EliasMooseblaster

[quote name='Meddle' timestamp='1425250443' post='2705629'] I just don't understand it. Ampeg come out with massively unreliable Class D amps and people defend them to the hilt. Ashdown come out with new technology and everybody uses this as a chance to get the boot in. If British bassists defended British manufacturers the same way American bassists defended theirs then this forum would be a slightly more positive place perhaps. Not sure we need pages of Ashdown bashing, and I'm glad to see a rep coming on here and kicking some backsides. [/quote] People mocked the horseless carriage and said it would never catch on. As other people have pointed out, Ashdown aren't the first company to produce something in this vein, but they are dabbling in a [i]relatively[/i] new concept, which will unfortunately attract a lot of people whose instinct will be to say, "what's the point of that?", "it'll never catch on", or, occasionally, "yes, but is it any good for metal?"

We're on second, so we should be hitting the stage about 9.30. (And I'll be wearing your old T-bird, now I think about it...)

One last bump as this is tomorrow night. Anybody looking for something the night before LBGS, you'll be able to catch me giving Merton's old Ashdown through its paces in its maiden voyage with Cherry White, with two other great bands on the bill as well - all for just five English pounds!

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1425430123' post='2707387'] [i]I superstes erit![/i] [/quote] [i]Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.[/i] There, I've said it.

Funny how we're always the ones who have to think about EQing, isn't it? The above points about "big" guitar sounds may be the key to it: see how high your guitarists have their bass controls set, and see whether you can roll some of that off. Guitarists (as a heavily generalised rule-of-thumb) seem to be particularly bad at not realising that what sounds good in their bedroom doesn't necessarily sound good in a band setting!

I shall ignore the instinct to rubbish the original article, and try to contribute something more conversational: surely one key question is, [i]can the human ear actually detect the difference[/i]? Obviously we now have digital tuners (or even programs on our smartphones) which tell us how close our 'A' is to 440 Hz, but a large swathe of popular music will not have been recorded with the luxury of such accurate tuning. Bear in mind that the next semitone down on this scale is somewhere in the region of [s]422 Hz[/s]*, so tuning to A432 is roughly equivalent to tuning a quarter-tone flat. "Back in the day," if you had a keyboard player on the session, most bands would have had to tune to the piano. The piano would (hopefully) have been tuned by a professional piano tuner, who would either have used tuning forks or relied on the gift of "perfect pitch." But how good a guide are those, when you're then relying on either your ear's comparison between the fork and the piano strings, or the piano strings and your own mental reference point? In one of the stranger recording sessions I was ever hired for, I was asked to recreate the basslines on samples of some old '70s soul records. For each sample the guy wanted me to play over, we had to re-tune my bass up or down by about a quarter-tone because Isaac Hayes' band was tuned slightly flat or sharp back on that day in 1974 or whatever. Some of them certainly would have been closer to an A432 tuning than A440, some were probably closer to A443. I can't say that any of them felt more or less "natural" depending on the tuning, so I remain sceptical. *Edit: sorry, ignore my sloppy maths; I believe it should be closer to 415 Hz!

Good lord. Part of me thinks it's hideous...but then another part of me thinks it wouldn't look that out of place on a stand next to my Thunderbird.

...and on the off chance that anyone's in town and at a loose end the night before the show, there's going to be a great gig at the Hope & Anchor (Islington) on Friday 6th, featuring V-Device, The Cortège and *cough* Cherry White *cough* ...only a fiver...

[quote name='taunton-hobbit' timestamp='1425052327' post='2703460'] The Cash Converters route always worries me - when they started out (some time ago now) they were the first place that our local Plod called on if someone had a video recorder nicked...'course that was back in the day............ [/quote] Not so different these days, to be honest - the last time I was burgled, they took my flatmate's laptop. The police suggested I might like to have a gander round the local Cash Converters and similar shops to see if it was in any of those. Which took a while, as there's a depressingly large number of such shops down the Walworth Road!

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1425040625' post='2703278'] Just put a paper bag over [i]everybody's [/i]head, play a recording of some nice music and have a crafty Sherman. [/quote] It would certainly make for quite a memorable gig...

[quote name='Marvin' timestamp='1424515665' post='2697125'] You could always put a carrier bag over the headstock? [/quote] As a precaution in case the carrier bag comes off while you're playing, be sure to put a paper bag over your own head as well.

[quote name='Panamonte' timestamp='1424864847' post='2701268'] I thought when I got a 5 string last summer (taking the total number of basses up to 6) that I was sorted. But I've just bought an EUB. And now I'm on the lookout for a 5 string fretless. It really is hopeless. [b]On the plus side they do all get played [/b] [/quote] This is the key justification I cling to. My total now stands at 7, but I can confidently say that I'll use at least 4 of them at our next recording session in a couple of weeks!

[quote name='bartelby' timestamp='1424808224' post='2700732'] [color=#000000][font=DroidSansRegular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=3]"The spinal cord of JFK[/size][/font][/color] [color=#000000][font=DroidSansRegular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=3]Wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's negligee"[/size][/font][/color] [/quote] The 12 days of christmas?

