lowland

Peter May has been Cliff's drummer since 1988, I'm pretty sure it's him on the ROB record. I met Pete at a studio I worked at as house engineer in the mid-80s and thought him a pretty extraordinary player (and all-round top bloke), one of those drummers who can play metronomically accurately or with as much feel as you could want. Googling around, I found this interview from a few years ago about the various work he's done with emphasis on West End gigs - an interesting read and insight into that world. [url="http://www.mikedolbear.co.uk/story.asp?StoryID=3135"]http://www.mikedolbe...sp?StoryID=3135[/url]

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477930393' post='3165344'] One reason reason I assumed it was Mo (apart from some interviews), was back then, Guitarist Ray Russell was also writing some cues on the show (although George Fenton composed the themes) They were all good friends and worked a lot together (from what I have read). Maybe 'Rich' Moderator might have some info. He did an interview with Mo Foster for Basschat (a very good read, actually). [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/182955-interview-with-mo-foster/page__p__2322435__hl__mo%20foster%20interview__fromsearch__1#entry2322435"]http://basschat.co.u..._1#entry2322435[/url] [/quote] Interesting, thanks lowdown. I'll have a look at the interview tonight after Only Connect!

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477927319' post='3165315'] Ah..ok. A full track version. This is the version I thought was Mo Foster (The opening titles cue)[/font][/size] [size=5][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif][size=2]I believe 'Rich' (moderator) interviewed him for Basschat, maybe he knows.[/size][/font][/size] [size=5][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif][size=2][url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/182955-interview-with-mo-foster/"]http://basschat.co.u...with-mo-foster/[/url][/size][/font][/size] [/quote] The thit plockens: I think that's an early version, fretless, and therefore (according to my theory) Dill Katz. I attach him to the Bergerac music because when the series was running there was a music video (presumably made by the Beeb) of the theme showing the musicians, with DK on fretless. Of course, we could have been hearing Mo Foster and seeing someone else...

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477925445' post='3165292'] Any links for the fretted version ? I have never heard a fretted version. It would be interesting to compare them. I know that there were two or three alternative arrangements over the various seasons. [/quote] Try this, note fretted gliss @ 0.03 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9iyPEJ4ELw

[quote name='ras52' timestamp='1477924113' post='3165275'] So who played on this one? Was it Dill - or perhaps Herbie Flowers? [media]http://youtu.be/3VdN-2RYPKg[/media] [/quote] Brilliant!

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477921576' post='3165257'] Learn something everyday. I thought it was 'Mo Foster'. [/quote] I think we're both right - I didn't know this before, but it seems there are two versions - one Foster (fretted) and one Katz (fretless).

Fretless bassist on Bergerac was Dill Katz - one of those bits of trivia you pick up along the way :-) Cracking (old) thread with some great tunes. How about - Flambards, composed by David Fanshawe. I heard him talking about it on the radio once, the second half of the tune is the first half upside down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHIk2eeXjBg

Having returned to bass about three years ago after some decades away, when I first started playing again I had detailed notes for everything. Although this helped get me up and running, I was often reading at gigs. Not good in a pop/rock covers band as my head was down and I wasn't interacting with band members or audience. Now I'm back pretty much where I was playing-wise in the early 90s (took a while though!), I don't need to write things down - I learn parts from Spotify and Youtube at home on my own, then we adjust where necessary as a band in the rehearsal room. The learning part has been helped considerably by acquiring a Zoom B3 recently: I run it off my iMac and listen to the track and bass (the latter using one of the amp/cab sims for a realistic sound) through headphones.

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477314697' post='3161313'] I am sure there must be a light bulb gag in there somewhere. [/quote] Haha! You're not wrong there... How many sound engineers does it take to change a light bulb? "Sorry mate, I don't [i]do[/i] lights, just sound...".

