Woodinblack

I think it seems that to most schools, music was a lesson to punish bad teachers, like RE, the ones they would get given if they had spare hours that didn't matter much, which is a bit of a shame!

Funny, I would view it the other way round. I would expect an expensive bass to be lightweight and a cheap bass to be heavy. I don't know about stingrays though. My expensive basses are the swamp ash ones, my harley benton was the heaviest bass I had!

Here is my lead bag after a gig: Before a gig it is very neat and organised, but afterwards everything just gets rammed in so I can leave, and it is also the one time when other people touch the leads. Bit of a mess really and that bag is starting to break now, with all the extra leads I have, especially since getting all the 10M red leads. How do you get your leads to gigs?

Are they really that mad?

As an aside on that, the XAirs internal wifi, for years I heard the 'oh you shouldn't use the internal router it won't work' and thought it was daft because it always worked. Then one gig, it just didn't, it was an absolute nightmare as I would try and make changes and they would ping back, or just happen 20 seconds later, completely lost control of it. Just the number of people in the crowd with phones looking for wifi, nothing you can predict beforehand. I alway have a 5GHz minirouter with WPA (£10 from pc world, smaller than the psu) connected to the xair, and connect to it from that. No trouble since that. I also have an ethernet cable in my bag, because I like being able to cope with everything I can think about, although never needed it!

Turns out I was wrong on that, you can't make your own models like Amp, but you can select rigs like Jam Up. Which is a shame as amp is very impressive, I guess you have to get their proper amps for that. Overall, the amp is good. It is fantastic for guitar, it is not really got much low end for bass, so at volume it would certainly struggle. With headphones it is obviously fine - shame it doesn't have a line out, might modify mine at some point to make one. The software is fantastic. When I first had it it would have trouble connecting, but thet seems to have stopped, probably one of the updates I did. So you turn the iPad on, you get the spark amp which lets you pick the model you want, and the effects etc and store them in the amp (it has a load of knobs on the top which you can adjust stand alone). Then it has a play section where you can select pretty well any song, it analyses it and gives you the guitar chords automatically. It either knows them instantly or it takes 30 seconds or so to analyse them, and it does it really well. As a guitar teaching tool, its second to none. But it is still handy on the bass. There are several different amp types and a load of effects, they work fine. Then you can play along with whatever you are playing on the iPad. There are some other lesson things, there is a section for bass where it plays chords and you do a baseline which is pretty useful, 'bass in the style of' with what is supposed to be generic music in a style for you to bass with but is actually pretty well a song from that style with no bass. Clearly this is a guitar tool and as it is, it is pretty fantastic. As a bass tool it is less focused and not as good, but still well worth having. As a bass amp it isn't great, and it isn't necessarily about size as it isn't much different to the Bose S1 that I use as my normal practice amp (obviously the Bose is twice the price) which handles bass with no issue. If I could have one change it would be a line out that I could plug into an amp, or maybe even just a speaker out (now there is a mod I might do) that I could plug into a proper speaker, as I am sure it is more a speaker issue than an amp issue. However that gets away from its portability. Also a shame it doesn't run in batteries. All in all though, I am pretty happy with it and I use it quite a lot.

When i originally said that I didn't remember any, I do remember now (I have a useless memory, especially of childhood). I had two parallel paths as I had piano lessons from pre-10 to probably about 16 when I decided it was uncool, and then maybe 18-19 when I decided it was cool again. But this is about school. In my first year of school, so 5, there was a music lesson, I remember playing puff the magic dragon on an electric guitar that wasn't plugged in. Later on a few years teacher was playing music and asking us to write down what we thought the instruments playing it were. Turned out we were all wrong it was a sin-thee-size-er. whatever that was. Anyway, pretty fascinating for me. Then at bigger school, first lessons were ok, people would bring in records and the teacher would go through them and say what was going on. That worked well. Then nothing, then another lesson which took all the fun out of music entirely that I don't really remember.Then later proper music lessons - brass. I learned the cornet and ended up first cornet in the orchestra. Which was good, I liked performing, saturday mornings shopping my parents used to drop me off in the big department store in portsmouth and I would play upstairs in the Organ department and get a crowd of old ladies watching. The staff loved it as they didn't have to demo anything and they got an audience, and my parents could just dump me and wander off and shop like parents did in those days. All in all very mixed and disjointed but some of it was ok. I think not anywhere near as good as the separate piano lessons really

Yeh, who is Les Paul anyway?

I tried all communications. In the end my problem was resolved well (very well in my case), but the 3 months before that when they just weren't replying kind of made any further dealings unlikely. With them it is sort of like shipping uninsured. If nothing happens and it gets through, it is fine. If not, you are pretty screwed.

Relic'd basses described as mint condition!

I don't think they did, just 4 and 5 strings. The switching was good in that they had 5 way switches from humbucker, single, both, single, humbucker if I remember. They didn't go down well at the time because they were chinese, which is a shame really as when the CVs came out that were also chinese, they went down really well. I guess it was a step too far for a fender logo but ok for a squier.

It makes other things sound good!

Think you could push to free shipping on that couldn't you?

What we know is that they are far from rare, they are pretty common. They came out before the classic vibes, and they were sort of interesting with the switching, and probably the cheapest thing fender ever did, but didn't really take off that much they did a Matt black 5 string that I would probably pick up if it was cheap enough

I have had several goes with a 6, and I never really use them much, or the necks get too big. The only time I played one live was a problem as I realised my ability to switch between 4 and 5 strings without issues was because I viewed everything from the top string, so I missed a couple of times! i have a 6 string at the moment but the neck is too wide for me

Are you sure it is? This is just for in the house, I have the smoothound for gigs. Seems like a reasonable choice

That is why I didn't go for the boss WL20s that seemed pretty good otherwise. At least with the animoon and the like they are very cheap.

You can have trouble with anyone, its more regional than company wide. I have never had trouble with DHL or parcelforce, i have with hermes and yodel. I can't use UPS because my wife does all our deliveries and won't deal with their racist driver, so I normally end up using DHL or Parcelforce through one of the brokers

Just a question of putting the different strings on and idealy (but not always) fitting a nut that works for it. String length and bridges are not an issue. You have to redo the intonation (but that is true with different strings anyway) and you may have to adjust the action / truss rod.

I just got new strings for my hohner B2V, and I got the steinberg double ball end ones as they were cheapest. They seem ok

There are no issues connecting two halves of the output (their own lead can do that), its combining hte output of two effects pedals is not ideal. Not that it will break them. Yes, but only for phantom power.

Thats what the helix FX is for. And if not that a buffered mixer would be a much better idea than just shorting the output of two effects together.

Agreed here. I missed out on a lot before I got mine. Turns out, I don't play it much but it would be one of the last instruments I got rid of. I got rid of my NS-Stick, as, in the words of my wife, the stick is a thing of its own, the NS stick was neither one thing or the other, but my stick would only go if I had another stick that was better! Mine is a 34, its a railboard. The railboard has a mono / stereo switch so you don't need that.

I would say, if you are doing it yourself for fun, get a chunk of wood, saws, files, a drill and sandpaper and an idea, and you will find out pretty quickly what tools you need!