Beer of the Bass

Cheers for the thoughts. I'll see if any local shops have more than just the Dunlops. Buying online is a bit of a pain while I'm still trying to find the right one, as don't want to buy them in quantity before I've tried them on. I'm not sure if I fancy trying Dave's reshaping trick on the ones I've got, as they're the celluloid tortoiseshell sort which are really impressively flammable, but I might experiment with dunking them in hot water instead.

I'm sure someone here will be interested - last time I looked, 12 working GEC KT88s on their own would sell for more than the starting price of the amp. I'm guessing from the location and appearance that it'll be part of an old dub reggae sound system!

I've been getting into playing acoustic with a thumb pick, but I can't find quite the right one. Dunlop mediums make the end of my thumb go purple, Dunlop larges slip around and the pick is too long on both of them. Filing the pick part shorter helps a little, but I'd be interested to hear what anyone else uses. Are the perfect thumb picks out there?

I'm still trying to figure out my cutoff point with Zappa. Stuff like the King Kong 1968 clip posted above, and albums like Uncle Meat and Weasels Ripped my Flesh through to the Grand Wazoo are sublime IMO, but some of the later stuff I almost can't bear to listen to. On the late 60s material, there's a real sense of the band trying to play slightly beyond their abilities, which is something I always enjoy hearing. Later on, it seems like he'd got a little too used to having musicians who could play anything, and the resulting sound is a bit too slick for my tastes. I also like the absurdist humour of the early material more than the later smutty stuff. None of this is intended as a dig at Mr Zappa, but when someone is prolific as he was, it's inevitable that not every album will please every listener.

The winter before last was a ridiculously cold one, and I was busking outside regularly with a carved bass. I didn't have a thermometer, but it was a good few degrees below zero most of the time as there was much ice underfoot. I had no problems at all with the bass, but it's really hard to keep your hands working. The left hand is the worst as it's raised up most of the time and doesn't get much blood circulation. I was wearing two pair of socks, army boots, longjohns, several jumpers, a big coat, scarf, hat and fingerless gloves but still couldn't keep my hands warm enough! I was careful about slowing down the changes between warm and cold by leaving the bass in its bag for a while as suggested above. In an ideal world I'd have a second bass for this sort of playing, but I don't have the space to keep one.

Leaving out any copyright concerns, I absolutely won't consider buying something something if I spot that the pictures are not the seller's. This is not so much for intellectual property reasons, but because he's just as likely to be a scammer selling a non-existent item with pictures taken off google images. This tends to be more of an issue on Gumtree than eBay though.

[quote name='the hand of john curley' timestamp='1358622657' post='1942456'] ....ahhhh.....that'll have been this then!!!! [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261083127110"]http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261083127110[/url] [/quote] I do wonder why he bothers. He's paid just short of £140 including delivery and is trying to sell it for £167. Subtract eBay and paypal fees from that and he can't be making much.

I wonder if they're any good? I've been put off tools from Lidl since buying a staple gun which no brand or size of staples I can find works with, though the supplied ones worked fine.

[quote name='oggiesnr' timestamp='1358710844' post='1943874'] In day gone by one of the sights of the folk scene was Martin Carthy obsessively tuning his guitar between songs, sometimes it took longer than the songs! Steve [/quote] I saw him on Thursday and he still does much the same, with nary a tuner in sight. I didn't feel it took anything away from his set, as he's mastered the knack of chatting to the audience while he tunes.

I like the white pickguard best against the orange. It's a great colour - sort of Glasgow Underground orange!

I had a brand-new Korean Squier strat in 1992, and it wasn't very good, to be quite honest. It had a plywood body, unpotted ceramic pickups, nasty tuners and pots that died. A new Classic Vibe would wipe the floor with it! It could probably have been upgraded and set up to play OK, but I wouldn't pay any more for one than you would pay for an Affinity or similar.

[quote name='silddx' timestamp='1358441496' post='1939269'] You have had too much beer my friend [/quote] In an uncharacteristically pedantic moment, I've just looked it up. If Wikipedia is to be believed, in the late 60s there were only large mechanical strobe tuners like the Peterson which were unlikely to be adopted by touring bands. The needle type electronic tuners appeared in the 80s and the clip-on tuners not until the mid 90s. So, "no tuners" was a fair assessment of what was going on here.

