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Those who are self-taught and those who have had lessons will have their own reasons for saying one is better than the other and, of course, those reasons are perfectly sound. For me, I’m glad I taught myself – not because of the end result but because of the numerous little victories along the way (and, 30+ years on, they still happen). Listening to a riff or technique and wondering if you’ll master it is part of the buzz, the other part being the thrill of working out how to do it. Each of these is a little step along the way and each feels just as good as the last.
Doesn’t matter what these steps are; it might be the first time you learn how to play walking blues, or a solid slap/pull technique, or major/minor riffs, or just that song you always wanted to play. You’ll keep ticking boxes, but they won’t be those on any sort of list – they’ll be individual ‘aha!’ moments brought about through curiosity.

For me it’s usually enforced silence. The MP3 player I have is a little USB stick thing, but you can’t use it when the USB is plugged in – it goes to charging mode. To listen to music you have to unplug it so it’s running on its battery, which means it keeps playing (silently of course) when you switch the engine off. I nearly always forget to plug the USB back in, so the device is dead by the time we’ve loaded out ready to go.
On the odd occasions I remember, it’ll be my usual assortment of pop/post punk and modern Brit rock; All Time Low, You Me At Six, Deaf Havana, Sugarcult, Muse, Fall Out Boy. Keeps the adrenaline flowing on an early hours drive.

One of the biggest frustrations can be tight rehearsals leading to rough gigs. We’ve always recorded rehearsals and, mostly, they’ve been of a standard that would be quite impressive live. Too often, though, live performances haven’t matched rehearsal quality – I very much doubt it’s nerves; I think, mostly, one or two people get a little bit excited and forget to stick to the script, so tempo is affected and you end up with unexpected fills and improvs.
Bassists have the additional problem of being part of a two-man unit, and if you can’t absolutely key in with your drummer the results can be messy. Had an (unsuccessful) audition last night; the whole band was very good but the drummer in particular made things easy for me by sticking to tempo and not varying patterns of the songs we repeated. Skin thrashers like that are hard to find.

Yes, adding tags would be great!

No, although looking at the strings in profile only the D seems very slightly high. The A is certainly in line with E - wouldn't want to change that as it could make playing feel slightly odd. Maybe they all need lowering?

While I love the feel and playability of the Ibanez SR500 I bought in November, there are a few things I’m not enthralled by.
1) Mentioned on another thread, the wood finish coming away to leave an ugly pale blotch.
2) One of the tone buttons recently fell off. It’s back in place, but is one of 2 or 3 which feel poorly housed. I could maybe understand it if these were used a lot, but the only time they ever get fiddled with is when I double check they’re all in their centre positions.
3) This is the main one. The E string is nice and powerful and punchy, but I just came back from a band audition where the A (and, to a lesser extent, D and G) was almost inaudible. This is with all pots central. I’m using a Line6 300W combo but I get the same result through a practice amp at home, through phones.

Are the Ibanez pickups on this model not particularly good, or is there possibly a fault? And, in the event that it’s advisable to replace them altogether, any recommendations to give a solid, punchy tone?

BTW I currently use light (35-90) strings. I will probably go heavier for the band I'm hoping to join - would they make much difference?

TIA for any help!

Items for sale in this part of the forum are often headlined with just the make/model, and for non-techies like me it’s very difficult to know exactly what’s being sold. I was wondering – very, very pretty please – if it might be possible to split the category into amps, cabs, combos and rigs?

I can't stand shop assistants asking me "Is that everything?". I usually reply "No, you've got loads of other stuff but I'm not buying it".

Standards of literacy have been mentioned. Maybe social media/texting hasn't helped, but there are people of mature age who should know a lot better. A friend recently posted something on FB in which he described himself as "mayed up" with something or other.

A recent addition to teen vocabulary is 'bae', meaning 'babe' as in anybody regarded as attractive, this despite the fact that it's a Danish word for 'poo'.

Whatever my original reply to this thread was, it’s changed a bit now as I head into what I can only describe as a sort of resignation. My search for musicians who live in the current decade hasn’t gone well – in fact everyone seems to have refused to let their musical influences move beyond about 1985, and most got stuck a long way further back. I’m sick of seeing ads for bands doing Johnny Cash, Elvis, Stones, Led Zep and lots of jangly twangly guitar bilge, so I’m giving up.
Of course I’ll miss the buzz of gigging – only natural to go through a bit of wistfulness – but it’ll give me more time to increase the work output that suffered through rehearsals/gigs. My Times crosswords have reduced to the occasional jumbo cryptic and I haven’t set for the Financial Times in over a year, so it’s time to get active again.
It’s possible I’ll get back into writing and recording but, the way it looks now, I’ve almost certainly retired from band and live work for good.

