BigRedX

[quote name='thepurpleblob' timestamp='1505818699' post='3374492'] I'm not sure that's true. The EQ on a bass amp or preamp is designed for a bass guitar whereas the desk EQ is very much general purpose. [/quote] The EQ on the desk is likely to be far more powerful and flexible than that on an amp. At best on a bass amp you can either expect a 12-band graphic or one with one or two sweepable mid controls. Any decent PA desk (especially digital ones) will have 4 band fully parametric with full-range frequency, cut/boost and Q for each band.

You will need to go and try as many 5-string basses as you can, and don't limit yourself to basses within your budget, because you will need to see if your £750 is going to be enough (IME it may not be unless you get very lucky). Too many bassists buy a cheap 5-string and quickly get disillusioned with it because it simply isn't a very good bass. Unfortunately there is a lot more to making a good 5-string bass than taking an existing 4-string design, putting a wider neck, and an extra machine head on it. To get an articulate and pleasing sounding and feeling low B string construction and neck stiffness are far more important than they are on a 4-string bass. Personally I wouldn't bother with anything with a bolt-on neck unless it has been made by either Mike Lull or Jens Ritter. Good through neck construction is the way to go. Also string type becomes a lot more critical when it comes to the low B-string. IMO the tension on the low B in a standard 5-string set is too low, so you need to experiment with different string types to find the one that best suits your bass. Good luck!

But on a two-pickup bass one pickup will always be closer to the bridge and the other closer to the neck. To me a "front" pickup would be the one closest on one of the ends of the bass - i.e. the bridge pickup.

[quote name='bazztard' timestamp='1505624894' post='3373175'] In what context could the neck pickup be called the back pickup? Never heard it called that [/quote] Because it's no more or less meaningful to call it that than it is to call it the front pickup.

[quote name='Jecklin' timestamp='1505737537' post='3373860'] Generally i'll be through a di to the PA which I have no control over so the controls on my bass are far more important that the amp [/quote] And still there are constant posts in the amps section saying that you shouldn't give the PA engineer a post-EQ feed...

I'd have liked to say that it shows that the composer will always be more important that the musicians, but unfortunately the "performance" was so obviously fake even before the "robots" rebelled, and the music was such a conventionally mainstream slice of electronica, that I'd feel embarrassed if I did....

It is indeed a completely dumb way to describe pickup position. All the pickups are on the front of the bass. If they were on the back they wouldn't work.

For a Sei, I'd take it back to Martin at The Gallery in London. What are you intending to run off the pickup? If it's anything other than Roland's V-Bass system prepare to be disappointed.

Why not? And how do we know your name really is Kevin Dean?

[quote name='SpondonBassed' timestamp='1505381384' post='3371427'] I always liked the Smiths. I never liked Morrisey. There, I've said it. While I respect his contribution to music I don't have to like the fellow. I think the Smiths might have stayed on the scene longer with a different front man. Hindsight's a bugger. [/quote] IMO there's a pretty good chance that with someone less controversial and a more conventional approach to singing and melody as a front man, The Smiths would never have anything more than another Manchester band with a couple of cult singles released on their own label.

[quote name='Japhet' timestamp='1505380522' post='3371416'] I'm not a huge Beatles fan but the thing that completely blows me away about them is the way their music evolved over such a short space of time. To go from 'She love you, yeah, yeah, yeah' to Across The Universe in a handful of years is quite extraordinary. I can't think of any other band whose evolution has been anywhere near as spectacular. [/quote] I would like to think that any group of half-way decent musicians and songwriters, give access to the artistic influences, technological support and development and lack of financial obligation to stick to a winning musical formula, that The Beatles enjoyed would be equally capable of showing the same kind of development. Just look at what The Pretty Things achieved from their debut album in 1964 to "Parachute" in 1970 with a fraction of the resources that the Beatles had. On the other hand there are those who would argue that "She Loves You" is a far superior song to "Across The Universe".

