Doctor J

When the genre is describing the music, fine, it can be useful. Death metal tells you a lot about what you're about to hear. Nice. Hair Metal is cretinous term - probably conceived by some snotty intern at Kerrang during that time when they realised metal wasn't cool anymore, went to great efforts to distance themselves from being seen as a metal mag and lamely tried to poke fun at that which made them - as it retrospectively groups bands based on how much hairspray they used in an attempt to belittle them, rather than any recognition of the nuances of the music they played. It's a derogatory aesthetic description, not a musical one. Most of those lumped in were considered hard rock at the time, alternatively known as glam rock, but never metal. Lazy 21st Century journalism at its finest. Just like with all the bands currently labelled as thrash who didn't and still don't play thrash music, there is much to be missed about when journalists used to get paid and made an effort.

There was no such thing as "hair metal". That stupid moniker was invented about 20 years ago applied to any band ever pictured with big hair, regardless of the style of music.

Glen Benton David Vincent Ron Broder Pete Cetera

Tonewood benches. It's a trap!!!

I would start by looking at what I use in E. For example, if you're using .105 for E, .85 for A, .65 for D, .45 for G then, since you're only going to be a tone or semitone up from having E, A and D anyway, I'd use them as reference and go with a slightly lighter standard tuning set - .100 for F, .80 for Bb, .60 for Eb. For C, I'd go with at least a .125, but I don't like floppy strings and have found greater definition and tuning accuracy at lower tunings comes from bigger strings. My first downtuned-to-C band started back in 1992 when string selection wasn't quite what it is now, so I've tried all kinds of setups over the years. Personally, I much prefer playing aggressive music on strings with decent tension and trying to match the tension I like in standard is a much better option than trying to get away with loosening a standard set and living with something you wouldn't choose in standard tuning. Unless you have plastic fingertips, of course 😉

It's alright liking lots of things. Basses are great. I like all kinds of different basses so I've started working on things I don't like and things I really, really like. Really, Really Like: 38-40mm nut width Forearm Contours 4 Strings Don't Like: 41mm and bigger nut widths No forearm contours 5 strings and greater By compiling these lists, I feel I've really cut out a lot of potential sources of GAS. Everything else is fair game. Sweet.

Am I good enough? Sure, why not? Am I rich enough? No. Hell no.

I used to have a 1980 G&L L1000 which had the locking grub screw.

No reason at all. If you want to make it entirely reversible, just get a new nut now and file it for the bigger strings. If you want to revert back to EADG, just put the original nut back in. I play a lot of downtuned music so set up a 4 banger for BEAD. Because I do a lot of stuff in A, too, I have a very heavy set on so I can drop-tune the B to A without having spaghetti to play - .147, .107, .85, .65 You need to be physical with the .147 but it's very satisfying to play.

Fujigen built/build Japanese Fender, Ibanez and probably a good few more.

I just bypassed the amp EQ with mine and, often, biased slightly towards the bridge pickup. From there, adjusted the tone to taste. It sounded grand, had enough mids to be heard and more than enough lows once the guitars started sharing the mid frequencies. Usually, removing a little low end from the guitars shows the bass has more than enough lows without having to boost the crap out of it and make a thick low-frequency fog out of everything.

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Technical ability and musical ability are very different mistresses.

It's inoffensive, yes, but I like more than that in music and there's not really anything else there which will make me want to listen to it again or buy the CD.

Time for a 'drunken mates' one. Our first gig of 1994 was in Dublin's legendary Baggot Inn on lineup with 3 somewhat stylistically similar bands. Things were looking very promising when a group of nice young ladies who, I think, were friends with one of the other bands, invited us to a party after the gig. Our good friend Big Al was helping out with carrying gear and general bonhomie, which was nice, too. We went into the set in high spirits, but it was not to last. Our singer was a lovely guy but could be quite divisive, on first encounter. The Baggot Inn had a very low stage, no more than a few inches high, so you were just around eye-level with the audience. Some nights you click and some nights you don't and this was one of the latter. We had a song called "What's Your Name?" where our singer would ask members of the audience their name and introduce people to each other, over our smooth jazz backing. Sometimes, there was a follow-up question - "Where are you from?" - to which the audience member would say where they were from and our singer would usually say "That's... my kinda town" and it often went down well. This night was not one of those nights. He encountered someone who wasn't really playing ball and, of course, after really having to work to prise this information from the guy, it meant the guy's town was not our singer's kinda town. The guy was not so happy about this and walked right up to the stage, almost eye to eye with our singer, and made the deekhead sign at him, right in his face, then sat back down. I noticed he was sitting with the party girls who, I also noticed, were uninviting us from that party through the mean expressions on their faces. Back then, we would sometimes finish the set with a cover of Paranoid and it seemed quite apt on this occasion. When the guitarist would play the intro riff, our singer would rip off his jumper to reveal a ruffled pink silk shirt, to which he had crudely added home-made white tassels and do the oul Vol.4 pose. It usually went down a storm. Not this night, as you may have guessed, with one exception. Big Al was, by this point, in a state which is often known as "heroically" drunk and loved his Sabbath, as do we all. I noticed him crawling slowly across the stage behind me as we played through the first verse, reaching our singer as the second verse started to play and slowly, in the Rocky vs Apollo Creed in Round 15 style, used the mic stand to try to drag himself upright onto his uncooperative feet. He then proceeded to sing what was left of the song in the jazz style, you could say, several seconds behind our singer and with no respect for pitch or melody. It cane across as some kind of demented delay effect. Alas, not even this could win back the crowd and, after we finished, Al crawled slowly back off the stage as we packed up and left. No parties were attended that night.