The first step is admitting that you have a problem. So, in solidarity: my name is Elias Mooseblaster, and I have terrible GAS. The second step is deciding what steps you're going to take to fix the problem...but that sounds boring. Sod it, I'm off to Denmark Street.

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1424456326' post='2696584'] If he wants to shift it he should offer it for less than nine million pounds, imho. [/quote] Ha! I notice it now says "best offer accepted." I can only presume that somebody dropped him a line to say "I'll give you a tenner for it."

[quote name='1970' timestamp='1424777756' post='2700261'] GAS is like herpes. It never goes away. You'll get a flare up, mark my words. [/quote] And oh, how it itches...

I fear that as long as I remain on this forum, I will never truly cure my GAS. Back in 2013, I thought I was cured. I'd found and purchased an 8-string, and I had everything else I wanted covered. Well, except a valve head, and there seemed to lots of threads praising the Ashdown LB30, so I tried one of those and left the shop with it half an hour later. Trouble was, they let me plug a Gibson Thunderbird into it in the shop, and I started to want one. It can only have been a couple of months later that Billy Apple's T-bird went up for sale and I decided that was quite definitely the best deal I was going to get on one. I spent the train ride home thinking, [i]yes, this is it. This is the nicest bass I've ever played and now it's mine, and I will not have any desire to buy another bass for several years. I hope.[/i] That lasted all of nine months, after which I received a deep and very infectious bite from the fretless bug ([i]Cucilidus fretlus[/i]). But that was fine; that was a different [i]type [/i]of bass altogether, like the 8-string. And I'd have to learn how to play it properly, so that would keep my mind off my dreadful GAS for a while. Well, it did, for perhaps another seven or eight months, and then our guitarist upgraded to a Blackstar combo. Same wattage as his old Blues Junior, but considerably louder. Suddenly I didn't feel that my LB30 was going to cope so well...how fortuitous that Merton should have put his CTM100 up for sale last month. Now I'm done. Definitely. Except for possibly wanting a little 1x10 cab so I can take my LB30 home and set it up as a bedroom practice rig. But that's all. Honest.

Bumpity-bump...less than two weeks away now!

[quote name='KevB' timestamp='1424450523' post='2696498'] I think we may have been separated at birth Said it in other threads that RG probably gets overlooked, you start picking apart something like 'Lazy' and appreciate how effortlessly fluid he makes it all sound. [/quote] I'd argue that Glover and Paice were a massively underrated rhythm section. I may have to run and hide after saying this, but I think as a unit they had a far superior groove to Jones and Bonham - but then I've always thought Paice was a far more imaginative drummer!

[quote name='Rumple' timestamp='1424441965' post='2696349'] Thank you for the reassurance [/quote] Yeah, if you hadn't told us that you'd had to cut them down, I probably wouldn't have guessed from those photos that they'd had anything done to them!

