chris_b

IMO these are great amps, they have their own sound and the one thing they are not going to do is sound like your Eden. I found the TH500 to be pretty intuitive. I kept the drive switched off until I'd got a sound I liked out of the rest of the amp.

If you are never going to gig then a small amp like the Ampeg pf20t would be an idea, or any 200 watt amp. But if there are gigs in the future I'd get a good 500 watt amp. One that sounds good at low volume and can be cranked as well. That's my Aguilar amps to a T. I'm learning some songs for the weekend playing along to the laptop in my front room and I'm using my Aguilar TH500 and 2 BF One10's. As quiet as you want it to be and bags of great tone.

Apparently Sadowsky has split the ranges between dealers. I'm not sure about Bass Direct (but they are a dealer), the Bass Gallery only handles NYC basses and Guitar Guitar Metro basses. I believe Thoman does them all. If you can buy the bass from a dealer here you might not be troubled by HMRC. Email Sadowsly to ask who is the dealer for the series you want.

Love it. 2 drums and a hi-hat. Love that especially.

IMO if we all agreed it would be great. Who doesn't like being patted on the back and told their views are spot on. Tell me you think I'm right. . . that never gets boring!

On a gig, in any genre, JB always gave 110%. I bought Songs For A Taylor and Harmony Row (he started to lose me after that) and saw JB with Tony Williams Lifetime, at the Marquee, and with John Walters big band all over London (all exciting gigs). Didn't buy any Cream records though. After seeing the gigs the recordings didn't do them justice.

The Vox Foundation was also available at the time. 50 watts and a 118. I had one. Nothing but extreme woolliness. You guys think you can get a bad sound today!!!!

Ed, 100% on target, as usual.

I've just put a set of D'Addario NYXLs on my Jazz. No residue problems for me.

Oh Yeah and Ah Um were required listening in my school band, we had a 3 piece brass section. We used to play Oh Lord, Don't Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me.

Agreed, but it's also a testament to him being such a royal PIA flip-wit that he managed to gett himself kicked out of the band that's finally stopped putting up with his nonsense after 40 years.

This could easily be a weight issue. I screwed my lower back 15 years ago after 10 years of lifting very heavy Mesa Boogie cabs, about 90lbs each. Now, any bass over 9 1/2 lbs is too heavy. On a good day 9 1/2lbs is my maximum for a 2 hr gig, but way too heavy for a 4 hr rehearsal. So far my experience is that less than 9lbs is OK. When I'm feeling good I can use my Sadowsky but otherwise it has to be the 8 1/2lb Lull P. So depending on the problem even something as small as 1/2lb can be make or break for a damaged back. The serious bit: If you get a lower back problem you'll discover, if you are very lucky, it can stabilise. These injuries rarely go away completely and the usual course is that it will gradually get worse over time. The time to be looking after your back is before you have a problem.

I remember double bass player Brian Brocklehurst (and his Sherlock Holmes pipe) frequently on TV backing folk singers etc back then.

The band I was in at school has an annual get together. The band was very good for the time and the places we used to play, think Blues Brothers minus the dark glasses and about 10 years earlier. It even worked pretty well when we did some 30 year anniversary gigs. Sadly, we've lost a few guys since then so, these days I'm happy to be sitting in a pub in the West End with no instruments involved. We reminisce a little but usually the chat is just about life during the last year.

Last night there were several instances of, "Phew, I don't think anyone noticed. I might have got away with that one!"

The first guitarist I played with used a Futurama 2 Deluxe. When we started practising together I switched to playing bass lines on my awful and impossible-to-play-chords Spanish guitar. Bass playing. What a revelation that was!

I used to drink in a pub In Chiswick with Warwick Rose, the original bass player with Love Affair. All the stories seem to indicate that they didn't like being a boy band, but the message I got was that they didn't really like each other very much either. By this time Warwick was in a band called Tangerine Peel, another car crash of a band. The singer was Mike Chapman and he was already writing Chapman/Chinn type pop songs for them but they all hated him and his music and just wanted to be a rock band. We all know how that turned out!!

Russ Stableford was also the bassist on Je T'aime.

AWB were touring in the US and they met up with the James Brown band. The JB's said they had a lot of people congratulating them on their new record, Pick Up The Pieces! They had to tell everyone it wasn't them! If you want more Scottish Funk, checkout the Haggis Horns.

If you're going to play a cover, do it properly. . . Featuring Trevor Barry on bass. Featuring Steve Pearce on bass.

Another reason US instruments were few and far between in the UK back then. . . was price. I bought my Fender Precision in 1969 for just over £90. I was living in Brussels and they gave me a discount price because I was a pro musician. The UK didn't give discounts on musical instruments. Others were allowed reduced tax on "tools of the trade" like cameras but musicians had to pay full whack. So my £90 was actually about £122 in the UK and that would have been about £1900 in today's money. Very few working musicians in the UK could afford that, which why so many were using Framus, Hofner, Burns, Kay etc.

Sounded pretty good to me. Everyone seems on top form, hit their marks played everything right. Why the negativity? Vocals and vocalists are usually overrated and Mick Fleetwood can never be too loud.

. . . . then Albert King put out Born Under A Bad Sign on Stax and everything changed again!

The rhythm players I knew back then were all into the likes of Ray Charles and the brass players were all over John Coltrane. Then BB King Live At The Regal came along closely followed by Blues Is King and everything changed.

Louis Cennamo. What a great player.