Russ

I don’t have a Z3 (yet) - was thinking of picking one up as a modding project, specifically to put one of these necks on!

Probably no worse in terms of build than an old Washburn Status. The electronics are going to suck though - they always do. These Chinese instruments tend to be quite nicely built in terms of woodworking, but they always have bloody awful pickups and electronics. But at least the pickups tend to be standard size so they're easy to replace.

@Kiwi What's the headstock shape, standard MM style? Also curious as to whether the neck length, size of the heel, etc would be compatible with a Sire Z3...

If you listen to that isolated track, there's some fills around the 3-minute mark that definitely mark the bass out as a fretless. It's not super-mwah-y, but the smooth slides give it away. Skip ahead to about 3:20, the end of that chorus has a few bits of slightly dodgy intonation! It's definitely a Stingray too - that sound is extremely distinctive. And, to my ears, the tone sounds like it's coming from a studio valve compressor - an old Neve or Drawmer or something like that (probably a Neve, Drawmer were never particularly popular in the US). Flea did quite a few guest appearances back around that time, and apparently he rarely used an amp - another track with a very similar sound was Freeway from Porno For Pyros' second album (which also featured Navarro).

It was a fretless Stingray, and I don't think any amps were involved - I remember reading a BP interview with Flea around the time that came out, and he talked about it, and that he went straight into the desk. In that isolated track, you can definitely hear that characteristic Stingray "thwp" when Flea hits his dead notes. I don't think it was as quick as they suggested though, because they didn't have much to work with - a basic arrangement, chords, drums and a vocal track, so Flea and Navarro had to work out the parts on the fly in the studio. Knowing Navarro, he was probably at the studio long after Flea had left, doing overdubs and fiddling with reverbs and delays. Most of the rest of the album was Lance Morrison, a prolific LA session player, on bass, but Chris Chaney played with her live for quite some time.

Well, not just basses. Used to have a couple of them, but they ended up getting lost, left at gigs or whatever. I went to get another one not all that long ago, and they're impossible to find now.

Was always fond of the venerable Catch-O-Matic. But I don't believe they're being made any more (unless someone knows differently - if so, post a link!).

For years, I coud sing, or I could play bass. I could do these things individually quite well, but putting them together was a different story. For me, it's all about subdividing rhythms. Learning which beats the vocal parts and the bass fall on. If you're just plugging straight eighths on a simple progression, you should have no problem since there's a bass note on every beat, but, once you start making it a bit more rhythmically complex, with gaps and different length notes, you have to start thinking about where the bass part and vocal intersect and diverge, and you practice the hell out of those bits. Just to get the basics down, play ham-fisted, thumb around the neck, and use a pick since it's a bit easier to keep the rhythm. Then refine from there - put your fretting hand into the proper position, drop the pick (unless you don't want to), and start putting the gaps in, while keeping the vocal part consistent. Don't be afraid to look at the neck, but not all the time as your head won't be in a good position to sing (chin up, loosen that jaw!). I'm not there yet, and I'm still far from Geddy territory, but I'm much better at it than I used to be, and this is what's helped for me.

FGTH played Two Tribes, with more or less the same arrangement as the recorded version, on John Peel in 1982, before they got involved with Trevor Horn and ZTT. The band, outside of Johnson and Rutherford, did not play at all on the album version - it was all session players.

Yep. I've got a Squier Contemporary Tele for when I feel the need to do the skinny-string thing. Looks, feels and hangs like a Tele. But it's got pretty hot HH pickups so it sounds, to my ears, like an SG!

It's a brilliant bass part. It's a shame the album version of the track had synth bass instead of a proper bass guitar track. It also reminds me of how many people were influenced by the whole post-punk/goth thing - the P-with-a-pick midrangey tone, the melodicism, the high-register fills, etc - straight from the Hooky and Gallup school of bass.

Steve Howe played on the original album - him and Trevor Horn are long-time collaborators, even before the short-lived Buggles/Yes "merger". He does look a bit out of place here, sitting down and playing dobro though!

