Doctor J

I also have a lot of love for All Moving Parts (Stand Still). Funky Geezer.

I studied sound engineering, worked in a studio for a while, produced a few bands and thought it would be a nice way to earn a living. However, I realised that having to work on music I simply didn't like removed all the joy from it. Having bands in who I couldn't click with turned the thing I truly love into an excruciating chore, so I choose to do music for love and a "regular" job for money. My taste in music has always been a little too niche to make a living out of playing and fame is something I would run away from with surprising speed. Covers, weddings or sessions playing music I don't like are of no interest at all. Being an anonymous schleb who plays what he wants when he wants, and enjoys every second of it, sits just fine on my shoulders.

36 minutes ago, Skybone said:

 

Notable mention for the song "No More Tears".

Ozzy? Bassline written by Mike Inez and played on the album by Bob Daisley.

It's Spiral Architect, but thanks for asking.

On 06/10/2023 at 10:31, woodster said:

My tech threw my Elixirs in the bin and told me not to use them. Recommended D’addario XTs as the winding wire is coated before the string is wound, not after like Elixirs. 

This is a bad thing, a very bad thing, actually.

Saying a string is coated is, in truth, fairly meaningless. It's like the ads for things which are "plant-based" under the guise of being healthier, but are still highly processed blobs of sugar, salt and fat.

How the string is coated is the important part. As mentioned before, the design and intent of the Elixir, coating the outside surface of the wound string as a whole, is to prevent biocrud getting into the windings because that is what makes your strings sound dull and lifeless. Putting a coating on and then wrapping does absolutely nothing to prevent biocrud seepage. In fact, all you're doing is adding a greater percentage of plastic into the string as the outer wind is coated even on the side which is touching the string core and never comes in contact with the player. It's a marketing exercise only and makes a string worse, not better.

This was a lesson learned the hard way, having tried Warwick and then D'Addario's "coated" strings and putting them in the bin not too long after installing them. Elixirs are worth the money because of how they are wound, which I think they still own the patent to. I should never have strayed as it was just an exercise in pi$$ing money away.

Great bass, well chosen!

I'd vote for a UK/EU location filter as there's a 25% price increase depending on where you are compared to the item you're looking at which is often a bit of a buzz kill.

I started playing in 89 and, back then, 25 years was widely accepted as "vintage" and this made anything pre-64 vintage, which made sense given the availability and popularity of electric instruments really only started taking off from about 1950. "Vintage" was roughly 14 years worth of instruments, so not that many, and neatly correllated with the pre-CBS era when referring to Fenders. There wasn't anywhere near as much money tied up in the "vintage" moniker as there is now, however, and it has been marketed differently and aggressively since by those with financial interests in doing so, as more and more instruments - including the now-prized 70's Fenders which were derided as junk up until the mid-90's - started flooding in and more and more stuff of varying quality could be termed "vintage".

Either way, Geek99 is right, now it means nothing other than the instrument is old and old does not necessarily mean good. Me starting playing is almost as close to the first P bass being made as now is to when I started playing, so the lovely pointy BC Richs of my era are legitimately vintage if a slab 50 P was vintage when I started 😂

I appreciate how much this concept could trouble the young people, however 😉

9 hours ago, NickA said:

Bit limiting of where you put your thumb / pluck the strings, isn't it.

 

Never used a thumb rest myself, but isn't something longer and more parallel to the strings more useable?

Thumb Fin in the way? It moves.

That's how Fender do neck pockets these days. The scratchplate covers a lot of lazy manufacturing practices.

The stupid routing guide hole would annoy me more.

It used to be age, over 25 years. Then, as more basses reached that age, the people who owned the older basses took umbrage at basses not as old as theirs being called vintage as they felt it diluted the term. Now it means Fenders made up to about 1975 but, really, it's anything over 25 years.

Rattling off lists of pickups without being able to hear them is fairly pointless. When I was building a single coil P, I went through loads of videos and sound samples to try to find something which matched the sound I was chasing. An old P pickup is never going to sound just like the split P for a multitude of reasons, but there's still a lot of variety out there and a lot of different sounds to choose from, more than you'd think. I thought, in theory, I would prefer a double coil wired in series as I was after a healthy mid bite but, to my ears, a proper single coil was closest to the sound I was actually chasing. Leave the tone open and it's bright and aggressive, roll it off and it fattens up nicely.

Anyway, here's what a Seymour Duncan SCPB-1 sounds like with D'Addario Chromes.

I've got a .149 for a B which I've used as low a G# every now and again.

If I needed a low G all the time a .160 makes a lot of sense. I'd do it.

Bigger is better the lower you go 🙂

If it's metal and they're playing that low C a lot, I'd tune to C too.

15 hours ago, iconic said:

According to Davide Romani (Change et al) basically anything Chic was recorded in the studio with Bernard Edwards on...... a Fender P.

 

Anything played on TV or in concert was played for looks, Stingray, BC Rich, Jazz, Sadowsky etc. 

In this instance, Davide Romani is a little wide of the mark. The first Chic album was a P, but most of what came after in the late 70's and early 80's was the Stingray. The BC Rich was very much for looks, Marcus Miller had a story about that, and the Sadowsky was a lot later, into the 90's, I think. The Stingray definitely became his primary studio instrument for a good few years, though.

Wire the pickup directly to a bog standard jack, find whether the pickup itself is the issue.

Whatever it is, a Fender it is not.

The two string retainer shows Leo never got it truly right, no matter which time. Apologies to all offended cultists, of course.

Get one of these and finally have some kind of consistent break angle for all strings over the nut. You will be able to put it in the same spot as the current one and cover the existing hole, so your headstock won't have an unsightly hole in it.

https://www.public-peace.de/hipshot-string-retainer-3-strings.html?language=en

Swap the pickups around on the blend pot and find out if the noise follows the pickup or the pot.

Yep. I always use my L2K in passive mode. Everything works in passive mode, it just seems to boost the output. If there's one thing it doesn't need, it's higher output.

Possibly the finest recording of a Metallica gig, from early December 86. Newsted was bang on.
 

Very sorry to hear of your loss.

Well done, Leonard, great stuff 👍🏻

Related to Mick? Did you buy a pedal and he promised he most definitely will post it to you?

On 29/01/2024 at 21:40, Vin Venal said:

They were all also huge racists back in the day

3 hours ago, Vin Venal said:

I reckon some of the people in Metallica were actually racists

Racism isn't a trivial matter and accusations of racism shouldn't be so casually thrown around as it badly dilutes the importance of the message. You've gone from slandering all of them, including Filipino Kirk and Cliff, to just some of them. What did Kirk and Cliff do which lead you to accuse them of being racist, out of curiosity?

Sure, Hetfield was a tool and I'd imagine him and Rose in a room together at that time was hardly a shrine to enlightenment, but do you really think a band who have been paying Mensch and Burnstein, their jewish management, 20% for almost 40 years really believe in National Socialism? Think about it for just a minute.