JoeEvans

It would make no sense for every band to bring a PA then take the whole PA down between sets and put the next one up. If you've got a decent PA I would be inclined to offer to run the PA for the day and do sound for all the bands, and charge them £2k. They could then pay the other bands a bit less each so they wouldn't be out of pocket, the day would run much more smoothly, and you could hire a decent sound engineer for £400 for the day and split the rest between you.

If you can spare the cash, you can be pretty casual about buying secondhand - pick up something interesting and if it doesn't work for you, sell it again for what you paid for it. Good secondhand gear is basically almost free in the long run.

So you're saying that if I fire up the fusion reactor for few days first, that should do it?

Thinking it through, you could get meters installed for ten imaginary flats (7a, 7b etc) and get an Octopus account on each of them, book out 24 slots a day for each of them while you live off grid, and retire? It vaguely reminds me of the time when Tesco offered so many clubcard points on baked beans that one guy bought literally thousands of tins and made a pile of money out of it.

So could you install solar panels, a wind generator and a battery bank, then book out 24/7 no electricity use sessions? In theory, obviously...

Yes - the build quality of the Axstar feels closer to a Yamaha BX-1 than to a contemporary cheap Steinberger.

The headpiece is really neatly engineered, individual string locks and a cover over the whole thing to keep the string end from snagging on things.

If you're going secondhand, I recently bought an Ibanez Axstar fretted 4 string. Sounds great, the body is comfy sitting or standing and it hangs straight as it has an upper horn. Very slim neck and quite close string spacing, feels very well built. But pretty rare so might not be easy to find...

Since the set-up I've done some more work on it myself including filing the nut grooves down a tiny bit lower, thinning and reshaping the bridge a little and replacing the tailpiece. The sum of all these tiny adjustments is a bass that's much easier to play and that sounds loads better, so it's definitely worth the effort!

I got my bass looked when I bought it and the luthier offered to move the soundpost a little, saying that it was in a position that would emphasise the higher end of the register. I said yes and sure enough it came back sounding more full and bassy with a richer tone on the low notes, at the expense of a slightly less bright tone higher up.

At the risk.of stating the obvious, it's to show you where the notes are. You could flip it around and ask, what's the advantage to not having them?

"If you know how good you are, nobody else has to." Wise words from trumpeter Don Cherry.

I think the bass, perhaps more than any other instrument, is a tool of collaboration. It exists to be played with other people. So for me, being 'good' as a bassist is about how good you are at supporting, lifting, driving, underpinning a group of musicians, rather than about your pure technical ability as a solo musician.

If you want me to stay (Sly and the Family Stone) is also very bass led.

Slightly off topic here but which cheaper EUB's have similar necks and scale lengths to actual double basses?

I read this thread recently and on the back of it I bought some ACS off the shelf 16db plugs because they were only a tenner, to sit between the 10db and 20db plugs I already have. To my surprise the ACS plugs give better clarity than my 10dbs from another brand, and I've started using them as my basic. So ACS seem to have got the filters just right for musicians, to my mind.

I'd use dark to describe a tone that was full and powerful in the low end; treble present but light and not dominant at all. For me it's not just about not much treble, it's about the quality of the low end - muscular and authoritative. If anything is absent it would maybe be the upper end of the middle. My double bass was what I'd call dark when I bought it; a couple of modifications have opened up the mid range a bit and made it more rounded, although still with a solid low end.

Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City. It's like saying you're based in London because you're based in Hackney.

How do you post YouTube videos on here so they they embed properly instead of just showing as a link?

So Rickenbackers are overpriced... Who knew, eh? Edit - just re-read this and realised that it might come across wrong, I'm trying to be snarky about Rickenbackers not about this interesting post...

Brief update - I recently bought a pair of the £10 ACS Pacato earplugs and tried them for the first time at a pub session last night. It was a noisy one (four fiddles, three accordion and a couple of other instruments) so I thought I'd try a step up from my usual 10db. The ACS plugs were great - slightly clearer treble than other plugs I've tried and in general really good sound. I'm going to investigate the custom plugs now, evidently their filters are good for my needs.

My Roth and Junius bag, bought for £90 or so a few years back (not sure of model or reference number) is now falling to bits at a fair rate, starting with the handles coming off at inconvenient times. So won't be buying one of theirs again...