[quote name='Stylon Pilson' timestamp='1477312337' post='3161277'] I was at a gig the other weekend where a band were using backing tracks to beef up the sound, and I found it totally unthrilling. Yes, they were in time, and yes it all sounded very rich and well-produced, but there was no feeling of immediacy, no connection. When I'm at a gig I want there to be a one-to-one correlation between what I'm seeing, and the noises that I'm hearing. Anything less than that and I just end up spending the entire gig fixating on which parts are live and which parts are recorded, trying to mentally calculate some sort of authenticity quotient. S.P. [/quote] Good points - yes, unsubtle use of BTs can come across that way if overcooked. I'd like to think that in our case we use just enough to make things a little bigger in the right places, but never so much it becomes plastic-sounding. Three of us are sound engineers (1 mastering, 1 mastering with a record production background and 1 studio owner/recordist/mixer) with a lot of experience between us, so - in theory anyway! - we should be able to make it work.

[quote name='mrtcat' timestamp='1477223638' post='3160629'] Wow that's pretty militant. We use tracks for horns and strings. We have a great keys player but it always sounds more natural if he is freed up to concentrate on more piano, Rhodes, moog and synth stuff. If a drummer can work well with click then it's a great way to improve the overall size and depth of sound. Monitoring is really important if you are using tracks. We all use in ears for best results. It does take away some flexibility but, if used only when beneficial to the song, is a great tool to have. That said, if it was just to cover a shortfall in a guitarists ability to fill space, I'd be more inclined to ditch the guitarist. Why he needs to fill space is another question that should be asked. Unless you are doing big rock songs then you shouldn't need more fill from him. [/quote] +1. We use backing parts played off the drummer's Roland pad to fill out here and there, plus he gets a click in his IEMs. The aforementioned strings and horns, plus we sometimes have small perc. elements going (the bongos on the dropdown of 'Let's Dance' come to mind), occasional BV parts to fill out what we're already doing live and once in a while rhythm guitars during guitar solos. We're a 5 piece pub and functions band and could manage without these things, but choose to use them because for us they enhance something that's already half decent.

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1476269472' post='3152822'] Great choice of inears! I think I need to start claiming commission soon! [/quote] For sure :-) Paul at CIEMC was great, and enabled me to audition a few sets to make a choice - I brought an iPod with some music I know well to run them. I'm a mastering engineer by day so fairly fussy about sound, and what impressed me about the JH11s was their very decent frequency response/resolution with no lack of lows, and although they're not exactly cheap they sounded better, or more usable for the purpose, to me than a set costing a couple of hundred quid more.

My band went to in-ears recently, it's been great for all the usual reasons. For me on bass, IEMs are wired and driven by a Behringer Powerplay P1 headphone amp; I have that on a a mic stand (there's an adaptor on the bottom of the P1) rather than being attached to my belt for freedom from the cabling. I still have an amp and cab on stage, albeit much quieter than previously as I'm currently using it only for a sensation of moving air to back up the in-ear sound - as I get more confident in time I may abandon amplification and send the Zoom B3 to the PA only. IEM-wise, I have JH Audio JH11s via The Custom IEM Company - thanks for recommending them in the other thread, EBS freak.

I use Sennheiser 600s with my Zoom B3 (the latter acting as a USB soundcard with an iMac) for practice - great. A simple but effective 600 hack is to replace the supplied cable with the equivalent part from the 650, which is thicker/more robust and sounds better. And not for the faint of heart, but I removed the internal foam from my 600s some time ago and found the mid and low clarity improved. I agree with bubinga5 re. the Beyer DT990 Pros: another very good set of open-backed cans with a warmer sound than the 600s. I've had mine over 20 years, although thanks to Beyer's spares availability I don't think any part, except possibly the headband, is now original.

Agreed, lojo - the cadence at 3.53 is pure Heatwave IMO. [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIx_HbmRnQY"]https://www.youtube....h?v=xIx_HbmRnQY[/url]

@ Woodinblack: I think you're referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect, '[color=#252525][font=sans-serif]a [/font][/color][url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias"]cognitive bias[/url][color=#252525][font=sans-serif] in which low-ability individuals suffer from [/font][/color][url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority"]illusory superiority[/url][color=#252525][font=sans-serif], mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is', and a corollary, where '[/font][/color][color=#252525][font=sans-serif]high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others'.[/font][/color] [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect"]https://en.wikipedia...93Kruger_effect[/url] I regularly see both types in my little corner of the music biz, audio mastering, an area where many would agree that there's no substitute for just doing the job. Ten years is regularly quoted as a typical time to get to a decent level of competency, and yet in mastering forums you'll often come across people who started the equivalent of last week and think experience is seriously overrated; or alternatively someone with a long and stellar track record questioning their own working methods and approach. I like the Bertrand Russell quote in the Wikipedia article: '[color=#252525][font=sans-serif]One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision'.[/font][/color] Tune in to the forthcoming series of The Apprentice to see illusory superiority at its finest!

