tauzero

I do quite a few open mics which have featured bands, and 90% of the bassists have 4-string FSOs. Having had both fan-frets and parallel frets, I prefer the parallel. I also prefer 5-strings to 6-strings (and 4-strings). For those reasons, this doesn't interest me except in the sense that I'd like to see if NS comes up with the CF equivalent of the Hohner B2AV or Spirit XT25 (with a nicer neck). It does look like a better thought out body than the symmetrical cricket bat.

Take the ones you don't want to bring back.

I'm in as long as it's not the last weekend in June. Probably.

The Telecaster that he used for the solo on Stairway to Heaven sold an awful lot of Les Pauls.

Friday was with The Bonnevilles at the Gate in Sutton Coldfield. It's a pub on two levels - last time I played there we were at bar level, this time (as a few times before) we were at front door level which is a metre or so lower. It's OK for space. All went well, most of the punters stayed there and there were a few dancers in the tiny area available. Fortunately the singer (with the PA) and I managed to get parking close to the door, it's not a great place for access. Sei Flamboyant 5 headless -> Lekato wireless -> Zoom MS-60B+ -> Tecamp Puma 900 -> GR Bass AT212. Caravelle memory foam trainers with socks. Saturday was with Dirty Roses at the Wheatsheaf in Atherstone. There is a reasonable amount of space there (though I should have got them to put the pool table at the side rather than the back). Load in and out is crap, you have to find somewhere close by on the street to leave the car and then get the gear through a narrow passageway leading to the rear of the pub. Gig itself went OK - did seem a bit fraught at one point as two big blokes (I only came up to their shoulders) seemed to be squaring up right in front of us, but someone cooled them down a bit and separated them, and they were back to being besties an hour later. It's one of those transient pubs where people move on, and by the end of the night the audience had dwindled from about 50 to about 20. And I forgot to take my glasses and my phone - fortunately the only small writing I have to make out is MIDI IN and OUT and I could manage that, the other small (and faint) writing is "Transmitter" and "Receiver" on the wireless and that's now labelled with a big "Tx" and "Rx" that I have no problem making out. Same gear and footwear as last night. No phone so no photo from me. David Bailey quality photo from the drummer.

Say you were washing your hair and it couldn't have been you at the gig. Maybe you have a doppelganger. Alternatively, talk to the singer and ask if you could still be friends if you were critical of the band. What you do then depends on the answer.

Are there any open mics or jam nights near you? Would be worth exploring if there are. Also, are there any rehearsal studios around by you? They're worth checking out for adverts and putting your own adverts in. Bassists are generally quite in demand, almost as much as drummers.

Very nice. And, fortunately, sold (not to me).

Basic personal hygiene - bath or shower at some point in the day before going to audition. If you're nominally clean-shaven, shave too. And make sure your clothes are clean. From the "auditioning them" point of view, work out whether they're roughly as competent as you. A bit better is fine, it'll pull you up. A little worse should be OK, especially if you can pull them up. On which subject, work out whether criticism can be given and taken if you can.

Even if it's easy to accidentally release them? I don't know whether it is or not, I'd like to find out. Not that I want one, I've found that I prefer parallel-fret basses.

It took a long time because it's headless and they wanted to make up new ways of it being headless rather than using something that's been around for 40 years, like they do with the headed basses? Not sure about those string clamps - how secure are they against accidental release? And what real advantages do they offer over screw clamps for those of us whose time between string changes can be measured in months or years? Headless basses do seem to have regained popularity, which is nice.

Which is why I said you need to know which way to turn the truss rod - I do have a 2000 Thumb but I don't think I've had to adjust the trussrod on it.

Nine Inch Rails, the well-known model railway company.

I forgot to mention the other potential failure mode, in case anything similar happens again - plugging the receiver into the bass and the transmitter into the amp tends also to produce silence.

The guitarist/singer in a former band got very sweary in his intersong patter. Not sure whether the drummer was intending to leave anyway, but he did, and the band broke up - story in the acrimonious band break-ups thread. In another former band, the singer (only a teenager) was very poor at stage patter so we wrote scripts for her. She didn't exactly deliver them fluently, but it was something. I saw another band of teenagers who also had a script. At one point, the singer said "Oh. Our guitarist has broken a string" at which point the guitarist put his still perfectly strung guitar on a stand and picked up his other guitar. Yet another former band had a Scottish guitarist/singer who would do intersong patter in an impenetrable mumble, from which the drummer and I had to try and work out what the next song was ("Hurble wurble wurble hoo hay, ha ha ha"), before the guitarist started and we joined in (no drummer count ins). At least the set list was mostly constant although songs occasionally got omitted.

How can you be very nearly a daughter?

They should try putting out a line of headless basses. It's worked for Ibanez and Cort, and Dingwall are jumping on the bandwagon.

Using Tuffcab?

3. Don't run the bearing over a void.

Triplets.

And yet there are people who don't like headless basses.

Only four strings and doesn't look great for playing seated. Headless and natural wood finish though, so that ticks two of my boxes.

What about the centre pickup? Are the controls for that on the upper bout?

Alternative - have a series of bars the width of the strings (plus a bit) running across between bridge and neck, each having two coils. One coil is for the signal, the other is connected to DC to turn the bar into an electromagnet. Power would be applied through a sliding switch - the wiper would connect a single bus bar to a series of segments, each powering a single coil. For added entertainment, there could be more than one slider - there would need to be a bit at the end of the slider's travel where it wouldn't connect power to any coil, so that either one or two pickups could be suggested. I suspect that to get an adequately powerful electromagnet, the voltage to be applied to the coil would be a bit on the high side, but I'm sure that could be catered for and the simple expedient of playing wearing rubber gloves would be a minor inconvenience when this is considered in the context of the next great advance in pickup technology.

If Leo got it right with the G&L, why did he persist with that stupid overweight and oversized 4 inline/4+1 headstock when better-designed basses are 2+2 or 3+2, or headless? It's reminiscent of Edward Turner when he was brought back to Triumph to design a 350cc twin to compete with the Japanese and persisted with the vertically split crankcases, so there was no centre main bearing and the crankshafts kept breaking. Admittedly not quite as disastrous, but definitely a poor idea.