SumOne

For Bass practice, I use the Audio Technica ATH M50X as they give a fairly neutral sound and are somewhere between the Sennheiser HD-25 and the HD-560 in terms of noise isolation and comfort and they have a good long coiled cable. They don't last forever - I'm on my second pair, the foam covering on the ears and headband is particularly thin/weak. For home listening and other stuff though, horses for courses, but I'm a bit of a Sennheiser fanboy: If you want tough, loud, good isolation, then the HD-25 have been DJ and broadcast industry standard for over 30 years for good reason (I still regularaly use my pair that are about 25 years old). But they are best suited to stuff like DJing, they can be a bit uncomfortable to wear at home for a long time and there are headphones that sound more neutral that are better for production stuff. I like open back for listening to music at home if the house is quiet, it feels more 'open', a bit more like you are in the room with the music rather than it directly pushed into your head. They don't block out outside noise though - great if you want to hear the doorbell, not great if you want to block out someone else watching telly in the same room. Sennheiser HD-560 are light, sound good, very comfortable. They'd be my go-to for listening to an album at home in a quiet room. Not always best for Bass playing if you're doing stuff like slap as you can hear the acoustic outside noise as well as the amplified headphone signal. If home listening and wanting wireless and noise cancelling then I like the Sennheiser Momentum 4 as they are quite comfortable, good noise cancelling, good sound, bluetooth. You can plug a cable into them for Bass practice but my main use of these is train and plane journeys and work calls rather than Bass playing. ....or, the Boss Waza Air Bass are great, I had some and sold them but am keeping my eye out to get some again. On paper, they're not much better than using an NUX Mighty Plug with the ATH M50X (a combination which saves about £200), but getting rid of that headphone cable is quite a bit more liberating than you'd expect, tough call to say if it's £200 worth of liberation though!

Lowrider sound a lot like Kyuss, I think they'd take that as a compliment. Also Bongripper with Electric Wizard.

Queen Ifrica (With Bob Sincliar, Sly & Robbie), The Beat Goes On

I haven't found compressors to be great at 'cleaning up' a sound, they are good at adding sustain, making notes have a consistent attack/release and limiting peaks, and some of them are good at adding a certain tone. But if the sound going into the compressor are 'un-clean' (e.g. overtones from other un-played strings etc) then depending on the compressor and how it's set it can bring up the volume of those un-wanted sounds while squishing the sounds you want into one monotonous/un-lively sound. If it's short defined punchy notes you want then perhaps muting and EQ would help more than compression.

I think reverb can sound good with Bass at home/recording but I've not got it to sound good playing live as the room room already has natural reverb, being in a pub and making the Bass sound like you're in a hall while the rest of the band have the natural room reverb just doesn't sound right. So I've just tended to use reverb at home with multi-fx, the Boss GT 1000 Core was good for it, at the moment I tend to use a Nux mighty plug for home practice and that has a reverb.

Everton Blender, Ghetto People Song 💥

Short songs that jump straight into the hook/chorus and fit in with popular playlist choices (e.g. 'relaxing work music', 'gym music', 'house party') are apparently a good way to go if you want streams. But then again, you don't get much money from streams so I wouldn't bother too much myself if money was my aim - other than using it a means to promote yourself (like radio) and then make money through merchandise or live gigs or getting your music licensed for games or tv. I'd try and go with management/small record label that put expertise into promo/marketing, or Bandcamp and social media of you want to try and make money directly through selling music.

RIP

Boss Waza Air Bass (some went for £200 on here a while ago, that's a bit of a bargain though, they are about £350 new).

I don't get on with Basses that are too heavy, or with tight string spacing. And phallic looking horns are a turn off!

J.Bs 'The Grunt' Great Bass sound from Bootsy.

I might be proved wrong (usually am!) but I expect these sort of things will get more popular for a few years and then the novelty will wear off - like 3D cinema. Or, there have been concert films for ages but it's never really become much of a thing to go to the cinema to watch them.