I was fortunate enough to play bass in a pickup band for whom Graham Broad was drumming; this was in the 80s, a one-off at a large (30,000) festival. I'd played with a couple of good drummers before, but for me this was like an electric shock up the spine in a good way. All through rehearsals, if the arrangement changed he never forgot (everyone else, including some serious players, regularly did), he was endlessly cheerful and encouraging, and made me look far better than I was. The groove quotient was fantastic, rarely doing anything tricksy - concentrating instead on driving the machine - but when he did it was appropriate to the music and top drawer. Unsurprisingly, that's been my yardstick drummer-wise ever since! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Broad

I bought my five (Ibanez SR1805) about a year ago, partly inspired though the band needing to drop some songs 2-3 semitones to help our singer with top notes. Prior to that I had tried having two fours on the stage, one tuned concert, the other down a tone or one concert and the other BEAD - I found swapping instruments at various points of the set and then back again unwieldy though, it definitely held proceedings up. By this point I had the five, but was adjusting to it and its relatively narrow string spacing slowly - the singer said 'why don't you just learn the lower songs in that key on the five, and have one bass?'. Simple enough, but that was the epiphany for me and I haven't looked back since: everything's much more straightforward now, and the combination of the Ib's tonal versatility and various other noises I can get through my recently acquired Zoom B3 covers all the bases (har!). I can't imagine going back to fours now, for gigs anyway, and greatly enjoy rearranging people's internal organs with the occasional low B.

Very pleased with my 5 string set of Fat Beams bought thanks to this thread, the low B's an improvement on the Daddarios. The only downside - the Amazon UK price has shot up from £21.76 to £49.06! Am trying Flubit via Amazon to see what they can come up with, and will investigate Bass Strings Direct. I notice on the BSD site they offer the same set with either a 125 (as I currently have) or 130 B.

I did an open air festival on Sunday in humid weather, and found this tricky - I wasn't especially nervous, but had to curtail some of the twiddlier bits as my fretboard fingers were sticking to a degree I've rarely had before. Some good suggestions here, also could evaporating hand gel as used in hospitals be a useful quick way of keeping hands clean and dry? Re. wood vs. varnish: my Ibanez 1805 has an unlaquered neck, all good there, but definitely a problem at sweatier gigs with a laquered Ray I had a few decades back.

Thanks to this thread I've ordered a 5 string set off Amazon - same gauges as the D'Addario Pro Steels I usually use, except the B string is 125 instead of 135; cost was £21.76, so a couple of quid cheaper than the D'Addarios. Looking forward to giving them a go.

[quote name='Highfox' timestamp='1469199745' post='3096609'] Sorry if I take this off topic, but had to go check Upp out.. found this live clip, seems the bassist was doing the chucking (maybe there is a pick , but it sounds great?) thing even before Bernard Edwards You can see it around 2:10 mark. Shame Beck destroys the groove for me lol. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzDqqxKnW3o[/media] [/quote] Equally OT, I was lucky enough to see Upp at Ipswich Civic College not long after the first album came out. Suffice it to say they turned a smallish crowd who didn't know who they were into a bunch of dancin' fools in short order. Neither on the recordings nor video clips are you getting the full flavour of what a monster player Mr Amazing (sadly passed on) was - I had never seen bass played like that before, and not often since.

Nice! The bass style reminds me of Steve Amazing of Upp. Check out Friendly Street at 7.11 - [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDbKtiy8YSs"]https://www.youtube....h?v=IDbKtiy8YSs[/url] - one of those intros like Car Wash that has you sure you know where 'one' is, and then... Album produced and guitared by Jeff Beck.

Frank Zappa, ouch! [url="http://ultimateclassicrock.com/41-years-ago-frank-zappa-pushed-off-stage-in-london/"]http://ultimateclass...tage-in-london/[/url] This is apparently the reason for the 'one of my legs is shorter than the other' line in Dancin' Fool.