 115 combo to start with (I think) - totally underpowered though (not more than 100w IIRC, and that was some kind of printing error in the manual IMO)
Moved to HH bass head (2 u sized thing - utter rubbish) into some old Carlsbro 15 cab.
Moved to a Carlsbro Stingray head (I think: had a semiparametric eq) into an HH 2x15 (unbelievably heavy - still have to see an osteopath every 3 months due to an accident with it in a doorway!)
Moved on to a Laney G300 stereo head into 2 Laney 410 cabs - massive improvement, I loved it very very dearly and wore it out completely in the end.
Added a Crown DC300 lab amp and 2 HH 115 PA cabs for maximum clout - ridiculously heavy and big rig, incredible volume though - loved it!
Added a Digitech BP8 for all things weird and wonderful.

Fairly long break ensued whilst I downsized several times until eventually replacing the last bits and pieces with my current rig:-

Korg DTR2000 tuner, Focusrite compounder compressor, Markbass sa450, Bergantino ae410.

Which is smaller, lighter and louder (I think) than my old big rig. And sounds about a million times better too

There is a pair of SH Moons in GAK at the moment - one is a white JBass reputedly used by Larry at some point. Has a tweaked EQ in it to his tastes apparently.

Had a good bash on it and holy mother of god that is one hell of a slapper :wacko::blink :

Going for just over 1K for each (didnt play the other one)

Just in case any of you are interested like....

Definitely meths over boiling, you cant get all the water out very quickly and that seems to weaken the inner core quicker (more string breakages as a result) it may well be to do with thermal stress more though.

meths does a good job, boiling appears to bring a bit more life back but for a very short period of time IME.

I have 2 sets of DR's for my 4 string and one set lives in meths to be swapped when the set on the bass goes too manky.

Works a treat (be sure to give them a day to dry out if you want to be certain theres none left to spoil that finish though.

I do really mean it - get the wavs up and I'd love to have a crack at remixing it for you. Just the once mind ;o)

[quote name='slaphappygarry' post='406132' date='Feb 11 2009, 11:50 AM']Its a turkey if you start with mp3 files dude. I don't mind hosting the .wav's if you can get me them.

G[/quote]


He's been using garbage band so I suspect he only has mp3s at this point....

[quote name='xgsjx' post='405348' date='Feb 10 2009, 01:59 PM']I'll have a look at finding what places I can get some space to upload MP3s of files like cheddatom suggests (Reverbnation comes to mind) if anybody want's a mess with them.

Cheers

G[/quote]

I'm always up for a bit of a remix too as it goes ;o)

I come from a long Logic background.

Reaper is up there in an awful lot of ways to be honest.

Pretty much everything you will really _need_ to track and mix on a PC is there. The routing is excellent, the provided Rea_blah fx are very light on resources.

So no for the forseeable future I dont think you _need_ to get a full fat DAW, reaper is a huuuge leap up from Audacity.

HD24's are, for the price, the best Harddisk recorder out there. Excellent ADA conversion, extremely simple interface really neat. If you had data loss due to hd issues then my guess is the hd's in question are probably pretty old (approaching or surpassed MTBF). HD24s use old PATA drives, really old tech by todays standards, perfectly adequate for their intended use, but the drives are often old. We run two of them hooked up to a mackie 32:8 + 24:8 extension, and it works really really well. Its simple enough for a drummer to run. But he does properly understand gain structure and tracking - I suggest you take some time to read up on this stuff!

If the 'engineer' tracked stuff with very low levels he's rubbish, or not got decent kit - we use a series one focusrite octopre to ensure we get no overs on drums - brilliant kit. If the engineer lost stuff he either needs to own up or if its kit issues, then he needs to sort that out pronto or it will cost him work.

Garage Band is dung, anything that only runs on mp3s is completely mickey mouse and not going to get you decent results. Sorry.

Reaper is excellent and as close to freeware as you get on windows.

Be careful with Maximisers, they all have artifacts that can make your mix seem great at the time but in retrospect sound very over produced at best - at worst you can crush the life out of a mix completely. Loudness is not everything.