[quote name='mikel' timestamp='1505338698' post='3371235'] Agreed. The Beatles have to be taken in context. Back in the day they were the pilot fish for the rest of the music world. People held there breath when a new recording was imminent. Exciting days, I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who did not live through the 60s. Anything and everything was possible. [/quote] I was born in 1960, but spent most of the decade interested in Lego, Meccano and model aeroplanes and tanks rather than pop music. In fact I wasn't really interested in music of any kind until I heard T. Rex on the radio in 1971.

Here is the The Terrortones website. It was set up originally for the purpose of being able to sell T-shirts and CDs to those members of the audience who had been unable to buy them at one of our gigs (where we sold by far the largest amount of merch). Apart form the merch page it mostly acts as a portal to all our other web presences and social media pages, and very conveniently comes out top when you Google the band. I do think that having a dedicated band website makes you look a bit more serious, as anyone with a spare 30 minutes can set up a Facebook page, but TBH most of our promotion was done through Facebook and since we joined Bandcamp we've sold far more CDs and records through them then we have through our website merch page (despite the fact that most items work out cheaper directly from us). The website was created by me with direction from Mr venom, but it was mostly hand-coded in Dreamweaver, which I have because was originally an Adobe Creative Suite user and now Creative Cloud subscriber. Hosting is done by Vidahost and is using a legacy offer that gave us free web space when we bought the domain name through them. Since the site is small, fairly low traffic and any high-bandwidth elements on the site are hosted elsewhere, we don't need anything fancier. Since the band isn't currently active, the main purpose of the site these days to maintain a web presence and provide links to places where people can buy our music in either physical or digital format. Even when the band was gigging every week, traffic was low and most of the interaction between the band and promoters and fans happened through Facebook and our monthly mailing list emails.

The electrons will have to work much harder to flow vertically rather than horizontally as they would in the amp's normal orientation. You may loose some of the "heft" in the sound.

[quote name='dmccombe7' timestamp='1505122402' post='3369561'] Its a nice looking bass and I don't know much about Lull basses but not sure i'd pay that kind of money for what seems a standard looking bass. Are they that good ? I was expecting exotic looking woods or fancy electronics to be honest. Sorry if my response is a bit negative. You have obviously tried one and know how good they are. Wishing you all the very best with it. Dave [/quote] IME exotic woods might look nice (if you like that kind of thing) but they don't really add anything else to the bass. Same with fancy electronics, which unless you are Wal or ACG and are specifying your very own custom circuits are just some off the peg pickups and pre-amp shoe-horned into the instrument. AFAICS Mike Lull makes the best new Thunderbirds you can buy, while Gibson continues to drop the ball when it comes to bass guitars.

[quote name='cytania' timestamp='1504895145' post='3368193'] Norman Watt-Roy did a session for Trevor Horn where he laid down various tasty riffs that Horn sampled. Alot of these made it onto the classic FGTH hits. [/quote] Riffs? I think you are seriously over-estimating what the Fairlight could do sampling-wise back in 1983/4 when FGTH's first album was recorded. The individual notes might well have been NWR but the "performance", which is the important bit, will be whoever worked on the Page R for the bass part.

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1504879007' post='3368002'] True, but there are fingering positions. In the same way as a fretless bass has positions, albeit the fretless bass has them marked with dots. [/quote] I've only ever seen tablature for fretted instruments where IMO it makes the most sense. For me the whole point of fretless instruments is that you can play "in-between the notes". Incidentally how does standard notation show quarter tones and the like? Apparently according Wikipedia there also tablature for chromatic mouth organ!

They sound exactly the same to me. MacPro optical out into Denon amp Mission Speakers.

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1504865154' post='3367835'] You don't actually need an Instrument in your hands to sight read, or where to place your fingers. You can look at the chart or score and visualise the note, or indeed just sing it. [/quote] How do you visualise the note - in terms of the finger position(s) required to play it? If you are looking at the score for a transposing instrument what note do you sing, the one your instrument produces when it has transposed it?

