Skinnyman

And can I say thank you to you for providing us old guys with a sense of purpose during these difficult days? Enjoy the bass!

Welcome to BassChat! Just be grateful that there are no cheese puns......oh no! What have I done?

Welcome to Basschat! Six pages in and we’ve covered Precision vs Jazz, skirted around the flats vs rounds discussion and ended up at “ @Teebs is weird”. Nice work! Of the basses you’ve mentioned I don’t think there’s a “wrong” answer - the Squier, Sire and even the ‘ray are all great instruments that will serve you well and hold a decent amount of their value when you come to sell. Its the same with the amps you mentioned - we truly are spoilt these days in that there’s very little gear out there that is truly “bad” and loads of well made, affordable stuff to choose from. Under normal circumstances I’d say not to worry about the P vs J thing - whichever one you get now, you’ll buy the other in a year or so when the big has bitten hard! That said, it sounds like you’re a multi-instrumentalist so my guess is that bass won’t be your only instrument - in which case you may end up with just one bass and, whilst either will do you well, the Sire is likely to give you more tonal flexibility. But ultimately, it’ll probably come down to which is in stock 😁 Whichever you choose to get, enjoy it! Please let us know what you get in the end.....

This. I’m also not a fan of the modern “coffee table” basses. Which, of course, reduces the demand for them (by, er, one), helping to keep the price down for those who do. It’s almost a public service.

Hi Dawn and welcome. There aren’t many positives about the current situation but having some extra time to practice is one of them. Except that you’ve just blown that by joining this site! Time that you could have spent practising will now be spent browsing the For Sale section. Well, that’s what happened to me, anyway.... 😁

Welcome!

Which happens to be exactly what I have. Although I am thinking of swapping them round. But that’s only because I’ll get bored stuck in the house.

Of course. That’s the way I (try to) play it. Perfectly in rehearsal. Badly at gigs. It’s even worse when I know there’s another bass player watching me.

Lol! In all fairness it was that band plus the one before. So I think I played my part in screwing it up. But yeah, maybe I had some help 😁

D’Addario NYXL for me. I use flats on most of my basses but NYXL’s on one of the Ricks. NYXLs seem less “zingy” than a lot of others so I like them as rounds that are a bit closer to flats. Have you tried half-rounds? (reading this thread, I’m tempted to try the Warwicks)

I used to have the same issue with All Bloody Right Bloody Now by Bloody Free. The part under the solo. Nailed it every time in rehearsal ( and properly too) but either fluffed yet it completely or ended up bottling it and playing the simplified version at gigs. Problem is that there’s nowhere to hide so if you get it wrong at the start everyone in the place knows. I seem to have got past it now but for years it was my bete noir.

They must have a lot of customers in Norfolk.

Er.....fixed

I was there too. Devo were the recipients of a lot of urine-filled bottles.

I think that was one of his early films wasn’t it? I think I have it on VHS somewhere.

Interesting wording along with the picture of Eric - “so good that even Eric Clapton owned several”. They’re not - in a very legal sense - actually saying that EC owned this one. But there is a clear implication that he might just have and the one in the picture might actually be this one (or probably not). Are old basses now becoming what so many vintage cars have become? Overpriced old tat? 😁

Not quite 😁 Peak power is at 2.67. You get more power for each 8ohm cab you add so 150w for one cab, 300w for two and 450w for three (2.67 ohm). Add a fourth and drop the impedance to 2ohm and the wattage drops back to 300w so I’m guessing they handle the low impedance by throttling the power back. The 800 amp is a lot simpler - 400w at 8ohms and the full 800w at 4, 2.67 and 2. But this is exactly why I chose the 500. The power climbs as I add cabinets so I can take one to rehearsal, use two if I need it for regular gigs and have the option of adding a third if I need it for bigger venues. The 2 ohm capability is nice and allows me to safely mix 110 and 210 cabs as I need to.

Ooh, harsh. True, sadly - but still harsh. (*sniff* fort you was my friend an’ then you come out wiv somefink hurtful like that.....*sniff*)

PS Forgot to say - haven’t heard a peep from the fans yet.

