Cato

I got hit in the shoulder by Sean Kinney's drumstick at an Alice in Chains gig. I didn't manage to catch it though. It bounced off me and landed several rows back.

Sire V3 is in a similar price range to those already mentioned.

I went so see an NME tour with Cribs, Mystery Jets and Arctic Monkeys on the bill below a headlining Kaiser Chiefs. At that point Arctic Monkeys had just suddenly become huge, just about everyone was there to see them, to the point that when Kaiser Chiefs came on the room was noticably emptier because people had left after Arctic Monkeys.

I've got some Aguilar 70s pickups in a Squier Jazz. Absolutely love them. They're not hum cancelling, but they're certainly no noisier than you'd expect a single coil J pickup to be.

I think it's the same preamp as on my Deluxe PJ, in which case the controls are (from the top) volume, pickup pan, treble/bass (stacked) and mids on the end.

Not sure what you're after. There's a technique called 'tremolo picking' famously used here The technique itself isn't that difficult although the level of control against the metronome in the example above is exceptional. Thing is, although the number of note strikes per minute is huge, the actual bpm of the song is 'only' 175.

Exhibit 1 Guitar body apparently made from Cotswold stone. Sounds like any other distorted guitar.

I'm very much a believer that in terms of tone, pickup position is the number 1 factor, followed by pickup type and electronics. Everything else, including body and neck materials has far less impact on overall tone than those three. I strongly suspect that you could mold a P bass out of concrete and as long as it had the split P pickup in the correct place and the usual passive tone and volume it would still sound very much like a P Bass. Might weigh less than plywood too.

Heavy 'Born in the USA' era Springsteen influence as well I'd say, which plays into the 80s revival that's become more and more prevalent in the charts over the last few years.

First time I heard this I thought it might be Kings of Leon.

My thoughts exactly. It's like someone handed a bass to a guy who'd never seen one before and told them to work out how to play it for themselves. There's no denying it works for him though. He's a better player than I am.

That's the Basschat way.

As mentioned by Alcytes above the easy solution is just to downtune the whole bass a single tone so it's in DGCF. The octave down pedal thing will work too but the technology doesn't always work perfectly, there can be a bit of latency between playing the note and the octave being generated, generally not much but it can be enough to throw off your timing. They can also even be a bit pitchy and because a lot of octavers are monophonic there can also be an issue if you let two or more notes sound at the same time, either deliberately or accidentally, say through sympathetic resonance. If you do decide to go the pedal route it might be worth posting in the Effects section of this Forum. Plenty of pedal heads there will be able to advise on the best pedal for the job you want to do.

That's a glorious colour. The official pics in this thread don't do it justice.

Bass and guitar, although I'm never really sure if that should be classed as being able to play two different instruments when for all intents and purposes they're the same basic idea, tuned the same way, just traditionally used for different roles. Anyway who can play one should be able to get at least a basic tune out of the other.

That green one's a cracker.

Also the inspiration for this Madonna classic.

I'd forgotten about Indfectious Grooves. I remember listening to their first album in the 6th form common room. Time to give it a proper listen.

The little jam at the end was good. Nice to see Trujillo displaying his funky side. I was a big Suicidal Tendencies fan in the early 90s, I think in many ways he had better opportunities to show off all sides of his playing with them than he has had or is likely to ever get with Metallica.

Failed at pretty much the first hurdle. I couldn't get the age box to open and the test wouldn't let me proceed without that information.

I've heard a couple of guitar bands have a crack at this. Tough one for singers though.

That was an experience. Some of the comments are hilarious.

In some ways it could be argued that they were ahead of their time. It's not a million miles from the vocoder/autotune rap combo that Drake and to a lesser extent Kanye West have had great commercial success with over the last few years.

I keep thinking that this should be the perfect opportunity to sit down and hone my skills. Instead it seems I'm spending most the potential extra playing time gassing over guitars and basses on youtube.

'Better' is subjective, but I've seen quite a lot of Far East made guitars and basses recently that, on paper at least, are as well or better specced than the equivalent US Fender model, let alone mex models, but for around 2/3 of the price of a US Fender. It just seems to be substantially cheaper to make quality instruments in that part of the world than even Fender's Mexico factory. Part of it is lower wages, part of it is that every part needed to make a quality instrument is already being manufactured relatively locally in that part of the world so it's cheaper to put the whole thing together. I'm sure there are other factors at work as well.