ZilchWoolham

If you have a rhythm section I don't really see why a click is necessary, but it certainly isn't a problem, either, unless you specifically play songs with tempo changes, either abrupt or gradual. But whether a band gradually drifts from 133 to 136 BPM over the course of three minutes instead of staying at a rock-steady 134 is not something I think anyone would really notice. You're still a band of humans performing, it won't sound lifeless. In fact, I'd argue that even a lot of electronic music doesn't necessarily sound lifeless. As far as audience engagement goes, the most prevalent form of dance music for the past 40 years or so has been fixed to a strict BPM and it hasn't exactly hurt its effectiveness on a dance floor. 

It's true I probably wouldn't want to see Fairport playing Sloth to a pre-programmed click track, but for a functions band I think tightness and economy serves you rather well. 

One of my earliest bass inspirations and truly one of (if not the) greatest melodic bass players of all time. Everything he played with The Smiths was terrific. Playing the way he did with someone like Johnny Marr on the guitar means that he not only anchored the songs rhythmically but also harmonically, giving very crucial context to all of those broken chords and arpeggios. Stephen Street said that he noticed Morrissey would often lean heavily on the bass lines for his vocal melodies and it's not surprising. 

There are so many song recommendations I could give, but This Night Has Opened My Eyes is truly sublime. Perfectly measured, perceptive, meaningful bass playing. One of the best early Smiths tracks that really showcases a band of four equals. 

I cannot praise this man enough. A very sad day. 

1 hour ago, Cosmo Valdemar said:

Ahem.

 

 

There's an Elvis Costello sleeve that looks like this!

As stupid as it is, this is actually not the worst Fender-adjacent headstock I've seen.

Then they decided to make a 2+2 style headstock instead with the bizarre decision to make it practically as long anyway, to give a bit of extra pop to their carefully chosen gimmick.

Then, of course, here's the worst headstock design I've ever seen. Remarkably, the makers were so confident in the superiority of their design that they had to include a miniature outline of the headstock, on the headstock!

20 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

 

While I agree with you on most things on the wal, it has a very ugly headstock - or at least the originals were, they got better with the 5 strings later on.

I have a preference for symmetrical 2+2 headstocks, that is to say if a headstock has to be present at all...

As for in-line headstocks, the classic Fender is perfectly fine by me, although anything that tries to look a bit like a Fender but not exactly like a Fender is usually a big turnoff. The very best looking in-line headstock, though, belongs to the Thunderbird, although it is of course barely usable unless you're a professional basketball player. 

7 hours ago, Quilly said:

Any high end bass that has too much 'bling', gold hardware, metallic finishes, too many stitches and knobs, too may pickups (unless its 'ironic' like the Warwick Bootsy Collins star bass). Wal, Alembic, Fodera, Warwick come to mind. Don't like exotic woods on basses either, they look like pieces of 70s furniture. 

 

At the opposite end of complex basses Fender P bass the black/white pickguards/rose wood fingerboard is a horrible combo IMO. It makes a good bass look cheap.  I love P basses otherwise. 

Don't think Wal belongs in that crowd, especially if we're talking about the early JG, Pro and Mk1 models. Exotic woods for the Mk1, yes, but the contour is very modest, the hardware looks very solid and reliable, and even with its complex circuitry it's not overwhelmed with knobs and switches. Overall very well balanced visually, and one of the best headstocks you can find! The other ones I agree with. I don't like the Warwick body shapes, but I will however admit that the most gorgeous neck joint I've ever seen was on one. 

Completely agree about the P bass, too. Similarly, a black Strat with a black pickguard looks fine, but a black Strat with a white pickguard looks like a department store guitar. 

1 hour ago, itu said:

There's one brand that has highest end basses but their designs have always been a question mark for me: Alembic. I am not to say they are ugly, but not all of them are pretty.

 

Alembic were definitely pioneers of the furniture bass, but in comparison the the increasingly large, increasingly amorphous blobs made in the decades since by the likes of Fodera, Mayones etc. I think the early symmetric Alembics are actually quite stylish. 

5 hours ago, Geek99 said:

I’m 5’8 with large hands but smaller fingers and short arms. I manage a p bass well enough but a stingray clone is a bit of a stretch 

I think I'm bizarro you! I'm 5'8 with small hands but longer fingers and long arms.

Re: Sparko, he typically had his basses hung quite high which I think added to the effect (not to mention his oftentimes mile-wide trousers). I've a feeling he's not 5'7 either. Funny thing is he had quite a good reach with his hands. I remember a thread on here where someone struggled with the chord riff in I'm a Hog for You Baby. Sparko seemed to pull it off effortlessly. 

