Kiwi

That is an ex-Mark Griffiths bass, he used to play for the Shadows and Cliff. For a while he liked Jaydees and then Status basses and then Warwicks.

For pick ups, they are a very coarse tone shaping tool. You can specify a resonance peak to hit a specific frequency but that has trade offs for highs and lows as well. Usually the best approach is to make the pickups as flat as possible and fall back to the wood/construction/playing style for timbre.

There is a hell of a lot of variation in some (but not all) tone wood. Wenge is a lot more reliable than swamp ash, for example. The weight of swamp ash varies tremendously according to not only the tree but where on the tree the wood came from which is why not all jazz basses sound the same. Same thing for mahogany and maple but to a much less extreme degree. Bubinga and wenge are pretty consistent in terms of their effect because they are fundamentally dense and (in the case of bubinga) oily. What I've found is that matching wenge and flamed maple seems to work really well in a neck regardless of construction (ie. bolt on vs neck through). So I am going to do my next build using that combination of woods on a mahogany body (maybe chambered to lift the resonance peak a little).

You're welcome. What I've learned is that there is a balance basically between soft woods to isolate and promote desirable frequencies, and hard woods that maintain structural rigidity for the purpose of playability. AGC, Tobias and Sei have made wenge and maple necked instruments I've played which sound superb even if there have been other aspects that I've found less attractive. This seems to be the most reliable way to get that purr. Soft maple is an alternative but those instruments need a bit more bass or warmth around 100Hz. Other methods involve far more experimentation but if they hit the bullseye (like Jaydee did with their Supernatural range) then I suggest sticking with what has been proven. Tone wood is the first point of reference though. If the wood isn't right then it's too much like trying to paint lipstick on a gorilla.

I've been thinking about something similar. The growl can be gained from a wenge neck but it can sound a bit boxy unless tempered by a harder wood like rock maple. Soft maple can also give it too but it's not as deep as wenge more of a purr than a snarl. My Spector NS5CR is made with soft maple and it purrs nicely on stage regardless of hands or pickup position. The later Euro basses with the Alder/walnut/maple sandwich aren't as satisfying to play for me personally. I had a Euro 6 for a while. Ken Smith basses achieve it with maple and bubinga but it doesn't sound as focussed as either wenge necked Warwicks or through necked, all maple Spectors. Ken deliberately avoids making the neck too stiff, instead relying on a massive ebony fingerboard to provide the structural stiffness - I think the same is happening with my Spector NS5CR too. Consequently I found it hard to get super low (like...graphite neck low) action on my three Smiths and the Spector but they were still very playable. Fender J and P basses sometimes achieve it with a combination of light swamp ash (for jazz) or light alder (for p basses) and well seasoned hard maple that is a little on the softer side. Dingwall do it with a combination of ash+alder that meets specific weight criteria and hard maple necks. Status did it with their Series II basses using pickups and electronics. Jaydee do it by using mahogany in the necks and bodies and relatively flat response pickups. There's no single way to do it, it's like mixing different ingredients to get the same flavour. You can do it with fingers over the bridge pick up and plucking very aggressively on many (not all) basses but some people don't feel comfortable playing that way. GK amps get you close with their boost control too but it's achieved in a different way. It kind of relies on an interaction between bass and amp and the mid prominence being achieved with bass, hands, the boost control and filtering by the speaker itself. Hard to achieve at low volumes but sounds glorious at performance. I'm not aware that GK offer the boost function in a pedal because it relies on passing the boost onto the woofer while leaving the tweeter highs unaffected. What is happening in both cases is that a very narrow band of mid frequencies (around 250Hz) are getting prominence. The easiest way to do it in pedal form is with a parametric eq or a band pass filter pedal but it has to be a pedal that does an extremely narrow band of boost. So narrow that it doesn't actually affect the sound of the bass in any other way. I've done it with the eq on a mixing desk and hoped to do it with a parametric eq...which is why I actually bought an Empress Parametric eq precisely for this purpose. But even that doesn't get narrow enough so it sits on my guitar board in order to give strats more bite and shimmer. The Empress boys actually sent me a way to mod the pedal so the mid band was narrowed further but I haven't had time to plan it yet.

I love her grooves but the lyrics make me cringe sometimes. She's kind of moved on from this funky thing now anyway and has become more experimental. I went to see her in Camden when she had the Spirit Music Sextet first going, it was quite a bit of this: She sat back in the pocket and basically just lost herself while the rest of the band were looking at her intently for cues. I also remember she started an hour late and her mood soured at around 12:15am as people were leaving while they were still playing. I'm guessing no one told her that the last Northern Line train was around 12:30.

