musophilr

Now is not a good time to sell. It's a buyer's market.

Instead, if you can't find the right people to play with, play with yourself (oo-er missus). Like I said, it's a buyers market so get yourself some cheap s/h recording gear and some other instruments. Teach yourself to play and record them. You never know what opportunities may open up for you as a result, and I can guarantee you'll have fun in the process. You'll be making music without having to put up with stoned guitarists who play too loud or drummers whose shift patterns in the day job constantly mess up your band practice schedule.

I wonder if tab (spit) has become popular simply because you can use ASCII characters to represent it. You can't do that with proper notation, regardless of how much superior it might be.

[quote name='Paul S' timestamp='1343231556' post='1747481']
Pink Turtle do jazz and swing version of rock classics, here is 'Smoke on the Water'
[media]http://youtu.be/OeQ2GgGivPo[/media]
[/quote]

Brilliant

+1 to Joe Cocker's Little Help, and all the Hendrix covers (especially of Dylan songs)

James Taylor has done some wonderful covers, eg this one
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgjMdjKw1Og"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgjMdjKw1Og[/url]

PAT certificates are worthless. You can do your own visual inspection. If the meter complains that there is > 0.5 Ohm resistance in the earth lead you press the button that tells it the mains lead is > 2 metres long and it will pass it.

[quote name='Ou7shined' timestamp='1342991503' post='1743634']
Here's me the other night at a botb (at my age, really ) ... the prize is £2000 so it's worth the effort*
Forty minute set - the longest I've stood up for since my achillese tendon op 4 weeks ago - admittedly I had to perch on a stool for a song in the middle of the set. See my crutches hanging off the stage bottom right.

For those who have met her, yes that's Betty (second bass I ever built). My main basses are setup and strung for CGCF... which is a little gruff for this new band. Betty's doing fine though and her new QP barks like a good'un.




*We notched up one of the highest scores in the comp so far and have been bumped straight through to the semi's without the "indignity" of more heats.
[/quote]

I thoroughly approve of the motorcycle marque on your T shirt

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1343047684' post='1744200']
You forgot to mention that score doesn't tell you where to put your fingers on a bass

It only tells you what note to play, hence you need to do some working out and it's harder to sight read.

Using a combination of tab and score simultaneously I find it very easy to sight read relatively complex basslines purely because I'm taking the best of both worlds.
[/quote]

There's proper conventions for fingering, in score notation, much of it borrowed from classical guitar. Yiu can indicate which reftting hand finger plays the note, which string it's on and which position you are in to play it. There are also up & down pickstroke markings borrowed from the violinists' bow markings, and again picking hand digits can be indicated as per the classical guitarists' [i]p i m a[/i] markings. It's all there. You [b]don't [/b]need TAB. Trust me.

[quote name='thebrig' timestamp='1343036551' post='1743960']
Why so much hatred of tabs, for all those people who [u]can[/u] read music, there are far more who [u]can't![/u]

Fair play to those who can, but not all people can learn to read music for various reasons, and I wouldn't mind betting that almost everyone has been thankful for tabbed music at some stage in their learning curve.

It just seems a bit snobbish to rubbish tabs, just because you can now read music.
A bit like a "reformed smoker" comes to mind, and yes I used to smoke, but I don't condemn those who still do.
[/quote]

TAB only tells you where to put your fingers, no more. To find out [i]when[/i] and for [i]how long[/i] you need the proper notation. So you're already reading rhythms and that's the hardest part of reading notation. Reading pitch is easy so why not complete the job and have done with this music-by-numbers crap?

Plus, proper notation tells you instantly the relationships that exist between the notes you're being asked to play so if you nailed your arpeggios and scales the jobs becomes so much easier.

'Tis nothing to do with snobbery. Players of orchestral instruments learn to read while they're learning to operate the instrument, I fail to see why bass players (and guitarists, they're even worse!) should be any different.

But a trumpet can easily trip a noise limiter on its own with no help from amplification. 'Tis not just a question of guitarists (or even drummers) always being too loud - although I accept that a lot of them are. Noise limiters are not a realistic solution to the problem (however you try to define it); my sympathies are with them that refuse to play gigs with a noise limiter.

Please! I'd like to rid the entire planet of TAB.

Like the people who moved into our village, then complained about the church bells ringing on Thursday evenings. Now there's just the noise of HGVs being driven through the village ...

[quote name='gjones' timestamp='1342965642' post='1743202']
You have a van? Isn't that how Bill Wyman got the Rolling Stones gig?
[/quote]

Didn't someone say if you want to be in a band you either learn to sing or get a van?

I spent some time away from what would have been called my normal "day job", after being made redundant from it. Drifted into freelance music teaching and did reasonably well out of it, topping it up occasionally with a relatively unskilled p/t office dogsbody job. Now that even the people with money aren't spending it, business has nose-dived, I can't find another suitable office dogsbody job, and the people recruiting for software think you forget how to design and make software after a few years, it's banging your head on a brick wall trying to tell them that the details you forget are not the big issue and freely available in reference manuals anyway.

