dc2009

hey uke, do you mind if i asked how much yours was?

[quote name='obbm' post='1244426' date='May 25 2011, 04:05 PM']Quite right, GAK etc., because of their volume of sales are able to buy cheaper AND sell at a lower margin as they have a very diverse product range and much bigger turnover with which to cover their costs and return a profit. Exactly the same argument applies to supermarkets v local corner shops. We don't have many of the latter any more and the same will happen to the local music shop if no-one buys anything from them. Want to get rich quick? Get an industrial unit in a deproved area, stack it with equipment, sell it cheap on line, employ monkeys and pay peanuts. Someone tried in Liverpool and failed. Someone else tried to be the UK's equivalent of GC and failed. However they have one in Germany and it's still in business. Where do the Brits go wrong?[/quote] Which in my post before (last one of the last page I think) I alluded to :-). I quite like the idea of guitar supermarkets, and obviously it hasn't quite been done right with GC in the US, as you hear mixed reports, but I don't think it would be too hard to fix, to make a guitar store chain the Waitrose rather than the asda! I'm interested to know that someone tried it, I wasn't aware of it happening before here. I quite like Thomann, and I know they sell and ship internationally, but if I was to be their business development guy, I'd be pushing for largish stores in largish cities across europe, sure it will cost more for them to do, but I think they'll get more sales to make up for it.

[quote name='obbm' post='1244391' date='May 25 2011, 03:42 PM']Sorry but you have no idea what the mark-up is because you don't know what it is costing them. If you are comparing with the US price then this is an unfair comparision. I will reiterate what I said before, in the UK most US products are handled by an importer who forecasts, orders and buys from the manufacturer and resells to the store, so there are 2 sets of mark-up being applied. Fender have Fender UK. The profit they make keeps Fender UK in business. In the case of Musicman it's Strings and Things who do just the same. They have to provide local warranty, etc which all cost money. The exception are small, low volume US manufacturers who deal directly with UK sellers such as Bass Direct and Bass Gear.[/quote] True I don't know what it is costing them, but when the markup from a local store is sufficient to make you realise that another, larger UK based store, e.g. GAK will do it for significantly less, you know their markup is more than that of GAKs, or that it costs less for it to get to GAK, which either way makes it cheaper for you buy from GAK than the local store, regardless of where the difference is made up. EDIT: in that example I wasn't talking necessarily about US products, I just meant any product, let's take an Ibanez or a Dean as an example, on sale in a large UK store (e.g. GAK, dv247 among others) or my local music shop, typically the large retailer will sell it at a lot less.

@ Russ and Molan In my experience, small stores are equally guilty of the above. There are guys who you can think are a waste of space and there are guys who can be so knowledgable, helpful and friendly that they are the difference between a sale and no sale, equally I'm sure both types are present in GCs or other large chains - this is the nature of the business imo. I personally think it could be done relatively easy, to set up a chain of stores where there is a standard that you know you can find everywhere, similar to (i can't think of it, the M&S equivalent in the US where they have to remember your name for ages). It wouldn't be hard for GC to implement an 'every guitar/bass gets this standard set up before going on display' policy.

[quote name='molan' post='1244293' date='May 25 2011, 02:30 PM']I'm not sure the mark ups charged by UK Bass Retailers are really that crazy for new stock. I've never met one who seems to be making much more than a basic living out of running his business. We'd be really screwed if they all cut their margins down to 10% and then promptly went bust. They have all getting hammered by online only distributors for a few years now and what would we all do if there was nowhere to go and actually try anything out (other than our wonderfully organised BC Bass Bashes of course!).[/quote] True. But then music is a hobby, and guitar/bass shops are nothing more than specialist hobby shops, albeit quite popular ones, I wouldn't expect them to rake in a fortune. I appreciate they have to markup on anything they sell, but I do often wish there were fewer stores (with more of a monopoly) that could get away with charging less of a markup, because they sold that much more. Too many guitar stores I've been to are tiny affairs in an average sized town, where they have very few basses in, and the markup on any you might want is so huge, because the guy has to make his living off the one instrument he sells each week, that you know you can get it online or S/H for a lot less and don't buy it at all. IMO if we had a guitar center type chain, with stores all over europe, not just the uk, you would know that they weren't charging as much in markup, because they consistently sold more. IMO Thomann are closest to doing this (seem to sell the widest product range of any music distributor I've seen in Europe). This wouldn't put any current shop workers out of jobs, they'd just end up working for the big company/ies, as happened with corner shop workers and the supermarkets. People used to be anti-supermarkets for putting the small places out of business, but who of us doesn't shop in a supermarket now? People would be anti a similar conglomerate taking over the music equipment industry, but they'd sure appreciate it happening once they got used to it and the benefits it brought them.

