tauzero

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, unless you think he's going to mug you and steal your bass if you go to a rehearsal.

When I joined the current band there were a few songs I'd done before, and I went back to some of them to check I was playing things right. Discovered I hadn't been playing "Run to you" exactly right, so I corrected that. I'm house bassist at a couple of open mic nights and the host plays certain songs regularly, so I have checked most of them out to see that I was reasonably consistent with the original. Something that annoys me at another open mic, where there's no house bassist but the host's assistant is a guitarist who owns a bass, is that said guitarist who owns a bass (who is, in fairness, f*cking awful as a bassist) is the favoured one to accompany a couple of the regulars, and one of the songs that one of those regulars does regularly is "Folsom Prison Blues". Possibly triggered by the word "blues", the guitarist who owns a bass always plays a walking bass line (extraordinarily badly) to this rather than the proper root-5th country line.

I bought a 2000 Warwick Thumb in 2006, surprisingly cheaply, and had the baseball-bat neck reprofiled to the same dimensions as my JD Thumb and defretted. Some years later, I had the unfretboard replaced with a slab of ebony by Jon Shuker. This is it with the initial defret:

A brace of Warwick Thumbs:

If the active speaker can take both mic level and line level inputs then any preamp pedal should drive it.

Friday night's open mic featured an appearance by the 14-y-o guitarist's mother to sing November Rain. She got a bit panicked and it all got somewhat rearranged on the fly but Phoebe managed to get her soloes in. And it was the last night that the 12-y-o singer was a 12-y-o singer as her birthday was the day after. Another guy put in an appearance - the first time Mrs Zero and I had seen him since well before lockdown. He used to run an open mic night in Coventry which is where I first met the keyboardist-singer that I'm now playing bass for. He had a series of mini-strokes but has recovered and is trying to get out more.

Fretless ex-demo 6-string, 15% off, just under £7k, presumably plus VAT and duty.

But for me to play it the right way, I'd also have to train the guitarist to play it the right way. And I think it sounds fine as it is.

I'm considering one of these - what's the neck profile like? I like a slim shallow neck, would I be disappointed?

I feel remarkably relaxed about that.

I've always played the intro along with the guitarist (multiple bands), same notes going up as going down.

It wasn't the guitarist who cut the solo off at seven bars, it was the singer crashing in at a random point. Verses and choruses would be added, deleted, or reordered completely randomly, the three of us got very adept at switching.

In fairness, one former band had a singer who regularly rearranged songs at random in real time. The delights of a 7-bar guitar solo in Johnny B Goode...

I just had some ICs sent over from the US by a guy from Talkbass. This is what he did about shipping: " I use a shipping broker called Pirate Ship (pirateship.com). For international orders I send the package to them, and they re-ship it to you. Saves lots of money. Anyway, in a few days the package will reach Los Angeles and will be trans-shipped to you."

Just ordered one of these from AliDistress: to give it a whirl with Fender Studio and anything else that takes my fancy. £14 (prices may go up as well as down).

Most of our gigs are play now, pay later - the drummer and I both act as "treasurers" in that some of the gigs he does the online thing and others I do invoices for and collect the money, then we just redistribute it as a straight 4-way split. Generally works OK although occasionally we have to chase up payments.

Too many "s"s in the website name - https://www.basstradersweden.com/ is the link.

My first bass, a Rosetti Bass 7. Hollow-bodied double-cut bass in hideous greenburst with a plastic assembly holding the pickups. Awful neck, and the body seemed to be made of papier-mache. Bought for £2, can't remember what I sold it for - this would have been about 1971. Didn't touch a bass again for three or four years. I don't have a photo, which is just as well because it would probably trigger me.

My Batking acoustic U-bass is 1.15kg, my Kala SUB 5-string solid U-bass is 1.75kg. A bag of sugar is 1kg.

Alan Cringean uses his preamps - @skelf, do you happen to know if John East is OK?

C:Ream Bream Pric Clapton

Killing Jake

Or the Dean Michael Schtinker.

You could always use flatwounds instead.