Solo – forget slap, you probably won’t need it. I spent the last year removing as much of it as I could, not entirely by choice. It so happens that the material of my guitar strap is such that it has gradually lengthened so the bass is just above my belt; for me that means it’s almost impossible to slap/pull, so I’ve replaced most of that stuff with straightforward picking style. There are one or two songs where, if you can slap, it’ll sound great, but it’s by no means a requirement and by no means detrimental if you don’t do it.
As for BVs & occasional lead I can’t really comment. I’m pants at both.

The Rasmus - First Day of My Life. Bit of an obscure one (most people remember In The Shadows) but it's great to play if you can nail the backing vox at the same time.

Don’t get me started on ‘not actually playing’! Doesn’t apply to gigs of course, but my pet hate is rehearsals where band members constantly stop to read/send texts, eat, and get into discussions about stuff of sod all importance (or, if it’s that important, why not just deal with it via emails?).

Having made a few posts without formally introducing myself has begun to feel a bit rude, so let’s get it done.

I’m based in Macclesfield, Cheshire.
Been playing somewhere close to 35 years. Left-hooker.
Started with a dreadful R/H Jedson bass, standard guitar scale, but it taught me the basics. Moved on to an equally dreadful CLI jazz bass copy, or at least it became dreadful after it got knocked over, damaging the G tuning peg. It was never quite right after that, plus the screening pretty much failed completely. After a lull in playing I got a lovely black Aria Pro II, which temporarily had a red fretless sister. Then it was an OK-ish Tanglewood – used for recording but never gigged – and then a Dean Edge when I helped set up the current band. Most recently this was replaced by an Ibanez SR500 which, for me, doesn’t have quite as much oomph but it’s a delight to play. When the band started I didn’t have an amp, so invested in a Line6 300W combo. This is only used for backline – I have a Tech21 emulator feeding into the desk with a parallel out to the amp.
The current band, doing funk, disco, soul & Motown covers, is almost certainly in its final year (I’m leaving whatever happens) and I’m hoping to set up a modern rock/pop punk outfit in 2016, doing contemporary covers and/or older stuff from wider genres but in rock/punk style.

Away from music I have the good fortune to work for myself from home, setting cryptic crosswords for the ‘big’ papers; Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Financial Times and Telegraph (in their Toughie series). The Guardian editor won’t have me though – says I’m ‘too well-known’. So much for reward based on merit.

Bit of trivia: In the final series of Catchword, the BB2 quiz game hosted by Paul Coia, I won my four rounds and reached the final. In the concluding anagram round I slipped up by forgetting the middle initial of a US President. The guy who, because of that, pipped me to the prize of a dream holiday had a terminal illness which nobody apart from the series producer was aware of. Sadly he died before he could claim his prize.

2015 is my final year with the current band. No personal conflicts, just a project which hasn’t realised its full potential. I now want to get involved in something closer to my musical tastes, ie modern rock, pop/post-punk, the likes of Fall Out Boy, Muse, All Time Low, Sugarcult, Deaf Havana. This could be covers of those and similar bands, or using those genres to cover material outside them. Whether you’re an existing band needing bass or a musician keen to put something together I don’t mind.
I’m also interested in offering bass sessions to songwriters in the process of recording original material. Not really interested in payment, provided the work is local – my ‘fee’ would be good final mixes.
More than 30 years playing experience, energetic stage presence, good gear (Line6 300W combo, Ibanez SR500 & Dean Edge basses, wireless, BV ability), own transport, and as I work for myself from home I have excellent availability. Daytime weekends are the only no-no as those are daughter/daddy time.
PLEASE NOTE; my transport is a sporty little thing, not a band bus!
PM if you’re interested please; can use that to exchange numbers/emails etc. The name’s Dean.

Everything I’ve recorded over the past 10 years or so is outside my preferred style, but there are demos on the lefunk.co.uk homepage and you’ll find more stuff on SoundCloud under ‘mayercarter’.

Blue – that reminds me of one of the nicest experiences I ever had. I was probably in my early 20s when I auditioned with a guy (singer) who wanted to set up a band covering classic soul stuff; Sam Cooke and similar. Having only one hand I’ve always been a little bit self-conscious so I was nervous at audition, but I got the gig.
A long way down the line the singer and I got talking about how the band had come together and I mentioned how nervous I’d been about my hand. He said that it wasn’t until about our third gig – and a lot of prior rehearsals – that he looked across and noticed I had no fingers! So much for my self-consciousness.

Like many, I joined a few mates in setting up what we imagined to be a band when we were in our teens. We just had drums, acoustic guitar and me on vocals despite having no singing ability at all. I think it slowly dawned on us that bands tended to have something called a bass guitarist, so I was encouraged to be one (or leave).
It happened at precisely the right time. My brother had just bought the Level 42 single Love Games; bass guitar went from something I was completely unaware of to something with glamorous up-front capabilities, so I went for it.

