Dankology

Just wanted to post a thank you to @tom1946for an excellent hassle-free and worry-free amp sale a couple of weeks ago - couldn't be happier with my new purchase and would recommend that other members buy with confidence 🙂

That's a great poster/photo. Did you do it yourselves?

I can't think of any famous ones but surely anyone called Pedro would be in peril here.

I've somehow joined one of my favourite bands for a short tour. Can't wait 😀

I'm not sure it is regarded as their worst album so much as an odd piece of pre-history but the self-titled live debut from Jane's Addiction is my favourite of theirs. Great idea for a thread 😀 looking forward to checking out the Cult LP mentioned above.

Just bumping this (cos I really want that amp)

I hadn't thought of that! I'm now wondering how much my amp actually affects the sound - I usually use quite a few effects... Will do a bit of experimenting. Thank you 🙂 These look great and are pretty much what I was looking at for at home too. I can't find any in stock at the moment though but I'm badly multitasking - will have a proper look later on. Thank you!

An odd turn of events has led to me playing a run of gigs with one of my all-time favourite artists. The shows will be slightly unorthodox in terms of the production and presentation and it has been gently suggested that I should be looking at a small amp. I currently have a Trace GP12 combo (which has started to malfunction this week, of course) and a Laney R7 (which I've often struggled with and usually gets sneered at when I've lent it to other people). I've had the Blackstar Unity things on my radar for a while now but I don't like the idea of having to buy their powered cab if I ever want to up the ante; the Fender Rumbles are of course ubiquitous and I quite like the look of the Session 77. I don't really want to spend a big chunk of money on a new amp so secondhand is a definite option and I'm not especially keen to do the sensible thing and just go via DI (partly due to habit and partly due to not knowing what the monitoring is going to be like). So, two questions: am I missing any obvious options here? And does anyone have something appropriate to sell me? Apologies for the vague details - don't want to jinx anything so early in the day but will definitely report back in full in due course.

I occasionally bring a fretless to rehearsal and no-one ever notices. This may be due to a multitude of factors, the least likely of which being impeccable intonation on my part. Musicians are generally conservative sorts - I'd suggest auditioning with what they want to see and then sneaking the fretless in later.

Been back for 3 days now, I'm afraid 😆

"and if they write their own I am too old!" May I ask how old you are? At 43 I'm the baby of our originals band 😀

I'm at the Holiday Inn in Hemel Hempstead until Friday morning when we drive back to Lancashire - fairly tied up with daughter's birthday activities but please send me a direct message if I can be of use.

Reading all these stories here has reminded me of our horrible old neighbour back where we used to live. She really was a caricature of a grumpy old lady: constantly complaining about parking, shouting through the wall when our baby was crying, lopping branches of trees & throwing them back over the fence, but also capable of a complete volte face and endlessly keeping my other half talking over the fence when she was trying to garden etc. I had bought a drum kit (it may even have still been one of those Arbiter Flats kits at this point) and tended to have a bit of a practice in the upstairs spare room when I got home from work - no more than 20mins at most at around 6pm or so. One day after comig back downstairs, I noticed that her TV/radio was at blisteringly high volume and I felt a bit bad that I'd forced her to turn up so loud. This kept happening and the length of time the volume stayed up became longer and longer - eventually lasting several hours after I'd finished playing. One day I realized that what I could hear was Buzzcocks playing at full pelt through the wall - very much not her sort of music at all. A bit of detective work revealed that she was putting Radio 2 on maximum volume in the living room and decamping elsewhere in the house. After several days of this I brought my little FM sender thing in from the car (the sort of thing that allowed you to tune a car radio into an MP3 player), tuned it into the Radio 2's frequency and spent many happy hours pumping horror movie soundtracks, weird Youtube finds and late period Scott Walker into her house. If I'd had access to the old War of the Worlds broadcast I'd probably have beamed that through as well. I suspect I'm an awful person. But nowhere near as awful as she was.

Thanks for the full and impassioned response @Baloney Balderdash It was a secondhand private sale so no hope of sending it back but I've just had a word with the local guitar chap and he's going to have a look for me. I really don't get Rickenbacker. Having lost many hours of my life to restringing my 12 string and putting up with its ridiculous approach to intonation, I should've known better. Which isn't to say that I don't love my new bass but some of the design flaws (not to mention the weird amount of attitude in the documentation and online) beggars belief. But it looks and sounds great so I'm going to make it work 🙂

I picked up a 4003s a few weeks ago and haven't spent a massive amount of time playing it yet. I've found that there's quite a lot of fret buzz at frets 1-3 on the E (and to a lesser extent when digging in on the A). The action is reasonably high - the E is about 4mm at the 12th fret. The neck seems uncommonly flat but that seems to be how it is designed to be. Having only recently ventured into the realms of truss rod adjustment, I am well out of my depth with a dual-rodded neck that is apparently meant to be set without any relief. Please could I have some pointers towards figuring out how to reduce the buzz?

