Ed_S

Fair point. I guess my opening attempt might be to define it as playing the instrument and learning/remembering songs only by listening rather than using visual cues, be that written notes/notation or watching hand positions/signals of other players etc. Though I do visualise my own fretboard and finger positions to some extent while playing, so I can’t say there’s no visual element to the processing; just not the input. I wouldn’t go much further than that, as I don’t think the term necessarily tells you anything about what you do with the musical information you just took onboard.. only how you consumed it. Personally, I learn songs monolithically end-to-end rather than in sequenced chunks, so it can take me a good few listens if it’s a long and complex tune. Learning the lyrics helps me to remember the song long-term. On topic, in the rehearsal room it does mean that my least favourite question is “what did/do you play for that bit?”, as I genuinely have no idea. Play your bit, I’ll join in, you can watch and tell me!

Heh, I do appreciate it more now I understand that not everyone does it, but it comes with mixed blessings and curses when it's all you have to work with. The most obvious issue is that I'm stuffed if I can't hear myself properly on stage, but having to commit every song I play to memory, to the same extent, irrespective of whether I like it or not, does occasionally make me wish I could just read them on the gig and then not be humming them to myself for the rest of eternity.

Personally, I don't wait for the amp to fail before using a preamp to the desk; I work on the basis that consistency and reliability of the DI feed to the FoH is the most important thing, so I run a pedalboard with HPF/compression/preamp on it that gives me the whole sound I want to send that way every time. With that sorted, the amp on stage is really just for me so it only has to make the pedalboard loud and perhaps EQ it a little to suit the particular stage and monitoring situation. It does mean that I can't use the preamp as part of my wider tone - it's the whole thing - but working the way I do actually means that the amp (and its built-in DI) becomes my hot-spare backup in case the preamp goes down. Even better than that, it doesn't have to be the same amp every time.. or even mine.

First proper rehearsal (after the initial meet and jam session) with the new covers band went really well, and we've very easily agreed on a couple of simple rules of engagement; [1] we want to make the singer sound as good as possible, so we'll play it where he needs to sing it and if it ultimately doesn't suit then we won't waste time on it, and [2] nobody has to play anything they hate. Plan is to get an initial set together and do some open mics to see what response we get, but the main drive behind it is that we play what we like and have fun doing it. With that in mind we went down the initial list, booted the couple I just wasn't going to have anything to do with, swapped some others with better suited songs by the same band, added some to look at which are my influence and they'd never heard of before, self-assigned some homework which are their influence and I'd never heard of before, and even chopped up and reordered a tune on the spot to get rid of a keyboard solo and make 'our' version. We have a better list for next time and it feels like everyone is pulling in the same direction. It's been ages since I've had to explain my odd (so I'm told) musical ways to new people, so that was fun, but they had to understand that keys / notes / dots / tabs / chord charts / number systems are all meaningless to me - I play by ear, have no idea which notes I'm playing, 'know' a song if I can literally hear it in my head, really don't care which key you move it to.. etc. It felt like one of those initial dating conversations where you start to question whether it'd be easier to just stay single than go over all this again, but at least they know now!

We played the 7pm slot in a new all-day power metal festival at a large social club yesterday. 6th band out of 9 on the bill, but I got there for the first band at 2 and didn't leave until midnight so it was a long enough day to be feeling it this morning. It had the usual metal-crowd friendly atmosphere, though, and the other bands were all really good with enough in common but not so much to be samey, so it was nice to make a day of it. Being a social club in Sheffield, the Stones bitter was fresh and not too expensive. Of course it had to be absolutely bucketing it down so everything got a water-tightness test on the way in, but cabs were provided so that made things easier. Said cabs were a pair of Vanderkley 1x12s that I was told were good for a thousand watts so am assuming were MNT112s. I thought we did alright, but I personally made a bit of a balls-up to begin with. I have two Warwick RB Streamers that I use for gigging - the black one was b-stock with a dead preamp so is gutted and rewired passive, while the white one is factory-spec with its preamp intact. Correct settings for the black passive is everything on 10, whilst for white active it's Bal/B/T in the middle detents and just the volume up to 10. I've been playing the passive recently, so of course picked up the active and without thinking set the balance fully forward (not a massive problem) and bass / treble boosted to max. Was a very brief line-check so it didn't really hit me how wrong it sounded until we started. Half way through the first song I twigged and had to give the sound guy a minor episode by correcting the EQ and messing up his mix, but despite that, everyone I spoke to afterwards said we sounded good. One guy commented that the vocals became much clearer from the second song... mhmm..! Streamer LX 5 (active..) -> Telepath wireless -> Fly Rig v2 -> Markbass Nano 2 -> 2x Vanderkley MNT112 (?)