Conclusion: if you're making money out of your day job, and can make more on the side out of music, do it, but IMO quitting requires serious unpleasantness going down in the day job coupled with guaranteed rewards in what you look at next. Both conditions are necessary; stay out of what you used to be good at for long enough and no matter how good you were, you'll find it very hard to take it up again.

I've been to a Blues Jam where the playing standards are high and thoroughly enjoyed it. Choice of keys, rhythms & grooves, and while there's a lot of the good ol' 12-bar there's a fair bit of my favourite 8-bar, and quite a few things that didn't follow either formula.

Then there's the 'Rock' jam, at which there's very often a variety of grooves to play with, but it seems more limited. You can't play a progression of more than 4 chords (repeated ad nauseam) - if you try nobody follows you and they just repeat the 1st 4 chords you played one chord to each bar - and you can't develop the groove into anything else. Most of the drummers insist on funk rhythms anyway and that's the thing that makes it most dull. When a singer gets up nobody in the band knows enough about the song even to busk it so you end up with words sung over entirely the wrong chords and it sounds crap not imaginative.

I've had some well good jams though. The best I remember was me starting "Toccata and Blooze in D minor" with a drummer who I knew well. A keyboard player joined in, programming it so he could so bass lines with his left hand and something else entirely with his right, and it developed into us throwing Santana-ish licks at each other after we'd done the Bach bit. He disappeared immediately after so I never got to thank him for all the fun but IMO a good jam is when people read off each other and develop the jam after being given just a hint of a development (eg "lets turn this thing into a reggae groove").

[quote name='slobluesine' timestamp='1342873279' post='1742144']
anyone else here totally pissed off with musicians who play for free?
[/quote]

Only if by doing so they encourage other people to expect musicians to work for nothing, or are undercutting musicians who ought to be getting paid properly.

FWIW I have an old Antoria precision copy. Its previous owner added a J pickup close to the bridge, with a pickup selector which did one, the other, or both. I found myself using the J pickup on its own more than any of the other 2 positions. This could be for a variety of reasons including the original P-type was crap like the rest of the instrument and the J-type was a good'un, but I found the P-type muddy and lacking definition. Sometimes using both on at once would add extra weight to the sound.

Good luck with finding the wisest thing to do with your bonus. IMO whatever makes the biggest contribution to the long term plan of improving your life is the best bet, even if not as exciting as more GAS.

I've got an Elton John EllPee. Does that count?

[quote name='Steve G' timestamp='1342693712' post='1739337']
Or a mahoosive one like me (8" UK hat size). Need a small amount of hair, #2 grade usually. Have to concentrate on the goatee these days (and keeping the nostril hair in check it seems)
[/quote]

yes why is it that when you get to a certain age your body decides that instead of hair on your head where it ought to be, it has to come out of orifices like ears and nostrils instead?

[quote name='MusicJunkie' timestamp='1342690602' post='1739247']
Ask Joe Satriani.
[/quote]

And Andy Powell

I prefer fingers but I'm also a guitarist who uses nails for fingerstyle on the guitar. To preserve my nails for when they're really needed I play bass with a pick, and guitar stuff that doesn't need fingers with a pick. If my nails were stronger I'd play bass with fingers.

IMO you need a 15" bin to shift air for the deep grunty stuff and a 2 x 10" to define the upper mids and the leading edges. Build those into a combo with an amplifier and you've got more than I could be bothered to shift in one go. Plus the least wagon you'd need to move it is an estate car.

I know someone who quotes his profession as 'freelance tutor'. They didn't ask what subject so he didn't tell them.

Why insurers think musicians are a bad risk is beyond me. They're not insuring the kit we carry around, and the fact that it's highly valuable to us makes us drive carefully. We don't often drive in the rush hour (well, the morning anyway) so that's less of a risk. The probablility of getting stopped on the way home after a gig is high, so the chances are we'll be sober, not many people end up pissed at the end of their working shift anyway. Less risk again.

They hit us with silly premiums and then act all surprised and uptight when people like the above-mentioned "freelance tutor" do all they can to avoid the use of the word "music" in their insurance proposal.

[quote name='KingBollock' timestamp='1342533968' post='1736705']
I remember being told about an accident where some kids were travelling in the back of a van with their bicycles when it had a crash and rolled. The bikes basically turned the back of the van into a huge human blender. Very nasty.

For years, while we had a Mitsubishi L300 with no back seats or rear windows, I travelled in the back on huge bean bags. It was really comfortable and I'd often nod off. Sometimes my mate would come with us and we'd sit with a hookah pipe between us. It was great, but we were very, very lucky we never had an accident.
[/quote]

yes if you'd had a prang and the police attended you'd have been in far worse trouble for having that hookah pipe than anything the prang could have done to you.

I reckon most bass players would think "playing with [i][u][b]one [/b][/u][/i]guitarist is bad enough" ...

It would seem worth paying attention to how you secure your load.

On a related topic, I drive a Focus estate, and I usually put the heaviest things where the back seat folds down, so that there isn't a big weight hanging rearwards of the back axle. IMO it helps the wagon negotiate bends a little better.