BigRedX

Personally I wouldn't buy another expensive (>£40) gig bag without first trying it on packed with my bass and anything else I was intending to carry in it. Some of these semi rigid bags weigh almost as much as a bass when empty, and IMO there's little point in having lots of storage space if filling it up means the bag is too heavy to be comfortable any more.

Never had a problem with playing My Sharona, just took a while to learn where all the different bits came. In the end I broke it down into 5 or 6 segments and wrote them out in the order they came. Worked fine after that. For me another easy yet difficult one was "Surfin Bird". Basically endless bars of the main chord riff followed by 1 bar each of the other two chords, and every verse is a different length. It's hardly the sort of song where you want to be visibly seen counting bars to get it right either.

The problem with all the semi-rigid gig bags is their size and weight. Most are a similar size if not weight to a Hiscox Lite Flight which offers far more protection to your instrument, but at the expense of not being able to wear it on your back. I own a Mono M80 which when I bought it was the lightest of these types of gig bag. IMO it's still too bulky, and I find it very uncomfortable to wear for any length of time. If I was looking for something now to carry a bass on my back for any distance I'd go for a Ritter-style padded one and be prepared to replace it when it started to wear out.

[quote name='waynepunkdude' timestamp='1422534563' post='2673763'] Yeah, you was wrong mate, you didn't like that bass you liked. [/quote] What I was trying to imply, badly, is that Denmark Street are in general purveyors of B-stock crap at prices that are over optimistic for stuff in grade-A condition.

I just buy some new strings.

What sort of sounds do you need?

When I use to play it I would use the first verse to check my tuning and the second to get my muscle memory ready for the bass part under the solo. It's hard enough doing it on a short scale bass as on the original recording so playing it on a 36" scale Overwater was always a bit of a challenge.

Do you know which EE pad you have? I ask because the only one I have seen - the EE Eagle - appears to be massively underpowered and struggles to run many of the apps that my Samsung S3 phone handles with ease. IME most music apps require a fair bit of grunt from the hardware they run on. I'd definitely want to try it out first before committing any serious money, and TBH I'd always look at a dedicated hardware solution for live. I'd be looking at second hand keyboard workstations from about 10-15 years ago.

There more I read threads like this I can't help feeling that the problem is partly the wrong type of gloss finish used on cheaper instruments and partly psychological when it comes to the player. All my main basses have high gloss necks and none of them feel even remotely sticky to me, and I have been known to get very sweaty on stage. Admittedly they are also considerably more expensive than the general basses being discussed (the cheapest had a new retail price of just under £2k) but until I started reading these kinds of threads I was never even aware that the problem might exist.

These days I wouldn't want to rely on any device that takes more than a couple of seconds to go from power off to fully functioning.

[quote name='Lifer' timestamp='1422530155' post='2673682'] I remember trying a Tokai Talbo in Denmark Street around 2000/2001 I wish I'd got it, haven't seen another since. [/quote] I also tried that Bass. Nasty B-stock body with far too many visible casting marks on it. Not a patch on the quality of the Talbos available in Japan (where they are considerably cheaper too).

Heart of Glass is easy. The main hook drops the last note of the melody in a couple of places which results in a bar of 3/4 each time. Since everything follows the melody it's simply a question of learning which times the beat is dropped. I'll put forward "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us" by Sparks. What sounds like a simple repeating riff is nothing of the sort. Once you start breaking it down you realise that there's different bar lengths all the way through the verse the cater for the timing of the vocal line. Plus no matter how much I counted I could never get the bass notes in the right place i the break down before the last verse!

That's a pity and a massive opportunity lost IMO. I had an MS20 in the 80s and it was my main instrument until I could afford something polyphonic with memories. I bought the MS20 because it looked as if it offered more than the traditional synth with the patch bay, but after I had spent some time with it I soon discovered that all the really interesting routings I wanted to try required access to the signal path, and something that the MS20 doesn't really allow. Leaving you with just a more complicated way of doing routings that other synths managed to do with far more convenient switches. Adding an MS50 expander opened up a few of the possibilities that I was looking for, but by then I had discovered MIDI and more importantly MIDI CC. It wasn't long before the more adventurous manufacturers were producing instruments where every parameter could be accessed by MIDI CC messages and that opened up all the modulation opportunities that the MS20 promised but didn't really deliver.

Here's mine: [IMG]http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n249/BigRedX/DSC01541-2.jpg[/IMG] A heavily butchered Burns Sonic bought second hand in 1981. I still own it and it gets used in the studio from time to time.

Do any of the new versions of the MS20 allow control of the individual knobs via MIDI CCs?

When I first joined the covers band I learnt all the songs as close to what was on the recording as I could hear. Sometimes though it just didn't work especially if the instrumentation was different to our line-up of two guitars bass and drums. When we came to add some new songs to the set I took a different approach which was to make myself totally familiar with the recording and then work out a simple bass line that followed the basic chord changes. I'd then add to the bass line after hearing what was missing from the arrangement with the simple bass.

