nobodysprefect

[quote name='XxBassMastaXx' post='586329' date='Sep 1 2009, 12:47 PM']I want a deep sound and clear tone so what string should i use?[/quote] I recommend Thomastik Jazz Flats. Are you using SS roundwounds now? If you want to stay with SS roundwound, DR Fat Beams, the Marcus Miller signatures work well for me. LaBella Slappers are also fantastic in many ways. (Think they have nickel AND SS)

[quote name='Earbrass' post='580474' date='Aug 25 2009, 07:44 PM']That's the kind of vital information they never put in the Tourist Guides.[/quote] Yeah, isn't it the strangest thing! Lonely Planet Japan was also suspiciously taciturn about the fact that japanese girls are [i]easy[/i]if you're from Europe. But since the guys there are usually somewhat fit be sure to do her without alerting him, since the humidity makes it a chore to run away. Yeah, many of the younger women there will think nothing of cuckolding their boyfriend to get some whiter meat on the side. Anders from Stockholm got burned really bad. He'd been in the game for a week and got to Kumiko's apartment when she told him they had to hurry before the boyfriend got back from work. Oh, about the band? I suspect I'm in, as I schlepped my rig there and it's not moved since and they keep informing me about the rehearsals. The writing's consistently good. It has much more variety than the two myspace clips even hint at, which is nice, but it does keep me on my tippytoes, as the grooves can go from bossa nova to picking straight eights at the drop of a hat. Perhaps too ambitious to sell, this material is? But it's a ton of fun so far! I was kidding up in that paragraph, they phoned me and let me know they'd want me in - they are great at communication so far. The guitarist and the vocalist are a cohabiting couple and also write most of the material. Let's hope no breakup drama ensues.

Well, today was audition day. I prepared by listening to the songs on the mp3 player and playing along, writing chord sheets but chose to not pick up the lines note by note. They picked me up which was super nice! Was fun chatting with the bunch on the way there, were quite friendly. I wouldn't say I nailed the songs, but they seemed happy enough with my playing we ended up playing through 'respect' and 'we are family' also, chatted some more, and it turned out the lady vocalist will soon be a licensed psychologist (I suspect they now know me for the pervert I am so it went to sh*te probably) and they admitted to being curious about my motives. Was as frank as is socially acceptable and we went back and played some more. The guitarist and the drummer had a monster groove going on, was really easy to play with them and the drummer had a very solid feel. There is one other guy they are going to audition and then they'll let me know. Frankly, I'd be thrilled to play with them, as they are really creative, we seem to gel relatively well both musically and hanging out, and I really like the music they write.

[quote name='joegarcia' post='569362' date='Aug 14 2009, 08:51 PM']I am a live sound engineer and feel for many of you and understand many of your comments. There are loads and loads of frighteningly incompetant people working as sound engineers but of course there are many good ones too[/quote] Yeah. I worked as a roadie for a sound reinforcement company that had pretty good sound engineers, and local custom made line array systems as well as traditional systems. I've never heard a bad mix from the older guys, and the one time a younger guy had a bad foh sound I walked into between the PA cabs. And what do you know, it was the band, blasting with two 4x12s per guitarist... BUT there are many guys doing sound that 1) don't have sufficient hearing left to properly do the gig 2) don't listen at the bass sound! They just assume it needs bass boosting. The last time this happened was at a Larry Carlton & Robben Ford gig, where Larry's son's sound was a ton of mud and a little mids (he was playing a Sad) and overall the volume was suitable for 2,000 people. There were about 200 there. I and the wife lasted 3 numbers and had to leave as the volume was over the top. And I needn't tell you it wasn't Larry Carlton blasting with a huge amp, but just did. hah. Also, that dinky Behringer DI: inside it's a 1:1 copy of the DBX turtle box. It may not have the same quality components (hm both are now built in China iirc) so doesn't probably last as long, but that dinky DI works just fine for live sound.

[quote name='dave_bass5' post='568950' date='Aug 14 2009, 03:00 PM']Yeah, and thats why we are there. As long as they enjoy us it doesn't matter if they dont dance. As long as they are appreciative thats enough.[/quote] Yup - I've long since given up any illusions of being an 'artist' and tried to be the best 'entertainer' I could be!

[quote name='OldGit' post='568902' date='Aug 14 2009, 02:20 PM']Yeas ago a local music shop had a 1x12 guitar combo box in the window with no amp and no speaker. It was labeled "The Social Club Special"[/quote] Yep. At one wedding the guitarist turned his combo off, and the drummer played with his fingertips.