If it's all I'm taking, I favour something 'real' that doesn't have to boot up. For example I personally wouldn't entertain the HX stuff without a backup because my very-light-home-use-only HX Stomp no longer boots - it just sits there with the backlight on but nothing happening. Support told me I was out of warranty/luck and could pay somebody to look at it if I wanted, but tbh it was never useful enough to warrant throwing good money after bad, so it's a paperweight. Fly Rig v2 is a good unit for travelling light (or at very least I like mine) but make sure you mark the positions of your settings, as the little knobs and buttons are easily scrambled in transit.

Got invited by the drummer of a band I've depped with a couple of times to check out another band of his which is being rebooted. Went down to meet and jam this afternoon, and it's a four-piece alongside singer, guitarist/bv and drummer, playing upbeat rock/alt-rock/indie-rock covers that aren't my usual fodder but I can still see being fun. All involved seem to be affable and have realistic expectations, the singer can sing, the guitarist had his combo up off the floor and was playing at a reasonable volume... sounded pretty good, so I reckon I'll see where it goes. Travelled light as I was on the bus and knew there was a decent cab I could borrow in the room: RB Streamer LX 5 -> Telepath wireless -> Fly Rig v2 -> Markbass Nano 2 -> Hartke VX215

Hmmm.. fair! It all seems to be about fan-fret, headless 5 or 6 strings round these parts when I'm out and about at gigs. Maybe if they'd given this one a 35" scale and set it up BEAD out of the box it might have added something. At least two paragraphs of AI word soup, if nothing else!

If I was still gigging 4s I'd definitely have one of those. Not because of that advertising copy, mind. Seems odd to target the metal market and not offer a 5, but it saves me from myself.

I've only done my first few dep gigs in the last year, but off the back of them the band I helped out say they now consider me their go-to, and I've also been invited to check out one of their drummer's other projects with a view to joining. Pretty happy with that, tbh. It's their original material that I've been playing, so I guess it's a bit different to knowing a set of covers or standards, but turning up rehearsed, equipped and suitably attired was how I approached it all the same. I was very quick to check before accepting the gig that they were happy for me to play their songs 'as me' rather than trying to mimic their bassist's style; I just don't find that a fun thing to do, and fun plus a couple of drinks was the pay. Fortunately they were fine with that. The one thing I did which might count as advice, is learn more of their songs than they'd asked me to. As it happened, one of the gigs was on a snowy evening which stopped another band on the bill from travelling and unexpectedly increased all the other set times in the lineup by 10 minutes, so me saying that I could play them another three songs was appreciated. After the last gig, one of the singers came to apologise profusely for not having publicly thanked me on stage for helping them out (again, seems to be the done thing with originals; possibly less so with covers bands?) but said that she'd forgotten I wasn't actually in the band! I thought that was thanks enough.

Never had any significant problems with the DI100s deployed by techs at small venues. I've generally found DI20s to be quite noisy and/or susceptible to interference, though, which is a shame as they're handy in concept.

I played many a gig through one of the earlier Rumbles - not sure whether it was a 2x10 or 1x15 but it was about 100-150W and it had a red light in the port to make the whole thing glow. It was the house amp at a venue in the middle of town where available storage space and parking dictated that most would make do with it rather than bring their own, and in fairness to it, it had the absolute ever-loving kicked out of it for literal years and held up better than I would ever have expected. It never sounded great, but it was identifiably bass and it was loud enough. Having also played through a few loaner Ultrabasses and Lowdowns, I don't think it'd be much of an upgrade. I had a V3 Rumble 500 (2x10) for a while, bought as a "let's see what the fuss is about" kind of experiment. The fuss is legitimate - they're great combos for gigging and I agree with the consensus that they sound much better than the previous models. I sold mine on as, in preference order, I use a small amp head with whatever cab somebody is willing to lend me, or take a lightweight Barefaced cab if I really must; as good as the Rumble was, it was always surplus. I'd happily play through one as provided backline, though, and personally I thought the tone when testing it at home was really quite good. I think clearing the decks and getting one of the smaller V3 models would likely be a worthwhile upgrade. Don't think I've ever played through a Cube for bass. I used one of the guitar versions and found it somewhat underwhelming.. bit better than a 'Spider' but not as good as a 'Vypyr'.. but that's neither here nor there!

