Ed_S

For electric bass in an acoustic band, D'Addario EXP Reds used to be my favourite as they were copper coated and had a suggestion of acoustic bass strings in their sound. Sadly they're not available any more and I've not seen anything similar coming to market of late - though I'd be interested to know if anyone else has. Of the strings that you can still get I personally favour Dunlop Super-Bright Nickels as they have quite a light and flexible feel, they sound nice and clear, and I find them comparatively easy on my fingers. I like the sound (and the feel - some people don't) of Ernie Ball Cobalt Slinky flats, but it seems that every time I put flats on a bass I end up selling it within a year as I'm just not using it any more.

My 104HR departed in a recent thinning and I'm using Barefaced as well, though I've used my Markbass gear for plenty of metal gigs and nobody's bemoaned the yellow. Ok.. they're a bit more Party Cannon than pile-of-twigs, but they're still 'good for metal'. Agree about the DI as well.

I've been using Markbass gear for 17 years (LM2, F1, LM800, LM3, Nano 300, Nano 2, CMD 121p, MiniMark 802, MicroMark 801, NY121, 104HR) and not had anything go wrong with any of it yet. Never experienced any negativity towards it either. I had one guy warning me that my amp was unreliable, but that turned out to be because the Nano 300 faceplate is red and he thought it was a TC Electronic.

I just worked out what my HB project actually owes me, and it turns out that from its £120 purchase price I've managed to add £240 in parts and supplies, and do work which a couple of luthier price lists suggest could be another £120 in labour. Given that the 'nice' version of it would be a USA Fender, I could have 4 of these modded to my satisfaction for the same price as 1 of those. I actually just sold my American Pro Jazz 5 and kept the Hardly Benton so perhaps I've made my decision, but if I took the HB to the local shop as it is right now they'd offer me £80 and sell for £120, so they probably don't make much financial sense if you can't/won't just take them out of the box and use them.

I personally don't think it's living in fear to mitigate a plausible risk, so I might play my backup bass as main if I thought it was more likely than usual to come to harm at a particular venue.

If I was just playing and recording at home, one nice bass would probably appeal. As soon as any gigging at all was involved, though, if the only way I could have a backup was to have all HBs then I guess they're what I'd be using. Multiple HBs could be a possibility if I was in (or a frequent dep for) a number of cover or tribute bands, and to get the various different looks right I needed multiple recognisable shapes and styles of bass. Of course, in this deliberately restrictive scenario I'm granting that every HB turns up 'cheap yet playable' as stated in the OP, but in reality that's not been my personal experience so I'd be aiming for 6 instead of 8 and saving some money back for sundries and spares to get them in shape.

Looks to have been investigated a while back and turned out to be a development site that never went any further.

Interesting question, because I was about to say... [Ashdown ABM1000] Because it's just the most hard-hitting clean amp I've ever owned. It fires notes like bullets and never seems to run out of power. [Orange Terror Bass 500 - original model] Because it has nearly as much on tap as the ABM1000 but with some power and control traded for bark and aggression. [GK MB200] Because with everything at noon it captures one of 'the sounds in my head' - it's just the perfect rock tone with a Precision. But then you specified "for gigging", and that's a different trio because the ABM is overkill, the original OTB is unreliable and the MB lacks power, so... [Markbass Nano Mark 2 - or Nano 300] Because it's light, loud, and with everything at noon it has that characteristic Markbass sound which I find works really well live to cut through and be heard. [Hartke HA5500 - or HA3500] Because it's just so easy to get a useable sound from no matter where or what you're playing, and it's a loud, reliable workhorse of an amp. [Fender Rumble 500 v3 - Combo] Because the 2x10 combo is a light, loud and great-sounding "put it down, plug it in and play it" rig, which can be an invaluable thing to have at a gig. But in all honesty, the answer is actually a Sansamp Bass Driver DI v2 sent to the PA in one direction and any amp you didn't have to cart there yourself in the other.

I bet that's epic. I just thought you'd listed the Mystic Prophecy version of Paranoid until I actually engaged my eyeballs. We used to play Demon's Blood alongside our own lower-tuned songs and I reckon most people thought it was another original.

