Beer of the Bass

Ah, there was one like that when I was at uni. He was university staff and maybe 5-10 years older than most students, he'd impress people by reeling off a bunch of Jaco stuff and well known funk lines so it was known that he was the bass guy in our small university town. But then when people tried to get him in bands it became apparent that he'd learned a collection of party pieces by rote, didn't know the names of notes or chords and couldn't jam along on even simply structured songs that weren't one of his prepared things. All a little sad really, from a guy pushing 30 looking for status with a bunch of 18 year olds.

I'm not sure I'm thinking of it dismissively when I call something showboating - a lot of interesting and very accomplished musicians will bring out an element of showboating when it helps get things across to their audience. I mean that little "hey, get this" presentation of something obviously tricky. I think it *can* be done in a good natured way that doesn't take away subtler properties of the music, but to pull that off you have to have self-confidence and the ability to back it up, as well as making sure it's not the whole of what you have to offer.

I mix finger and pick playing depending on the song, so my focus is more on getting the balance right between the two with a single amp setting, and bringing out the differences I want to hear with the pick. So I probably make some different choices than I would if I did everything with the pick. I like relatively light picks (Dunlop Ultex triangles in 0.88mm), specifically to bring out the attack click. I always favour the neck pickup with a pick (on a bass with Jazz style wiring), tone control back just a little for an older feeling rock tone, or tone control up and a light overdrive for a brighter, "let's pretend it's a Ric" tone on one tune.

If they're a few years old, didn't Status strings have black silks? They came in medium scale and lighter gauges too.

Re tapping and other showboating styles, I was around Edinburgh during the Fringe for years and saw and chatted with a lot of street performers, and I feel that short-form, algorithm driven social media favours similar tactics to that. A lot of the performers who could dependably draw a crowd weren't necessarily doing something you'd watch a 3-hour show of or have as your all-time favourite album. The "wow, he's doing what with the instrument?" factor tended to be the big draw that got people walking by to stop. So lots of slappy-tappy-percussive looper performers, gimmicky or extravagantly faux-aged instruments, quirky arrangements of recognisable pop tunes, an unusual outfit or vibe, etc. Grabbing attention in the short term is everything, and I think TikTok and much of YouTube works the same way.

Fair enough, I did just skim the Sapko video, I find his quirky youtuber personality schtick grating.

I will admit I only skimmed through the Sapko video, but IDK how comparable her situation is to Turro. Yes, she has social media followers, but he was getting gear deals and trade show appearances, and selling tabs - does she have anything like that depth of success through fakery or is Mr Sapko just reaching a little?

How do we know that's not pronounced yiff? (Make sure you're not at work if googling that one)

Oh, the effects forum has reminded me of another - envelope filters with no reverse/downward sweep setting. Why would you want that? I get tired of the upwards quacky sound pretty fast, but the downwards "bowwwp!" like Bootsy on Chocolate City (or indeed, like the Grange Hill theme) is great fun and my sole reason for having one.

I always thought it strange that the Moog original didn't include a downward/reverse option on the envelope follower, and the Behringer looks like it repeats that. What's the point if you can't get that "bowwwp!" sound? I don't think I ever use my envelope filter in the normal upwards setting, the quack irritates me quickly. This might just be my personal weird preoccupation...

A choon, even

This is reminding me of the music teacher who took our high school big band. He'd go off on these diatribes about swing and how if you had to ask, you did not got it, like some parody of a 50s jazz cat. Perhaps not the most effective way to educate.

I was enjoying gigging with my PF50T at the weekend. The PA was a small setup that we used for vocals and flute only, so I had it into the zone where it was just starting to get hairy on the louder sections, always a satisfying place to be.

I was surprised how many of the earlier Alembic users were on flatwounds, it tends not to be what I think of those basses as doing

I've had comments on both my envelope filter and my fuzz. I use them unsubtly but quite sparingly - the envelope filter is in a downwards "bowww" setting on specific sections of two songs, and the fuzz is a Univox Superfuzz clone which is never on for a full song, just when a part really needs to stick out.

I picked one up a couple of weeks ago. I have a terrible habit of just not practicing electric bass at all between rehearsals and gigs, and I thought a handy headphone amp device might help me break that, as well as fulfilling some guitar functions. It is working for that, it's a handy little thing and I like that it charges off the ubiquitous USB C cables that are already around my living room. Though I must say I'm not really blown away with the actual sound possibilities of it so far. The amp models mostly sound somewhat like you'd expect, it's quite functional, but I haven't really dialled in something that makes me smile yet. Totally clean or strongly driven it works OK, but getting an amp model into where it's just very subtly breaking up and squashing at the top of my dynamics is quite hard to nail.

Between that and the "Who Sell Out" cover, one has to wonder if that was someone in the band's thing. No judgment from me, just entertained...

Tweeters on electric bass. I like the funny non linear cone breakup stuff in the higher frequencies of a paper cone that people take a great deal of effort to engineer out. And they sound horrendous with fuzz unless you're running some serious filtering, and if there's a proper crossover then the cab usually sounds plain dull with the tweeter level turned down, compared to just hearing the main driver run full-range.

I'm enjoying the poster name/content congruence going on here!

One we used to use in Glasgow had some power extension cords with PAT test fail stickers on them, in daily use. I suppose at least they'd had the tests done.

Are bands getting louder? I'm not sure that assertion is supported by real world experiences. More and more bands and musicians are going for quiet stages, modelling rigs or smaller amps, electronic drums etc. Big gear that used to be a gigging staple like 8x10" or 2x15" bass cabs and guitar 4x12"s go for pocket money prices because very few still have a use for them, and there's a whole market for gear that imitates the cranked amps that used to be normal.

Sounds good to me, how are you liking them? I feel like there's some more midrange presence compared to the previous video with the black nylons, the attack is nice and the pitch is clearer.

This is entirely conjecture, but with the melodic approach and dexterity around the instrument that La Faro was going for, I suspect that if he hadn't been sadly lost so early he might have been an enthusiastic convert to light gauge flexible steels like Spiro lights or Lycons through the 60s. You can kind of hear that he's pushing beyond the older type of gut sound, I feel.

There have been a few different versions of Ampeg's active midrange EQ in different models over the years. They all use a multi-tapped inductor in a similar way, but they've used several different valves to do it.

I think typical earlier 20th century gut sets wouldn't have been all that low tension compared to modern specialist rockabilly slap sets - they were usually silver plated copper wound on the lower two strings, and with the higher action that was common, I'd say they wouldn't be easier on the left hand than my Spirocore mediums and lower setup. I think you mentioned elsewhere you were playing a "bumped" Rotosound nylon set? Unbumped, those might be similar in feel to traditional gut sets, but it would be fair to say you're working with an ultra low tension setup compared to most, which will probably give you more leeway in how you use the left hand. As a fan of higher tension steels myself, I feel like we don't use them out of some masochistic sense of what's "proper" or even to gatekeep out the noobs by making things unnecessarily hard, but simply because that's the sound I found inspiring and they're the most direct route to getting that out of the instrument.