EliasMooseblaster

Yeah, I think they're just mixed a bit too "raw" and upfront - if you listen to the other parts, the lead guitar sounds really woolly as well. I think a lot of bands unfortunately come a-cropper with radio sound techs who are more used to mixing for spoken voices and properly mastered recordings!

Yep, they even recorded one on a uke. "Blue, Red and Grey" from The Who By Numbers is performed by Townshend singing and and accompanying himself on a ukulele, with a brass arrangement by Entwistle in the background.

That does sound wonderful - though you have to wonder how much of that is down to the combination of a well-made pickup in a well-made guitar! Very interesting concept though, and I have to say I liked all of the tones they went through on that demo.

The neck on mine is quite narrow (Gibson-style basses often are), though a similar depth to a Precision neck. I think my Schecter has a Jazz-like neck profile and string spacing, and things definitely feel a little closer together on the EB-3. I don't personally find it claustrophobic, but then I've never been too fussy about spacing. It won't clank in the same way as you'd expect from a Precision, but it has its own take on aggressive sounds. The neck pickup provides a lot of deep "woof," and you can turn that into quite a distinctive "bark" by blending it with the bridge pickup. Different from Precision clank, but delightfully raucous in its own right.

There's a further challenge if the group's name relates to the number of band members. Though this, apparently, didn't seem to deter the remaining members of pop groups 5ive and S Club 7 after some of their original members buggered off and weren't replaced...

I speak from the experience of someone who's been playing one since something like 2010*. It's madness because: they weigh a tonne, they are rather neck-divey, and they have a very particular sound. It's the best idea ever because: that particular sound gives you a nice, fat low-mid authority which can sit well in certain styles of rock music; they're also very articulate at the dusty end of the neck, and the neck profile is rather nice for twiddly stuff. Having the two humbuckers does also make them surprisingly versatile. (Upgrading the neck humbucker with a DiMarzio Model One tightens up 'that' sound nicely, and is coil-tappable for even more versatility.) And, perhaps most importantly, they look f***ing awesome. *I recorded the majority of this album on an EB3, if you want to hear how it sits in a rock context

Weirdest one I've played was a building formerly used as a wind tunnel. Basically an aircraft hangar with some really heavy duty acoustic treatment on all the interior surfaces (presumably to stop the machinery from resonating the walls to pieces). Guitarist and I took it in turns to take a walk while the other played a bit, to see what the sound was like around the hangar...both of us came back reporting that it basically sounded identically wherever we stood. And not the slightest hint of natural reverb. Completely uniform, but utterly sterile. It's almost as if we've got used to sound having a certain quality when confined to an indoor space - you don't realise how much you're used to ambient reverb until it's taken away!

Sad as it sounds, it doesn't surprise me. From the biographies I've read, even back in their heyday, their was a firm friendship between John and Keith*, and John and Pete*, but you get the impression that they were never firm friends as a group, and Roger was slightly isolated from the rest of them. *Notice the common theme in the above pairings. Wasn't there a thread on here a while ago about bassists being the glue holding the rest of the band together...or did I just imagine it to soothe my own sense of self-importance?

Many of my best posts are written with some kind of Scotch influence...

Sort of. Except in my case, it's not so much other bands and their songs as much as YouTube videos of people getting stuck in revolving doors or falling into duck ponds.

Fixed it for you

To be fair to Richard Cheese, his reworkings were always tongue-in-cheek. Smooth Jazz in its more earnest form is, of course, an abomination, and I do believe that when the Four Horsemen rend the very skye and ride upon this mortal plain, bringing unto mankind the woes of death, of pestilence, of famine, and of war, one of them shall hold aloft a saxophone, yea, even of the soprano register, lo, and his name shall be Kenny G.

Strangely, Mini-Mooseblaster used to be calmed by Black Sabbath and Motorhead when he was very young...

*grabs "Controversy" control and dials it right up* Is the amp or the cab going to be more crucial to getting the "right" sound? I'm not going to pretend that cab voicing and driver combinations don't make a difference; having tried a few, I'm very aware that they do. But if we're talking about amps which really colour the tone of your guitar (and for a '70s rock sound, we surely are), then I wonder if the choice of amp is going to be more important. As a fellow Ashdown CTM junkie, I feel like the character of those amps was still shining through, whether I was playing through my cheap Laney 1x15 conversion, or my Berg 2x12. There's no doubt the speakers make a massive difference to the tone, but I would have EQ'ed differently for each cab, and I don't think I ever lost the amp's voice as a result. This is my opinion at 09.29 on Friday, anyway. Wait until I've had some coffee and there's a chance I'll change my mind completely...

