Doctor J

Schon and Cain despise each other. It must make for a terrible atmosphere within the band. There's only one way to resolve it... one of them needs to be leavin' and not stop! I'm terribly sorry 😁

Get thyself to Ishibashi and trawl the u-box for an old Bacchus Grooveline. Scaled down J body with Stingray guts, weighs about 3.5kg. Not cheap but, still, a handmade Japanese bass for less than a US Stingray. Lovely.

Actually, just thinking, Geezer doesn't spend a lot of time playing low low notes whenever Sabbath tuned down. He was usually a octave up from where one might expect him to be.

I've done stuff down as low as G, but generally hover around B and dropped-A tunings for downtuned stuff. I've found staying in the higher octave (i.e. the B, A and G you find on a standard tuned 4 string) sounds fine and really only go an octave lower for effect, for a bit of thickness and impact, rather than living there. It was David Vincent's playing with Morbid Angel, whenever Trey picked up the seven string, which turned me onto that way of using it. Have a listen to God of Emptiness and the way he moves between octaves, especially at the end. If he didn't play the lower octave, you probably wouldn't notice most of the time he was an octave higher than he could have been. There are quite a few bands who tune down and don't have any bass at all, but still maintain heaviness. It's definitely doable. Me borrowing the idea liberally in dropped-A

I haven't set foot in a guitar shop in many, many years. I am quite particular in terms of how I like an instrument set up so found trying in guitar shops utterly pointless. I don't think 5 minutes in a shop really gives you too much insight. Learning how to set up instruments liberated me to buy anything interesting-looking second hand in the knowledge I could sort any foibles it may arrive with. I have a good idea of what I like and I don't like, what will work for me and what won't. Learn how an instrument works and what you need from a set up and learn to do that. It's not hard. Buy second hand and you generally won't lose much money if you decide to move it on. Have fun exploring in the meantime.

It really is just practice.

It spreads. My earliest memory is listening to my Mum's Mothers Of Invention records, particularly, Absolutely Free and We're Only In It For The Money. Generally, my Mum was Stones, my Dad was Beatles. I was into 80's pop as a kid, though. As a teenager, I got into Thrash, then Death Metal. That was my music. In the late 80's I started playing bass, but I was listening to lots of Bernard Edwards alongside my, for then, extreme Metal. After '93, new music became a bit of a wasteland. I started investigating older stuff. I still kept an ear out on any new stuff but the Metal I loved was a no-go zone in that era. I discovered Steely Dan and stuff like that. Early 00's, the metal world improved but I saw EST a couple of times which was amazing, catching Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds tour was amazing too. New music, old music, there's only good music and bad music. These days, I am genre-less, in terms of preference. I'll always love the great Metal of the 80's and the very early 90's but still try new bands. I feel I definitely have a fairly high shite filter, there is so much terrible stuff out there, but the good stuff is really good. iTunes tells me my recently added music is from Strigoi, The Mars Volta, Goatwhore, The Beatles (Revolver stereo mix), Snarky Puppy, Sonic Youth, the new Turin Brakes, Elder and The Final Countdown by Europe. Music is amazing. Give me more.

Yeah, I mean, it's not even old.

Relax, lads.

HMU?

I've looked at the ad and I've watched some of the video and I still haven't a fooooken clue what the purpose of that is. It's not even a solution for a problem which doesn't exist. It's just... pointless. It reminds me of what the goon I bought my old Streamer from had done. If you know what a Ken Smith brass but is shaped like, each fret had been sculpted a bit like that - a raised bit under the string, shaped to cup the string like a nut slot, and filed almost level to the fretboard between the strings. I still don't understand why someone would do that.

The custom butter-knife pickup routing technique, I see.

I could have lied, but it's Stone Cold Bush.

I generally tune lyrics out but, when I don't, self-obsessed me-me-poor-little-me, especially delivered from a middle-aged person of wealth, don't put me in a happy place.

Nah, Streamer was the bass of the 90's for me (alongside its daddy, the Spector). So many bands were using that design in the 90's. If anything, it was going out of style in the 00's. What about an Ibanez SR, one of the fancier wood ones? Or a Bongo?

Just be aware the USA SUB basses have no forearm or belly contouring, so if you like those ergonomic comforts, the SUB might not be for you. Like Bolo has pointed out, the asking price for them has sky-rocketed in the last year and often are not too far shy of a full-on US Stingray.

Same here, IOS with firefox, nothing updated between last night when it wasn't there and this morning, when I can't get rid of it. Very annoying. Only popping up here.

Well done, Lurks!

Nothing wrong with liking either of them, just they're very deliberate efforts at trying to get radio play. Two albums full of melodic mid-tempo rock, intentionally inoffensive lyrics with big, singalong choruses. They're soft, so very soft. Mustaine tried to blame it all on Dann Huff a few years later 😂

Youthanasia and Cryptic Writings are soft as warm butter.

The production is what sold that album. There is filler aplenty on there. Rock made some fairly weak songs (alongside the confirmed bangers we all know and love) sound immense. Saying it would suit Britney is just rubbish. It's thick with reverb which suits the slower tempos, it allows long decays to fill the space beautifully. It wouldn't suit their early songs at all, absolutely not, it would just sound like mush but it's definitely a long way away from being a pop production too.

On a semi-related note, this is an interesting read https://loudwire.com/avenged-sevenfold-m-shadows-insight-ticketmaster-pricing-controversy/

Jazz Confusion necks.

Crime pays. It pays big. https://www.wearesuper.co/metallica#ee-section