bassace

The man who failed to earth?

In jazz you never play the same note once.

I thought there was plenty of coverage of the Auschwitz anniversary on TV, especially the news channels. It still chills me to realise that the brutality hadn’t started when I was born but was going on during my lifetime. Interestingly - if that’s an appropriate word - it was Belsen I first heard about and Aschwitz quite a while later. We thought they were simply prison camps and then the awful realisation came that they were indeed extermination camps on an industrial scale. Never again!

But Rommel liked jazz. He was always saying ‘Wes Montgomery.’

Nothing about banning banjos.

Lark Ascending. Ralph Vaughn Williams.

That’s just the sort of thing a drummer would say. The cone area is a function of the diameter squared. So, disregarding the common factor of pi, 2x10squared = 200. 1x15squared is 225. Your experience would thus be validated by the maths. Of course, there are other things to consider but this is a valid rough comparison.

Dangerous to generalise, but the smaller drivers tend to be ‘quicker’. Quite useful/essential when you’re trying to move a behemoth like a double bass.

In perusing a topic like this I’m reminded of my own oft repeated aphorism:- ‘Thumb for show, nut for dough’.

It seems that those not in bands spend a lot of time in ‘Off Topic’.

No. Save your money and enjoy your Bryant. BTW, two days ago I agreed that Mrs B could order a new AGA. Same day I noticed an ad for a Bryant soloist and mentioned it to her. Her reply, ‘well, that’s not really expensive, is it?’ I was very tempted to pull the trigger, sort of strike while the iron is hot?

Mine is much admired for it ‘song’. Yours will too. Enjoy!

It’s not how wide the bridge is per se. It depends on the bridge width in relation to the dimensions of the bass. As I said, check whether the foot gets onto the bass bar. You can feel or see the bass bar through the top scroll of the E side f-hole.

Has any work/setup been done on this bass? I have a Soloist and had this problem in its early days. Bryant basses were notorious for having their bridges too narrow and the E foot not standing over the bass bar. You could check this out yourself. If you could find a decent luthier up there a new bridge and soundpost adjustment could work wonders. Laurence Dixon in South London has totally transformed my bass.

I use a 10-3 Array with DB so not the best comparison. But I recently sold a Magellan to a BG player who tried it with the cab and was knocked out by it. And of course I rate the cab very highly. You won’t be disappointed. And Jeff Genzler is very approachable.

Great little amps. I have two, the spare resides under the car’s passenger seat as a backup.But not needed so far.

I remember heaving my DB up here in Oxford. Parking was ok though.

About 13-14 years ago I bought a new Clarus S2 amp And it served me well. But seven years ago I sold it to a fellow bass player and then embarked on a round of Genzler and Tecamp stuff with all sorts of outboards. I also recently tried a brand new Clarus S4 but didn’t like the metallic mid clang from the pickup. But a few weeks ago my friend suffered serious ill health to the extent that he must end his bass playing career and sold the S2 back to me. The two amps differ in that the S2 has only a three way eq in contrast to the S4’s four but the clang isn’t there in the S2 and it’s got a robust and controllable tone without any outboard. It’s got its own inboard HPF. I think that with the other stuff I had been using I was slipping into a mediocre sound without realising it. No more gigs until after Christmas but I’m very much looking forward to gigging my Clarus again. Here is a pic of the amp with the detritus from last nights gig.

I still can’t get my head round some z list singing person credited with ten-fifteen top ten hits. Who are these people? What are these songs? It’s all a cynical racket.

That’s quite correct, although Wiki erroneously has him with a tea chest. He had Chris Barber, followed by Micky Ashman. We decided to graduate from a tea chest and went up to Chas Footes in Denman Street where they had a cellar with lots of DBs at all sorts of prices. We chose the cheapest at £35 and got into conversation with a nice tall guy about the strength, or otherwise, of the E string. It was only after he had left the shop that the assistant said ‘that was Ray Brown’. Happy days, 1954 as I remember.

I suppose in one sense skiffle started it off for us. The most expensive item was the guitar and after Rock Island Line cheap guitars were coming in consignments of 200. Tea chest bass and washboard and, hey presto, you had a skiffle group. You didn’t worry about PA, if there was one at the hall, then great but otherwise........ This was the first time young people had heard a live band playing with any greater energy that your average turgid dance quartet. Your friend, Bassace, started his public performances on washboard while learning to play the trombone. Then when we had a front line together we strapped the skiffle group on the back and we found we had a band. And this just happened without any clear intentions. Chris Barbers jazz band has only recently come to a close with the ill health of the leader himself. The Lonnie Donnegan Skiffle Group came from within the band with Chris himself playing double bass. Only last Tuesday I played with Chas McDevitt, now 84 and one of the original Skiffle players whose early career took him to an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. He’s written a very good book on the subject which I think is still available.

Nice to revisit this topic and to look back at the ‘journey’ from 2012. The landscape has changed somewhat; Peter Tyler and Paul Bryant have both retired. Ben Packham has emerged on the scene and has some very nice budget basses as well as higher end stuff. My journey has ended and I’ve thinned my collection down, after all you can play only one bass at a time. My treasured instrument is a Bryant, it goes out with me at least once a week. Two gigs next week. BTW I know of a very nice Martin Concert belonging to a player who is giving up due to ill health. Nice price and in the Middx area.