EliasMooseblaster

2 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

They get less conservative at night. The Long Player and Phil Alexander are pretty eclectic at times.

In any case, where else can you tune in with a decent chance of hearing the Pink Fairies, Alex Harvey or the whole of Stargazer?

Ooh...thank you for the tipoff - I've obviously only heard it at the wrong times of day!

On 02/01/2020 at 16:13, Nicko said:

"Classic rock" doesn't really exist as a genre because its just old rock, but if someone says classic rock I assume they are talking about the kimd of music that predominated rock before punk. More accurate would be 60s and 70s rock with too much focus on guitar widdling (ie The Beatles don't really count as they are a pop band)

This is probably the extent covered by the initial lasso of a station like Planet Rock, isn't it? Notice also how they tend to only play a very narrow selection of stuff by The Stones (Brown Sugar or Start Me Up, perhaps?) or The Who (generally only the ones that got picked for CSI title credits), despite them generally being considered a little on the influential side everywhere else. Oh, and nothing too psychedelic either - Hendrix and Cream sneak in as a rare breath of fresh air on that station some days...

Not quite the same story, but I found myself in a similar rut about ten or eleven years ago, once the two bands I had going were dwindling in activity. It became apparent that if I wanted to devote more time and energy to music, I would have to set off without them, so I started loitering around jam nights in town.

Not all of them were worth going to, in hindsight. And yes, you will no doubt wince at the number of times you're asked to do a 12-bar blues, or have to put up with some Bob Dylan wannabe who gets butthurt about the other musicians not knowing Ballad of a Thin Man, or whatever, but at least you'll get to meet a lot of other musicians very quickly. And they almost always need good bass players.

By analogy, if you compare it with answering a band's advert and going along to try out, a good jam night can be more like speed dating. It's still no guarantee of success, but at least you get to scope out more of the local scene more quickly.

Wow. That drummer does not look happy.

25 minutes ago, JellyKnees said:

It seems there may be other reasons not to like him...

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/showbiz-tv/pj-proby-reveals-sickening-attraction-16035680

Ugh. I felt slightly nauseous after reading that. But also, what part of him thought it was a good idea to discuss this in such disturbing detail in a public interview?

"So, you're here today to promote your new tour?"

"That's right, Holly. And while I'm here, I'd like to make absolutely sure that my few remaining fans know I'm a raging nonce."

15 hours ago, binky_bass said:

Set ups are subjective, but there is a degree of 'set up' that will show case a bass's best side to 90% of punters, having £1500+ basses hanging from a wall that play like a piece of Far Eastern tripe does no one any favours.

From looking through this thread, I think it's fair to suggest that everyone has a different threshold of "setupness" below which they would start to have doubts about the instrument. At the very least, I think there's a border you cross between

"hmm, that's not how I like it, but I can fix that",

and,

"does this just need a little tweak, or is there a fundamental flaw in this guitar?"

And I guess that border will shift depending on how much confidence and experience you have in adjusting necks, bridges, nuts, etc, as well as the price tag on the instrument. I'm happy to adjust nut slots and bridge saddles, for example, but much more reticent to play around with the truss rod more than I absolutely have to: I'd find it much harder to judge whether a bowed neck could be fixed, and that might put me off. Though I might be more inclined to risk it for a £200 bass than a £2000 bass - so I can see why the examples you tried might have come as more of a shock!

I make do with what I'm given; for someone who spends a lot of time up the "dusty end" of the neck, I only ever owned a couple of 24-fretters in my lifetime. At least, I assume my Shuker is a 24...is kind of hard to count as it's fretless!

It's a little irksome that Fenders (and most copies), and indeed Thunderbirds, stop at 20 - but it's not as if there are many occasions where I need to run all the way from bottom E to top E. I seem to remember both my Schecter and my Epi EB-3 stop at 22 - whilst it's nice to have access to a top E and F, it's not like their services are required that routinely...those routinely soloing in D minor may beg to differ.

2 minutes ago, lownote12 said:

Do you get roundwound chatter marks on your skin like fretless fingerboards?

 

I avoided this by having my arm fretted in advance.

On 14/12/2019 at 13:40, TheGreek said:

Expect them to pull the hairs out of your arm..ouch!!

