BigRedX

Do they? But there are over 40 different species of tree that are included in the "Ash" family. As far as the timber merchant is concerned they are all ash. But they are all biologically different so it follows that the timber they produce must have slightly different qualities. If the wood used on a solid electric instrument is important to its sound then manufacturers should be telling us exactly which species of Ash is being used. And where it comes from, because "ash" grows in a wide variety of climatic conditions all of which will have an impact on the way the layers of grain that go to make up the trunk of the tree and produced and in turn the timber that comes from it as a result.

No of course it hasn't. You'd need to do it with hundreds of instruments, and you still wouldn't have a definitive answer because every piece of wood is different, so there is no way of telling if it was actually the body wood that was making a difference and not some other variance in the construction. Even if you did tests where you just swapped the body and kept everything else exactly the same, first you'd need to eliminate the possibility that simply disassembling and reassembling the instrument didn't result in changes in the sound. If you could get to the point where it was possible to consistently rebuild the instrument without changing the sound you would then need a scientifically valid number of bodies - say 25-50 of each type of wood. All the bodies would need to be exactly the same size and shape, and each made of a single piece of wood to eliminate any effect joining two pieces of wood together might have. Until someone can go to this trouble and expense all you can say is that every instrument will sound slightly different to the others, and it is impossible to pin-point exactly which factors are causing those difference.

Depends on the bass. IME there is no one brand/type gauge of string that suits every bass. In the past I have spent between £10 and £60 for a set depending on what worked best for each particular bass. At the moment for the four basses I use regularly I have four different sets of strings costing between £20 and £35

And Carl Thompson, another highly skilled and renowned luthier, has said that there is no way of telling what an electric bass will sound like until it has been finished.

Both of those changes would have made a difference to the sound of the bass. However, it would have been slight and until they were made there was no way of knowing if they would be an improvement (which in itself is completely subjective). We also don't know what other tweaks to the setup of the bass were made at the same time, or if simply the act of dismantling and re-assembling what is essentially a very ordinary factory-made instrument would have been responsible for most of the "improvements" in sound. There of course is the placebo effect, and the fact that no-one will want to admit that complicated and expensive modifications to their instrument will have resulted in it sounding worse. As with all these anecdotes there is no scientific method and the data itself is completely subjective.

For one band where a play a more "traditional" bass guitarist's role I have a pair of 34" scale 5-string basses. For the other where I play both "bass" and "melody" parts (alternating with the synth player) I use a 30" scale Bass VI. Whilst I could play a lot of the first band's bass lines on the Bass VI, it wouldn't be a particularly pleasant experience. Most the things I play on the Bass VI are impossible to play on a conventional 4 or 5 string bass.

I play in two very different bands and therefore need two very different basses.

Well it's certainly not Nottingham.

If you can't gig why not work on recording and songwriting?

For me time spent learning a song I'll never otherwise play is time taken away from writing new songs that I probably will play.

IMO it's a big enough category for it to be a top level forum within "Gear" and not a sub-forum and certainly not a sub forum of "Other Instruments".

One of my bands supported Toyah just before COVID and from the songs I recognised, the live arrangements were quite a bit different from the versions I knew from the records.

I've owned a lot of very expensive audio interfaces over the past 25 years, but these days for bass and guitar I use the USB output of my Line6 Helix. This lets me record the bass with and without the effects applied simultaneously, so if I not 100% sure about the sounds I want to use I can then run the direct recorded sound through the Helix Native plugin and tweak the parameters whilst listening to the playback. When I'm happy I can then download the edited patch back into the Helix to use when I play the song live.

I briefly experimented with using my Linn Adrenalinn in one of the effects loops of the Helix which would give me the sorts of synth sounds I wanted but still with the flexibility of signal chain positioning that the Helix allows. In the end I decided that it was too much faff, and if I couldn't get the sounds I wanted out of the Helix on its own, I'd stick a "keyboard" synth sound that I wanted on the backing, and blend it with a suitable bass or guitar like sound from my playing through the Helix. That has worked perfectly well for me.