Look up frequency mixing, compression techniques, use of additive vs inline fx and creating a 3d field with all the previous to add depth to your mixes.

Also join here:-

[url="http://homerecording.com/bbs/"]http://homerecording.com/bbs/[/url]

and start learning!

I've not even touched mic choice or use as possible issues, or acoustic treatment, each of which are areas with tomes written about them by cleverer cats than me.

If you think bass playing is a resource hog, home recording is a whole 'nuther galaxy of pain

You'll love it!!

At least MS comes from a Soul background, you can actually get away with being quite funky on it if thats your bag, rather than just the usual 12 bar blues fodder that you get in covers bands. Its at least a small step in the right direction for me.

I'm the only guy in my band who wants it to be funky at all - the rest like blues rock. Its a battle of wills sometimes, but I generally get to subtly undermine them with a bouncier bassline than they though could possibly work

OP, I'd swap your day job with mine in a heartbeat mate. Sounds absolutely fine to me!

Reaper.

Its the canine undercarriage.

Not strictly free but a very open ended try until you buy license.

[quote name='bobbass4k' post='395562' date='Jan 30 2009, 05:07 PM']does Tia Carrera count?[/quote]

Who cares?

I never even saw the bass.......

I cant stress how much I think you'd help yourself by switching to right handed now if you've only been playing a little while. My son is a leftie, played violin (they only come right handed, picked up bass rightie, and now plays upright as well (and they also are almost always right handed).

There is no problem playing wronghanded, it just takes a little while to get used to, and it certainly hasnt stopped the likes of John Patittuci (sp?).

All your lefty small market issues and not being able to try basses disappear too.

WRT what bass is good for what genre, literally any bass can be made to sound fine in any genre. I'm not kidding. It might look very out of place but if its half decent it can sound fine. What you want to concentrate on is playability and bang for the buck (resale value is a good one too). Mostly whether it works for you in your hands though. You can upgrade electronics, but you will struggle to make significant changes to the inherent ergonomics of a design.

Pick what works for you, I bought my Vester in '94, as it just fit my hands and body right, upgraded the electronics to EMGs a few years later (just like buying a new bass in terms of sonic difference, but like keeping the old one in terms of muscle , memory and feeling 'at home'). I only just felt the need to upgrade to a big boys toy (the Roscoe) - sure the workmanship is in a different league, but there is nothing wrong with that - it cost 3 times as much! I dont think I would ever lose a gig because I turned up with the Vester rather than the Roscoe, unless it required 5 strings.

Oh and my Vester is the one commonly called a Warwick clone, although actually it really isnt - there isnt a single Warwick that looks the same (vague resemblance to a Thumb) but the hardware is closer to a Spector (esp the brigde which is a complete clone - a very very good!) - in any event it is a really really good mid range bass, that you can easily upgrade the electronics on when the time comes.

I'd also strongly recommend you check out the Ibanez SR stuff - even the 300 series is a super playable bass!

Played on one yesterday

Not so far away from my sa450 to be honest - I didnt AB them and couldnt tell you any startling difference in tone that stood out for me. Has an even more powerful eq section (4 sweepable eq bands rather than 2) though if thats important to you.

I'd recommend the sa450, LMII, LMK, or the ta5## to anyone though, so you might be asking the wrong guy

Another vote for the Ibanez sr300

Got one of these [url="http://www.ibanez.com/BassGuitars/model-SR300M"]Ibanez sr300[/url] for a female friend as her starting bass, and its amazing the tone is fine, the action is great (admit I did have to tweak it abit though), but it weighs nothing, and is so incredibly slim and ergonomically well sorted, its no wonder she's loving playing and really turning into a super bassist. My first bass was utter $@*& in comparison!

[quote name='silddx' post='397941' date='Feb 2 2009, 03:06 PM']All I remember being aware of was the pulse and the accents. It was tight, musical, thrilling, improvised but I was only half aware, like in a dream. Doesn't happen very often, we usually have rigid structure and don't deviate very much, because the song is king. We have a lot of comms going on on stage usually. It was sort of instictive I suppose. Drummer's eyes were closed, he was trippin too.[/quote]


[quote name='The Funk' post='397948' date='Feb 2 2009, 03:10 PM']That's a good thing. It's being in the zone![/quote]


Beat me to it Mr The Funk sir.