Referring to 'top' and 'bottom' strings in terms of relative elevation in conventional playing position, instead of musical pitch.

This journey, into bass playing? What made you pick up that first bass at the start of this long and winding road? I was given a musical aptitude test at school when I was in Y2 (age 6-ish?) and got picked to take violin lessons. Kept violin going for about 10 years, hit maybe grade 7 practical-wise and enjoyed playing in big orchestras with a G7/8 entry requirement and audition.. but played by a mixture of sight-reading and ear-training, refused to take grade exams or learn any more theory than was absolutely required, and almost never practiced at home. I give myself an A for blagging-it, looking back. In a Y9 music class (age 13-ish?) I had a classical guitar shoved at me and was taught the chords to play along to 90% of Everybody Hurts by REM, and that was enough to get me interested in guitar and signal the beginning of the end for the violin which, if I'm honest, I was mostly keeping as a way of avoiding PE lessons by that point. I bought a cheap electric guitar and amp (a Session Pro black and white Strat copy and a Peavey Rage) from the son of a friend of my mum, and proceeded to get absolutely nowhere with it because the focus of everything I read was learning ever more chords. Traded the guitar and amp against a bass working on the theory that it was more violin-like; 4 strings and focused on one note at a time instead of bloody chords. The difference in pitch and the idea of playing the 'bass part' never came into my thinking at all. Brought it home, tuned it up, sat on the sofa and proceeded to just play along to the football show theme tune that happened to strike up on the telly in the background. It made near-instant sense to me and I had a new instrument. Do you still have the same fire and enthusiasm? Do you still love it? Yeah, it's still my thing. My other thing is being the kind of computer geek that has an 8U rack of switches, routers and firewalls where most people have a BT smart hub on top of a Billy bookcase, so I need something mainstream-cool going on outside that. What has changed along the way? Your taste in music, taste in basses? My mum was (..and still is) into rock music so she passed that on to me and it's always been home. The classical years were great ear training but I don't seek out classical music. Meeting friends and playing in bands has forced me into some slightly heavier metal styles but if I can't hear a definite note from somewhere at all times then I just can't play along, so bands that are constant blast-beats with a wall of guitar-noise, flappity-fingered bass parts and growling/screaming vocals are still completely inaccessible to me from a playing standpoint. Basses-wise, I've gone from playing 5-string Vampyres and Warlocks for 10 years, over to 4-string Precisions and Jazzes for 10 years, and am now back to 5-string Streamers and Stingrays. Thought it might be Spectors and Ibanez SRs for a while, but nope. What was the first bass? And what’s the latest? First was technically a black/white/rosewood Squier P-bass Special, but it had issues which I now know were to do with the truss rod, and the shop eventually let me know the distributor was recalling the batch so I should return it. They fixed me up with a Yamaha BB N4ii in 'yellow natural satin' (read: wood), which was orders of magnitude better. Latest is one of the new '24-spec Warwick RB Streamer LX 5s in gloss white.

Possibly, though I'm not sure what I could do much differently. I don't get obvious callouses but I just find that if I've not done a few 15-20 minute practice sessions in the week, and then try to hit a 3 hour jam session on the weekend, I'll be at risk. If I've put that bit of pre-work in then I'm good to go, but I don't always have the time, inclination or advance notice.

I realise nobody was asking me, but... I play acoustic rock and singer-songwriter stuff with fingers as I prefer the sound for those genres, and I use a pick for pretty much everything else. The 'everything else' is a much greater proportion of my playing time, though, so my fingers aren't always in the kind of shape that can withstand hours of playing without risking blisters. Some seem to accept blistered fingers as an occupational hazard (maybe because it's their only option) but I can just switch to pick and not have to suffer, so having a pick and/or pick technique that gets me somewhere in the ballpark of my finger-style sound is really useful as it keeps things consistent-ish.

That's just it, isn't it - what works for one falls completely flat for another. Genuinely glad yours worked out for you 🙂 I tried again with a Fender Kingman when they first came out, and that was a nice bass. But I had to put one of those rubber feedback bungs in the sound-hole to use it live, which made it sound broadly the same as a P-bass and meant its only advantage was aesthetic.

