chriswareham

I remember when A-Ha broke through with the re-release of "Take On Me". Something about the quality of the song writing combined with Morten Harket's singing just elevated them above their peers, and what an iconic video. That vocal climax in "Take On Me", starting with "I'll be gone..." still raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

I've been playing bass in bands for 33 years. I didn't know I was autistic when I started playing, I just knew that I struggled in social situations and being in a band was a conscious effort to overcome my fears as I'd been reading a lot about confrontational therapy. Being in a band also meant I had a way of appearing somewhat outgoing, but I could distance myself from people if I needed to by disappearing backstage. That social anxiety and general confusion also meant I also gravitated to quite aggressive music, emulating bands like Joy Division, Amebix and New Model Army. Cut to the current day, and I still have the same motivation albeit informed by an eventual diagnosis of having Asperger's Syndrome. So every concert I play is still a mix of exhilaration and terror - amazing myself at being able to overcome my fears and get up on stage, but always at the edge of panic.

Bit of a coincidence, as I came across this thread while having Roxy Music on in the background. A bit indifferent to their early, glammy stuff but "Manifesto", "Flesh and Blood" and "Avalon" are fantastic. They laid the groundwork for bands like Japan, early Talk Talk and Duran Duran (stop sniggering, at their best they were brilliant purveyors of pop perfection). The bass playing on some of those tracks is sublime, often the melodic focus of the music along with atmospheric synths and the guitar adding an understated rhythmic acommpaniment.

MXR Flanger / Doubler. Very popular in higher end studios at the time, and a bit of kit I'd love to own as it's responsible for the incredible synth sound on Soft Cell's "Youth". I've tried reproducing that sound with several other flangers but without ever getting really close.

On Joy Division's track Isolation, there was a bit at the end Martin Hannett the producer wasn't happy with. He kept on trimming the tape, until at some point they were in danger of having to rerecord the whole song. The solution was to add a weird feedbacking echo effect to cover up the truncated ending. There was nothing in the rules for appearing on ToTP that said you couldn't play live, and some bands insisted on doing so. New Order and New Model Army spring to mind. The former did a pretty rough version of Blue Monday, and the next week it dropped down the charts. The latter were wearing T-shirts with the words "Only Stupid B*stards Use Heroin" on them, only to be told it was unacceptable. Their solution was some strategic gaffer tape over the offending words, but the tape fell off during their performance and they were banned from ever appearing on the show again.

Some of the early flangers had envelope followers, could be one of those.

London to Cornwall for a Hondo II Rickenbacker copy. Went by train, met the seller in the railway station car park and straight back on the next train to London. Then there was the sheer insanity of going by train to collect an absolutely huge and heavy organ from North West Wales. It was in a tiny town on a branch line, so involved numerous changes and a trolley jack to shift the beast, a very rare Logan T249.

Way ahead of you:

When I previously lost a band I found the following poster helped:

Just to be clear, I wasn't making any judgement on the use of backing tracks. I've played many, many shows with either a drum machine or sequencer as that was a distinct part of the music. I'd never want to mime though - if I'm not playing a particular part then I simply won't pretend to.

Lots of bands mime substantial parts of their performance at concerts, especially at the professional level. My wife is a former professional opera singer and was in denial when I told her that several of her favourite bands mime a lot. I knew this because friends have actually played in those bands and told me about it. Then through one of those friends she was offered a chance to perform with the side project of the lead singer from one of her favourite bands. It was to "perform" the operatic backing vocals and keyboard parts. They sent the backing tracks, which consisted of pre-recorded vocals and keyboard parts that the audience would hear plus an in ear track she would hear. That in ear part included a click and cues of the form like "chorus in 4, 3, 2, 1" simply to ensure the mimimg was convincing to the audience.

Easy to appear tight when you're just mimimg along to a heavily quantised backing track that you recorded at a far slower tempo and simply sped up with a DAW plugin.

