AM1

[quote name='Martin E' post='431635' date='Mar 11 2009, 04:34 PM']I want to switch instruments during a performance – in my case I want to start using my Stagg EUB for some numbers. Short of obviously pulling one plug out of the amp and inserting the other how would a professional do this? Some footswitch arrangement maybe? The EQ settings on the amp I could get away with for both bass and upright but the volume for each instrument would have been carefully set at the sound check. How does everyone else do it? Any tips appreciated – I like to keep things as simple and foolproof as possible. Thanks[/quote] Hi - haven't read the thread so apologies if I'm repeating something someone else said. There does seem to be an element of engineering a problem to fit the solution but in this instance, a simple, cheap and professional solution is back to basics...a good old fashioned cable with a kill switch. Planet Waves do a decent one, with right angled connectors. Cheers AM

Yo I need an ampage crash course and fast! Any willing [s]victims[/s], whoops, volunteers?! Might be a beer in it, if I don't manage to run away fast enough ha ha. Advance warning - I am ultra, ultra geeky on techie details so prepare for some brain zapping questions! Cheers AM

[quote name='Jimbo' post='434467' date='Mar 14 2009, 10:20 AM']AM, Was this the kind of technique you were thinking of? [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9uEl17my-o"]Sample from Rocco Prestia's instructional video[/url][/quote] Alright Jimbo, absolutely spot on. Thanks for that link to that vid on youtube, that's absolutely excellent, I had no idea that stuff was on there! Amazing technique. Rocco Prestia does actually describe them as ghost notes in that clip as well. It's those little percussive "taps" but they're also actual notes sometimes. I am trying to mute with my left hand (fretting hand) not my right, my difficulty is just co-ordinating my hands. I practice every day but it's my hands techniques that's slowing down progress, so this instructional stuff is fantastic, many thanks. Cheers AM

[quote name='William James Easton' post='432860' date='Mar 12 2009, 08:54 PM']Today is a bad day. After 3 and a bit years with out playing. I finally get back into it. buy some new gear and put all my free time into brushing up my skills. Then after a year of writing and jamming it seems that 2 of the members of my so called band decide they don't have time to do it. I am gutted. I've worked so hard picking myself up after a very bad patch and have focused on playing original music again. and now, even though i have more on my plate then ever, i am the one being let down by people who i thought where going to get that spring back in my musical step. Do i think "forget it" sell up and give up or should i just hold out for a pub covers band to turn up just for the sake of playing? some one please slap me and point me in the right direction. respectfully yours Will '08457 90 90 90' Easton[/quote] Hi. Although new to the bass, it's not my first instrument. I've been exactly where you are and I can tell you categorically that if you jack it in for good, you will look back eventually and deeply regret it. You can never recover that wasted time. Music is therapeutic, even in the bad times with no band. Selling up is absolutely the worst thing you can do, it's closing the door and there's too much finality. What about the days when you just had a bad day and want to pick up an instrument and disappear into that void for a few hours and you can't. A bad patch with music in your life is better than a great patch with no music in your life. In the times with no band, there are plenty of other things that you can to re-ignite passion for music. One basic example - buy a looper and start playing over your own loops or with drum loops. Do some writing and recording. Why don't YOU be the one that puts together a set and a band. Find like-minded people who have passion for playing and don't want to rely on it for a source of income only (these are often very jaded musicians). There are still people out there that genuinely, through pure love of music, want to do it for music's sake. While you are looking, keep hammering the practice, set some goals and be single minded about it. The only difference between flogging your gear and finding something truly great is your own motivation. Don't give up - you will live to bitterly, bitterly regret it. Believe me, that is a [b]much, much[/b] worse place to be in than where you are now. Cheers AM

[quote name='mrcrow' post='432737' date='Mar 12 2009, 06:37 PM']woooooohoooooooooooo!! rocket science..[/quote] Indeed! Your modification was interesting - but a bit like putting all the eggs in one basket!

Hi, resolved, thanks to all, a loose ground wire was the culprit.