I'd not been playing very long when I bought an acoustic bass because I thought I ought to. I was playing alongside a couple of acoustic guitarist / singers so it'd be the right tool for the job, and imagine the convenience of none of us needing to plug in to rehearse. Yeah. Just imagine it. There have been plenty of bits mentioned in this thread that I've bought 'to see what the fuss was about' and found that I genuinely liked, though... Precision basses, Markbass LM heads, Barefaced cabs, Thumpinator HPFs, SansAmp preamps, digital wirelesses (starting with the L6 G30) - they all arrived via that route and haven't left yet. Of course, I did also buy a TE Elf 🙄

Heh, yeah, all its pointy bits are still attached. The one and only time I ever tried to gig it, the damn hard case was too long to fit across the back seats of the car and allow the doors to close! With the boot already full of cabs and the back footwells full of everything else, it just wouldn't tessellate in so I had to leave the KB at home and take a different bass. Maybe next time I have to do the dreaded band photo-shoot thing I'll take it as a prop...

Nice one - I'm not normally a fan of gold hardware, but that works! Here's a naff photo of my cheaper KB1. Probably the oldest piece of kit I own but, whilst I don't play 4 string basses any more so it just sits in storage, there's just no point me selling it as it's hardly worth anything and it's very 'mine'. I should get it out and check it still works, but even if it didn't I'd just bung it on the wall as art.

I'd been a bass player for about 19 years when I picked up a GSR200b by chance at a local shop and thought it was not only good, but actually too good not to buy right there and then. I'm sure there are some individual examples out there that have issues, but that can be said of just about any production bass. In my experience the neck was smooth and straight, the fretwork was well done, the hardware was solid, the pickups and preamp sounded good, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it alongside other basses that cost anything up to 20 times more. If you get a good one there's no reason it can't be much more than just a beginner bass, and the only reason I don't still own mine is because I switched back to playing 5 strings exclusively and couldn't quite justify the space to store it.

Reminds me of a gig I did aaaages ago where the sound guy was quite aggressively insistent that I plug my bass straight into his very ordinary £50-ish DI box, and then take the link-out from that to my pedalboard and amp. Main problem being that I had a Drop pedal on my board at the time, which would have meant that had I agreed, half the set would have been in the wrong tuning through the PA. The concept didn't seem to bother him at all. When I'd finally made him understand that I wasn't going to use his DI (I'm still not sure he grasped why...) he still wouldn't take the feed from the Sansamp on my board, and instead angrily set up an SM57 on the cab.

At the risk of being the 5th person with recommendations 9 and 10, I play melodic metal originals using a standard tuned 5 and favour this method.. - Use a compact pedalboard with a preamp at the end to get the DI tone you want to send to the PA, rather than a particular amp/cab - Just take the pedalboard if good foldback or full backline is provided by the venue (or you use IEMs - I personally don't) - Get a simple, light, workhorse of an amp that just makes the pedalboard output loud (mine's a Markbass Nano 2 - highly recommend it) - Use the amp EQ to keep the stage sounding how you need it, knowing it can't inadvertently affect the FoH DI - Use whatever cab is provided by a venue or headline band, as it'll probably be fine for stage monitoring and you don't have to move it - Get a cab based mostly on the weight you can stand to move and the value you can stand to lend (mine's a Barefaced Two10 - my wallet is healthier than my neck/back) - If you need two cabs then get two the same, and if you like to keep your gear clean and presentable in metal venues then avoid carpeted cabs Of course, my free advice is worth every penny you paid, but all the very best of luck with the new band and the gear search! 🙂

Rare outing as a 4-piece last night, as one of our guitarists is taking some time away to savour the constant wailing of his new baby. We were supporting another local band's album launch and a decent number of people turned up, which is always nice. Very warm on stage, and as the headliners got rain-soaked during load-in the whole venue was at rainforest-level humidity. Still, I thought we played well and there were some nice comments from random people afterwards. First time out with my latest stage bass (a white RB Streamer 5 LX to match the black one I already had) and I'm really pleased with it - it looks/feels/sounds just right. Thickened up the bass tone a little with just a hint of octave-up to suggest more guitar than we actually had, and from what I could tell it seemed to work acceptably. For the tech-inclined: RB Streamer 5 LX -> G30 Wireless -> TU-3 Tuner -> Thumpinator HPF -> BC-1X Comp -> VT Bass v2 OD -> Sub-n-Up Oct -> BDDI v2 Pre (-> FoH) -> Markbass Nano 2 -> Blackstar 115

Looking back, things stayed broadly the same for another 6 years and then started to gravitate back towards 5s, with a complete switch during 2020. First bass: Yamaha BB-N4 'Go-to' bass: Warwick/Rockbass Streamer 5 'Your' bass: EBMM Stingray 5 Special