I'm a very average bass player who doesn't drive or own a car (I have passed my test and have a clean driving licence, but I'm a crap driver and IMO a menace to other road users so I don't drive), and very occasionally because I'm self employed work has to take preference over music. However I'd like to think that as a band member, I'm enthusiastic and have plenty of experience of gigging and recording, a decent composer and arranger, a good graphic designer with plenty of contacts for getting things printed cheaply/for free, and have my own good quality recording setup and rehearsal space (for bands without acoustic drums), means that for the last 45+ years of playing in bands years my short-comings have been more than out-weighed by the positives.

Until the cookies and tracking policy is more transparent and all cookies over than ones essential for the login functions of Basschat to work can be easily to rejected without having the deselect each one separately, Basschat has been relegated to its own browser where all cookies and other browsing history are automatically flushed on quit. No links in posts will be followed and no other sites will be visited from this browser rendering all the tracking data useless.

I think what they mean is that it is based on all those horrible telecaster-shaped basses produced in the far east in the 60s and 70s that were often shorter than 30" scale length. The actual Fender Telecaster Bass doesn't have the same body shape as the Telecaster Guitar.

That's one of the great things about the Helix. Not only can every preset have a different selection of effects in a completely different order, but using the set lists I can keep all the different requirements completely separate. So I have one set list for each band I play in plus one for when I'm playing/recording guitar at home. One each set list I have one or two default presets that have all the effects I would normally use with that band in the order that I would normally want them, so creating a new preset for a song has been made much easier.

IMO most live albums are essentially "Greatest Hits" with more honed/developed versions of the songs from the original recordings played a bit faster and often with simplified arrangements to compensate for the lack of studio overdubs or the fact that some of the more complex parts could not be played whilst also singing or throwing some "rock n roll moves". All of this can be a good thing. Unfortunately this can be counteracted by extended guitar solos, drum solos and other over-long sections, plus embarrassing between song banter. There is also the problem with live albums released on vinyl where the original set list running order may have been sacrificed to satisfy the pressing/cutting requirements of not having loud and energetic songs on the last third of each side, which can kill the flow of the gig the album is supposed to be capturing. Having said all that my favourite live album is "Steppenwolf Live" or at least it was until I discovered that the crappy Dansette I used to play it, produced one side of the stereo much louder than the other. Playing it properly balanced revealed lots of very loud and very insipid organ parts which ruined it for me. These days I prefer my gig/concert recordings to be accompanied by visuals so my favourite is the DVD release of Shena Ringo's Gekokujyo Xstasy tour.

BTW none of the new cookies from Ezoic appear to be listed on the Basschat cookies page. Does that not need updating?

As I've said before, I have completely given up on limited edition product releases and previews of things that are still being designed. If a product isn't available for me to buy in a shop and take home with me today, or order on line for immediate shipping, then I am simply not interested and will make do with those things that are available to buy right now.

Not as bad as I gig I once did with The Meteors who turned up with just a guitar and expected to borrow everything else (including a double bass and all the drum "breakables") from the 3 support bands. They weren't travelling particularly "light" is they also brought a van-load of T-shirts to sell!

Hi and welcome to Basschat. It would help if you could post some close up photos of the bass showing where the missing parts should go along with some additional measurements. The problem you are likely to find is that early copy guitars and basses only bore a passing resemblance to the original instrument and therefore standard replacement parts may not fit without a lot of additional work. It will also depend on how authentic you want your restoration to be. For things like machine heads, modern versions will be far superior to almost anything off a 60s copy instrument, but getting something that looks exactly the same and has the same fitting will be difficult. Most people would settle for ones that have similar keys so the instrument still looks the same from the front, but accept that the screw fittings on the back won't line up with what was there previously.

I've played in some loud bands but have never been so loud that could actually feel the sound pressure waves coming from my rig. If I had I suspect I would probably be even more deaf than I am.

The sorts of gigs that the Foo Fighters do even if they were all on IEMs and had no amplification or foldback speakers on stage it would be far from quiet. There would be enough spillage from the FoH to keep things lively and loud. It's not the Dog and Duck you know. But it looks wrong without the amps on top of the cabs.