[quote name='OldGit' post='568695' date='Aug 14 2009, 11:50 AM']Waaaaah! No wonder thr suicide rate is so high! Must be musicians ... Having said that the "humppas," dance sounds potentially promising [/quote] Hah, humppa can be fun to play, even though it's such basic stuff [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkHpJ5jTdCM"]Kaksi kolpakkoa - two pints[/url] yet on the other hand, it can be horrible if it's done with all seriousness [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8VH-lqZWEs"]Arja Koriseva, lit. Arja Groaning[/url] and when it's comedy, it's [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRZlXvjbH5k"]comedy gold[/url] - this time reading the comments pays off. The band's called Old Gits, btw! And yes, dancing the humppa often precedes the doing horizontal mambo! Y'see, at public, er, 'dance floor ball' you'd get to present your leet skills and perhaps get to 'walk the girl home.' Had a relative of mom's get pregnant from her first time at a dance floor ball. Forget about suicide rates. Our homicide rate is at about thrice the level you guys have. I'm reading a book by the leading Finnish psychiatrist of criminal mental disease and, well, for some reason people who get (homicidally) aggressive when they drink, like my mother's male relatives, were selected for among those settling on the Finnish peninsula in the last few millennia. Drunken killings account for 70% of our homicide, according to leading criminologists. The weapon is usually fists, knives, axes, bits of wood, kitchen knives, sofa legs, chairs, crowbars, whatever you have handy. So, yeah, I've been there when one wedding guest started to groun'n'pound on the groom in the parking lot.

[quote name='wateroftyne' post='568667' date='Aug 14 2009, 11:19 AM']If only...[/quote] Have you seen the way Jazz Basses dress hereabouts? No decency in those slags, I tell you!

[quote name='wateroftyne' post='568644' date='Aug 14 2009, 10:52 AM']+1.. for the Fender bass, even.[/quote] Yeah, I guess. Depends on what kind of sound engineers one works with, but f***ing up the fender sound is not anywhere as likely as applying that magical fender setting to an active bass. If only fender produced decent instruments! Kidding. Mostly. Fender's the same as any other musical instrument giant - they are out to make a buck, and if making a buck doesn't preclude making good instruments, they'll make good instruments. As it is, they make instruments, some of them very good, some of them real dogs, but mostly average. I DO think that warwick or Music Man produce less dogs per outstanding instrument.

Also, since I own and use active basses, you maybe ought to use your ears and abandon that magical fender setting. You needn't crank the bass to 11 on my channel tonight.

[quote name='velvetkevorkian' post='568339' date='Aug 13 2009, 09:55 PM']This post= win.[/quote] Since win = nude... I DID have a routine where I played pedal notes on open strings while mock-fornicating with the upright. That was always a favourite with female audience. Or maybe not, can't quite recall.