4 hours ago, Dan Dare said:

 

No need to find it. Something I've done for many years is to write my own. Not a full score or even anything approaching one, of course. I make basic charts and add notation of awkward, tricky or key phrases so I have an aide memoire/reminder to hand. I find it very helpful.

Right. Well, that's all good. But then you are in fact making it out by ear. 

17 minutes ago, fretmeister said:

 

 

 

This reminds me of a bit from the Metallica gig with the San Francisco orchestra.

On the extras tape (VHS!!!) there was a scene where one of the classical players was talking to Hetfield. Something on the lines of 

 

"How did you come up with that? You've mixed 2 modes in a way that I've never heard before. You took the mixolydian into the realms of baroquephyrigianyesque somethingorother..."

 

Hetfield" I have no idea what you just said. It just sounded cool"

 

 

Clearly their inability to read music held them back. I mean, nobody has ever heard of them.

 

Which of course doesn't really have much to do with reading music in particular, but in turn reminds me of an interview where Ritchie Blackmore recalled asking Ian Anderson about how he found his bearings around the rhythms of a particular song. 

"Oh, I just count to two."

"But you can't count to two in 9/8!"

4 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

I actually agree with ZilchWoolham, in that for rock/pop, listening to the music is even more important than eg listening to a classical/jazz piece, in order to perform it well.

And I agree with most of what you're saying here! It seems my early snark-laden reply might have been premature and I apologise for turning the thread a bit nastier in tone - no one needs that on Easter. 

4 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

 The classical/jazz musician is no better than the rock/pop musician, its just that their skillbase leans more towards being able to play from reading rather than commit to memory; and more tightly playing "as written", in general. Of course there are shades of grey in there too, every element is important.

But I would argue that the thing that sets jazz musicians apart from both classical and pop musicians is their affinity for improvisation. 

4 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

Another myth to bust on "reading on guitar" is that its unnaturally hard - its not - violin, viola, cello, etc players do it all the time, yes there's different positions and different ways to play the same thing, but that's true of almost every other instrument too and just a part of playing that instrument.

And I do think the guitar is an uncommonly complicated instrument to read for (the bass guitar, not so much). A piano is dead easy if you know your notation as there are zero ambiguities, it's strictly one-to-one in that you can only play one note in one place. Your classical string instruments are more ambiguous but more often than not if both you and the composer/arranger are familiar with the instrument you're probably playing it with the intended positions. Guitar parts typically use many more different positions. Consider an atypical chord played on a guitar using five strings, two of them open. Now consider that two of those notes might actually be the same, but one is played open and left to ring, while the other is fretted and simultaneously slid down to another note. An atypical example, maybe, and one that could be tricky to learn by ear (certainly if the part is not prominent in the mix), but I also think it would be quite difficult to translate properly to, and quickly grasp from, notation.

I'm nitpicking of course, but what I mean is that classical notation is not a perfect system. If you can indulge my straying from the subject a bit I'd like to claim that no way of translating a sound to a piece of paper could be perfect or complete. I suppose technically you could write down a digital audio file in binary code, but you would need a lot of paper and a lot of ink! 

1 hour ago, Dan Dare said:

 

This might be a novel, even bizarre suggestion, but perhaps people could do both 

 

Never said you couldn't. 

1 hour ago, Dan Dare said:

 

If I had a pound for every time I've hard people complain about "dismissiveness" and "elitism" when someone suggests reading music/parts may be helpful...

Not at all what I did. 

The user I quoted implied that the only viable way for musicians to communicate is via sheet music. I don't agree. For a big band? Sure. A chamber ensemble? Sounds reasonable. A large orchestra? Of course (and adding a conductor). Now, I will admit that I don't know what sort of band the thread starter plays in. But I am fairly certain that most of the gigging bassists on BC are part of function or tribute bands. And to suggest that any and every pub band to ever crank out a set of golden oldies should have the same sort of discipline and adherence to sheet music as the examples mentioned above would be ridiculous, unrealistic, and yes, I do think it would smack of elitism. 

And of course, if we are dealing with popular music, you run in to the problem of actually finding the sheet music. And if it does exist, you can be certain (barring old standards, musical numbers and the like) it wasn't written down by the composer. This is very different from classical music where the notation should conceivably contain everything the composer intended for the performers to know. 

I don't think reading sheet music is elitist. If you can learn a piece quickly from (fairly reliable) notation that sounds like something you absolutely should be doing. I have no gripes with that at all.  

I would never suggest that a symphony orchestra sit down and separately learn a movement by ear. I was reacting to a tone of dismissiveness I perceived in your post (which there is a possibility I could have misread, of course), and taking a bog-standard function band as an example. I stand by my view that if your audience wants to down a pint while shouting along to The Chain or Mr Brightside (for whatever reason) you'll be better fit to serve them well if you know what the song sounds like when they hear it on the radio. 