Always had great experiences with Ashdown, going back to when I had my first ABM in 2003. I've had several of them since, and on the rare occasions they proved not to be completely bulletproof, they've always been fantastic in either replacing or repairing them, and doing it quickly. And Dave has always been very responsive.

Not bad. It's very Stranglers.

Basically, he won at life and completed the game - the gig the other week was the big boss fight and he won. I'm noting that there's no mention anywhere of his cause of death - would be entirely unsurprised to find out he went to Dignitas or something. He did everything he wanted to do and went out with a blast.

He had to have known his number was up when he did the Back To The Beginning show the other week. He was probably given six months to live or something. What a send-off though.

Literally just saw that. Did what he loved right up to the end. RIP.

So the current consensus seems to be that the Ventures are apparently reliable, and get the V12 because the V7 is potentially a bit underpowered. Got it.

I'm not at the point where I want to quit anything at the moment, but frustrations are building. I'm in a band with a guy who has the absolute worst luck in the world - if something can go wrong for him it does, whether it's with his work, his health, his family life or whatever. Seriously, it's like he has been cursed or hexed or something. And, when things go wrong he tends to wallow in it. We ended up having to take most of last year off because he couldn't get his s**t together. And now he's just discovered he has a fairly serious health condition. The band and I always support him because he's like family, but it's frustrating. We're all in our 40s and 50s and aren't dreaming of rock stardom or anything any more, but actually being able to get together and play music and maintain at least a modicum of momentum is important! Also, our recent recordings were done in a way that I don't find particularly satisfying. We did an album a few years back and it was (IMHO) how it should be - started off with the whole band performing the songs together, then sprucing them up with overdubs, etc. It had that vibe you only get when you put people in a room and have them play together and play off each other. The last couple of recordings we did earlier this year were done a very different way, with a different engineer - we all recorded separately, and it was all done piece by piece. It was "assembling" music rather than "performing" it, the process had no flow, and I really didn't like working like that. The end result was decent, but it was missing something - it came out maybe a bit too "mechanical" for my taste (judge for yourself - the Bandcamp link is in my sig). Our singer loved working with this guy, and the other two found it a bit frustrating but thought it was worth being "stretched" to try something new. I just flat-out disliked the experience. Our remaining time over here may be limited so I'm reluctant to chuck it all in, especially when one of our number isn't in great health and needs our support. But, bloody hell, it's frustrating. Andy - best of luck with whatever you end up doing. The struggle is real!

I like baritone sax, and tenor when it's played well. The higher-pitched ones hurt my brain!

Really good, driving line that grooves hard. All the FGTH stuff has great bass on it though, thanks to Trevor Horn. Here's a live version of The Buggles playing Two Tribes, with Horn playing bass: Best P-bass tone ever though? For me, that's Eric Avery on Deconstruction, the project he started with Dave Navarro in 1993 after Jane's Addiction broke up the first time around.

Yep. Lots of melisma and impromptu scatting these days. Thanks, Mariah f**king Carey. If you've got a horn section, you'll have a tough job getting the sax player to actually play the song. Seems like they're all aspiring Sanborns, Coltranes and Parkers. The two sounds I despise most in music, and that sound the most like small animal strangulation, are harmonica and badly-played alto and tenor saxophone.

I'd love to be convinced that the Venture range is everything that the Portaflex range should have been, and I may get there eventually as long as their long-term reliability proves to be good. But we need valves. I think the new Trace stuff is excellent (as the owner of a TE-1200). But there's a lot of people out there who refuse to even acknowledge that a good Trace amp could have been designed and built outside Maldon - a Trace users' group that I'm in on FB is full of posts from owners of 89s/90s Trace gear ranting that the Peavey-era stuff isn't "real" TE. It's as real as any post-Kaman Trace gear, and they all seem happy to play through those.

The SVT-7 had that special sauce, complete with as much power and weight as you needed. When it worked. When my old one died in the middle of the first song of a set (wasn't even turned up loud), that was it for me.