Thanks to all for the great advice - I've gone for the ER20s for now. Having had ringing in my ears after the last few rehearsals, using ANY protection for now is better than nothing! EDIT - I also found out that an Ipod plays at the equivalent of 120db, which is loud enough to cause hearing damage long term. Lesson learned about cranking up the earphone volume! The problem is I LOVE loud music - why is it that everything that is good, is bad for you! Regards AM

Like you, I haven't been playing bass long either. Here's a few things that have really helped me. Understanding the role of the bass in both the rhythmn and harmony capacities is fundamental. The bass has a dual role in a band. Listening to drums is crucial. Drum and bass are both rhythmn instruments, but the bass is also an instrument of harmony. A chord does not become a chord until you the bass player decide what root note to play. When you practice, always use a metronome or drum loops. Drum loops are the best because you can use the drum fills to construct fills on the bass. The bass players that I like tend to play grooves in the verse and fills mirroring the drums. The bass is really like a mini drum kit but with dozens of little pitched drums! Forget learning other people's basslines for a while. It is fun but doesn't particularly progress or advance your playing. Writing your own basslines and recording them against drum samples will teach you much more. It is boring but crucial to learn scales, chords, modes, intervals, triads and arpeggios. So, for example if your guitarist says, in the verse, we play C, F, G major chords...if you know the notes of those chords, you can break them down into major triads or arpeggios by playing the root of the chord, the note that's a major 3rd above and the note that's a major 5th above or even the octave notes. Now you know some notes you can play on top of guitar chords but you don't have to mirror what the guitarist is doing. Even if you start in one key only and learn these building blocks, it will make a huge difference in being able to construct basslines that complement songs. It isn't always a bad thing for the bass to play the same riff as the guitar a la Geezer Butler style but breaking out of the mould is definitely useful longer term. If you learn as much harmony and chords as you can, including what scales and modes work over what chords, you can do a lot. As long as you hit the right notes when chords change, you can get away with a lot in between. But - not to be a broken record - keeping time with the drums is key. A poor timekeeping bass player can break a good band and a solid but not very technical player can lift a poor band. Work on rhythmn and when you start hearing where the drummer throws in fills, that's the place to also throw in bass runs. Buy a cheap keyboard and learn how to play chords and scales. This will teach you about intervals and harmony and the impact upon chords of playing different root notes and building additional notes upon chords. I have got some useful material I can send you if you send me your email address. Don't get disheartened, just think about what you can achieve if you step away from learning basslines. Anyone can be a bassline jukebox, but the real joy of the bass for me is the ability to construct basslines that work for different musical styles. Regards AM

How do you play those little percussive taps on the bass? I know the strings are supposed to be muted but I can't co-ordinate my hands to do the mute notes and then play normal notes quickly. It sounds so easy when I listen to others do it!

I'm after a bit of advice really - I know musicians with tinnitus and by all accounts it's hell. The damage doesn't manifest itself immediately either, it can accumulate over years. Being beside the drums AND a bass amp is loud...I want to avoid ear damage. My question - other than price, what is the difference between relatively cheap ear plugs and the more expensive ones? Regards AM

[quote name='peteb' post='378523' date='Jan 13 2009, 12:32 AM']My twopenth for what it's worth! I have spent many years playing in hard rock bands (classic rock if you will) and have been lucky to play with several very good players in that particular idiom, in particular guitarists The best guitar players around generally couldn’t read a note! That is not to say that they didn’t have a decent working knowledge of theory, but couldn’t read However, there was one guy who had been to music college, good singer, could play several instruments to a high standard (he was also a session horn player) and was very clever at arranging songs but was a very uninspiring lead guitar player with no real fire or aggression and it was generally acknowledged that there were a few other guys out there who could play rings round him! Years later of course, no one from that scene ever had more than pretty minor success but guess who is the only one to have made a fortune out of music (writing music for computer games) Yep, the guy who went to school and could read…..[/quote] Interesting point - I have now seen quite a few bass players (some of whom have been playing a really long time) whom are technically very good, but there is absolutely NO "feeling" to their playing and they have poor phrasing. To me, it's ALL about phrasing - it is intrinsically linked with "feel" i.e. groove. But there is a dichotomy in that it can be difficult to replicate "groove" from notation.... P.S. I loved the music from the old Dizzy games on Amstrad CPC 464. A lot of these guys have theory backgrounds - reading helps with composition. Regards AM

