pete.young

I had a 1/2 size for a while and it was OK to play and very portable, but sounded puny against a 3/4 .

Bad news for skiffle fans. "Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of America" doesn't scan.

For a minute there I thought the Burman Pro 4000 had one, but it's only the guitar heads like the Pro 2000 which do. I misremembered. Although there is no reason why you couldn't use a Burman guitar head for bass, if you could find one. Plenty of people did back in the day.

I was told that it used to be the case in the orchestral world that left-handed double basses, and other strings, were not permitted in orchestras because it spoils the visual effect of having the bows all going the same way at the same time. If you were left-handed, you learn to play right-handed regardless.

I'm using an RB Boss Shelf which I got online from Wicks. Industrial grade, free standing and not fixed to the wall, although it does have a couple of wedges under the front feet to just angle it back slightly. You can put the two middle shelves wherever you like.

A friend has one. Fantastic for rounding up stray dogs.

We have a new acoustic blues jam in Ipswich, every last Wednesday of the month at The Duke, Ipswich. It's run by Tim Ainslie (guitar, vocals) and Adrian Day (harp, vocals) . I'm not normally one for jamming but since I have a high regard for both these guys and play in a band with Adrian, I went along last week. Acoustic instruments only, no drum kit (there is a Cajon), no electric guitars and the pub's Yamaha piano. Adrian provides a low-volume PA and some DI boxes. I took my double bass. Another bass player eventually showed up with some kind of pseudo-semi acoustic thing, which I didn't recognise. Both basses sounded OK at low volume through the PA. Usual format: Tim and Adrian did a few songs, then rotated the line up through the 5 or 6 guitarists, 2 keyboards and bass players who put their names down on the list. The atmosphere in the pub was great, quite a few people had come along to listen and chat, and were able to do both thanks to the low volume. There is a very loud electric blues jam once a month in the Shamrock, and I enjoyed this session far more, the lower volume being a major factor. I'll probably go again, and might take along the mandolin and/or the Weissenborn to give a bit of variation to the sound.

This. I bought a used Stentor student bass off Ebay for less than £500 and once set up it's fine. My band is not bluegrass (very little that claims to be bluegrass is), it's an old-time string band and it works fine for that and also for a Chicago-style blues band I also play with. The challenge is getting it to sound OK amplified. As @Beedster says, a great journey.

Talkback mike plugged into a socket on the mixer?

If they're unbalanced outputs from mono jack sockets then they should probably go into the line-level jack socket inputs on the desk.

One way to reduce the amount of tap dancing is to put all the pedals you're going to use in a loop, such as a Boss LS-2, then you can leave them all on and just hit the loop to turn them all on at once. If you use the pedals individually as well, that's less helpful. Not sure what kind of synthy sounds you're using, but the Boss SY1 has some very useable sounds even though it's an emulator not a proper synth. Also, I've just spotted that you have a compressor in the chain. I found that the MXR Envelope Filter wasn't very happy with a compressed signal, and worked very much better with the compressor downstream of it.

Provided that you have have relatively modern (ie 20 years old or less) balanced mikes and use XLR cables you should be fine. If you have any ribbon mikes they need to be safe with phantom power. https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-phantom-power-on-dynamics

I have an Eko electric mandolin which suffered a headstock break. I rang Roberto up to ask if he would sell me a replacement neck. Instead he gave me a bollocking for breaking it and told me to get it fixed. His view was that if he sold me a neck, that was another mandolin that he wouldn't be able to make. A great character and a sad loss to the musical world. I did get the mandolin fixed by a local repair-setup guy, and it's holding up some 10 years later touch wood.

Roberto died in March 2022, so it's more than a few months. I'm pretty sure it's now permanently closed, just waiting for the auction of bits on Gardner Houlgate.

After SGC Nanyo finally stopped making basses, there were quite a few Chinese copies with this shape headstock knocked out under various brand names in the early part of the century.

I've used it but not since the last lockdown. I used to join in with sessions in Germany and Ireland. I found that instruments with built-in mikes worked better than acoustic instruments miked up, and that it was better to use headphones for playback if you were using any mikes. It's apparently improved since and is still being actively developed. At the time the advantage it had over Zoom was that the latency was pretty good, particularly if you were close to a decent server with fat pipes. I understand that Zoom has since reduced it's latency so might also be worth a look.

Since this is a single band project and you're starting completely from scratch, maybe a multi-effects unit somewhere between an HX Stomp and a Zoom MS-60B? You might get better replies in the Effects forum.

Collection in person only from Fleetwood. Road Trip!

Stick a rubber doorstop on the spike.

So sad. Condolences to his familiy and many friends, including a good part of basschat. Hope you guys are doing as well as can be expected.

I've just come across this excellent intereview of Nathan East talking about and playing some of his well-known bass lines.

The PA world calls these cables 'Inserts' .

I get my acoustic strings from Eagle Music. Fantastic service, only problem I had was with a banjo tailpiece and they put that right straight away.

I also ordered some pedalboard stuff on Monday from Thomann. It was picked up by DHL on Saturday morning and has now made it as far as the delivery depot. So I would say this is normal or close to it for post-Brexit orders from Thomann.