Congratulations, SH73, fantastic piece.

Off the top of my head... this could get expensive 😂 Alembic Series 1 Warwick Thumb G&L L2000 Rickenbacker 4001/4003 Ibanez AFR Ibanez SR Spector NS Kubicki Ex-Factor

Guitars and drums. I play both. I have more basses than guitars but it's still too many guitars, really. With drums, I am strictly limiting myself to one kit due to space but... you know... a kit is made of many pieces but everything must fit on the mat, that's the rule.

How do you feel the day went? Did you get 9 tracks down?

The first thing I do when I buy a used instrument is strip it, clean it, then put it back together again. It gets all the old users out of the picture early on, the best for everyone. People can do stupid and often disgusting things with instruments. Never live with someone else's stupidity or bio-crud 😀

Nothing of the sort. Basses are not complicated to set up, they're really not. There's a lot of money in making people thinking there's black magic and sorcery involved but there are just a some basic principles to understand and that's it. It can be easy to be intimidated by it but if you take it step by step, understand why you're doing what you're doing, there is very little to it. No self-aggrandisement to it.

Basses are not complicated at all, your comparisons are very wide of the mark.

Yep, I do it. I see it as a fundamental part of being a player. If you don't understand the basic nature of how your instrument works, well... that's not very good at all.

Mine changes depending on the music I'm playing and listening to. Even within sub-genres I'll dig different tones for different things and it is educational to hear what others are doing. I still like the aggressive tones of much of the music of my youth but, even in my heaviest metal-teenager days, I was listening to Chic and digging the Stingray with flats tone too. I'm currently building 54 style P which I've got a set of Chromes waiting to be put on for that kind of tone but it's something I've wanted to have for over 20 years.

When I was around 16 or 17, I was in a band with my schoolmate, drummer Glen and some older people from where he lived, playing 80's-style hard rock which, since this would have been 90-91, wasn't too much of a crime. We were playing some multi-band event which was going to be televised and got to record our song in a real studio which we would then mime to on the night of filming. All good and very exciting for a pair of kids like Glen and I. On the day of the event, we were asked to show up to the venue, a large ballroom in a very posh hotel, at noon and it was explained to us that we would be going through several rehearsals for the show so the TV cameras could get their angles right and all that other technical stuff we we oblivious to. They ran through the entire show, so each band got up and played in sequence, eight bands in total. Our band were second in rotation. Hearing yourself coming loud through a PA was very exciting and quite surreal in the sense that if you stopped playing, you could still hear yourself playing. Glen and I were getting great craic out of this. Hey, we were kids. Tearing down, then watching the next band set up, play their song, tear down, then through the rest of the bands, then repeat the whole process three times in all, it got fairly tedious quite quickly and the other three in the band, who were a good few years older than us and quite grown-up, were acting grown-up and schmoozing so Glen and I were popping to the bar and getting a beer or two as we hung around and watched the other bands. Glen was 18 and I looked older than I was, so we had no trouble getting served. By the time of the show, we were both unintentionally rather tipsy and, with the venue now filled with comfortably the largest audience either of us had ever performed to, quite giddy on a mix of beer and adrenaline. The first band played and then we were up. Our song was a power ballad type of thing, keyboards and clean guitar to start, then bass drum and rimshot snare and I came in with the first chorus when it became more power and less ballad. I was standing there on stage, looking moody and emotional as I waited for the bass part to come in. Just before the drums started, I heard Glen calling my name. I turned around to see him waving his right foot at me as the bass drum played loud and proud which was probably the funniest thing I had seen in my life, or so it felt at that time. We both spent the rest of this moody song trying, and sometimes failing, to suppress the giggles in front of several hundred people and the TV cameras. During my two close-ups, I'm not playing anything resembling the real bass line. Glen was a top fella, brilliant drummer and has played to slightly larger audiences since with The Script and I reckon has learned to keep his foot on the pedal 😁