I had a V8 for a while. It sounded monstrous compared to my Shuttle 6's and 140w Burman heads. All enveloping throbbing bass and a top end which could be compressed and overdriven at will. I once threw a couple of 4x12 bass cabs under it and it shifted air like nothing else I have ever played.

Mooer make some great stuff. I have their Ocean Machine delay/reverb on my guitar pedal board. But that pedal doesn't have MIDI so it seems there is no clock sync available.

I have a couple of early Ibanez TSA5 combos which are 5w 5E3 based for 99 quid each. They sound very nice when at full voice, I had some nice comments from BC-ers when I brought them to the SE Bassbash in 2014. I also have a 50w Burman Pro501 combo and a 60w Fender Concert II (Rivera era) but they're a little too loud for home use.

@Quatschmacher does the sequencer on the C4 have a null option for each step? By that I mean the capacity for a step to be silenced in a pattern?

I have two F112 cabs from them and they are probably the last cabs I will ever own. Really great sound and very portable.

A great example of the great, writhing serpent of irony trying too hard and eating it's own tail. At which point I'd imagine much angst would be generated over being misunderstood and not appreciated. Cue: Flailing of teeth and much gnashing of fists. Mind you, if this was the late 70's I thought most amateur mod bands dressed like that anyway.

Of course these days 13 year old girls are on Youtube ripping away on Donna Lee and JP is considered a bit passe...as is Hendrix. But while they were both alive they were blowing everyone else out of the water in terms of both technique and creativity. Context is everything.

Special brew is for pussies. Baiju at 70% by vol is the nations choice of poison for formal occasions. It tastes like the angels' share from a homemade vodka experiment mixed with sake. Initially sweet and enticing but with a brutal, steel toe capped DM to the soft palette and a distinct after taste of scorched Nankang streetsteel radial. And the after taste hangs around like that lonely drunk bloke you met in Whetherspoons one evening, the one who decided that a jovial exchange of three sentences in the gents as you were both reaching for the paper towels at the same time meant you were going to be best mates forever in the bar.

Thank goodness for acid jazz which managed to cling on to the public consciousness for it's life until around 1996.

I don't know much about music, I just want something to Dad dance to. Actually there's also the factor of IP lawsuits, economic efficiency and levels of accessibility to music making technology. Lots more people are able to make music. There is less demand for recordings from record companies as more routes to publishing have become available. Record companies have streamlined their economic interests to reflect the reduction in demand for their product. Record companies also have better information on who is buying what and when. Where before everyone worshipped at the altar of creativity and novelty as being the key to success, now it's looks a song that is crafted within certain parameters, a certain look to the lead singer, and a whole load of slick and persistent marketing. Creativity doesn't matter that much to the record company's target demographic (which seems to have been tweenies for quite some time)...so one could argue why even consider record companies as part of the creative side of things any more? Then add onto all of that the fact that song writers/artists are constantly under threat of being sued by anyone with a back catalogue and the remotest hope of establishing they had a significant influence over that song writer's process...which, arguably is impossible to avoid given the amount of back catalogue out there these days. Sure, these factors aren't going to stymie the most dedicated and persistent artist in itself but the business isn't as romantic and glamorous as it used to be. It's a bit of a wet blanket. Anyway, music today is shit. It all went to pot in the mid 90's.

I dated someone from the sun in 2013, sort of near where you are. Maybe you have met? I would tell you her name. It was a sort of dolphin scream followed by violent swinging between guttural clicks, whistling and gobbing but I can't find those sounds on my keyboard unfortunately.

I have one too. Haven't actually played it yet owing to the small matter of 6,000 miles distance between us. I used to own a Trace V8 but it was too much for me in every way.

Like...a crossover for biamping?

FEA Labs Dual Band Compressor Limiter. I have one for the same reasons. https://www.fealabs.com/ It's great. Digitech did one too but I thought it was crap. Way too much colouring.

At risk of sounding conceited, noone influenced me in the beginning. It was a change out of convenience. I was a groove obsessed drummer but damaged my wrists playing volleyball at the age of 14. So I switched to the next grooviest instrument which was bass because it was a bit more complicated harmonically than drums. About 9 months later I took my first (and only) bass lessons from a brilliant teacher immediately after my birthday. Ironically my first lesson with him was the same week that Jaco died. He exposed me to Mark King, Flea, Stanley Clarke, Jaco (of course), Pino and Norman Watt Roy and it was an epiphany. The grooves on Level 42 Live at Wembley on VHS in particular blew my mind. Level 42 were never the same after the original members split (as much as I idolise Alan Murphy now).