Is anyone else experiencing issues uploading HD video to Youtube? I've always uploaded my HD material in wmv format after reading multiple recomendations to do so. Last week I uploaded one in MP4 (1080p 23.9fps; approx 80mins long) and it was still "processing HD" a couple of days later. I emailed the help desk - no reply but approx a week later it finished processing... but I was still only left with the downgraded 360p version. I deleted it and uploaded a new WMV version this morning and nearly 12 hours later it is still "processing HD". This would normally be a matter of minute-to-hours. A bit of Googling suggests a few people have had similar issues but the advice ("try a different format", "it might be your upload speed"(!)) doesn't seem very helpful. Have any of the Youtube users here noticed anything similar?

For running scales & arpeggios and general noodling it's a fretless Crafter acoustic that lives in the front room. Sometimes before a gig I'll play along to a rehearsal recording and plug into a Laney 2x10 combo but invariably not with the bass I gig with - and usually one strung with flats rather than my gigging rounds. I may need to have a look at this.

Yep - am probably a borderline hoarder... Not that there is any system - just piles of posters, flyers, unsold tickets, setlists etc in various drawers or shoved onto shelves. Digital preservation is also becoming an issue - we try and film as much as we can and frequently record our rehearsal to multitrack (XR18 making this pretty straightforward) - it's amazing how quickly the gigabytes accumulate. No doubt my kids will unceremoniously bin the lot once I've popped my clogs.

A couple of nice bass artifacts in here alongside the current Scots-themed temporary exhibition. Basses belonging to Matlock, Mani and Redding should appear below. Hooky's Shergold was meant to be there but was mysteriously absent from the cabinet, presumed auctioned. Apologies for slightly underwhelming photos - if I'd been thinking, I'd have made sure I had the polarising filter with me. Tickets are valid for 12 months though - no doubt I'll get another chance. Got some great shots from the nearby Dr Who exhibition too 😀

Looking great in black and white!

Last Friday, actually - not that anyone cares, I'm sure. This was the third gig in an uncharacteristically busy six weeks for our originals trio. We'd had to miss our last rehearsal due to the drummer/singer being poorly and so I'd not been able to check out my lovely new (to me) 4003s ahead of the gig. I still took it but the strings it came with looked like they'd been used to scour pans so I restrung with the only set I had to hand (Warwick Reds bought on a punt). I hate new strings and would never replace a set within a month of a gig if possible, so you can imagine how horrible the originals were. This was also our first gig using Ableton to trigger some samples and between-song FX. We've strarted using a couple of projectors to project black and white footage behind/on/around us but the venue was mainly black so we decided to hang up some band t-shirts as a partial backdrop. Half of which got left at my house but were rescued by my brother on his way down. The venue is one of our local favourites and the soundman was a friend with great gear who had all our presets saved from last time 😃 Improbably, it all seemed to work out ok. As ever, I made some new and entirely unexpected errors on the bass while gliding through the bits that should have tripped me up. It was boiling hot and the Ric wouldn't stay in tune so I'm sure I annoyed all present by having to sdjust after virtually every song. The samples worked ok apart from me managing to trigger one on a loop during one song and not being able to stop it. The t-shirt backdrop thing worked as well as could we expected - we'll probably get some cheaply printed with our logo and sell them for a couple of quid at the end from now on. The only downside was about half the audience walking downstairs to the bar about halfway through and not coming back as they found they could go out the front door hear everything through the open windows while staying cool and enjoying their inhaled substances of choice. Thoroughly enjoyed it, got a decent recording, some nice photos and £200 in the kitty. Would fully recomend the venue (Whip & Kitten, Rawtenstall) to any nearby original bands...

Really very happy so far with this 4003s in walnut after picking it up yesterday evening. I'll have to make a decision regarding the pick up cover - I quite like the way it looks but it seems to be just where my hand wants to be for both picking and fingers. There seems to be a significant discrepancy in volume between the two pick ups when at full whack but they are at wildly different heights. The fretboard is in dire need of a good clean. I don't think I've owned a guitar with a maple fretboard since a Squire Telecaster I had as a teenager - is there anything I need to be wary of? Next gig is in six days - hoping to put it through its paces then 😀

It really was a great way to spend the afternoon and proved that Basschat is not just an effective means of emptying your bank account. Many thanks to @AndyTravis for sorting the gig and backline and @mr zed for the PA and expertise in running it. I absolutely love the idea of being able to go to a pub out in the sticks and hear three bands playing original music - and three very decent bands at that. Video evidence will follow! Still grinning about the whole thing and hoping for some further gigs together.

On iplayer now and sounding very nice.

I saw the Weather Station at Gorilla in Manchester a few months back - was gutted as it had been "upgraded" from a smaller venue and the last time I'd been to Gorilla the sound had been underwhelming. But it was absolutely spectacular. I was making a sneaky audience recording and even that sounds pretty magnificent. I caught the soundman at the end as I had to ask if he was the band's own engineer - nope, just a chap who knew his craft and knew his venue. He looked genuinely touched when I said how good it sounded. There are still some very talented people out there. That said, I rarely go anywhere that holds more than a couple of hundred people so my perspective might be skewed.