Mornats

[quote name='gjones' timestamp='1424001538' post='2691314'] Get gigging. Turn up at some open mic nights and get up and play. There's nothing like the possibility of looking like a fanny in front of a pub full of people, to make sure you put the practice hours in. [/quote] This is a massive help for me. If I'm doing a gig I'll put the practice in beforehand. I'll run through our set list (half a dozen original songs in a semi-acoustic band) a few days in a row before the gig and I'll do warm up exercises on the day too. Also, I tend to try and learn something a bit above my level too so that I can settle back into the comfortable territory of our songs much more easily. I played a set once, thought I did terrible and played without a lot of confidence and I had a double bass player (I always look up to double bass players) come up and say, "nice playing mate".

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1423959981' post='2691031'] Stabs in my head..! [/quote] I hope in a good way!

Whoo-whooo! Mine's done https://soundcloud.com/mornats/trains I had the idea of the rough bass and the piano stabs in my head already and found some nice train-esque hi-hats in my EZdrummer midi. And now finally I can go and listen to all the others.

[quote name='FinnDave' timestamp='1423876447' post='2690097'] Somehow I ended up with a new Fender standard Jazz [/quote] I went shopping for bed linen and "somehow" ended up with an Overwater contemporary jazz. Still haven't worked out how that happened. Happy NBD

Cheers AT. I hope it's playable. I've been after a uke bass for a while now having played a really nice Ashbury one and a Kala. I just couldn't justify £200 plus on one. The HB one comes in at £42 including postage which is nice. Kinda wish I'd had a couple of other things in my basket to take advantage of the postage but it's still a bargain.

Yes! Ordered! Just what I was waiting for And sold out! Sorry!

I upgraded from an old Core 2 Duo with 8GB of ram to an overclocked i7 running at 4.6ghz and 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro RAM (don't you just love RAM that's called Vengeance?). I had a track, one of my entries for this competition in fact, that it couldn't play without a glitch unless I froze half the tracks and even then the CPU use was hitting 80-90%. Under my new system the same track, with everything unfrozen and played in realtime hits around 8-12% CPU usage. The crazy thing is, it runs quieter than my old system too!

I've just spent 3 and a half hours tonight and around the same time again over the last week trying to work out why my project was crashing all the time. During my testing I'd found that if I swapped the same rate on my Forte from 48khz to 44.1khz it would crash immediately without fail. Hours of trying every damn thing I read up on and nothing sorted it. So I stripped out the VSTs one by one and eventually found that it was Sampletank 3 Free version that was the culprit. I was 30 mins away from doing a full Windows reinstall before finding out it was that. Anyway, still working on mine. I'm gonna leave the recording/composition as it is and do the mix. It's sounding pretty decent at the moment and I'm loving the bass sound too.

I found that the Fender strings that came with my VM sounded great for 2-3 days then died off very very quickly. I was tempted to buy another set to see how long they last from fresh (the set on the bass were on there when it was up on the shop wall) but then I splashed out on a set of Elixirs.

Mine's coming along nicely. As per usual it's got a spy-music feel to it with some old movie dialogue jammed into semi-appropriate spots. I'm just deciding on whether to go for a synth or to add strings to my brass section (I'm leaning towards the strings). Next up will be a bit of mixing but I've been following advice I've read and I've been trying to get it right by just balancing the volume of each track first. I'm hoping the mixing stage will just separate some sounds from each other so you can hear them more clearly. Might have it done by the end of the week

[quote name='White Cloud' timestamp='1423598252' post='2686921'] Origins of the word [i]Brand [/i]= "[i]A method of burning a distinctive symbol into the skin of animals to differentiate between one persons cattle and another's[/i]." Be careful of the brand that you choose allegiance to....you wear it. The things that you own own you. [/quote] Which brand are your socks? How allied to them are you? Do they own you?

I much prefer the look of the Ashbury over the Ashbory basses (the latter look like malformed toys to me - sorry!) but I've not played an Ashbory bass. So so far I've had a go of a Kala u-bass (very nice to play, nicely built and sounds immense) but I hate those rubber strings. I tried the Ashbury bass that had flatwounds on and built quality and playability seemed up there with the Kala with the added bonus of having nice strings. It sounded great too but I've not played it plugged in yet. As I just mentioned I also tried a Luna u-bass which was simply dreadful (and at £250, more expensive than the Ashbury). It had a cheap gloss finish to it, played awful and sounded poor. It did have a P width neck on it which some may prefer but I felt was wrong on an instrument that was so short. All of them are tuned as a u-bass (EADG) and not as a uke and I'd plan to play one as a bass substitute. So I'm still leaning towards the Ashbury as a grab-n-play instrument at home that I can jam along to music with without plugging in and without disturbing the neighbours. I could probably record it through my condenser mic too, as well as through plugging it into my audio interface. I'm still struggling to justifying the expense of one but I'll let you know how I get on if I do buy one.

Ta! And that should have read looooong time, not looking time Auto-correct, I'm sick of your shirt!

Having received some great advice on here about getting a good tone when recording I had a go at recording a tune that had been forming in my head. I popped along here to check the theme, and expanded the tune to fit. I need to re-record some instruments, clean up a couple of parts that aren't working and do the mixing (eq tweaks so that no instrument is stepping on the toes of others mostly) and I should have my first entry in a looking time

Is that a Ritter car and boat?

If I saw you playing that at a gig I'd come up afterwards to ask about it as I've not seen it before. If you were playing, say, a 3 tone sunburst P or J I may just go to the bar

No worries! I'm actually a jazz bass man but I thought the pickup position of the Dimension would suggest a Musicman type sound. But if you're after a different sound to a P, J or MM then this bass might be right up your street. It's a quality instrument for sure with a different sound to other Fender instruments.

[quote name='Painy' timestamp='1423397727' post='2684250'] Interesting. A bit disappointing as I really do love the look of it but it's the classic Ray sound that I'm really after. Still might be worth trying one out though if the quality is there as you say. [/quote] Yes, definitely worth checking out still. You may hear the tone you want from it still

I tried a Luna bass ukulele yesterday and it was absolutely rubbish, especially when compared to the Ashbury so I'm suspecting that the Ashbury is quite decent.

Ben's videos are great. I have them just playing in a long playlist in the background when I'm working on a bass, even if they're not covering the work I'm doing. They just kinda get you in the mood (ooer!)

I tried the new Squier Dimension bass yesterday and compared it with an SUB. To be honest, as nice as the Dimension was (and it really was up to the Squier VM standards) the pickup sound didn't do the classic MM sound to me. It felt too much like a modern, active bass and lacked a bit of soul. It sounded good though, it just didn't do that funky honk sound. The SUB had that classic tone. I had a go of a mate's OLP 5 string that, despite being passive, got that stingray tone down a treat too.

Here's Ben's video on how to do it (Ben is the guys who taught us how to level frets): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uflkxIgPr1c I'm usually terrified of taking a tool to anything but I'm quite happy doing this now.

Wow thanks for all of the fantastic comments and advice guys. Basschat at its best I'm gonna try recording from the DI on my MarkBass 121P (essentially an LM3) and as Simon suggested, just keep going at it and at it, learning and learning along the way. I'm very interested in 3below's suggestion of a DI box although that's what I'm getting from the MarkBass I guess? Worth trying with what I've got before giving myself an excuse for GAS I learnt from The Recording Revolution about recording at low levels and leaving loads of headroom. Thankfully the preamps on my Focusrite are deemed to be very noise-free by many so I should have no problems here. I'll let you know how I get on and maybe post a comparison of my old technique and any new techniques that I end up using. Thanks again all