Well, not even your favourite band, necessarily, but just for a gig you really wanted to see. You kerrazy kids must have a few stories to tell, so I thought I'd share my own story to get the ball rolling. The gig: Hooverphonic, live at Aula Magna, Louvain-la-Neuve Universite, December 2008. Good god, was it really six years ago? I'd (re)discovered Hooverphonic a couple of years prior to this, but as they never really broke into the UK, material was limited. I managed to track down CD copies of [i]The Magnificent Tree[/i] and, with a bit more effort, [i]Blue Wonder Power Milk, [/i]but I'd long since accepted that I was going to have to look for their other albums abroad. (Yes, I probably could have ordered them online, but that would feel like cheating!) So I was reduced to enjoying these two albums and occasionally finding tracks on Youtube or similar, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that they weren't going to come and play over here. Earlier in 2008, they released [i]President of the LSD Golf Club, [/i]which was followed shortly by the announcement that Geike Arnaert would leave the band at the end of the associated tour. This, I decided, would not do: I had already missed out on a chance to see The Who before John Entwistle passed away. I [i]had [/i]to catch Hooverphonic in concert with Geike Arnaert on vocals. I looked through the list of tour dates and decided my best bet was to go to Belgium. From this point onwards, Google Maps plays an important role in the story. I looked at Louvain-la-Neuve Universite on a map and thought "it's not that far from Brussels." And, strictly, it's not - the SNCB website indicated plenty of fairly regular trains out there. I could get the Brussels by Eurostar, catch the train out to LLNU, enjoy the gig and get back to a hostel in Brussels the same night. I asked around my friends to see whether anybody else was interested. A couple of people had listened to the albums I had and were definitely interested when I first mentioned it. Oddly enough, when I explained it would involve a trip to Belgium, they lost interest. Gradually I reached the conclusion that I would have to go by myself. Oh, well. Undeterred, I booked a Eurostar journey and a hostel. And to begin with, everything went very smoothly. On the train over to Brussels, I ended up talking to the elderly businessman sitting opposite me, who seemed intrigued by my little adventure, and warned me that the area around my hostel (close to Gare du Nord) was a bit dodgy, and I should be careful after dark. I found my hostel without incident, checked in and put my bag in a locker in an unoccupied room with six or seven bunks. Was I the only person booked in the room that night? The journey to the venue was a bit trickier. It began with a moment of slight panic, in which I mis-read the timetables and thought my trains to LLNU had disappeared. Then a moment of greater worry, as I located my train and realised that, although the intercity trains are very modern, and frankly put British services to shame in terms of space, comfort and punctuality...the same could not be said for this little stopping service. It was probably on a par with some of the old slam-door rolling stock that was still common in the south of England during the '90s...except that there were no announcements for the stations. By this time, it was pitch dark outside, and I had no idea how many stations there were between Gare du Nord and LLNU. Peering frantically out of the window at each stop, to try and read the sign on the platform to identify the station, was certainly not the most relaxing train journey I've ever had. But I got there. I emerged, triumphant, from the station, and pulled out my Google Maps printout to navigate a strange little town which felt a bit like an overgrown shopping centre. I must have been wandering around blindly for half an hour...even briefly following what looked like a slipread onto a dual carriageway - [i]surely I must be reading this map wrong? Is it the right way up...? [/i]I went back towards the centre of the complex and tried to reorient myself from there. Eventually I did the highly un-British and definitely-not-very-manly thing of asking a local for directions...the venue was just around that corner. It transpired that, whilst Google Maps had comprehensively mapped out a large proportion of major European cities, it had not quite so comprehensively mapped out the smaller towns. Not entirely their fault, these things take time, but if I'd followed their directions, I would have ended up looking for the venue in a layby on this dual carriageway. It was worth the journey. Hooverphonic were excellent, and I remain glad to this day that I made the effort to catch what, for most fans, is the definitive lineup. The journey back was far smoother - being more relaxed, and more confident with the trains, I caught an earlier train and changed at Ottignies, onto one of the fancy modern ones, and realised how much more pleasant my train journey could have been. Gare du Nord was not as dodgy as the kind old man had warned me. And my hostel room was not as unoccupied as it had been earlier - turned out I was sharing with five American girls, which wasn't in the least bit awkward. The following day, I went out in search of CD shops and stocked up on the band's back catalogue as best I could. Then I gradually ran out of things to do and had several hours to kill before my train back, so I found the Delirium bar, where I got talking to a Frenchman who drank with me for most of the afternoon, took my number, promising he'd come to London early in the new year and we should hook up for a beer then, and staggered off half-cut, never to be heard from again. I was probably a bit wobbly myself by the time I got to Bruxelles-Midi, but damn it, I'd had a great weekend.

I offer this one cautiously: REM. I don't know...is it just my friends, or is there a more general perception that there's something fundamentally "uncool" about Stipe & co? I would readily criticise the fact that a lot of their more famous singles all sound too similar to each other - on the other hand, I've just put on [i]Automatic for the People [/i]for the first time in donkey's years, and I have to admit that it's not a bad album on the whole. I couldn't even tell you the bassist's name, but he's doing a pretty good job on a lot of these tracks.

[quote name='ras52' timestamp='1424419337' post='2696040'] [/quote] Christ almighty. Reading that quote makes me realise the limitation of only having one head to bang against the desk in disbelief and frustration at this potential trajectory of the developed world as a whole.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1424267740' post='2694536'] Far canal, Ralph, you play like that and you're doing it the wrong way round too? Respect! [/quote] [quote name='KevB' timestamp='1424269335' post='2694550'] There was a poll a year or two back, there's actually a decent number of us on the forum that are naturally left handed but play right handed (including me). [/quote] Having given this one quite a bit of thought over the years - and discussed it with BlueJay, who of course does left-handedness 'properly' - I almost wonder whether it makes more sense: by playing a right-handed bass, my (dominant) left hand is in charge of the fingerboard, where I'd argue most of the complicated stuff takes place! The catch - and there's always one, isn't there? - is that you might well want your dominant hand fingering/picking the strings, for its greater sensitivity. I suspect learning keys for a couple of years before I started the bass was probably crucial in building up the dexterity in my right hand.

Hope you're feeling alright post-hospital; I'm sure it will be good to catch up on that sleep over the next three weeks! Still, oddly enough, I'm going in the opposite direction to you! I'd got to the stage where, having got most of the albums I wanted on CD (including using trips to Brussels as a chance to track down Hooverphonic albums), I was going to have to accept downloaded .mp3s as my future medium of choice, as most of the new artists I was discovering were small, independent and often in different countries. All well and good...until a good friend told me he was looking to flog his amp/speaker system, and Ms Mooseblaster bought me a vinyl LP for my last birthday. So very soon, I'll be moving (partially) onto a nice amp/speaker system, with a nice CD player (I've had to play my CDs on the computer for the last few years) and a turntable. In anticipation of this, I've gathered a few LPs that I'm looking forward to playing. Will I be able to hear and appreciate the difference (especially after years of abusing my ears in loud bands)? Watch this space and I shall report back as soon everything has come together!