Although I’ve committed to my current band for the rest of the year, I’ll be quitting after that. With a covers band you want to either make each song your own or absolutely nail a copy of the original, and for me it’s a case of not quite getting there. I also think some of the material choices are bad; too slow, too long, repetitive… and often cheesy. I need something more exciting.
Apart from that, my musical history has always been cyclical. I’ll spend a couple of years writing and recording original stuff, then I’ll get the itch to go back to live work. It’s now been 5 years since writing/recording. Funnily enough I don’t have notepads full of lyrics and chord sequences – nothing at all if I’m honest – but the urge has returned.

Blue - absolutely. Thanks to band FB pages and tweets, fans get to know even the tiniest (often totally unnecessary) minutiae.

It’s hard to deny that modern music is popular though. The big festivals still attract huge crowds, and as a recent convert to Muse I’m now used to watching YouTube vids of them in packed stadia. All Time Low (one of the newest bands out there) are at Wembley at the end of March – I bought 2 tickets on the morning of release, a good few months ago, and the rest sold out that day. Pretty much the same for Fall Out Boy in (I think) October.
Of course, as has been said the 60s/70s acts benefited from massive label investment, but online technology is giving today’s bands greater exposure than ever.
Just as an aside, if my daughter and her friends are anything to go by we are beginning to see a slight shift away from X Factor boy bands. HMV merch counters have more 5SOS than One Direction and, overall, pop punk is eating into the market once taken up by the likes of 1D. Perhaps ATL, Fall Out Boy, 5SOS etc don’t have the musical twiddliness of classic rock, but they write and play and I think more of the younger audience is starting to appreciate that.

Yeah, the phrase that springs to mind is ‘lowest common denominator’, and NO that is NOT an assessment of old music.
The more popular a particular genre becomes, the more of the marketplace it takes up, so anything outside it ends up looking at a smaller and smaller niche. Everybody bought VHS tapes but there was nothing at all wrong with Betamax – they just gave up the fight because, by some quirk, VHS became what everyone bought.
There definitely is a place for modern music. Maybe it just has to shout a bit louder.

Don’t know if this is supposed to be a question or a rant. Desperately seeking a change in musical direction, I’ve been looking around for musicians interested in covers of contemporary material in the rock/post-punk style – think Muse, Fall Out Boy, Deaf Havana, All Time Low, Sugarcult – but I’m beginning to think they don’t exist. Everybody seems to focus on 60s/70s.
Although I dislike it personally, I’m not saying the old stuff is bad. I’m just surprised that no-one seems interested in newer material. “Ah” you’ll say, “The thing is, the 60s/70s represented the best era of music”. Fair enough, and maybe the universal appeal of that time never dies so there’s an attitude of ‘if it ain’t broke…’, but isn’t that the sort of attitude that would have prevented the invention of the wheel? Isn’t there a case for saying it’s time to move on?
And is there an age thing? At 50+ am I supposed to live in the past, or does the fact that I love today’s music make me some sort of freak?
OK, it’s a sort of rant. I’ll give you that.

Thanks truckstop. Yeah, the drums were loop sample based and the kick was a tad weak. Given the chance I'd probably use HotStepper to add beefier kicks but I don't know if we still have the master. It's a recent upload but we did the track about 5 years ago.

Hope I’m going to be OK posting this. I don’t post stuff the band does because it’s all covers, but the guitarist and I have occasionally written and recorded our own material. The only thing that makes me nervous is that drums/percussion/keys are either programmed or sampled and I know that can come across as cheap. We’ve always done it that way simply because we haven’t had the musicians available to learn and then record parts (it’s a difficult ask) and, for us, it’s never been serious enough to warrant that sort of investment.
Anyway, as far as basslines goes this is the only one where I was able to let fly a little, and while it’s not a technically difficult line it has a nice, prominent role in the mix.
As well as bass, my role here was drum sampling/programming, brass sampling and manipulation(!), a few keyboard bits and the vocals.
Dave added guitar, a couple of arrangement tweaks and a rather good job of home recording and mixing.

[url="https://soundcloud.com/mayercarter/no-chilli"]https://soundcloud.com/mayercarter/no-chilli[/url]

Let the ‘What were you thinking?’ questions begin…

That has to be one of the universal pet hates of musicians, when someone comes up to you (often while you’re playing – even worse) to ask if you can play a particular song. As if you have the world's entire back catalogue of music to pick from, unrehearsed.

The ‘people coming up to you onstage’ thing just reminded me of a cracker from late last year when we did a 70s theme night. We included an ABBA number – at the end of it a woman came up to our vocalist and shouted “I hate ABBA!!”

After our first set at a pub gig a fortnight ago, I slightly tipsy female came over and complimented me on two songs which weren't - and never have been - on our set list.