[quote name='ras52' post='1244142' date='May 25 2011, 12:29 PM']Am I the only one who can read standard notation but is perplexed by tab - largely because most of the examples I've seen give no indication of rhythm?[/quote] Typically you go to a tab for a song you already have heard, so the tab only needs to give you the notes as you largely know or can get the rhythm. I use guitar pro/powertab, where you have both score and tab, and I use the tab for the notes, and the score for the rhythm. @ZMech, I see the idea, though it could be made to work if you had a frequency system based around the semitones we used today, i.e. one semitone is 100 dc2009's (the unit, obviously ) above the previous one. The current system of Hz relies on the 12th root of 2 to relate notes, does it not? Cos that is distinctly impractical.

[quote name='stingrayPete1977' post='1243593' date='May 24 2011, 10:31 PM']Like 1-1 1-12 2-12 2-5 etc looks harder than notation to me [/quote] and vice versa for me

[quote name='Higgie' post='1243739' date='May 25 2011, 12:45 AM']I managed to snag my mint condition unlined fretless Stingray, from the year of my birth (1989) with a hardcase from the States for £685 all in. Bargain.[/quote] Are you kidding? o.O That's ridiculous!

[quote name='JTUK' post='1243621' date='May 24 2011, 10:51 PM']the more competition the better..generally.[/quote] agreed :-) and gareth, she sure is lovely, congrats!

[quote name='molan' post='1243310' date='May 24 2011, 07:22 PM']Is it the same as this one at BassGear? [url="http://www.bassgear.co.uk/products-page/accessories/tech-21/sansamp-1-u-rackmount-bass-preamp/"]http://www.bassgear.co.uk/products-page/ac...nt-bass-preamp/[/url] If so then Phil has them in stock at £269 [/quote] That's the ticket, and I hadn't even heard of it!

[quote name='stingrayPete1977' post='1243240' date='May 24 2011, 06:38 PM']Get a fiver And how could you number all the notes with at least 80 choices even on a 4 string? If they had what would you of called B string notes, Minus numbers? All other methods including tab limit you to that instrument as you say you now know what a 3 on the second string is or whatever but if you can read an F is an F and all you need to do now is learn where the notes are on the instrument of choice rather than it's equivalent sort of tab just for that instrument.[/quote] I meant numerically per string, as tab does now? :s

So just been looking at Tech 21 Sansamp RBI's, new, via the tech 21 site, you are greeted with a list price of $329, not bad I thought, so I checked the UK prices. The cheapest being £335 at DV247, and it was £399 at GAK, which is strange as they're normally some of the best for price. I was understandably a bit hacked off at this obscene price difference, is there really a decent reason for it? I'm seriously considering importing one of the US ones, because I think it would be cheaper to do so. I remember similarly, with my Dean (Edge q4 Bartolini) which I bought through a US music shop's ebay store (new). They shipped it in an indestructible Gator Hard/Soft case which they threw in for nothing, and including import tax, the thing got to my door for just under £400, the price for the UK, given by Dean's distributors here (Bill Lewington IIRC) for the exact same model was £500, and many shops had it on sale at more than that. So why do we get ripped off here, and has anyone else got any success stories of beating it by importing directly from outside the UK? Dan

As far as my own playing goes, I rely solely on my ear I think. When I am given a song to write a bassline to in a band environment, I almost always have what I want it to sound like in my head, and then play it. I wouldn't say that my rudimentary knowledge of scales and keys assists me at all, but I know that from one note to the next, where I am likely to want to put my fingers, it might take a coupla goes to hammer out the precise bits of it, but it's there in my head, knowing any musical theory or not. I do however hope to start to learn to sight read score, but I do like my current arrangement where the numbers on the tab give me the position, and the score notes give me the duration. IMO tab is the most logical and sensible way to relay hand positions for fretting instruments (violins etc included). This is to do with how you fluent sight readers no longer read the name 'D', but initially you did. Similarly, I suppose I've used tabs for so long I don't read 3 and think third fret, I simply remember where my hand goes. I think that if the instruments were re-invented today, or on an alien world, you would label the positions numerically, not according to the note they produce. The other issue for me with wishing to learn to sight read is that I have previously been in bands where we use different tunings, and I can envisage being in such a position again (my current band does use drop D on the one song too). It is not useful to learn that a D on the score corresponds to however many fret positions on the fretboard as doddy put it earlier, if those positions are not necessarily always the same - obviously if you never play out of standard tuning they are, but if you want to play in a different tuning, tab is without a doubt the more logical system.

