BigRedX

BTW for me the tuner is perfectly fine (and has got even better after the last firmware update) to the point where I have sold my Peterson Strobo Rack because there wasn't any point in having it. I use it with both 5-string (BEADG) and 6-string (EADGCE) basses.

These are all things that I will happily put up with simply because I know when I hit the relevant footswitch I will get EXACTLY THE RIGHT SOUND for that particular part of the song EVERY SINGLE TIME. Prior to getting my first programmable multi-effects unit (a Roland GP8) my effects set-up filled a 14U rack case, and almost every sound was a compromise so I didn't have to fiddle with about 50 different controls between songs. Also in the early 80s I used a semi-modular synthesiser live. Changing sounds between songs at gigs could be interesting, especially if the lighting engineer decided to dim the stage. In order not to have to take patch charts on stage with me I had to memorise the settings of 30 knobs and switches as well as the positions of 6-7 patch leads for each of 8-10 songs. In order not to bore our audience with massive gaps between songs while we set up the synths, each song had an atmospheric 20-30 second intro where only the backing tape played. Of course that meant there was no possibility to try out the sound before you were actually playing. One wrongly positioned patch lead could result in either silence or an out of tune screech instead of the sound your were hoping for. For me, affordable, programmable synths couldn't come quick enough. That's why I'll live with all the apparent compromises of the Helix (although TBH for me there are none I discovered since I started using it).

One of my bands recently gig a couple of "acoustic" gigs with more laid-back arrangements of the songs. We were all going to sit down to play these until both the singer and myself discovered that we simply couldn't play properly when seated, and I certainly didn't have enough time to not only learn slightly different bass lines for all the songs but also how to play them in a sitting position. Because I never play in front of an audience sitting down, I never practice that way either. Even at home when I'm writing. I think the last time I played in public sitting down was some time in the late 70s when my band provided some improvised musical backing for school drama performance with me on my home-made electric balalaika.

The 0.01µF cap is filtering off quite a bit of the top end before you start turning down the tone control. It will also add a slight resonant hump at the cut-off frequency. Of course the whole circuit should be balanced against the impedance of the 60s Gibson pickup, so if the "mudbucker" in the Epiphone isn't the same design, that circuit won't have the same effect.

Several - here's the first from 1981. I'd been in Nottingham a year and had made lots of friends in the local originals band scene, but was getting a bit frustrated that I wasn't in a gigging band. At the time my band was recording only and most of the other members had gone their separate ways to go to university. We'd made our last lot of recordings on a reel-to-reel recorder bouncing from channel to channel to build up the performance for each song. I hatched a plot with the percussionist that the two us would perform these songs live using the version of the recording without the vocals, me playing guitar and singing (I'm a terrible singer) and him playing bongos and drum synth over the top. Out of necessity, the set order would be the order in which we had originally recorded the songs onto the tape. We turned up to our first gig, a multi-band affair at the Ad-lib Club (later to become The Garage), unannounced and blagged our way onto the bill. As we were on first, there were no free channels on the PA for our backing so it had to go through one of the other band's guitar amps. The performance was interesting to say the least. Our already lo-fi backing was turned into an unrecognisable sludge by the amp, which was virtually impossible to play in time to. We started each song where we thought was right place and hoped that we'd end at roughly the same time as the recorded backing. Whether we were in time with the recording as we played, who knows? Amazingly this shambolic performance got us a rave review in a local fanzine who compared us very favourably to Throbbing Gristle (not that we had any intention of sounding even remotely like them), as well as requests from another band to do some supports - more of which later...

How to make a "boutique" pedal. 1. Find a design from the 60s or 70s and copy it. Make sure that your version uses at least one germanium transistor even if the original pedal didn't have any. 2. Make sure that one of the controls and one socket is in a completely ridiculous place. Say they need to be there in order to improve signal cross-talk from the original design. 3. Give the pedal a name that only a 13 year old boy will find amusing - ideally some kind of knob joke. 4. Give all the controls unintuitive descriptions like "spatter" or "fragrance" and write them on in a barely legible scrawl. Do not put any other markings on the controls, and if you're not using chicken head knobs then have ones without any position markers on them. 5. Pedals with three or fewer controls on them should be in huge chunky metal cases, with the controls positioned at random and in an order not consistent with the signal flow. Pedals with lots of controls should be in a case so tiny that it is virtually impossible to adjust one without inadvertently moving at least one other (also see point 2). 6. Get a five year old to do the graphics. Ideally every pedal should have a different "graphical design" even though the electronics inside are identical. 7. Charge at least £200 for it even though the parts and labour cost to make them is a fraction of that.