Can't resist replying... My life used to have an annual cycle of summer with lots of wedding gigs and winter with function and small-christmas gigs. January and February were usually the quiet season, and the only time of the year when I could get plastered on early Saturday nights. I think most of the wisdom has already been freely given, really. I don't know if this is true in Britain, but here wedding gigs are bread and butter for people studying for a master's in jazz at Sibelius Academy, which isn't too shabby a place. We're really quite egalitarian here! One thing I'd like clarified is: how in the heck do you play more than one wedding per week?!! Here, it is not physically possible, despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In real life, on cannot be physically present in two different wedding parties at the same time. Or are you people going to tell me that normal people get married on other days of the week than Saturday over there? It boggles the mind! Also, you don't know how good you guys have it playing weddings. You complain for having to play a soul classic? You have to get to the place all of TWO hours before the down beat? Here, the reality is this: you will start driving at about 1 pm. It can be 11 am or 3 pm if the wedding's in your town and the actual church stuff is set late, but never 4 pm. You set up your gear so that everything's set up and you can get away from sight before the guests start arriving. Because they haven't paid to see sweating, cursing musicians schlep gear. You get to eat from the buffet unless the gig was sold by a twat with a stick with metal twine on it, and now some c**ts will abuse the wine and beer buffet and make the music go all to hell. Now you get to the first part with options: cake can be had either before the couple's walz or after it. If it's before, you play the couple's waltz - it's always, [i]always [/i] a waltz - followed by parent-child waltz, followed by FIL-bride/MIL-groom walzt. Then you play a set of traditional dance music. Waltzes, polkas, tango, jenkkas, humppas, masurkas, foxtrot, perhaps a pair JIVEs or TWISTs if you're a maverick and maybe a set of two latin (rumba, son or merengue) songs. If the cake's after the couple's walz, it's 3 walzes, the cake, then the first set of 45 minutes at some point of time before the couple leaves. You can play more, but you can't claim those minutes against your later play time. The down beat of the first set can be at 8 pm, but it can also be at 11 pm. Whatever is the case, you're paid for being in the readiness to play and schlepping gear, not playing. So you'll try to pass the time in some sort of drafty back room with people with whom you get along, or not. Since a lot of the guys I played with were starving full-time musos, I'd play with the same line-up maybe twice each wedding season. (They'd always take a freelancing gig if it came their way, as would I - 'our band' was together for some years, and the one who couldn't make it due to previous engagement would get themselves a capable sub.) A few more words on the music: the couples waltz would in my estimate be in 60%-80% of the time be [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IA8MBbSgc4"]Akselin ja Elinan häävalssi[/url] this youtube linky also has a rough translation. I'd like to point attention to the lines in second verse:'We'll share the poverty, sorrow and joy of together, until away we sink into oblivion.' Combine this with a slow tempo and I never could see why people chose this waltz. I much preferred [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko8KS-ZowZg&feature=related"]Maijan ja Jannen häävalssi[/url] esp. when we'd booked the female singer for the gig (we had two singers who did about half and half of our gigs) or [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-Mt98Sed0A&feature=related"]Häävalssi[/url] or [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFxfPDD_k_g&feature=related"]Metsäkukkia - woodland flowers[/url]. Häävalssi is Finnish for 'Wedding Waltz.' Now, for those who are not scotsmen, this muscular pathos may seem ridiculous, but you have to understand how it relates to our national narrative and history. The VERY English habit of portraying the attitude of not taking things seriously can ease social interaction, but, you know, giving one's own culture an unquestioned universal applicability is, simply put, neither very perceptive nor cogent. And we'd all like to thought of as perceptive and cogent, no? We still live in the world of [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs7nWKYyUFU"]Scottish Borderlands[/url] in some sense. Now, depending on the wedding, there would be one to five sets of traditional dancing music. I usually sold 'wedding waltzes plus 3 x 45minutes, would you like one set of traditional music and two sets of pop-rock-disco?' When one plays traditional dancing sort of music here, there are a few iron-clad rules. Firstly, one must set the tempo at something the elderly will be comfortable with dancing. From about [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjWK9HV8tIo&feature=related"]Kulkuri ja joutsen/Vagabond and the Swan[/url] to this [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorgJ0zivAA"]Säkkijärven polkka[/url] or a little more. Chose this version, not the faster one by Viljo Vesterinen, as there's some imagery related to the lyrics. More specifically, the stolen Karelia. (GDDMN that revisionist history practised in Russia, backed by the state gets to me) Secondly, whatever music you perform, you must have a set of two in the same style and close in tempo. We call that set a 'pair' and we'd have specific pieces that were a pair in our repertoire. Thirdly, as regards pop music, play whatever. Make it well-known to please the peeps or less known as suits you. Don't play songs related to breaking up or killing your man / woman, though.

So I guess it looked like a total my penis is like a freight train cuz I play the Real (Men's) Bass. I've found there's not much like buying an upright for taking your expectations to a reasonable level. You buy the not-completely-sh*te upright for about £3000, then you buy a £100 string set so you can have a passable arco sound, the £500 bow, and of course the fingerboard needs to be dressed and the bass given a decent lookover for another £200. Add a pickup for £100 and at £3900 you have a bass that has probably somewhat terrigible action, won't sound good for 3 to 5 years even if you really apply yourself to opening up the bass with daily arco playing and the bastard just won't stay in tune at gigs with any kind of ventilation systems and wtf is up with that intonation changing on you every time you pack it up and take it to another building? The strings love to hang on the nut, the bridge threatens to collapse every time to stufff in it a car (sic), the finish can't take any sort of bumps without damaging and the fat f***er feedbacks like there's no tomorrow. Soundmen don't know what to do with it, the pianist wants you to sound like Ray Brown and Gary Peacock while he tromps all over your slice of the sonic spectrum and every funking w***er needs to come over and comment on how your intonation was off in that song (remember that ventilation system? it pumps cold air (or hot air if it's winter) all over your bass, making the untalkative but spankable damsel's tuning go up or down like a 5-year old on a slide) that the vocalist has decided sounds better in Db. Your instrument projects like a wet box of cardboard while the smug flautist pulls that silver pipe of his from his coat pocket and drowns you out. The drummer complains that your attack isn't that hot today and the guitarist keeps on urging you to fill more space while he solos for the 13th chorus of Mr P.C. when your luthier has pulled a prank on you and the bass is suddenly set up for orchestra arco playing. So if a £1k electric isn't a total genocidal war every time you pick it up, I'd say you're getting your money's worth.