[quote name='lojo' timestamp='1504862716' post='3367813'] I know we are going off topic but the thing I've never understood is why the sax player is always saying his key is a tone higher than the guitar key ? [/quote] This because the saxophone is a transposing instrument. On the tenor sax if you play a note with the fingering for "C" the actual note is "Bb". For an alto sax the same fingering produces an Eb note. This has been done to make it easier for woodwind players playing from a score to be able to switch to different instruments since they nearly all share the same basic fingering. The score takes care of transposition between the different instruments, so although it looks as though each part of the score is different, when the correct instrument plays it they produce the same notes.

[quote name='The Jaywalker' timestamp='1504858524' post='3367776'] 2 ways it can be done: 1) Written at pitch - the notes are the notes and its up to the player to relearn their fingerboard position according to the tuning used. I guess easier for the composer and trickier for the performer. 2) Written as if the instrument is tuned normally - i think this is called scordatura in orchestral and classical guitar stuff. Can get weird with key signatures being wonky, but ultimately is trickier for the composer and easier on the performer once tbey get used to reading something which "sounds wrong". [/quote] As a composer I would most definitely prefer the first way! If the second way was chosen there would be places where it would be necessary to also indicate which string was to played otherwise there is a possibility of playing the wrong note. And now I am going to be controversial! I seems to me, from what I have seen in this thread and others about notation and tablature, that a lot of sight readers don't actually "read the notes" but read where to put their fingers on the their instrument to play the required note(s). That would explain all the musicians who can competently play more than one instrument but can't sight read for all of them. The thing about transposing "solo" double bass in post #252 would also tend to confirm this where the player "reads" E, plays the fingering for E, but because their instrument has been tuned differently for that piece actually sounds F#. Isn't that what tablature does?

[quote name='The Jaywalker' timestamp='1504853161' post='3367735'] Alternate tuning is specified at the start but the piece is written as normal. For example, "solo" tuning for classical double bass is a tone up - F#, B, E, A - but a solo concerto in B minor would be written in A minor. In other words, you read and play "as normal" - first line below the bass clef you play as your open E but it sounds as an F#. Alternate tunings basically function the same way as transposing instruments like trumpet, sax etc. [/quote] I can see how that makes sense for a simple transposing tuning, but what about a tuning where the intervals between the strings changes from the normal, like DADGAD on the guitar or one I've used on occasion on the bass - DADA?

Incidentally, if a piece requires your to tune your instrument differently to the conventional tuning is that indicated in standard notation and if so how?

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1504803740' post='3367472'] Also, why don't serious classical instrumentalists use it? [/quote] Because there are very few fretted, stringed instruments in classical music.

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1504792908' post='3367358'] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X7qgBVnMfY[/media] [/quote] Interesting, but IMO not really accurate or relevant. You simply can't make the connection between reading words in sentences and paragraphs and the ability to be able to read notation more easily than tablature. As someone who is marginally dyslexic, I have trained myself to be able to read properly formatted text by being able to recognise word shapes. However I can't see the similarity because despite the fact that you could in theory put any combination of letters together to form a word, all the common words use set letter patterns, and sentence structure means that the words themselves generally follow set patterns. I know this because if they didn't, then I wouldn't be able to read at all. When it comes to music there are a lot less in the way of rules to help you work out what is happening. As a composer I can put any two or more notes together to form a chord, and I can follow any note with any other note of any length. True you can use the key and the time signature to help as a player to narrow down the choices, but only the simplest of music is going to constantly fit into the easy choices. You don't have to be playing prog rock or jazz to encounter accidentals, key or time signature changes in what on first listen sounds like a completely straight forward piece of music. Music IME is a lot less predictable than literature. Or maybe it is simply that I don't find either notation or tablature easy to read. Give me a piece in either format and eventually I'll be able to work out what I need to do in order to be able to play the piece, but for me music is simply to complex and unpredictable to be able to sight read. Tablature its not better or worse than notation.