In what way? IIRC all the fancy wiring options were on the EB3 variants. After all there's not a lot you can change with one pickup, volume and tone controls.

in which case you over-paid by about £25.00

But it's all those original idiosyncrasies that made the Who (up to Moon's death) musically interesting. The fact that none of the instruments (apart from the vocals) are playing their traditional roles. Without that they are just another average rock band. It's more than obvious from the dullness of Townshend's solo stuff - same song writer, far less interesting music.

If I did it would be something a bit more innovative and interesting than a Fender Precision.

OK recommend me something with Pino on that you think I will like.

I suppose that if people were prepared to pay me enough money to live on for playing in their band(s) I'd be prepared to play any old shït too. Pino's a weird one for me in that I really like his fretless bass playing, but think that in a the context of the whole music he plays on that's the only musical bit of merit. He's the only only redeeming thing about the Paul Young records (apart from the truly awful version of Love Will Tear Us Apart which even he can't salvage). Go West was just fake 80s pop for people who don't really like music. Unfortunately in The Who he's not a patch on Entwhistle to the point that the band had to have a second guitarist to fill out the sound.

No he was too busy playing sax on "Baker Street".

They why does he play for the most part really boring music?

It seems to me that those who are having difficulty seeing what an expensive bass can bring are people for whom a bass guitar is either a Fender P or J or their close derivatives. And TBH I can completely see their point. There's not a lot extra that can be brought to designs that have changed little in the last 60 years and whose USP was that they could be made cheaply using 1940s engineering operated by relatively unskilled labour. When you consider that CNC machines in the far east can churn these instruments out by the hundreds of thousands at a rate and price point that Leo Fender could never have imagined, it's impossible to see exactly how a US made P or J is so many times better than the equivalent Squier. It also depends what exactly you want. If I wanted an instrument that would simply produce low notes in a pop/rock band then the second hand Burns Sonic I bought for £60 as my first bass back in 1981 would still be perfectly acceptable.

Why would you do that? Plus if you're writing your own bass lines then surely you work them out by ear?

Is she going to be expected to play lots of riffs which need to follow the guitars only an octave down and incorporate lots of open string notes in order to be playable? If not start by getting the 5-string version of her preferred 4-string set and ignore the G string. Tune BEAD and take it from there. IME if you don't need to follow the guitar parts exactly then use a different tuning to the guitars tends to lead to more interesting and inventive bass lines.

Try the Keyboards and Synthesis section of the Sound On Sound forums.

TBH without the Paul McCartney link Hofner would probably have stopped making violin basses a long time ago.

With those of light strings they may well fit in the nut as they're only slightly heavier than a standard E-G set. What the OP will more likely need to do is slacken off the truss rod as a light-gauge B string will have considerably less tension than a G.

You can't have Bluetooth with no noticeable latency as it's simply not in the specification. AFAICS the bluetooth connection is simply for playing music from your phone or iPad where the fact that it has been delayed by up to 200ms won't matter, and for controlling the effects on the headphones. The connection between the instrument and the headphone will be done by some other method that is sufficiently low latency but it won't be Bluetooth.

When you say "non-precision" do you mean the body shape or the presence of a single P-style split humbucker pickup?

Not Rickenbacker themselves, but there have been instances in the past where US tech companies have been very jumpy around the subject of IP and copyright infringement, and their default position had been to shut the service down first and ask questions second, this was especially noticeable in years immediately after the DMCA came into being. It's a while since there have been any high-profile instances so I'll have to do some digging to find when it last happened. The problem is that most websites rely on multiple 3rd party services to keep going and all it needs is for one of them to get cold feet following an IP infringement allegation and the whole site disappears.

Owned by bass players of a certain age. The cheaper music shops (and junk shops) were full of them in the 70s. If you bought your first bass back then and didn't have much money to spend, it was either one of those or something equally nasty from Woolworths.

Regarding what Rickenbacker can do to Basschat, I doubt anything has changed since last time this question was raised. While they may not have the time and energy to pursue this through the UK courts, there is plenty that Rickenbacker can easily do which would make things difficult for the day-to-day running of Basschat. I suspect that like most relatively small websites Basschat relies on a number of services that are provided by US-based companies. Which company did Basschat use to register the domain name? Where are the servers physically located and who owns that infra-structure? Even if neither of those have anything to do with the US there is still the software used to run the forum (Invision) and Cloudflare who the site relies on to protect it from on-line attacks are both most definitely US based. It would be very unfortunate if Basschat were to disappear because Rickenbacker put pressure on the those US companies and services the website relies on, on the grounds that Basschat was facilitating IP infringement. To challenge that would most likely require US court time which isn't going to be easy or cheap for a UK website.