Just market it as dual purpose: jewellery and exfoliator in one.

1 minute ago, jimmy23cricket said:

Quick run through last night. Nice bottom end indeed. Quick question on the valve drive though, how sensitive are they? Cranked mine right up and and best its more like a boost rather than an out and out drive?

That the same on all yours?

 

Don't know if the same would be true for the Evos, but I've found with my CTM heads that if you really want to make them crunch, your best bet is to push the mid frequencies. Might be a different story if the Evo has a dedicated drive stage, but if there's any similarity with their voicing, the mids will probably give you the clarity to help that lovely soft clipping to shine through.

On 11/12/2019 at 13:35, yorks5stringer said:

It's not the Luthier skills that amaze but that they think its worth £150. The back of the neck joint looks like a Bear's behind...

I imagine that neck plate spent several years, maybe decades, holding a gate onto a wall before it was repurposed.

Personally I'd nominate Eruption by Van Halen, and maybe something by Pig Destroyer.

On 11/12/2019 at 13:27, Geek99 said:

Wasn’t a certain amount of their bass work by the great Jerry Scheff?  

I think Scheff only played on the LA Woman LP, but they had other session bassists in for most of their studio sessions; it was usually only live when Mr Manzarek's left hand took over the role.

15 minutes ago, Happy Jack said:

In a world with so many choices available, why would anyone opt to do business with someone that inept?

 

Happens to the best of us, to be fair...

On 03/12/2019 at 22:56, AngelDeVille said:

congratulations on the new bass!

 

 In the most basic terms...

EB0 is the early version with the neck “mudbucker” only.

EB3 has a bridge pickup.

SG is the more modern EB3.

Gibson confused matters even more recently..

the bass on the left is called an EB, some have taken to calling it and EB4 or the 5 string version EB5

the bass on the right is my 2006 SG

...and just to muddy the waters further, over at the Epiphone offices:

The EB0 is the short-scale (30.5") with just a neck mudbucker,

The EB3 is has a bridge pickup as well...and is long scale (34")

Gibson did originally distinguish their short- and long-scale twin pickup models by calling them "EB3" and "EB3L" respectively; Epiphone appear to have ignored that convention!

Use? A bit.

Need? No.

Over the years with Cherry White, I added a Tubescreamer as a boost for solos, and a Big Muff for a couple of songs which were recorded with heavily distorted basslines. Both were off for the majority of a set, and the night we left my pedal bag back at the studio, I reassured myself that I hadn't become dependent on them. Useful, but not essential.

This may be an unpopular choice, but I think the OP's concept is epitomised beautifully by The Human League's most famous hit, Don't You Want Me?

I'm treading lightly, because I understand the fans get very defensive. I've listened to people compare them favourably with such electronic innovators  as Kraftwerk and Gary Numan. And, to be fair, the intro to the track suggests something in that vein - a moody synth melody, which seems to be setting the tone for something dark and atmospheric...

...and then Phil Oakey starts singing, the music behind him lurches through a massive gear-change, and suddenly we're in naff '80s pop territory. By the time he's singing the titular line, "don't you want me?", I've very much made up my mind that no, I do not.

Not having any background in psychology, nor having read enough Freud that I feel compelled to ascribe all thoughts, dreams, and other subconscious brain activity to an inherent desire to have it off with one's own mother, I'm afraid I can't offer an explanation for your dreams.

I can, however, reassure you that you are not alone. I have had similar dreams in which my instruments bends, folds, or shrinks to the size of a ukulele. In one case, I was on stage trying to play a borrowed bass on which the strings resembled those coiled, springy, rubber keychains that were briefly popular in the mid-to-late nineties. In another, I left other band members to pack the gear while I went ahead to set up the venue, had to berate them for forgetting to pack my amp, and found myself trying to amplify my bass using the "paper cup telephone" method and running a taut string from the body of the bass to a floor tom.

I'm sure there are others; in some respects I'm quite grateful that I forget the majority of my dreams...

On 17/11/2019 at 15:14, Silvia Bluejay said:

This time it didn't work. 'Oh, but I thought you were doing the music!' comes her disappointed reaction.