I've recently had a bit of good customer service from them, too. I bought a b-stock RockBass Vampyre 5 for a bit of throwback fun (I used to have one about 15 years ago) and whilst it needed some tidying up in terms of sharp frets, rough bits and terrible setup, the electronics were never in question. Then the preamp kinda half gave up; everything still 'worked' but there was very little output level. They asked for a video of the problem, and I obliged as best I could, but made it clear that I'd rather not risk shipping the bass back to be fixed - I really just wondered whether they could squeeze Warwick to send me a new preamp as a field replacement spare part. They agreed to try.. and to our join surprise it actually worked and I got a new preamp in a couple of weeks. In the event I've not fitted it yet, as I was so convinced that they'd tell me to either ship it back to be fixed or just to jog on, that I actually got some 25K pots and wired a passive V-V-T with a coil select switch for the Twin-Jazz pickup. It proved that the pickups weren't the problem, and ended up sounding pretty good. But I digress - I was heartened to find that Thomann were willing to entertain a slightly left-field support request and make it happen.

Aye, that's not bad. I hadn't seen the semis this year, but a couple of the songs I saw in the final felt like they'd be heading towards symphonic metal if you just added the right guitar tracks. My figurative money was on Croatia to win, but I also found Estonia entertaining in a 'is that Rob Chapman?' kind of way.

I've been playing various things since the early 90s but I'm not very sentimental and haven't kept any 'my first' instruments. Oldest thing I've still got is this daft item from 2002-ish give or take a year. Can't see me gigging it, but it might look cool for a photo/video at some point.

The Warning at Manchester Academy 2 last night.. first gig I've been to in ages, and I'd forgotten just how annoying people who hold phones the size of portable TVs above their heads to record poor quality video snippets are. That aside, the sound was excellent from where I was stood and Ale's blue Spector looked very nice indeed. I'd be very surprised if I get to see them again for £16.50 in a 950 capacity venue.

Yup, it would/does - I recently used some as a temporary fix on a couple of loose grub screws in a lower-end Ibanez bridge until I could get some replacements, and it kept everything in place but adjustable. It's kinda fiddly to apply, though, and even worse to remove, plus it's hard to keep it invisible on a black bridge. I couldn't honestly recommend it over proper threadlock or just getting some better-fitting replacement parts.

Nice one! I've got the lighter "natural flat" finished version and it's a great instrument. Can't go too far wrong with an SR.

I'm fully 5 string at present but your all-time stats got me wondering. As best I can work out from memory I'm coincidentally at 58 as well, but it's 31-27 to the 4 strings. No real point to working that out, but it's a slow afternoon and I had spare post-it notes 🙂

Music lessons at first school were basically learning recorder, which I enjoyed.. then a musical aptitude test lead to the offer of violin lessons, so I went off to junior school already playing a couple of instruments. I was lucky that my junior school had a few senior teachers who all played instruments (headteacher played tenor horn, deputy head played euphonium, another senior teacher played flute, and they all played piano and sang) and put a lot of value on music, so there were proper recorder groups, orchestras, string ensembles, wind bands, brass bands, choirs, a steady flow of peripatetic music teachers all week, not a word said about leaving normal lessons to go to your instrument lessons or leave class early to get your lunch first so you had the full hour to attend whichever group was on that day. The standard was good and they took it all seriously (I mean, looking back I doubt any of them had a 'normal' lunch hour in their working lives), but the music was generally fun rather than high-brow classical stuff and the focus was much more about the whole orchestra or band being tight and together (things like four bar phrases and dynamics) than any one instrument's part being flashy. The word that was used in the welcome at every workshop or concert to describe what they were trying to instil was "stickability"; they knew from experience that learning an instrument was sometimes difficult and frustrating, as are many things in life, so they put a high value on sticking at it and not giving up, whatever 'it' happened to be. Having since worked in the technical support side of education I've never encountered another school like it, and I'm pretty sure that as soon as the driving force behind it retired, it will have stopped. I was just in the right place at the right time for once! All the same, at the time I thought that was just how school treated musicians, so it was a bit of a shock to get to secondary school and find out that playing an instrument was either a deeply sad waste of time which would get you bullied by sporty kids and frowned on by most teachers, or a perniciously snipey clique which ejected you in short order if you weren't already grade 5 in theory, heading for 8 in at least one instrument and vying for the solo in every performance. There was an orchestra but it was the exact opposite of what I was used to - everyone playing twiddly rubbish at the edge of their ability and hence sounding terrible together. Music as a taught subject was patchy - mostly a bit of chalk and talk about something poorly explained, then off to bash on a broken keyboard through broken headphones for the rest of the hour. One teacher was a bit different, though.. one run of lessons around Y9 was things like trying to pick out and identify all the different sounds in the intro to Time by Pink Floyd, and getting everyone to learn some chords and play Everybody Hurts by REM on as many functioning classical and acoustic guitars as he could scrape together. He came along at a point where I was getting distinctly fed up with violin and planted the thought of guitar as an alternative. I ended up playing bass via guitar, so in that sense even secondary school really did help with my musical life.