So I was thinking last night: for those of you that sight read a score, when you read, how do you convert that into bass playing? What I mean to say is, do you read a note on the score and think, that's an A and then go for the most convenient A position on your fretboard, or do you read a note and think, that corresponds to a certain position of my fingers on the neck/fretboard (i.e. you read a note which happens to be a D and your hand instinctively is at 5th fret on the A string, without actually considering that the note is a D)? I think this is akin to learning another language in a language other than your mother tongue, as in to say, do you 'translate' the word twice, or can you bypass the intermediate stage.

[quote name='cetera' post='1242721' date='May 24 2011, 10:55 AM']Loving the Spectors [/quote] mmm, the rainbow one is cool for sure, and the tops on the other two are so nicely figured, hence their inclusion

[quote name='Roland Rock' post='1242385' date='May 23 2011, 10:23 PM']Lovely, although I'm not crazy about the rainbow one. There's also a Classic series Stingray on there (can't get the link to work properly) that has possibly the nicest maple neck I've ever seen.[/quote] I liked the originality of the rainbow one. Though out of all of them, I gotta say that PRS is up there with Ritters as one of the nicest basses I have ever seen. Not seen anything quite like it before either.

Some of these basses are so beautiful I creamed many times over. Here are some links for you to admire: A lovely PRS: [url="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=ja&rurl=translate.google.co.jp&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://1484.bz/shibuya/347075/&usg=ALkJrhiTaeEti4ZTrQ4pL9Rm5fefjU9g1w"]http://translate.googleusercontent.com/tra...pL9Rm5fefjU9g1w[/url] A few spectors, the top one is unbelievable: [url="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=ja&rurl=translate.google.co.jp&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://1484.bz/shibuya/341713/&usg=ALkJrhgLrTfx95arABLlCrblxYJSXZWjAg"]http://translate.googleusercontent.com/tra...lCrblxYJSXZWjAg[/url] [url="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=ja&rurl=translate.google.co.jp&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://1484.bz/shibuya/341714/&usg=ALkJrhgjGLIGSp_jhBRqhmen11DLoeyuBQ"]http://translate.googleusercontent.com/tra...qhmen11DLoeyuBQ[/url] [url="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=ja&rurl=translate.google.co.jp&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://1484.bz/shibuya/130192/&usg=ALkJrhjd-zXNq0pSsDF9xsYAqQMYkoxO8A"]http://translate.googleusercontent.com/tra...9xsYAqQMYkoxO8A[/url] A noice jazz: [url="http://translate.google.co.jp/translate?hl=ja&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2F1484.bz%2Fshibuya%2Fc1"]http://translate.google.co.jp/translate?hl...%2Fshibuya%2Fc1[/url] And a status: [url="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=ja&rurl=translate.google.co.jp&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://1484.bz/shibuya/126036/&usg=ALkJrhjpc9pnWvjZWRPK-e-st_-oJIG9dw"]http://translate.googleusercontent.com/tra...K-e-st_-oJIG9dw[/url] AND THIS: [url="http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=ja&rurl=translate.google.co.jp&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://1484.bz/shibuya/94700/&usg=ALkJrhicpLkilgE6IiDYeHV5iH_HGl4MrQ"]http://translate.googleusercontent.com/tra...YeHV5iH_HGl4MrQ[/url] o.O Enjoy.

[quote name='ZMech' post='1242267' date='May 23 2011, 09:23 PM']I think you're underestimating the time each tube journey takes. If you're staying in shephards bush, I wouldn't recommend holborn as a stop off. This is as you want to get either the jubilee (grey) or metropolitan (purple) line to wembley park. Shepherds bush to holborn would be around 20mins+walking each end. Holborn to wembley then means gong back to bond street first then changing lines. Instead I'd suggest bond street is your easiest midpoint as it's on both the central and jubilee lines, so no unneeded travel, meaning more beer and chow time. Bond street to wembley park will take your at least 30 mins of time sitting in the train, i don't know how long the walks through the stations are (can add a few minutes each end sometimes). timeout will often find you a good place to eat, or maybe someone on here will know of one.[/quote] Team up Burger King with this month's vouchers and you have yourself a wonderful meal.

NancyJohnson, that is absolutely gorgeous, pretty much all I am gassing for right now is a 5er version of that exact bass, in that colour, though I'm fairly sure such a bass doesn't exist. When I'm famous I'll get an endorsement and make them make me one like that, and a black one with all gold hardwardwae incl pickguard - secksy!

[quote name='toneknob' post='1241895' date='May 23 2011, 05:11 PM']Both, really: Denmark St has indeed got all the shops but I'd never buy anything there; also just because there's a lot of tourists and places to eat in Leicester Sq it doesn't mean they're any good for tourism or food! [/quote] I doubt the thread starter was planning on buying anything with a champion's league final to attend, so in terms of volume of stuff to browse, denmark street has got to be it. I meant Chinatown for the food, and the food is almost certainly better than the stuff in Camden, which gave my mrs food poisoning only last week!