I'm struggling to process this degree of stupidity...did she just assume that Jack & co were playing a very elaborate form of Guitar Hero along to the music on your tablet...?

Should Blondie have an honourable mention in this thread? Not one-hit wonders themselves, of course, but they made hits out of at least a few singles that had otherwise sunk without trace - Hanging on the Telephone (originally by The Nerves), The Tide is High (originally The Paragons), and Denis (Randy & the Rainbows, originally titled Denise).

Sleeping Satellite by Tamsin Archer.

Doesn't seem to get a great deal of radio play these days. I'd more or less forgotten about it until a few years ago, when the band shared a bill with a singer who included it in her set. The lyrics make no sense, and the production pigeonholes it very much to the '90s, but I can't deny it's a good tune.

19 hours ago, Marvin said:

1/ One of my customers is just learning to play guitar, he's in his mid 50s. His guitar tutor asked what his aim was and the chap said he just wanted to play one gig. The guitar tutor replied that he'd need a better guitar. The guitar in question is an Epiphone Les Paul copy. It's in good condition and very playable. My customer asked me what I thought, I said I thought his tutor was talking out of his rear exhaust pipe.

You might like to direct your customer to a thread over on GuitarChat around a video which does a blind A/B of a 'proper' Gibson Les Paul with a Vintage copy. In terms of tone, I was far from the only person who thought the Vintage, in some respects, sounded better than the Gibson. So if it's a case of his tutor being snobbish about the Epiphone being expensive, said tutor is indeed guilty of communicating via the colon.

On the other hand, the tutor may just have some kind of shady endorsement deal with Fender...

On 24/11/2019 at 11:33, BrunoBass said:

I’ve got a solo EP coming out in the new year. My plan all along was to release it digitally only, but I was asked yesterday if I was releasing it on CD too? I hadn’t considered it, as I didn’t really think it’d be viable to do so. Does anyone buy CDs anymore? 
 

I see the benefit of having something to sell at gigs, but I rarely gig solo these days. Has anyone released a CD recently? Is it worth it / financially viable? Do people even want them? Do you still have boxes of the things gathering dust in your loft? 

Do you have an audience you could survey?

If it's a new project, I realise your audience may well be a bit limited. But if you have a so-shul meejah channel where they can start to congregate, you could always start slipping in questions about their preferred formats. You never know; they may overwhelmingly prefer to carry music around on a collection of USB memory sticks!

One other upside to CDs - which I think has been implicitly covered already, to be fair: even if lots of people no longer have a dedicated CD player, most of us still have an optical drive on our computers, or a DVD player attached to our tellies, or a CD player in the car. Most people will have some means of playing a CD and/or copying the contents to their preferred format, and at least buying the CD gives them those options.

2 hours ago, DoubleOhStephan said:

Pretty good (albeit unscientific) article on the subject here

They've given the list of tasks performed by each hand and believe the dominant hand has more complex tasks to do - 

 

The biggest thing that jumped out for me there was "Keep the time accurate." Has anyone else ever worked with a drummer who played open-handed hi-hat?

The first time I encountered it was the drummer in my old blues trio - and when I asked him about it, it made perfect sense. He was left-handed, but played the kit with a typical, i.e., "right-handed" setup. His dominant hand was therefore the one tapping the hats.

Years later, another drummer switched to doing it one day. Previously he'd played them the conventional, or "closed-handed" way, and been pretty solid. Again, we asked: he'd been talking to some drummers, including a lot of teachers, and they seemed to think a shift towards open-handed playing was going to be the Next Big Thing in modern drumming.

Trouble was, this guy was right-handed. He went from being solid and reliable to being - frankly - a bit shaky, overnight. Not that I wanted to stop him from developing his own playing and technique, of course - I was happy for him to play this way in rehearsals...but did he have to start doing it at gigs as well? There were a few nights when I was almost counting down the bars until he moved onto the ride cymbals, so I wouldn't have to keep reining the tempo back in.

On 24/11/2019 at 00:58, mr zed said:

I would love to own a Tony Franklin. Everything about them is just right!

I would heartily recommend getting one. Probably the best passive fretless I've ever laid hands on.

And of course, the OP has made the correct choice by getting the black one. (Congratulations on your tasteful purchase, sir!)