I'd have no issues with sitting for my melodic metal gigs if my back/neck was too painful to stand with a bass on a strap - it's not happened yet, but it's been very close and could easily happen. I used to sit for the vast majority of my acoustic duo gigs, but we both did... and as it's easier to cradle your chin between your thumb and index finger when you can rest your elbow on the table, so did the audience. If it was going to be longer-term and sitting was the only way I could continue gigging, then I'd get something akin to the Ashdown speaker stool made; custom height, lightweight, folding, and obviously not actually a speaker cab - just dressed up to look like one. I'd be tempted towards other bits of lightweight 'set dressing', too - I don't sing, but a cheap vocal mic, stand and cable (trailing off to absolutely nowhere) take up very little carrying capacity and, to my mind at least, kinda define a space on a stage where a performer is expected to be stationary. Personally, if I'm hiring and can find band members that are easy going and competent, the other quality I'm looking for is 'reliable', not 'athletic'. If I was routinely helping to move a bandmate's gigging gear, all I'd ask is that they'd made it as minimal and lightweight as possible, just like I do with my own. No valve heads and fridges!

I paid £749 for my D800 when they'd not been out long and there was a bit of hype surrounding them (Jan 2016 according to the email I just found - amp is around s/n 700 from memory) and I remember it seeming a bit premium but not unexpectedly so for the Mesa name. The online bank calculator thingy tells me that would be £985 today, so given the price of everything at the moment, £1149 doesn't seem all that much of a hike. Sadly I can't offer a lot by way of a review; I used it a couple of times to make sure it worked, but then it ended up in storage and has been there for the last 8 years. I've kept hold of it because it's the only amp I've got that claims to be happy at 2ohms, and the circumstances of its design and manufacture let me believe that it probably won't cook itself if I ask it to try. Now there's some more hype surrounding them I should probably get it back out and see what I think the second time around.

I've never used a Blackline 250, but I've used Markbass in general since the release of the LM2, including the LM800, F1, LM3, Nano 300 and Nano 2. I don't use the filters either, and mostly leave the EQ with everything pointing upwards at 12-noon. All I can really offer is that the Nanos are capable, convenient and subjectively sound "like a Markbass" to me.

I would have liked to see either weight relief as an option, or the ability to choose a target/maximum weight for the finished bass. My SR5 Special is a comfy and nicely balanced 8.3lb, but there's an identical one currently available off the shelf advertised at 9.4lb, so I'd be reluctant to order a custom build without being able to specify that my dream bass is a light one. I'd also like to be able to choose to have the satin finish they use on the back of the headstock continued all way down the neck, rather than the oil/wax finish. I mean, it's fine and I've got a little bottle of the recommended stock wax to take care of it, but I wouldn't actively choose it over a finish that requires no maintenance.

For me it’d be the Bonnie Tyler version on ‘Faster Than the Speed of Night’.

The way I've found it works for me is that as soon as I've caught myself giving serious thought to moving a piece of gear on, it's pretty much inevitable that it's going; I just wouldn't be thinking about it in those terms otherwise so there's little point delaying other than to wait for a more favourable market. Sure, I've regretted a few things that have left, but it's always been so many years later that the likelihood of them actually being how I remember them is slim, and there's no way I'd have stored them for that long anyway.

Heh, I'm tempted to go and get an isopropyl alcohol wipe for my monitor after having that on it Different strokes innit.. some people like the smell of an old library, and some like the smell of a new bookshop. I like the new smell. Unless it's a toaster. New toasters smell terrible. But I'm still not buying a second hand toaster.

Aah, in that sense my personal preference is to look for any bass arriving brand new in its box - extra points for intact factory tape/seal/staples - from an authorised dealer with full warranty support. Fakes and scammers aside, I've heard far too many tales of the weird and wonderful things people do to their basses (like oiling the fretboard with their own nasal sebum, for example) to find the second hand market in any way appealing.