NancyJohnson

Hahaha. My trousers are on fire!

Well, I've enquired. Let's see where this goes...

I was giving this some thought last night. My wife just chipped in said, 'Why does it have to have Hamer on the headstock? As you love Mike Lull stuff so much, wouldn't Mike Lull build you one? This actually set me juices flowing somewhat. Mike Lull is Jeff Ament's primary builder and Mike Lull has built two basses for me already, so umm, it's worth a punt. Dollar is weakening against Sterling. Might be a good time to enquire...

I owned a Waterstone TP12 and didn't really connect with it. I found after much trial and error (some of this after the Waterstone was sold) that fundamentally, if you want to achieve that Tom Petersson tone it's not simply the case of plugging in and away we go; my experience led to the conclusion that while the bass was both rich and bountiful tonally, pretty much anything played up the dusty end frankly sounded ridiculous. So how to achieve a good tone? A crossover, some outboard processing and two amps. Utilising the crossover, shoot the lows through one side, the highs through the other. Apply dirt (or go with whatever your amp will provide. TP has used a brace of amplification over the years, favouring HiWatt and Reeves valve heads, before more recently using Orange gear. Note these are not bass amps...he favours guitar ampliifers. Cabinetry, I'm not sure about, I'd like to think he'd favour bass-centric cabinets, but hey, when you're (probably) being given them for free, then you'll try anything.

I own a Hamer FBIV...that's pretty rare.

I've started to put out some feelers...fingers crossed.

Nope. If there's no 'Hamer' on the headstock, then I'm not interested. It's like someone buying a Bravewood or a Nash. £3k isn't an issue.

Conservative estimates put the number Hamer made as 'under ten'. So a bit rarer than the numbers left of my other Hamer, then.

He's [edit] 5'11" and the bass is huge.

Never experienced any grounding issues using Elixirs. That's a weird one though as the core and ball-end of the string is exposed, so dependent on your bridge type the ball/core should allow contact with the metal, rather than the coated area. Maybe the Warwick (two part bridge) needs grounding to both bridge elements. In my 30+ year sojourn in bass, I've never questioned any of those points that so many people raise. Nut width, neck radius (which is right misnomer as most bass necks taper), string tension, neck dive (shudder), weight, electrics, pickups and so on. Sure it's nice to have decent gear, but so long as the bass intonates and the action is nice and rattly, that does it for me.

Does anyone on here own one of these? Just sourcing some information ahead of trying to source one. Ta!

Over the years I've used strings by pretty much every manufacturer and I don't mind D'Addarios, they're cheapish but lack any real longevity (unless dead strings is your thing). It's a false economy though, just switch to Elixir Nanowebs; I've had a set on one of my basses for 14 months and they still sound fresher than a two week old set of D'Addarios.

I left and he was. Another thing...we had a backdrop. Despite their insistence that we use it at every gig, no one could be assed in help put the thing up. Singer to busy standing on cables, drummer too busy being a drummer, guitarist getting temporary deafness whenever anyone asked him to do anything,

My big bugbears: Singer insisting on standing on stage while we're trying to set up. Not helping at all. Just standing there. In the way. Singer insisting on standing on cables all the time. Singer throwing his microphone stand down during piques of excitement, not worrying where it goes (shins, guitars, drums). Singer unplugging stuff from my rack so he can plug in a wireless unit. Singer leaving venue before we've broken down our gear. Singer singing the wrong song. This happened more than once. Guitarist playing the wrong song. I could go on and on and on.

I do love Doug, but a little bit of me died when he joined Living Colour.

And:

If you have a two-channel interface, you should be able to assign input #1 or #2 to each track. (Same goes for a larger channel interface.) Only arm the track you want to record and hit record. Boom.

It's very easy! I'll approach this from a PC-user perspective, but it's all fairly similar. For a small set up 1. You'll need Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software (as covered by rubis above), 2. You'll need an interface of some sort to get your instrumentation into your Mac (I use a two channel Pre-Sonus Audiobox USB; if I'm home-demoing, I can only play one instrument at a time) and the appropriate cables. 3. Unless your chosen DAW has some kind of built in drums, I'd investigate midi-drums or if you want to go the very easy route, check out real audio loops (I use Beta Monkey, Loopology or Future Loops, which are all live drums). 4. Consider purchasing some OK-quality headphones (I use some closed-ear Senneiser cans) 5. Consider purchasing some powered monitors, not whatever got bundled with your Mac. I have a pair of M-Audio BX5 speakers. They're perfectly adequate for a small/spare room setup. I made some desktop stands to bring them up to ear height by glueing/screwing lengths of 2x2" together and screwing in isolation feet. 6. If you're wanting to mic-up instrumentation, do your diligence and source a decent microphone for the job. I just use a Shure SM57 for any guitars, but I also record guitars direct. Bass I record direct. 7. If you're singing, purchase a phantom powered microphone for vocals. We just went with a Rode kit; it came with an isolation mount and a spit guard. Perfectly adequate for what we wanted. Just on the subject of DAWs, while there's a ton out there, whether you decide to go with a full-blown Pro-Tools package or something bundled with an interface, just remember that they all do pretty much the same thing. I use an age-old version of Adove Audition and for what it doesn't do, I've formulated workarounds. It's just a case of being of an enquiring mind.

I had two Laklands; a DJ5 and a whatever passed for the Jazz bass version back then (now it's a 55-60). I owned the DJ5 but the 55-60 was a loaner. They were both pretty stunning, but that said my Mike Lull beats these by a country mile.

Lovely! I used to have a real horn on for that whole colour combination.

I bought some DR Black Beauties at the London show. I'm assuming the coating is pretty much the same. They do feel a bit coarser than the Elixirs that I tend to favour. They have a nice burp to them; not a lot of new string zing going on. They've only been on a month and have had light use. Would I try them again? Possibly, but not in black. I didn't realise it would be so difficult to actually see them on a black bass with a black fingerboard...

G30 here. The sender case is a little flimsy, but stick it in Levys pouch and you're sound.

I think this hits the nail on the head. I've bought well, along with one purchase a while back that I still pinch myself about. I could do with getting rid of a couple, but I have space and there's no urgency to do so.