First impressions posted over in the GK Fusion thread (spoiler - I like it)

Thanks! I’ve spent a happy afternoon playing with this and I’m very impressed. I’ll have a better impression when I’ve gigged it but that may not be for a while if we end up having to cancel gigs because of, well, y’know..... First impressions can be summed up in two words; depth and clarity. I had a GK MB800 briefly (used model returned because of a faulty fan) but I was impressed then with the sound it made and have hankered for another ever since. I toyed with the idea of the Legacy 500 but decided to go with the Fusion as it’s basically the same amp but with slightly more flexibility and, of course, the tubes in the preamp. Build quality seems good. All the knobs have a push/pull function as well as normal range of adjustment and I can’t feel any ‘wobble’ or insecurity in them. They’re nicely weighted - maybe not quite in the same milled-from-billet feeling that you get from a Genzler or Mesa but they’re certainly on a par - if a little easier to adjust - with my Tone Hammer. A big appeal for me was the flexibility to run a number of cabinets down to 2ohm. I mainly use a single BF One10 as a stage monitor and DI through the PA system but I wanted the option of adding another One10 or even a Two10 if I needed to go standalone. Soundwise? As I say, depth and clarity. It’s very similar to the MB I had briefly so I guess that’s the GK ‘sound’ everyone talks about. Paired with a One10 which has no tweeter and is very “vintage sounding” it seems like a brilliant match. With all controls at twelve o’clock the natural brightness of the GK is tempered by the natural depth of the One10 and makes for that ‘just right’ tone. I find my Aggie a little “muddy” with the One10 and even my Genzler 800 is a little boomy through it - nothing that can’t be EQ’d and it’s probably my ears as much as anything - but by comparison the Fusion sounds clear, deep and authoritative (not using the H word!) on standard settings. The overdrive channel is nice - it can go to silly levels just like the Tone Hammer but it seems that I can wind it back to give a nice subtle boost with just a bit of added thickness. Looking forward to playing with that some more I’ll get a better idea when I’ve rehearsed and gigged with it but so far I’m really pleased. 😁

These don’t seem to be coming through in quantity yet so I had a job tracking one down but my new GK Fusion S arrived today. Only had chance to turn it on and check it works so far but I have to say I’m very impressed with it in partnership with the One10. It sounds great and the lights look super cool. Hmmm, pwetty lights...

Bit of gaffa tape and she’ll be right.......

Pretty much 😁 None of the companies I’ve been employed by are still in existence. The names may exist in a couple of cases but the companies have been bought out and “rationalised”. I can’t take credit for all of them though.... I also made sure that in the year 2000 not a single line of my code was running in production anywhere in the world so they couldn’t pin anything on me.

I haven’t really had a career, certainly not in the sense that it’s been planned anyway. I left school in ‘76 and spent too long prevaricating to get Into Uni and I’ve been doing “fill in” jobs ever since. One day I might actually get an application in on time and go do a course. In the meantime, I’ve delivered washing machines and televisions, been a shop manager for currys and then Rumbelows (remember them), joined their training department as a trainer, swapped to the IT department as a trainee programmer, left and went to Comet (remember them?), then joined a series of IT software firms ending up as CTO for one of the Fujitsu divisions which we carved out as an independent. Once that was sold, I was a director for the firm that bought us for a bit before going into semi-retirement and becoming a store assistant at Aldi for a year or two. I then got offered a contract job at RBS doing some mainframe architecture stuff before I ended up as head of real-time payments architecture at the company that runs the BACS, LINK and Faster Payments Systems (relax, I never worked on any of the UK systems 😁. Well, just the one but it was cheques so it doesn’t count). Then the company got bought, I got bored with the commute and I retired. And now I spend my days volunteering with Young Enterprise and tormenting Young @Teebs on here. Which is a nasty job but someone has to do it..... (The @Teebs thing, obvs. Young Enterprise is good fun)