Not only is this Zone a very real thing, its been studied, and its said to be the reason behind a lot of top sportspeople's success. I get it sometimes too. Funnily enough I was well in the zone for my entire driving test (many years ago) the examiner was just a disembodied voice, it was retrospectively quite a bizarre experience, essentially just concentrating so hard that you lose yourself completely to the moment.

I also find that zone when I'm recording sometimes - then its almost always a really great take, so I'm not surprised your recording turned out so well silddx, not at all!

Of course dont mistake the zone with being stoned off your gourd - sometimes it can feel very similar (so I'm told ) but on the one hand you play brilliant and dont realise and on the other you think you played brilliantly but didnt realise you just pissed yourself in front of everyone....

[quote name='birdy' post='397908' date='Feb 2 2009, 02:37 PM']Congratulations!! Lovely bass :-)

Steve[/quote]

Cheers, I'm loving it!

Hmmm bright green Vester 4 string and as of Saturday's visit to BassDirect the Roscoe Century Standard....

sa450 and a berg ae410 - its the absolute epitome of quality tone for me.

[quote name='alexclaber' post='394349' date='Jan 29 2009, 09:15 AM']Go back fifteen years and we thought 300W was a lot of power and 500W was as much as you could ever need! Many cab makers have hardly moved forwards with their speakers but their amps are far more powerful than then - all that extra power is simply wasted unless you have cabs that can make use of it. And that does not mean you need to look for a cab that is rated at 500W or a 1000W or so on because that only tells you how much heat they can handle - even an expensive 1000W rated neo 4x10" can't handle more than 300W in the lows without distortion.[/quote]

+1 my old rig (circa '94) had 2 410s each rated at a then very respectable 280w, driven at 150w each (also had a couple of 15's rated at 250w a piece, driven at 300w each, if you belived crown's specs). This was considered huge overkill.

I now have an amp rated at 500w and a cab supposedly capable of coping with 800w RMS (god knows what the peaks are like) - I've certainly not given it even close to enough beans to make it stressed.

Frankly the new rig is significantly louder than the old one too, it just doesnt fill the back of a club as well

Wow thats an awsome piece of kit.

Anyone know how good they are for bass.

To be entirely up front I'm not about to buy this off you right now, but its a seriously cool looking toy!

I need three things from my gear:-

Reliability (its GOT to keep working)
Functionality (It has to give me what I require in terms of what it can do for me)
Tone (I have to like how it sounds)

Its also really handy if I can afford it (ever the realist eh!)

Seems pretty obvious but it means I have played the same bass since '94, although I did swap out the pickups to improve the tone. And thats a Vester; which many people look down their nose at - but the neck just works for me better than anything else I've ever played yet....

My amp and cabs stayed the same for years, but I recently upgraded very significantly, mainly because my old gear was literally worn out. You know the best thing about that? The advances in technology wrt bass gear over the past 14 years have been enormous! So much more noticeable for not having bothered with it for ages.

My only piece of equiptment I wish to upgrade now is my trusty old Vester - again because I ahve worn it out - which is the universes way of telling me to upgrade. [b]Now upgraded - see sig [/b]

In truth you only need one bass and one amp and one cable to play bass (and power) and you can play in any style, with a huge range of perfectly useable tones. But all that lovely stuff just keeps calling doesnt it

In:

Berg ae410
Focusrite compounder
Korg dtr2000
Hartke LH500 (for my son)

Out:-
Nowt - oops!

Not looking to good on the balance sheet is it??

Well in my case my left wrist clicking is a warning that my RSI is about to kick off if I dont a) lay off clicking it and rest it as much as possible and c) make sure I'm not putting it under any undue strain typing at work.

I'd keep a close eye on it if I were you....

Fantastic recording and playing!

Just really shows what you can do when you work within the limitations of your equiptment.

Also a lesson to anyone who is utterly slavish to the click.

Really inspirational grooves, must get home and get the bass out now

Cracking effort sir!