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (Charles)

Billy Humble Bragg The Educationally Challenged Minds The Psychedelic Faux Furs

The thing is, it's not "AI", at least not what the originators of that term envisioned back in the 1960s. That's why the actual name of this thing we're talking about is Generative AI. It just consumes huge amounts of existing data and basically rewords it. It's not sentient. It's not intelligent. It's the equivalent of a traditional search that instead of listing the actual source of the results just produces a single summary of the most common results. That's why it's so susceptible to poisoning - get it to ingest enough dodgy source material and you can make it spout any old b*llocks you want it to.

Read that as "strap ons" at first, and got a bit confused.

The problem I had as a seller on Reverb is the US centric nature of it. For instance, I sold a Yamaha drum machine on there. The US buyer complained about the import taxes and then opened a return as the machine had a UK mains plug (there was a voltage selector on the unit and that was clearly stated in the description). That was just one example of a few similar selling experiences. As a buyer, a synthesiser I bought arrived in a sack. Let me reiterate that, shipped internationally in a cloth bag. Unsurprisingly it arrived in bits, but the seller even had the gall to dispute my claim of a refund.

Very true. My local grocery emporium were out of stock of my usual brand name choice, so I took a chance on their own brand. On opening the bottle I missed the woody notes of my favourite Domestos, and whrn decanting I noticed a lack of body. It went down well enough after I'd let it breathe for a while, but the afterburn was shocking.

We're X Ray Love, and the concert is next Sunday, 27th April. If you do get to the show then please come and say hello, it's always great to meet fellow basschatters! https://youtu.be/Yx_Sqq6jooI?si=dJtdOxsrnDR5eWYx

Thanks for the stairs warning - I've not played there before! I definitely prefer gigging the amp I'd like to use, no matter how impractical to transport, and plan to do so as long as my back and knees let me. I do have the 136 combo as a backup, although that's quite an awkward lump as well.

While we've veered off onto the subject of John Entwistle... My current band briefly used a rehearsal space earlier this year that had one of John Entwistle's old bass rigs - the guy who owned the space bought it when a lot of stuff was auctioned off after Entwistle's death. It was separate Ashown pre and power amps in a rack case going into a big Ashdown cabinet (6x10" I think). It sounded absolutely sh*t. I was not entirely surprised as I've always found Ashdown gear to be woolly and underpowered crap, but was suprised someone like John Entwistle would have played it. Turns out the missing ingredient was the big stack of effects units that sat between the pre-amp and power amp (or in the effects loop when he was using a combined pre and power model of amp).

I've been on the hunt for a big Acoustic rig for a long time, something like a 360 or 370 head into the matching cabinet with an 18" speaker in the weird, back facing configuration. They seem to be as rare as hen's teeth in Europe, so I've been using an Acoustic 136 combo as my main amp for a while now. Then the successor to those two big Acoustic rigs popped up on this forum. So now I'm the proud owner of a massive, impractical but wonderful sounding Acoustic 320/408 combo thanks to @Skinner. The 408 has four 15" speakers, and it's another of Acoustic's unusual configurations - two conventionally mounted, forward facing speakers, plus two mounted horizontally to face each other in the middle portion of the cab. The beast had it's first full rehearsal this week, and the most interesting thing is how much bottom end the cabinet chucks out. It seems to generate some unusually low frequencies that are audible and sit perfectly under the two lead guitar sounds in our post punk/new wave influenced outfit. Meanwhile, it also puts out the middly clank sound of a Rickenbacker that sits in a tonal gap that the lead guitars also don't occupy. First gig with it at London's Lexington next week - all I have to do is work out how on earth I'm going to transport it to the venue!

That's a common technique used by the kind of composers who have to write songs to order, but it's skating very close to plagiarism. It reminds me of a bassist I knew when I we were both teenagers. Unlike me he came from a very well off family, had a top of the range bass, Hartke amp stack when that was considered the gear to aspire to, and had attended the Bass Institute in LA. Could play Living Colour and Red Hot Chili Pepper bass parts flawlessly. But by his own admission he couldn't write an original bass part, let alone an actual song. Giacomo isn't even on that guy's level, as the few videos of him unquestionably playing live are mediocre at best and several are downright terrible.

Probably best to do a web search, as he has (or at least had, maybe he's finally managed to alienate them) a fanatical bunch of followers and I wouldn't want them spilling onto Basschat to defend him.