It looks great with the GK-5 (does then cost about £1k though!). Assigning different sounds to each string (and each range of notes on a string) is a great party piece - especially to turn your Bass into a drum kit. And being able to trigger other synths opens it up to make just about any sound. .....but yeah, latency/tracking low is an issue. If Nate's playing (with a mute) can get 'a little inaccurate' and needed 'many performance takes to get the tracking just right' then there isn't much hope for me! I kind of feel that £1k and perfecting a different playing technique could be better money/time spent by playing a keyboard (you can get a great synth keyboard for £1k). Also, tracking aside, a keyboard is always going to also be a more practical way of playing in a piano/synth style of playing multiple notes at the same time with both hands, having things like pitch wheel, accessible controls to change parameters etc. I love the idea of playing synth via Bass, and love synth Bass sounds, but I dunno - I think it's something that a keyboard is always going to be better at, in the same way that playing a keyboard to sound like a Bass guitar is never quite as good as playing a Bass guitar.

Nice! One of the things I prefer about Precision vs Jazz is their one-piece pieckguard/control panel - it seems a nicer design to me than the usual Jazz thing with a seperate chrome control panel and different pickguard. Without going the custom Tiny Tone route (which would be good, but being custom I guess gets expensive), does anyone know where I can get a one-piece plastic one just off the shelf? Something like this to go with my USA Sunburst Jazz: It seems Fender produced them for a while in the 80s and 90s https://www.talkbass.com/threads/fender-jazz-bass-with-a-one-piece-pickguard-american-traditional-90s-mim-etc.857688/

I'm not sure about that, it's what people like to say, along with 'I'm not into genres, just good music'. Yeah, everyone likes what they personally think is good music, that kind of goes without saying - but it's subjective and it's like saying 'I like good food', you'll still often want to know if you're going to get pizza or a curry - and what type of curry, and you'll probably have some food you generally prefer over others. Catagorising food, or music, or films, or books, or styles of art etc. is useful to the consumer. I don't thing it's generally b/s made up by music journo's for their own benefit, or even by artists/labels for thir own benefit. Reggae (a name made up by an artist), has sub-genres and offshoot like 'lovers rock' (named after a record label), 'dub' (named after recording technique or dubplates), '2 tone' (record label) etc....I don't think they set out thinking 'I'll make up a new genre name' they were just making something slightly original/different and so it naturally gets called something different as a useful way to communicate the sound, it is just how music evolves.

Those genres have been around for most of your gigging years though!

'I just like good music' is all well and good, but there are over 100 million songs on Spotify alone (about 600 years of constant listening) and 60,000 songs added to it every day, so you need some way of focussing in on finding what you want to hear and genres/sub-genres are a reasonably simple way to do it. Even if we were limited to a few genres like folk, rock, pop, country, blues (it'd be a boring world if we were!), Country alone has been sub-catagorised into long list of sub-genres (at least according to Wikipidia). Alternative country Americana Cowpunk/Country-punk Gothic country Roots rock Australian country music Bush band Bakersfield sound Bluegrass Old-time bluegrass/Appalachian bluegrass Traditional bluegrass/Neo-Traditional bluegrass Progressive bluegrass/Nu-grass Bluegrass gospel Bro-country Canadian country music Christian country music Classic country Coastal Country Country and Irish Country blues Country en Español Country folk Country pop/Cosmopolitan country Country rap/Hick-hop Country EDM Country rock Cowboy pop Cowboy/Western music Dansband music Franco-country Gulf and western Hokum Honky tonk music Instrumental country Lubbock sound Nashville sound Countrypolitan Neotraditional country New country Old-time music Outlaw country Progressive country Rockabilly/Neo-Rockabilly Psychobilly/Punkabilly Gothabilly/Hellbilly Southern rock Southern soul Sertanejo music Talking blues Traditional Country music Truck-driving country Cowboy/Western music New Mexico music Red dirt Tex-Mex/Tejano Texas country Progressive country Western swing Phonk and Bronx Drill are just a sub-genres of Hip-Hop, partly characterised by location and sound/lyrical themes (Phonk uses choped beats, Drill tends to be dark with street/gang lyrics), the sub-catagories are probably quite uesful for people really into that music.

Chris has just bought a pedalboard from me and as with our previous dealings all was good. Thanks!

I've bought a Bass frem Clarky and all was good- as described, good comms and meeting etc. And cheers for the lift!

There's a lot of different lyrical themes, love and heartbreak are what trend to sell pop records though. Reggae: Being a rasta, fighting injustice, weed. Hip Hop: Making money, being the greatest. Punk: Fighting the government/system. Stoner/Doom: Weed, evil/menacing stuff ending the world. Death metal: Horror. Funk: Getting on up/down.