Are you sure that's a tuner? I'm only 31, but I've been playing since I was 8 and I can only remember seeing clip-on tuners in the last 10 years or so. When I was a kid, my mum took me to the local music shop to look at tuners, and the only electric tuners were those chunky ones with the needle display and the built-in microphone. Other than that the choice was pitch pipes or a tuning fork, and that was in 1990. I don't think they had clip-on tuners in 1969 - would any veterans care to confirm this? I think it's a flower he tucked under his strings because he liked it!

I find the original recording to be an interesting work as an indicator of what Coltrane was up to at the time, although A Love Supreme does a lot more for me aesthetically. However, I do agree with Bilbo that Giant Steps is mostly played as a tiresome excercise in cleverness nowadays. I've been at at least one jazz jam where the tune has been called by one of the regulars expressly to humiliate less experienced musicians. This is the sort of thing that puts people off getting involved in the Jazz scene!

The accordionist in my old band used to really struggle with feedback, but I suspect his frankly crazy setup was the main contributor. He used a home-made internal mic system, which was mixed together using the inputs of a WEM copicat (also running a slap-back echo). This then went into a 100 watt Laney valve amp feeding a JMI cabinet with a 15" bass driver and a rotating treble horn, Leslie style. This used to be turned up so loud that my bass would be drowned out at some gigs. The resulting sound was halfway inbetween Zydeco accordion and an overdriven Hammond. It was an interesting sound, but we were all pleased when he ditched the huge amp!

I do my own, using a similar process, except my fret levelling beam is a 500mm hardwood turning blank, planed true on one side with 240 grit abrasive stuck to it. After levelling, I do my crowning with a triangular file with the corners ground off (like this one; [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AxeMasters-LARGE-SIZE-FRET-CROWNING-FILE-3-Corner-Luthier-Guitar-/350667278683?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item51a566095b"]http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AxeMasters-LARGE-SIZE-FRET-CROWNING-FILE-3-Corner-Luthier-Guitar-/350667278683?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item51a566095b[/url]) and protect the fingerboard from the file with one of those flexible metal guards. For the crowning, I mark the top of the fret with a permanent marker. then round off each side with the file until I'm left with a very thin line in the centre. I then polish with various grades of abrasive as above. This takes me several hours, but then I haven't done it more than a handful of times as I just do my own instruments. I'm pretty sure it's one of these things that gets quicker with experience!

No double basses yet? I feel that a good double bass has a sort of elegance to its lines and proportions that few (if any) bass guitars have achieved.

In my teens I used to take classical guitar lessons with an excellent teacher who could be quite exacting, but I also played bass in bands on the side. The nails were a bit of a struggle TBH, and I don't think my approach to bass at the time was very sensible - I just kept the nails and developed a really inefficient fingerstyle on bass using the pads of my fingers. I think this really hampered my bass playing when I first started out. I don't play classical guitar any more, but I do like to finger pick on steel-string acoustic. For this I keep a little bit of nail, filing them so they're rounded at the edges but short enough not to get in the way for bass.

Relatively few drivers are sold as being bass-guitar specific, and that includes the ones used in many commercial bass cabs. I've got a cab using B&C 12HPL64s, which I believe are intended as a PA midbass driver.

For me that "halfway house" sound from Chromes lasts for about two months, then they get closer to a traditional flatwound sound. Soaking them in alcohol brings the brighter sound back for a while. I don't know if they're like this for everyone, or if it's some quirk of my skin chemistry!

If you look under violin accessories, they've got a "Dick Chinrest" too, for extra comfort presumably! The Dick company have recently changed their name to Dictum to stop English speakers from giggling, but it seems Thomann didn't get the memo...

The back of the body looks it's made of two pieces glued at a crazy angle. Did Fender ever do this? I've not seen this on [i]any[/i] factory made instrument, but I'm not a Fender expert by any means.

That does look good. I take it the Molotow paints are about as nasty as any other nitro and need a proper respirator? I'm sort of tempted to have a go at a telecaster body some time, but the faff of trying to find a suitable space and not make myself or anyone else ill puts me off somewhat!

Rather nice price for a MIJ Ibanez, if anyones in West Lothian or doesn't mind driving a bit. [url="http://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/ibanez-roadstar-made-in-japan-bass-guitar/1005891760"]http://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/ibanez-roadstar-made-in-japan-bass-guitar/1005891760[/url]

Am I the first to check in post-gig? Ours went OK, a little less packed then we'd hoped for but not bad. I wore my loudest shirt, we had some people dancing and got paid, so I'm happy enough. Happy New Year!