uk_lefty

I love it when there's fantasist out there who think they're the next Mick Jagger/ Jimi Hendrix and they get really shirty with you for not being professional enough while also begging to have an audition... At least you don't have to waste your time meeting this one!

My school music lessons involved a fight to get a shoddy electric keyboard out of a cupboard then we had to magic up the ability to read sheet music and play piano. You shared a keyboard between two and just had to sit there and work it out. Hardly education. One week they asked us to do a rap. That was excruciating.

Double P pickups... Fender Precision Elites from the 80s, Westone, BC Rich, Warwick buzzard basses... Double P looks awesome to me.

I still did well over 40hrs... Honest. For the non UK based company I work for!!

Ah, well mine was the intro to Sweet Child O Mine. Not at all complicated, and I play far more complex things, but somehow this eluded me for years. I was blagging it on a dep gig just playing something that kinda fit... Then my boss had a week's holiday so I had some day time to noodle about on bass and using songsterr helped me nail it. I now play it almost every time I pick up my bass just to keep it front of mind. It's silly because it's not a complex line but I think I kept getting frustrated and quitting.

I've only recently discovered Songsterr where it plays a backing track and moves along the tab at the right tempo. It's really helped me learn some tricky parts that stumped me for ages.

Aha, thanks for that I did suspect it was guitarist gear. It says its full range flat response though... Which I thought meant "takes anything"? Is it "takes anything that sits within its certain frequency range"?

They have a 2x12 powered speaker cab specifically for using with amp modelling fx, wedge shaped. I think it's around £250, saw it advertised yesterday. Wondering if it would be good for bass or not, could be a good multi amp solution. I've now got a guitar multi fx as well as a bass multi, both with good amp modelling though they're older tech than the Helix and other stuff you can get now. I follow Harley Benton on Facebook which was a bad move. Too much GAS...!

If they did that design in full scale I'd be tempted. It looks great but I just don't see the short scale attraction I'm afraid.

If you wanted to be snotty you could ask them how they spend the 10 quid. Do they re pack it or go to any extra effort or do they just look at it, sigh, then tell Gina in accounts to send you a fine letter and it gets posted as you had packed it? You'd get a cow poop reply but it would allow you some small sense of moral victory. Or you could write saying its my first offence guv, didn't know the rules, have sent loads with you without a problem. That way you might get let off, you might not, but if you don't ask you don't get. I've got round a few parking tickets that way, not 100% of the time though!

Satin neck finish. Just feels right.

That's nice!! Here's another thing that puts me off... Right handed basses.

Yep!! I find sweet home a really boring song to play tbh, not because the bass line is so simple but because it's just too long. For pub gigs medleys help keep things interesting. Please tell my band members this so they can think it's their idea and then get it on our set list 😊

Right, hopefully an end to the saga. Armstrong suggested I take it to a chap at my local music store, Music Department in St Albans. I figured that if it definitely is an issue with the pickup then they would accept that as an explanation from the people they recommend... So the bass went in and a few hrs later I was asked to collect. There was some loose wiring and poor soldering, probably through age, so they neatened it up and tested it. I've given it a quick test at home and I now have a working 1984 Aria Pro II SB-Elite 1. The Armstrong pickup is great in dual coil, really throaty deep lows and quite percussive too. Very thin on the single coil but I need to play with EQ a bit more. I haven't thoroughly given it a bash yet but plan to in the next few days to really see where this bass has its strengths. Overall I'm just pleased to have it working. It's number 4 out of 4 basses, but I'm hopeful that it will do the job for bashing out covers. With what I've had to spend on it I'd probably break even selling it, but actually hoping it finds a place and earns it's keep. It's been a frustrating journey but one that has led me to a few good lessons learned.

I sold a bass within an hour on Reverb to someone uk based, all went very well. It had been on Facebook for a while and I got "is it still available?" from two Americans and a German but nothing remotely solid in terms of interest. I didn't bother with Gumtree and I leave eBay as a last resort.

It would be hard to say. I'm a jazz bass man, so I guess if I sold my four basses I'd buy a USA jazz and have change left over. But really, the CIJ Jazz I have looks better than anything available to buy right now because the Japanese have a higher proportion of left handers so they made better options. I'd maybe get a Sire 5 string jazz then if I had to have just one so I've got that 5th string option. Amp wise I love a Trace Elliot for everything except size and weight, so I'd probably stick with my Ashdown RM rig because I don't need more bells and whistles than that. I have a Trace amp emulation in my fx board anyways. So why do I own 4 basses, then? Probably because one is a fretless I've had since aged 18, and I am most at home on that bass. I have a Stingray because it's big ballsy tone is best suited to bashing out 80s covers in a busy pub or at a wedding or function. I have an 80s Aria because I wanted it, no other reason, its probably expendable. I have a jazz because for fretted basses I prefer the sound and feel of a jazz bass over anything, even a Stingray.

Describing any bass whatsoever as "custom" "handmade" "rare"... When it's a Tanglewood precision bass over 20 years old and they're asking £250 for it.

I use one of these and carry it around in a laptop bag. I'm not an Ampeg lover myself, having got rid of my P Bass, but the Ashdown RM amp is great for flexibility. Decent amp on its own, you can add in the valve simulated drive, or you can switch off its EQ and use pedals to simulate amp and cab combos. I even had a while switching off its EQ and using the inboard EQ on a Sire bass then sometimes bringing in different amp simulation effects from a Boss multi FX pedal. These days my Stingray and jazz often go straight to the amp with no pedal in between at all. There are "better" amps out there but if you want a lightweight, not too expensive, single box to do 80 percent of what you could ever need then I don't think you'd find many better. Ml