Will this look like piling on Josh? I think Patitucci - who's also my hero - said it very well. Of course, tone is a subjective thing. But if one wants that full tone, like, say Charlie Haden, Ray Brown, John Patitucci have, the strings need to have enough clearance. I love the lines and note choices of some of the greats of bass, but man does their low action choke their tone. But then again, a thinner, bottomless tone is great for clarity! (But couldn't they have played a cello?) The electric bass allows for incredibly low action (compared to old doghouse) while retaining a full, round tone. Ken Smith said something like:'if you let the amp do the work and polish your technique, you can get the action quite low.' But he really emphasized that letting the amp do the work thing! And Ken's another upright player. Playing the upright has generally been considered a great excercise for one's hands and ears - not to imply has Josh's ear isn't good, just that the challenges are different! And the benefit for electric technique from [i]PROPER classically trained upright teacher [/i] is generally thought to be enormous. I can certainly attest to that. I've never had trouble adjusting to whatever electric after I started considering the upright bass the real bass and the electric as the moped of bass family. (I'll readily admit to being on a stupid buying spree last year when attractive stuff became available and non-playing related, personal stuff really fusked with my mind)

[quote name='Linus27' post='565854' date='Aug 11 2009, 02:54 PM']I so need to go to Stockholm [/quote] Oh, if you're anything like the typical brit there's one word of warning I'll need to give you: the Swedes are absolutely hysteric about consumption of alcohol in public places. They charge you about 5 quid for 4/5ths of a pint of 3,7% abv piss lager, to boot! Oh and you can't get buy any alcohol before 11 am, either from a bar or a store. So you'd better bring your own... The Swedish lager couldn't fight it's way out of a wet paper bag. The locals will expect you to like it, though, and comment on how 'one can really taste the drink and not just the alcohol when it's not so strong!' I tell you, if it weren't for the blondes, I'd not have made it out alive the last time. FFS, making a man last until practically noon without a drop of drink!

[quote name='Linus27' post='565808' date='Aug 11 2009, 02:03 PM']We, I was actually going to say Scandinavian girls are yummy, especially Swedish girls but I know what you Fins and Swedes are like. Didn't want to start a war about Sweden and Finland :)[/quote] Ah yes. Would've been a little like saying 'English girls are yummy, like the lead vocalist of Corrs' or summat. Swedish girls are great if you're into blondes. I usually salivate uncontrollably when I'm over in Stockholm!

[quote name='thepurpleblob' post='565799' date='Aug 11 2009, 01:55 PM']They're really good... I'd like to hear some more. I actually quite like the bass playing on the recordings, it fits very well IMHO.[/quote] I like Petja's bass playing, too. I'm kinda anxious about not measuring up: my time has suffered because I've not focused on playing for the longest time and I've lost my confidence about building nice lines. Oh well, will have to see how it goes.

Well, at least the guitarist replied 'can't get my work comp to open musepacks, will listen to it at home.' I'd sent the file in .mp3 format! Oh well. =) Anyways, I hope Linus27's comment doesn't speak more about girls in the UK as I've never found local girls particularly yummy, I've seen all kinds... But I guess they do put out for native English speakers quite readily. Mölkky is invented in Tampere. Nuff said.

[quote name='Platypus' post='565402' date='Aug 10 2009, 11:12 PM']hope you get an audition Ville - lets know what happens anyway[/quote] Will do Paul! Wrangling basses without playing out was beginning to wear me more than a little thin I tell you!

After a long-ish hiatus from playing in a band as opposed to being a freelancer (five years now, is it?) there's a local band that's looking for a bass player and I really dig their songs and the female vocalist's timbre and delivery. Sent them a file as a sample of my work, haven't heard back from them yet, and it's been 12 hours! Are my nagging doubts an indication that I'd really like a shot at audition or is it just the hollow feeling of knowing my chops have atrophied tremendously? I'm older than they are by a few years, but it COULD be a problem as they are only 22-ish at the moment. Also, perhaps informing them of having already made plans on their proposed audition day was a fatal mistake? Who knows! Anyways, am listening to 2 of their songs on myspace daily now and trying to figure out what kind of bassline I should prepare in addition to grokking the one played on the tracks by the guitarist. Probably an 80's German slap solo blitzkrieg on the 6-string Smith is called for! Here's the band's MySpace page btw [url="http://www.myspace.com/mboostband"]MBoost[/url] the name, I think, is cute. Too bad the vocalist isn't featured more prominently on the page. I'll try to rectify the situation once I'm in and too well lodged to loose. (Now THERE's a strategy for all bassists! '(P)Lay low 'til you're too well lodged to loose')