EliasMooseblaster

I think I struck lucky: my band includes a Welshman, who is de facto more interested in the rugby, and a Brazilian who emigrated for reasons including, but not limited to, his native country's increasingly tedious glorification of its past footballing prowess. The fact that I keep an occasional eye on Leicester City's results makes me the closest thing to a football expert in the group....

Perhaps I'm too used to passive basses. I tried a couple of Sadowsky Jazz-type basses at the Gallery a few months ago, and I also found the onboard EQ a bit challenging to work with. In the end I decided I liked them best in passive mode - no denying that the guitar itself was a delight to play, to be fair. Perhaps the preamp is a bit of an acquired taste! For balance, I also tried a couple of Sandbergs, and similarly found myself wondering whether I'd ever use the active EQ if I bought one, though I did find their slightly more subtle cut/boost controls easier to get used to. (I say all this having only owned one active bass previously, and the EQ knobs hardly ever left the detente when I was playing that one...)

Is your amp valve or SS? If valve, you'll knacker the amp very quickly unless you plug it into either a speaker or dummy load. I think you can get away with it on a SS amp, but there are probably still reasons why it's not recommended...

Strengths: I can carry my amp. Weakness: I can't carry a tune.

I used to front a blues-rock trio. Good fun, if very draining. If I can offer any single nugget of advice: Make sure you can trust your drummer. The logic is as follows: your attention is split between the bass and the vocal line, but the majority of the audience will focus more on the vocal line, so you need to make sure that is as spot-on as possible. As others have said, you may find you have to simplify the bass part as a result, and you won't be able to devote as much attention to the rhythm and the groove. Ergo, the last thing you need is a clodhopping shed builder behind you who can't keep time or lock in with the rest of the band.

I used to play with a band that was comprised entirely of deps. It was a singer/guitarist who had a reservoir of friends he could call on who knew his songs (yes, it was originals) and obviously liked to fly by the seat of his pants! It became his running joke to say to the audience, "...and at this point, I'd like to introduce the band...", then turn around and introduce us to each other - fair enough given most of us had literally just met for the first time.

I shall continue to fly the flag for Schecter. The Model T is an excellent P/J bass. I've recently gone back to playing mine more regularly and remembered how much I love it. If you turn off the J pickup, you essentially have a beautifully-made Precision which sounds as good as an American Fender, but only costs a bit more than a Mexican one*. *I'm assuming you can still get your hands on the passive Model Ts; the active ones cost a bit more, but I've heard they're also very good!

I agree: the usual playlist on Planet Rock makes me fear that rock music is in pretty dire health (I have ranted on this subject quite a big in the past). Every so often I come across groups like All Them Witches, or Bouquet of Dead Crows, who seem to have some fresh ideas, but they're few and far between. Like you, I also owe a couple of great discoveries to Last.FM - it's a shame it's not more widely used.

£500 is an insanely good price for an insanely good amp. Hope you enjoy it!

I think, at its most ridiculous, I was playing in about six or seven bands at one point. Fortunately, most of them were fairly ad hoc, so it wasn't too difficult to manage the calendar around them. You may have to make a decision about which band gets your first priority, though - and maybe make this clear to the other band(s).

"Home is where the (victim's) heart is..."

Exactly: if you were looking for a place to live, you'd expect to see plenty of photos before agreeing to a viewing, just so you don't find yourself standing in a pigsty / fresh murder scene / sex dungeon, awkwardly trying to explain to the lettings agent that this didn't really meet your standards for a "cosy family home." If this bass is indeed the "ONLY ONE OF ITS KIND, YOU B**T**D TIME-WASTING TIRE KICKER; I BET YOU KICK PUPPIES AS WELL, DON'T YOU, etc, etc" then surely the guy would be all too happy to send you some more photos to show the thing off?

One of the trickiest things to nail will be the custom shop pickups. The P pickup is very bright - a '62 RI would probably get you there - but the J in the bridge position is apparently something they designed with TF himself, and may be difficult to come by outside of that bass. Not being a connoisseur of Jazz basses, I'm not sure how to compare it to other bridge pickups, or what might get you close. If you do decide to go down the bitsa route - firstly, I look forward to hearing the results! - and secondly, you could probably improve on my only gripe with the design: replace the blade switch with a blend control!

