mattpbass

Stumbled across your post by accident and weirdly sounds like we are doing exactly the same thing at the same time! Been playing bass 20+ years, no keys experience, bought a Sub Phatty about a month ago, first gig with it tonight! I play in a wedding/party band so it’s all pop stuff, thankfully tonight is just a low key gig for one of our singer’s local pubs. On the synth menu this evening - Ain’t Nobody, Say You’ll Be There, Into The Groove, I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Flashdance! More than happy to share experiences, patches, and anything else that might help, I’ll let you know how it goes!

This is still on tonight, not the rip roaring response I was hoping for though! Hopefully there will still be a few people there, Fender will be on hand giving out free goodies.

Hi Chaps, Hope it's ok to post this here! Just wanted to let people know that the fretless master Tony Franklin will be making a rare UK appearance at Rattle & Drum Music in Derby on Weds 5th December. Tony is from Derby originally and this is a bit of a homecoming to the shop he bought his basses from way back when! The event is free and will kick off about 6:30pm. Content wise we are leaving it up to Tony but he will definitely be both playing and speaking. Be great if you are thinking you might come along if you could post in here so we can get an idea of numbers, space will be limited! For those of you who don't know us we are in central Derby, full details on facebook - facebook.com/rattleanddrum Cheers!

Really glad to hear you are happy with the bass Alan, I would be, I thought it was a cracker (once you've got to grips with the many controls)! The GK combo that we had went pretty quickly, I didn't get much time to play around with it but I liked what I heard. Appreciate hearing you guys' thoughts, we'll definitely explore the possibility of stocking them. Good to see our youtube channel getting some chuckles, we really need to get some more videos made, no shortage of ideas, just shortage of time!

As a shop we've always found them to be very obliging, considering the amount of Ashdown we sell we get very little back anyway, but they've always been helpful and quick to turn stuff round. They're doing a 5 year warranty on quite a bit of their stuff now as well.

[quote name='ThomBassmonkey' timestamp='1337885991' post='1667030'] Cool, just chuck me a message on here if you want to sort something out. As Bert said, it's Polar Audio. [/quote] Cheers, we don't deal with them at present but I'm sure we could!

[quote name='ThomBassmonkey' timestamp='1337858799' post='1666443'] If you want mate, I'll pop along sometime with my two heads and I can explain the controls. The RB and MB ranges are the most popular so they'll be relevant for most of the amps. I understand Ashdown's popularity, they're decent amps for the price (I've even recommended them myself in the past despite not liking them) and as you say, they do lots of budget amps and their CS is good. I'm just not a fan and with them being everywhere, I doubt people would travel to Derby for them like they might for rarer amps like GK and Hartke if they were in stock. Whenever I suggest GKs to people their biggest problem is finding somewhere to try them, somewhere right in the middle of the country that's 15 minutes from the M1 could be handy for a lot of people. [/quote] I might well take you up on that at some point, cheers for the offer! Do you know who the distributor is for GK in the UK? Off the top of my head I don't think it's anyone we deal with at the moment. Thanks for the welcomes guys!

GK is another one we are looking at, we get the odd bit through second hand and I've always found them to be well built and great sounding amps. If I have any criticism of them it's that it's that they're one of the few amp ranges where you can look at the controls and not have a clue what half of them do! There are lots of reasons why Ashdown are so prevalent, and much of it stems from being a British based company. They give a great deal of support to dealers and their customer service to the end user has also been exemplary whenever we've called on them (which is not often considering the amount we sell). I also think their range is sensible - the reality is that the vast majority of the bass amps that get sold are at the lower end of things (hoho) and they do this well. Personally I've used the ABM stuff for the past 10years and really like it, but I like a warm old school sound, I can see if you want something more modern and precise they might not float your boat, so the new brand needs to compliment that rather than compete, and I think both GK and Hartke would do that. What's the general consensus on Ampeg these days? Anyone tried the portaflex stuff?

Ampeg is the one we are most likely to go for, the main thing delaying it has been space, too much gear in the shop! Hartke is definitely another one we are considering though. Would be great to be able to go for both!

Hi Guys I'm Shop Chap #2 in the first post of this thread, I'm Matt, one of the owners of Rattle & Drum, and a fellow bass player. Always interesting to hear people's view of us. Obviously we don't come across that brilliantly in this instance, which of course is disappointing to you the customer, and to me, a business owner. Like all businesses, our main issue internally is usually communication related - Andy our repair guy had done all the things we were supposed to do, it's just that the rest of us didn't have the information to hand. This is something we are very conscious of and are working hard to try to address. The slightly confused nature of the conversations is probably just us spinning our wheels and being on the back foot because we don't have the information to hand. Not much I can say about this other than we are real people too, and sometimes we don't get it right. I can assure you everyone who works at Rattle & Drum cares about doing a good job, and is upset if we let someone down. It's encouraging to read that in general those of you who've been in think we're doing alright! It's not an easy industry to be in at the moment and we know the only way shops like us will exist in future is by providing a good level of service along with a great range and competitive prices too! We're trying to do that now, and we are always working on doing it better. Anyway, I hope the above shows that if nothing else we take criticism seriously and we care about doing a good job. While I'm here, I'd be very interested in you guys' thoughts on amps - Ashdown is our main amp brand right now, along with a few other bits and bobs. If we were to add a second brand in depth what would you like to see?