Doctor J

😂 Good one!

Yeah, the first Chic album is P and, for the rest of that era, including Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Shiela B, etc, it was almost all Stingray in the studio.

Did I read correctly that John Taylor owns Bernard's Stingray now?

The thing to be careful of with fancy switching is to make sure you're running coils in series at every point. Most switches facilitate parallel wiring and I'd imagine it could get very complicated indeed to ensure you're always running one coil into the next and then to the output. If you're not running in series, you're not getting real P tone.

Andy is right, it's a BC Rich Eagle, but you're hearing his Stingray. I recall an interview with Marcus Miller where Bernard told him he used the BC Rich basses for performances like this because they looked cool but he thought they sounded terrible.

Skipped through a few tracks and they sounded fine to me.

I'll start by being clear I've never played a Ray34 or a Ray35, I have no idea what they're like, so this is half speculation and half my own experience with EBMM Stingrays. I picked up my 3rd proper EBMM Stingray, a mid-90's one with the fancy neck, in a trade a few months ago. All three have all been lovely basses, for sure, but I sold the first two over the years. I'm thinking I'll probably sell this one eventually, too. As I say, it's a really nice bass, I have no complaints, it's really nice. However, I honestly think it's worth more as a trade item or if I sell it than it is as a bass. What I mean by that is I can pick up what I think would be an equally good or better bass for less money, albeit from a less fashionable/prestigious brand. That's just me, though. I sold my first Stingray when I picked up a Godlyke for half the money on the forum here. It could do everything the Stingray could do and more, was better built, IMO, and was a bit sexier too. I still have it. I bought and sold another Stingray since.

@martthebass is bang on, I think. It's an itch you just have to scratch. Been there, bought the t-shirt, etc. The only way you're going to know is to get a full-on EBMM Stingray. Just don't expect a night and day difference for the extra outlay. They're consistently great basses and It might just be the bass you always wanted but it also might not be everything you think it might be. I appreciate this is probably not helpful at all.

4 hours ago, SteveXFR said:

For doom, tune lower and add more dirt, maybe slow down to 120bpm and add the word bong/wizard/funeral to the band name.

 

120bpm? Do you want a speeding ticket? That's disco, man. Do you doom on gallons of Red Bull? 😂

We've gone down to 45bpm for some stuff. Doom is double-digit bpm at the very most 😁

You shouldn't need glue if the plug and screw are sized correctly for the hole they're in.

Back on topic, they're close together in colour to the naked eye, the camera exaggerates the difference a bit.

It sounds like you know what the right thing to do is.

25 minutes ago, Dubs said:

I'm vaccinated and boosted and in very low risk demographic. I don't worry so much about my health but I do worry for others and that I'm being complicit in this madness which is obviously driven by politics. 

Just because you reckon you might not suffer from it, you can still catch it and pass it on, even vaccinated and boosted, to someone who will suffer. Just how important is this gig, in the grand scheme of things?

Put your health first if you're unsure about it.

Plus, if you're tuning up and down a full step across all strings your audience are going to need to being jigsaws or sudoku to keep entertained while you're tuning. You're also going to have to set your truss rod so the lower fretboard doesn't choke which will leave it quite bowed when you tune up to E. Are you sure you can't get away with drop-D like you initially said?

If you're only dropping the E string then that's the only string you need to consider changing. Try it as it is, see how it feels to you. If it feels ok then it is ok. If you feel the tension is lacking then try a 105 but bear in mind you'll be playing that string tuned to E, too. If most of the set is standard and only a few songs are dropped D, I wouldn't bother changing at all. Go with what suits the majority of the songs.

It was something I noticed when the 2024 came out. None of the 2024s I saw had it, the 1024s and below did. My TRB 4 and 6 don't have it but the Bex4 did. Purely anecdotal, rather than something I could say for sure, though 🙂

I thought it was ones made outside Japan have it, Japanese ones don't? Could be very wrong, though.

As a thrash-loving teenager, all the 80's glam rock was given short shrift by me at the time. Motley Crue and The Cult were grand, they were heavy enough to be acceptable but the more poppy stuff was strictly forbidden. I realised I may have backed the wrong team, however, when I saw The Cult on the Ceremony tour and the venue was packed with fantastic looking goth ladies, quite a shocking change from the sweaty sausage-fests your average thrash or death gig tended to be, back then.

I have found an appreciation for a lot of the 80's stuff which young me would retch at. I have found myself picking up CDs by the likes of Poison, White Lion, Cinderella, even the Jovi. There were some great albums from that time which definitely passed me by.

Grunge was just fine after thrash ran out of ideas at the very start of the 90's. Nu-Metal was, is and always will be unforgivable for all involved.
 

Also, yeah, the Corabi and Bush albums were class then and still class now.

Genres of heavy, guitar-orientated music, notable for slower tempos and frequently tuned lower than standard.

Just thinking about it, one of the classic hallmarks of doom and sludge, as established by Butler and Iommi in 1970, is playing higher notes up the neck on your lower strings, rather than lower down on the thinner strings. E played on the 19th fret of your low A string sounds very different to one played on the second fret of your D string. That fatter sound is part of the game. When playing doom and sludge, I spend more time up the neck like that than I would for other heavy genres. You need fatness over twang every time.

I mentioned it before on one of the "lend your gear" threads, I once played a gig on a one-string bass. Just the big string, I think we were tuned down to C#, but I realised I could get all the notes I needed for that band just using the full range of the neck on one string. Before we played, the bassist from one of the other bands came in looking to borrow a bass but my downtuned one-string kriegsmaschine wasn't good enough for Johnny No-Bass, no 😂

If you're not going to use the skinny, non-doom string, why have it there at all? Doom is all about the low stuff, no? 😉

I used a 5 string for the Withered Fist stuff (shameless plug alert: http://witheredfist.bandcamp.com ) which was tuned to dropped A IIRC, AEADG, but for the new stuff I'm now using a 35" 4 string Yamaha TRB tuned AEAD, strung with D'Addario XLs, .145, .107, .80, .60 which just feels nicer in hand than a 5 string. I can't recall using the G string of the 5er at all, if I'm honest. There's nothing wrong with using a 5, if that's what you're into, but many prefer the feel of a 4 and I am one of them. If the G string is only going to be there for show, personally, I'd rather it was somewhere else other than in my hand.

In a similar sense, all the guitar is 6 string tuned AEADF#B with a set of .14-.68 baritone strings, rather than a 7 string, too.

Arctic Monkeys? Who else?

If there's nothing wrong with the Squier, keep the money. You don't need to upgrade things just because you can and the adverts pressure you into thinking you should.

5 minutes ago, SteveXFR said:

 

Corgan has become 100% ego.

I saw Smashing Pumpkins at Glastonbury a few years ago and they were so average that the only thing I remember was that Corgans shirt was too small and his belly was stuck out the bottom.

He has always been 100% ego, that's what's so much fun about him. He's absolutely compulsive about he does and will usually choose the path which means alienation and commercial suicide if he believes it's the right thing to do. He can be incredibly frustrating but also great craic to follow 😁

As an aside, good to see Beato highlighting Jimmy Chamberlin there. Unreal drummer.

Nah, Corgan has spent his life purposely antagonising people who like his music 😂

A roasted maple neck I ordered from Warmoth in 2021 is going to arrive in 2022. I'll need to buy some more bits to finish off that project. I'm already out before the year has started