Dan Dare

Agreed. Using words for their sound or rhythmic qualities, rather than their meaning, together with onomatopoeia and other devices are long-established literary traditions. Poets have been doing it for centuries. Pop music follows in the tradition and has done so for a long time. How about "Tutti Frutti. Aw Rooty. A Wop Bop A Loo Bop, A Wop Bam Boo" from the 1950s? And Little Richard was following in the footsteps of artists like Slim and Slam before him. Poetry, music and literature doesn't HAVE to mean something/anything. Sometimes, it's just pleasing to the eye or ear.

If you like the instrument but just want to tame the output a little, this is good advice. Find a pre that doesn't require alteration to the instrument and that you can remove and replace with the original should you sell and you're good to go.

Absolutely. As they say, opinions are like *rseholes. Everybody has one. You're correct. It is shite.

MB stuff always sounds good in the room, in my experience. Just seems to fill the place better than many.

You're being too kind. Much too kind. Featuring Liz Truss on vocals...

You'd need to look for the most efficient driver you can find and use an efficient cab design with only 10W to play with. That would most likely mean a larger cab, which would defeat the object of having something very small and portable. A direct radiating cab - even a reflex design - is unlikely to cut it for anything other than home practice at low volume when driven by 10W. At the extreme end of the scale, some of the hi-fi horn designs produce tremendous output from 5 or 10 watt amps, but they are massive. They also do not produce a lot of low frequencies, which you would need in a bass cab.

Same power amp module (ICEpower) and different preamp. AG700 overdrives more subtly. I like my AG, but if you want a thicker sound, go for a TH.

What springs to mind? The gas and lekky bill...

This. A longer scale length makes a big difference at the low end.

This. If seeing a few ad's means I can use and benefit from this site for free, I'm perfectly OK with that. You can't expect to get something for nothing.

I'll have a pint of whatever you're been drinking.

Aguilar are excellent (I use an AG700), but I've heard that getting them fixed is not necessarily easy or cheap, either, although I haven't had to find out as yet. For us in the UK, Ashdown are renowned for backup. I'd suggest looking at Laney, too. Another UK based company and their newer bass amps are very good.

Eh? My point was that materials of good but not outstanding quality, used correctly, are what is important, rather than exotic materials. It seems you are trying to pick an argument for the sake of it. As for "tone woods", they matter in an acoustic instrument because the instrument alone produces the sound you hear. The sound you hear from a solid electric instrument is entirely the product of a signal produced by a piece of wire vibrating in a magnetic field, which is then amplified and reproduced by a loudspeaker. It is a purely electrical/electronic process. A pickup is not a microphone. It does not respond to vibrations of air molecules. So by your own logic, the material a solid instrument is constructed from has no bearing on the sound produced.

As a tightwad who views instruments as tools to do a job, I don't understand throwing money at exotic materials, unless there is a performance benefit that makes the cost difference worthwhile. In the case of necks, good old plain maple has been found to do the job perfectly, so why change what ain't broke? Quality of build trumps materials every time. I'd rather have an instrument that has been well made from plain (but suitable, ofc) materials any day. That way, I can afford more toys. Interestingly, Stradivari is reckoned to have used ordinary lumber he bought from local timber merchants to build instruments. If it was good enough for him...

Enough bunny. Now hop it.

If this is the case, might you be overdriving the tube preamp stage, causing it to behave like an overdriven guitar amp? The difference between playing gently and digging in, in terms of the signal you are sending to the amp, is pretty large. There isn't a lot of headroom to play with with 50w, either. 12AX7s are not all the same. If you have a higher gain version, it will increase the likelihood of overdriving. I swapped the 12AX7 in one of my heads for a lower gain version because it got dirty too quickly, with only a small increase in gain. A lower gain version gave a more gradual transition into overdrive. Watford Valves were helpful in helping me choose a suitable tube.

I'd look to cut extreme low frequencies and boost the mids (you'll have to determine which by experiment). Aim for a J bass sound. Andy Fraser used an EB3, but he favoured and played over the bridge pickup He would use thumb as well as fingers, too.

Aaargh. Not "underrated" again. Mods, could we institute a ban on the use of the word, please? If I had a fiver for every time I've heard a musician or band described as "underrated", I'd own a tropical island.

I'm already a dinosaur. It's not so bad. Young people even offer me a seat on crowded trains.

"If you know about these..." followed by a load of tripe.

There is also a Tecamp M212 cab in the Marketplace (not being sold by anyone I know, so not trying to boost a pal's sale)). £340 and 4 ohms, so will make the most of whatever amp you use it with. They are light cabs and quite compact. One should provide all the poke you will ever need for function band and similar work with a suitable head.

Difficult to say whether it's the timber alone. An older instrument has had time to mellow and has been played in. I have a 1975 D35 that sounds fabulous, but it's been played (a lot) for getting on for 50 years. I doubt it was as good when it was new. I bought a nearly new Gibson F5L mandolin in the early 1980s. For a couple of years, it wasn't much to write home about, but it steadily improved and is now a great instrument. A friend bought a Martin D28 that was around 25 years old, but had rarely been played and had spent most of its time in the case. It was pretty ordinary when he got it, but improved out of all recognition after a few years regular playing.

Judging by the force of your reaction/reply, perhaps Mr Boodang touched a nerve, too...

My thoughts: 1. If costs are rising, manufacturers either have to increase their prices or reduce costs, which means economising on materials, etc. So you either get the same quality for more money or lesser quality for the same price. 2. That's because the greatest improvements happened in budget instruments, as automated production, computer aided design and CNC machining enabled manufacturers to give the customer more for the same money. There was less room for improvement for high-end stuff, which was built more for quality than to meet a price point. So the gap in quality between inexpensive and expensive instruments narrowed. I'm 70 this year and my first instruments were terrible. Today's starter instruments blow them out of the water. 3. That is relatively recent. For several decades, people have been able to afford better quality due to improvements in manufacturing techniques, opening of factories in low-wage economies and similar. It couldn't last for ever. We are seeing a period of consolidation at the moment, as equilibrium re-establishes itself.