One concise, if slightly dismissive, maxim I've come to like is that "there are no prizes for being the healthiest person in the graveyard."

I'm not sure there's a clear rule one way or t'other, but I've tended to be of the opinion that: If you're recording it, make it your own or else what's the point? If you're playing it live, it depends how well-known it is: most of the audience won't know the Camel song you've snuck into the setlist, but there'll be one bloke at the back who'll be delighted to hear it. But if it's a radio-friendly pop song that most people would recognise, I think there's a lot to be said for putting your own spin on it and leaving people guessing. Which provides a neat segue into my own link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifIpiVFDMKc

Tui. It probably wouldn't offend me quite so much if they didn't have the advert playing on a loop while you take the little shuttle train from one side of Gatwick to the other, but being forced to listen to that crappy fey cover of Chaka Khan multiple times is a new and subtle form of torture.

So when I wake up with my ears still ringing, after trying to get my screaming toddler back to sleep in the small hours, and having achieved all of three hours' sleep myself, I should actually try and power through without coffee if I want my ears to recover? Thanks, life. Way to kick me while I'm down...

Turn down the tone control a tad.

My Generation...but NOT for the reason you'd think. Of course there is plenty of merit in learning those solo breaks, but if the band plays it properly, it is a song in which the bass has to hold everything together, but is also right upfront and completely exposed. Listen closely to the original single (and the better-known live versions, for that matter). Study the bass part, but also study the guitar part. The guitar chords on that intro are actually very sparse - those droning crotchets are just being played by the bass. You have to be right up at the front of the mix - time to kick in that overdrive pedal with the midrang hump, perhaps. Now listen to the drums. This is the other giveaway: My Generation swings. Keith Moon's over-the-top playing obscures this fact a little, but if you listen to the way the drums and the bass lock in, you will hear it swing. If you play it straight, you will fall into the same pit of mediocrity that caught out Green Day, Oasis, and countless others. Once you have beaten these subtleties into your bandmates' consciousnesses, take some time to learn the solo breaks. Because we all know that any Who fans in the audience will be judging you on those. EDIT: I'll come back with the other four when I think of them...

I was wondering this - has he just assumed that, because a 7-string is typically strung down to a low B, it is de facto a bari guitar?

I've a couple of tenuous ones... 1. Years ago I saw The Hamsters in Milton Keynes - I'd had no prior warning that they were filming that gig specifically to generate footage for a live DVD. They were their usual, reliably entertaining selves, though it did feel a bit odd when they "broke the fourth wall" towards the end and started discussing which songs they wanted to get another take of. Tenuous, because I never did find out whether said live DVD was finished and released. 2. I am in the audience on the DVD release of Bill Bailey's Part Troll show. (Tenuous, because his act is more "comedy with musical bits" than a band.) A group of friends managed to get tickets for one of several nights at Hammersmith. When the DVD was released, we weren't sure which night - or nights - the footage had been compiled from. Not, that is, until he started talking about hash brownies, and asked the audience what else they had cooked with weed - somebody yelled out "stroganoff", and at that point we knew, yep, that was the night we were there.

This hits the nail on the head, and nicely exposes a great mismatch: at 18, we're full of ambition and energy, but we're also incredibly naive, especially to the scale of hard work involved. By the time we're seeing out the end of our thirties, we have a much better understanding of how hard we need to work - and how to do that work more efficiently - but life has rather drained us of that spark and drive along the way. Or to put it another way, if 23-year-old me had known then what 33-year-old me knows now, I could have been regularly playing to literally tens of people by now.

The stars could be aligning - I saw a gorgeous Shuker fretless on the marketplace earlier... If, however, your heart changes back towards Gibson-style things and you want to keep the costs down, you could always do what I did - get an Epiphone EB-3 (or EB-0 if you're set on short scale), and swap out the stock mudbucker for a DiMarzio Model One. Works really well with a nice valve head, especially if you've the patience to wire up the coil tap option for a bit more versatility.

Damn, they certainly sound good! It's reassuring to know that someone else has been able to use them without knackering a fingerboard.

For the first time in ages I have something to contribute to this thread! Did anyone else get along to Danzig last week in Brixton? Great show; only got into them in the last few years thanks to Mrs Mooseblaster, and it was a bit of a treat for us that the set featured a lot from the first few albums.