[quote name='hiram.k.hackenbacker' timestamp='1422377563' post='2671885'] A lot of the arrangements we are doing are from the BBC gig in 2000 (i.e. Ashes, I'm Afraid of Americans, The Man Who Sold The World). It also helps vocally working from these recordings as he dropped the key of quite a few of songs. I spent a little while nailing the structure and subtle differences in the run downs to Rebel Rebel to be told we were doing this version which I think is terrific. [media]http://youtu.be/7HyWXftUiWc[/media] [/quote] For me that pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with Bowie post "Lets Dance". The arrangements are almost as important as the songs themselves, and to loose that in order to give all the musicians something to do lessens the impact of the song IMO. Every superfluous muss twiddle in that arrangement distracts from the pure simplicity of the original riff. Nasty.

[quote name='BassBus' timestamp='1422365829' post='2671655'] You can get a synth app for your iPhone for many, many pounds less which will do many, many times more than this will. [/quote] Maybe, but you have to have an iPhone first. All three pocket synths together still cost less than an iPhone.

[quote name='Skybone' timestamp='1422365052' post='2671631'] Anyone enlighten me on the neck width at the nut? Is the neck a chunky handful or slim & narrow? [/quote] On the 5 string MiK version the width of the neck at the nut is 44m and the distance between the string centres B-G is 36mm. I'd consider the neck to be average - I have basses with slimmer and chunkier necks. I find the Warwick Star Bass particularly comfortable. TBH I've never understood the fascination for getting measurements for instruments. IME the bass either feels comfortable or not and the individual measurements themselves only tell a tiny part of the story. The taper of the neck and where the nut sits in relation to the rest of the bass when on the strap can have just as much influence. In fact the bass I have with the narrowest nut also has the widest string spacing at the bridge...

[quote name='jonnythenotes' timestamp='1422365982' post='2671657'] If your doing a Bowie tribute, I think you must reflect the fact he has a presence in music for six decades......60's to present. Easy just to focus on, for example, the 70's and and or eighties, but that is only a small percentage of both his career and his catalogue. Also, if you are show casing him, don't forget his involvement with dozens of other artists...... Mott The Hoople and All The Young Dudes to name but one. If you look at his time with us, and his total portfolio of songs, you could start a dozen Bowie tribute bands, and still not repeat each others material.. [/quote] But also bear in mind that from an audience PoV a tribute band tends to reflect the more popular moments of the artist that they are covering which in the case of Bowie means the majority of the set should be material from the 70s and 80s, and that is borne out by the set lists of the two bands listed earlier in this thread. I'd consider myself to be a Bowie Fan, but my record collection goes from Hunky Dory to Scary Monsters only, and I'd be perfectly happy to see a tribute band play the set from the Ziggy Startdust film minus some of the extended soloing.

Might have to get some of [url=https://www.teenageengineering.com/products/po/]these[/url].

Unless your singer is actually David Bowie, people are going to want to hear songs that they know and initially that means hit singles form the 70s and 80s. Even if you limit yourself to those that made the top 20 in the UK and ignored the novelty re-releases and duets that's still enough songs for two sets. If you want to expand the set beyond that, base your song choice on what you asked for. After a few gigs you'll get an idea whether the audience want you to play Ziggy in its entirety or if they'd prefer some of the newer material. Of course if you really want to be eclectic in your choices you need to play at least one Tin Machine track!

As others have said as far as the average punter is concerned the song is the vocals and the instrumental hooks. Sometimes the hook is the baseline in which case you should probably play it. The rest of the time so long as your in time, in tune and not treading on another instrument's sonic space you can pretty much play what you like. A few years back I joined a friend's covers band. I'd been to see them a couple of times before I joined and had been impressed with how accurately they did the songs they covered. I did my best to learn the bass parts as they were on the recordings. Imagine my surprise when I heard a recording that the previous line up had done and found that my predecessor had only made a vague attempt at playing the original baselines. Until I actually learnt the songs for myself I had never noticed.

Bear in mind that if you bass was originally finished in a solid colour, the wood (and how the pieces that make up the body are joined) might not be attractive enough to stand being visible through a sunburst finish.

Depending on how elegant (or not) you want your single string fretless to be, will depend on how easy it is to make one. The Atlansia looks deceptively easy to make, but it's had a good deal of innovative thinking in the design to make it work. It would be fairly straight forward to bodge one with off-the-shelf parts and it will probably be perfectly functional, but it won't have the same graceful simplicity of the Atlansia. Good luck, if you do decide to have a go and if you want some more detail of how Atlansia have solved some of the design issues get in touch and I'll do my best to answer them. Bear in mind that my Solitaire is up for sale and I won't have it forever...