Beer of the Bass

I like the Dunlop Tortex .88mm Green picks for bass. I've tried heavier and lighter ones, but these seem to get the balance between body and "click" that I like.

I think there must be only a select few bits of the music scene where things like hospitality riders even exist in medium sized venues. I've never, ever played in a venue that had towels! This week Dave Swarbrick, who is a bit of a legend in folk circles was ranting about a mid-sized Glasgow venue that didn't even provide a backstage loo or changing space, so he had to queue with the punters. And this is a guy who has been performing at the highest level (in folk terms) for more than 40 years.

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1390779741' post='2349540'] I rehearsed for a while at a place in Edinburgh where they provided the Peavey Tour 450 amps with the Cosmos control. Sometimes I'd turn around to look at it, and I liked to think that if I used it it might just take me on a trip around nearby galaxies. That and the blue led made me feel happy. I never used it 'though, as I wasn't sure I'd be back in time for dinner... [/quote] It's a good thing you never turned the knob! I can just picture you preparing for liftoff, then being underwhelmed when instead of being transported to the planet Gong on a flying teapot, you just got a sort of not very good octaver effect.

[quote name='Bassassin' timestamp='1390763233' post='2349231'] That's the second ludicrous local Gumtree bargain I've missed in the last month or two. The previous one was more upsetting though - a Canadian Balogh Odyssey guitar for £30. Just ask Flat Eric about these... [/quote] Ah yes, I was fancying that one too. I had no idea what it was, but for £30 it would have been worth buying and then researching later! These things do always go fast though...

I find that with the action below a certain point (assuming correct neck relief and a good setup), I can play a little more fluently and pull off things that I might not manage otherwise, but in practice I have a lot of relief and an action at the high side of medium at the moment. I do find that on instruments with a really low action, I struggle to lighten up my right hand enough and I have to constantly think about not playing too hard, both on electric bass and guitar. This may come from being used to playing double bass with Spirocores and a heavily strung archtop guitar. My gut feeling is that I should probably work on this through practice rather than setting up my electric bass and guitar with hefty strings and a high action, but I'm not there yet...

For forty quid with a nice ash body and a hard case, someone in Edinburgh needs to buy this: [url="http://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/maya-electric-bass-guitar-fender-telecaster-bass-copy-with-hard-case/1046283537#photo-content"]http://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/maya-electric-bass-guitar-fender-telecaster-bass-copy-with-hard-case/1046283537#photo-content[/url] I don't need it myself and I'm trying not to fill the house with stuff, otherwise i'd have a punt...

At a professional gig I'd be running a DI alongside my rig. Failures can happen with any brand of gear or country of origin. The only time I've played a gig where a bass amp went down, it was an Italian made Markbass.

Certainly, you're entitled to reservations about buying Chinese goods. That still doesn't give you any basis for claiming that they're made in labour camps in North Korea, when there is no evidence for that. The parent company behind Behringer and Bugera have their own plant in Guangdong Province which does not appear to be a labour camp.

[quote name='spacey' timestamp='1390736966' post='2348744'] On quality control, if makers are manufacturing in North Korea as most do now in the slave labour camps, how much pride would you have in your work if you had just been given 25 years hard labour for failing to name 20 current party officials when questioned. Not a Fking lot would be mine. [/quote] Which companies are manufacturing music gear in North Korea? I'm not aware of any so far. All of the Behringer and Bugera gear I've come across has been labelled "Made in China".

On a lesser budget, the Kent Armstrong toasters are good sounding pickups for the neck position. They're intended as guitar pickups, but Ric use the same toaster pickups on guitar and bass. WD music have them. [url="http://www.wdmusic.co.uk/replacement-toaster-pickup-front-2687-p.asp"]http://www.wdmusic.co.uk/replacement-toaster-pickup-front-2687-p.asp[/url]

The valve preamp one does look rather nice. I wonder if they were waiting for Genz to cease trading to avoid litigation? It does look like they've got LEDs behind the valves to make them look brighter though, which always looks naff IMO. Why do they do that? ECC83s don't usually glow as much as that! Although it could just be that the picture is a computer rendering...

The littler amp of the new Peaveys looks quite elegant really, with no flashy lights or knobs labelled "Kosmos", so I think they're aware that not everyone will love the one with the lights.

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1390667326' post='2348145'] Well, a Barefaced Big Baby 2 has been ordered... If it lives up to expectations, I can see two of these in my future, we will see. [/quote] Ooh, I look forward to hearing that one. I wonder how many gigs you'll really need both cabs for? Although I guess with three guitarists plus brass in SBK, you do need quite a bit of onstage volume at some gigs, especially with a dancing audience.