I've a B-Station on the way - hoping it will be a more satisfying replacement for my old Behringer BDI as a preamp/DI solution when I have to go ampless!

As I'm about to come into possession of a Hotone pedal, I thought I should check what the accepted pronunciation is. My intial thought was "Hoe Tone," but then I'm sure I heard somebody on a demo pronounce it "Hot Tone," which might make more sense. How do you pronounce it?

"...because the drummer and guitarist usually can't be trusted to do either!"

The weak points are (usually) at the jack ends. If you buy cables with jacks that can be opened, pop them open when they start playing up and see whether the connections are fraying. They're easy enough to re-solder. That said, I haven't had to solder one myself for a very long time: I agree with others on here that there is a lot to be said for being kind to your cables!

You can go all-valve without breaking your back these days. Depends on the size of the gigs you're playing of course, but if you're in small-ish venues, or have good PA support, there are always options like the Ashdown CTM-30 / Little Bastard / Little Stubby. They go a surprisingly long way with a well-voiced 2x10 or 2x12. Or if you need more power, go hybrid: Orange do the Terror Bass, or you might be able to get a second-hand Mesa/Boogie Carbine - both of these are tube preamps with a transister power stage.

Yeah, I can definitely see the sense in both approaches. I guess if you extend your range upwards then tuning your higher strings to C and F (and Bb?) opens up the instrument's range slightly more than tuning to B and E, plus you're not going to be playing huge chords across all 5/6/7 strings. On the other hand, having the major third in among the fourths might give you more scope for transferring certain guitar chord shapes onto the top strings more easily than if you were working solely in fourths...although I've never tried it myself, so I can't reliably comment!

I'd still argue that it's a member of the guitar family. I feel like the fact that we typically play it monophonically has less to do with its design, and more to do with the dense intervals of a full triad sounding - to put technically - utterly gash at those low frequencies. Try the same on a piano - play a simple major or minor triad of your choosing in a standard guitar's register, then try it an octave down. Open fifths and octaves, by contrast, can be quite acceptable when used judiciously (which is to say, not over the drummer's solo). The consistent fourths tuning likely has more to do with the fact that the rulebook hadn't been written when ERBs were being invented, so people just made up their own rules. It's worth noting that a Bass VI follows standard guitar tuning, and I have heard of some oddballs tuning their six-string basses B-B (however, such revolutionaries may have been taken out back and shot by now). Not to mention the fact that, of any Western musical instrument, members of the guitar family are the most likely to be found in some strange and deviant tuning at any given time and for any given piece: please spare a thought at this moment for Sonic Youth's guitar tech. Where I'm going with this, in my usual clear and concise manner, is that not only am I equally comfortable being referred to as the bass player or the bassist, but that I am also content for observers to group me in with the lead and rhythm guitarists and refer to us, collectively as, the guitarists.

By coincidence, I'd just stuck on Dead Can Dance when I chanced across this thread! I know they have a couple of live albums, but I think I'm right in saying their touring schedule became quite light after the first few albums.

I've only been able to do it once - usually when I've left a band, it's because something's been a bit off, and sure enough, I've bumped into one of them later on to find that the band ran out of steam and eventually folded. But one group kept on going, and found another bassist, and so I was able to go and watch them with their new lineup. We'd parted on good terms (I just didn't have enough time to spare to keep playing with them), so it wasn't awkward - quite the opposite, it was nice to catch up with them all, and the new lineup (and new material) sounded good. And by curious concidence, a few years later, I started a new job and was welcomed into the office on my first day by...their new bass player. Small world...

No, I think that's why they gave me a hard time...!

Yeah, it's not doing anything for me either, and I also love(d) The Who. But they've been a funny one over the last two decades. Every so often there's flickers of hope that Townshend still has it - remember Real Good Looking Boy? And I will admit that I got my hopes up with Endless Wire: sure, it wasn't on par with their '60s and '70s output, but it had its moments. As a lot of critics said at the time, comeback albums usually sound a lot worse. And it beat a lot of the music molesting the charts in 2011(?) into a cocked hat. But then, unfortunately, this comes along and drops into the same bin as Be Lucky. And you wonder how far we are from sinking back into the Kenney Jones era...