6 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

How are you communicating with your fellow musicians, if not all reading sheet music?

With words, perhaps? 

5 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

 

Horrendous inefficiency aside.......that technique relies on each musician listening to the SAME recording.

Hardly seems an insurmountable problem to me. 

5 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

 And also agreeing on what the "intro", "verse", "chorus", "break" etc is, otherwise if during rehearsal you stop, you'll have to go to the beginning to restart playing it.

Even people who don't read sheet music tend to know what a chorus is. 

5 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

Yuk! Of course, pop/rock music is much simpler than those genres where written dominates, so its not really that much of an issue.

 

Except when it is.

Your elitism is showing. But I suppose that's the point.

If you're a cover band who trades in somewhat accurate renditions I think giving the record in question a few spins might serve you quite well. There's more to a song than note values and pitch. After all, if they had invented audio recording in the 17th century, we wouldn't have academics bludgeoning each other over just what an historically informed Bach performance actually means all these centuries later. 

1 hour ago, peteb said:

Either that or done by tone deaf American students / bedroom players who have just downloaded the tablature software but have no ear at all...! 

 

Listen, I indulge in a fair bit of Yank mockery now and again when appropriate, but this just seems petty. What would nationality have to do with it? 

A lot of the replies here present a false dichotomy of all roots vs. fusion freak-out, but there are about a million different interesting things you could do in between those two extremes. 

I remember that I started putting this together during a GAS-intensive period... Not updated in a good while now, and I feel it might need a bit of a clean-up! 

A PJ and a Ric should absolutely cover most of it. It's worth noting that a lot of punk bassists used transistor amps: HH, Peavey or even Acoustic if they could afford it. I would think the M-Pulse is a fairly versatile thing, but maybe it just isn't nasty enough. Personally I would crank up the mid level controls and then sweep the bands until I find something that seems appropriate. 

A lot of Ian Anderson corkers I could mention, few of them from actual live albums. Here's one: "The next piece is a vegetarian song. It contains deep, significant, meaningful comments about ecology and the environment... It's really f**king boring." 

11 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

The Stranglers - Live X Cert

Band stop the song after couple of bars.

"Did someone say w*nk3r?

Where is he?

(pause)

Come on then, Isn't he going to own up?"

 

At about 2.40.

You can hear the original "w*nk3r" if you listen carefully.

 

There's a Stranglers 12" B-side called "An Evening with Hugh Cornwell" which is just 18 minutes of Hugh insulting the audience. 

One particular favourite of mine is how Roland Kirk changed his name from Ronald Kirk because of a dream. A simple procedure, just swap two letters. 

Blues singer and harp player John Lee Curtis Williamson took on the stage name Sonny Boy Williamson, and several years later another blues singer and harp player, Aleck Miller, took the same name to capitalise on the fame of the first Sonny Boy Williamson! In fact, Sonny Boy Williamson II is slightly older than Sonny Boy Williamson I. 

If I'm playing for 8000 people I think I should be having fun! A couple of Acoustic 360/361 rigs would sort that out quite nicely.

1 hour ago, Nail Soup said:

The Stranglers - "Do Ya Wanna - Death and Night and Blood (Yukio)"

I read an interview with drummer Jet Black, who says a fan asked him about a mistake on this.  Jet's response was along the lines of "Well spotted, I thought I'd got away with that."

It's basically two songs medleyed together. When It switches from the first song into the second song (about 2min30s) the drums are kind of 'out of phase' with rest of the band, but goes back into phase (snare on the 2 and 4) at about 3mins.

Given the extremely off kilter drum pattern in the first half of the song, it would be reasonable to assume that the 'mistake' was deliberate. So hats off to Jet for owning up!

 

Listened to this just the other day and I can admit I did not spot it! Just as you mentioned, it wouldn't be hard to argue it's supposed to be that way. That era of the Stranglers has some bizarre arrangements. Baroque Bordello off The Raven has Hugh in a different time signature to the rest of the band. They were really playing at the limits of their abilities on those two albums, maybe sometimes a bit ahead of them, so to speak. 

This Was isn't a stinker, but I think most people who aren't Mick Abrahams or John Peel would agree that Stand Up is the first proper Jethro Tull album. 

I am stunned. That "Leaves of Tears" purple monstrosity has got to be the most tasteless design I've ever seen on an official Fender-branded guitar. It looks like a Warmoth bitsa assembled for an AOR band in 2005. Apparently  good judgement is an entirely optional quality for a master builder!