I do enjoy his playing, though I haven't always been a massive fan of his tone. Having said that, I liked his sound much better on this clip from 2013 than some of the other material I've heard. Not a trace of noodling either, which is great. And Carla Bley is always awesome!

I haven't done this, but if you've no intention of reusing the rosewood fingerboard, I'd be tempted to simply plane it off.

I wasn't very taken by it on acoustic, but on electric it reminded me of a Hohner Clavinet. That could be fun for certain kinds of part. It's not going to revolutionize the instrument, but it could be a fun thing to pull out for an overdub.

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1390258462' post='2343377'] You can tell by the color. Speakon 1/4" combination jacks are green. [/quote] This is true. They also have the word "combo" moulded into the plastic.

I've often idly wondered how low-powered a valve amp I could get away with in my band, given that I have a fairly efficient cab and a drummer whose volume tends towards the moderate. Certainly when I was using a 100 watter I never got it to the point of sounding gritty, though I've no experience with the LB.

I don't see it working for the meat and potatoes stuff, but there are a few high-end instruments I would be very curious to experience playing that I'm not in a financial position to consider buying. I'm not in the habit of trying out things in shops unless I'm considering a purchase - I'm a polite sort of chap (or try to be) and it just feels a bit cheeky. So I'd be quite open to the idea, in certain cases.

Thinking about it a little more, I'm going to bite the bullet and build a new neck. It's probably overkill, but it'll change the bass from being a bitsa with a homemade body to being a bass I built. Also, if I make it nice and stiff with a double action rod and CF reinforcement, it may help my B-string response, which isn't the greatest on this bass. I have a couple of metres of Fender sized fretwire knocking about already, and I think I can find a friend to borrow a router from. Now I need to source woods. The body blank was from David Dyke, and they were quite helpful so I may try them again.

I still have enough range on the bridge saddles for a string height I can live with, but necks with slightly less relief just seem a little more pleasant to play. As far as I can gather, the "normal" range of relief would be about half what I have.

I have a bass I built using an OLP 5 string neck, which is my main gigging instrument with one of my bands. While it's not obviously broken, the truss rod is unable to bring the neck straight enough, even when trying washers on the nut to give me more adjustment range. I have around 0.7mm of relief at the moment, which is playable but I'd like a bit less. The neck still has some relief with the strings off and truss rod slackened, and the rod doesn't change the relief even with the strings off. If it was a Fender sized neck, I'd just try a new neck, but there are almost no MM sized 5-string necks on the market (barring Status, but I can't afford those!). I have no back-up for this bass and very little budget to sort anything out. I'm loath to buy a different bass as I spent quite a while making the body for this one and it does sound good. As far as I can see, my options are as follows; -Live with it as is. It not unplayable, but it could be a lot better -Experiment with heat and clamping to straighten it out -If the rod is still ineffective, I could attempt surgery as per this thread; [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/160580-olp-mm3-broken-truss-rod-update/page__hl__olp"]http://basschat.co.u...e/page__hl__olp[/url] -Alternatively, I could think about building a new neck. I've done it once before, and I'm sure the tools I don't have I could borrow. What would anyone else do in this situation?

[quote name='Phil Starr' timestamp='1389617661' post='2336098'] It's more likely we will come up with a 1x8 design for this purpose, but it won't handle quite that much! [/quote] Would that be using the Faital 8" drivers that a couple of the US builders are using? I think my interest was piqued when I saw that the displacement should allow them to get as loud as many 10"s. Given that a 1x10" does me for a lot of my playing, and I use buses a lot, this could be very much of interest to me.

I've mentioned this here before, but I love Hugh Hopper's fuzz use on the Soft Machine stuff. I'm fairly sure he used a Shaftesbury Duo Fuzz, which was the same circuit as the Univox Superfuzz and Shin Ei FY6. I always wondered if this album might have been an influence on the Ben Folds five, with its fuzz bass and energetic piano. [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zvlOu4kT2Y"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zvlOu4kT2Y[/url]

I play guitar in a band which has had two basschatters on bass. When I joined, it was LawrenceH, and when he moved down south he was replaced by McNach. That's not a huge sample of the forum, but both are nice dudes and good bassists. I'm pretty sure basschatters have a higher throughput of basses and gear than other bassists though, as most of the non forum using bassists I know are one-bass guys.