[quote name='XB26354' post='429748' date='Mar 9 2009, 08:04 PM']This comes up in every music-related forum I have visited. How far would most of us get in everyday life without being able to speak, understand, read and write English (or whatever your chosen language is)? Sure there are some who never learn properly (or people who emigrate and can't/won't learn the native language), but they miss out on massive chunks of society. Why should music be any different? If you make music and don't understand how it works then you miss out massively. A lot of indigenous music isn't written down and doesn't need to be, and that is fine. Standard notation is the de facto standard for writing out music for other people to play (often without rehearsal). I don't think that Leland Sklar, Nathan East, Marcus Miller, Will Lee, Pino Palladino, Freddie Washington, JJ Burnel, David Hungate, Anthony Jackson, Tony Levin, James Jamerson or Chuck Rainey suffer/suffered from being able to read music! You may totally dislike classical music, but just about every musician and composer there has ever been was a reader. They have far greater technical and emotional challenges than we do playing bass, to the point that they don't really have a choice if they want to make the music happen. Once they get it under their fingers then they use their ears, experience and heart to turn it into real music (just like every other musician). I started playing by ear, had a good ear, then decided to teach myself music theory from a book. I went from there into understanding "jazz" harmony and arranging. I still love playing along with records or jamming, and as I get older appreciate all forms of music. It all reinforces itself - a good ear puts sounds to what you see on the page, and the theory formalises and recognises the patterns that occur in music (as well as nature). I blame the lack of decent music education in this country and the woeful standard of a lot of private teachers (of all instruments). Learning to read is not difficult, it just takes a bit of practice and dedication. The reward is the last 500+ years of music history.[/quote] Hi, great post. I love classical music and strongly believe that a grounding in classical music (particularly piano due to polyphony elements) hugely develops the ability to play by ear anyway as well as developing fundamentals such as harmony, chords , intervals, arpeggios, etc. Regards AM

Hi - it's the marcus miller signature jazz - thanks for the diagrams....there are two tone controls for active mode on the marcus miller jazz so I just wanted to check which wires were earths etc...there is buzzing from the output so it may be a loose connection. Completely random - bass was perfect one day, then the next day buzzing. Luckily, I've ahem, adopted another bass as a spare. Cheers AM

Hi As the title says, I'm looking for a wiring schematic for Fender Jazz basses, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. Cheers AM

[quote name='dlloyd' post='391590' date='Jan 26 2009, 11:58 AM']I think it's more likely the other way around. Those who are impressed by w***ery are more likely to learn the parts of theory that will enable them to replicate it. It's sad that people are being turned off theory by an unjustified association with bad music.[/quote] Yes, deeply sad, as is the attitude that people who like jazz and are trained are "playing w*nky music". Those persons liking a certain genre of music and learn to read/theory in order to play their chosen style doesn't make them any less of a musician or person than a guy who plays root notes in a pub. Musical snobbery does nothing to further the debate. There are some pieces of music you simply cannot learn by ear and reading is useful and there are some that have groove which you simply can't learn/replicate from reading a score. Being able to do both makes you a more versatile musician.

[quote name='BigBeefChief' post='391569' date='Jan 26 2009, 11:45 AM']No I don't. There's loads of benefits. I don't dislike theory. I DON'T DISLIKE THEORY![/quote] Maybe you personally don't like it. However, inadvertently you are implying that the learning of theory and reading has a detrimental effect on the quality of music that trained musicians produce. But you make fundamentally flawed and illogical arguments to support this. Also, you keep stating your own views about disliking jazz. Whether you like a genre of music or not is irrelevant in the determination of whether theory is beneficial or not. There is no place for musical snobbery in this discussion. Learning to read music opens doors, whether you want to be a pro, or a hobbyist. If your band got a recording contract and have to stick with the budget for recording, the ability to read music means you can speak the lingo, communicate to each other effectively and lay down recordings straight from certain points rather than wasting time faffing and saying..let's take it from the bridge, let's go from the last chorus, let's start again, etc. Same goes for rehearsals. Whether you want to learn to read or not, your argument that doing so, produces a weaker, less creative musician, is erroneous. Attempts to progress your argument, by suggesting identification of certain musicians as a way to prove a point, is a flawed methodology for strengthening an argument, because you are using a subjective factor, which means you will always use that subjectivity to favour your own points. Regards AM