TimR

Great thread.

I have ordered one to 'replace' my Warwick ProFet 5.1. Nothing wrong with it other that it weighs close on 15kg in the flight case. 

It's due back in stock 28th April. I may or may not have it in time for May 5th gig where I'll give it a spin. 

I have 2x Warwick Pro 211 cabs which are 250w per cab, and 25kg each!, so hoping for some great volume from this. 

Will report back. 

Then maybe looking at some barefaced cabs...

4 hours ago, Mykesbass said:

Don't know anything about your specific health issues, but do take a look at @Happy Jack's post on posture. I used to suffer with lower back pain, but Pilates has put paid to this.

Good post. Simple bodyweight exercises like planks and mountain climbers will strengthen your back and shoulders without too much impact. 

Travelled 80 miles to a gig to find the place had shutdown and was boarded up. This was pre-mobile phones so not only had each of the band driven there but so also had a group of hard-core supporters. 

On 07/04/2024 at 07:45, casapete said:

Wonder if they’d taken more than expected on the bar they then would have paid you extra?
Absolute tw*ts.

Played a gig once where the locals were calling their mates to come down to see 'the band' while we were playing.

The place was rammed by the end of the night.

We got £500 instead of the £350. 

Never happened since. 😂

15 hours ago, TheGreek said:

Even though they made good on the fee eventually I'd still name and shame on as many social media sites as I could. 

I'd avoid doing that. Legally you're on shaky grounds. If a business suffers from something you wrote, you'd better be able to defend your words. 

Plus when the place changes hands as they do regularly, the new owner is saddled with a bad reputation. So you've achieved nothing other than sending another potential live music venue down the tubes. 

@solo4652

Might be worth a read.

51 minutes ago, cheddatom said:

Great young newish band in yesterday. The drummer can't play a beat and I'm wondering why he's trying to play it, when he clearly can't. I offer advice from a drummer's POV - he was struggling with the bass drum so I suggested adjusting the height of his stool, and adjusting the pedal. It got to the point of "we're going to have to simplify the part", but the guitarist said "hold on, let me play the demo". They'd recorded a decent demo of the song some months back, and the drummer was playing the beat in question perfectly! That left no choice but to go over and over until he got it. A frustrating hour and a half but worth it in the end.

 

They actually gave me their demo, less the drums, to use as a guide track and that saved a lot of time. I suggest this to a lot of bands but these are the first to ever do it!

Red light fever?

Intelligence measurement is normalised so that its an evenly distributed bell curve. 

Exactly half the population are below average intelligence. 

But it's like driving - some people are better than others, we set a lower limit and test, those that don't make the lower limit can't drive. 

Unfortunately there's nothing like this test for using social media. 

I don't understand the question.

What is 'home practice'? 😉

Actually to be fair when we do a cover version we do it in the style, rather than someone's version.

We have guitar, bass and drums. So many songs are just what arrangements we come up with to approximate something recognisable. 

I tend to prefer our versions and I suspect that's what must of us do, even if we won't admit it. 

Going back and listening to the 'original' after we have been playing something a while is quite odd and can often lead to some confusion as to how 'our version' goes. 

2 minutes ago, Steve Browning said:

 

Thank god you cleared that up for me. I'd never have guessed.

I'm not sure anyone is supposed to 'enjoy' it. It's done to serve a function. 

9 minutes ago, Steve Browning said:

 

Hi Nik.

 

I just find his playing way more than is needed, and it leaves me a bit cold. It's all horses for courses, naturally enough. I don't profess to be the arbiter in any such discussion (none of us holds that distinction). I'm not much of a fan of any player that feels the need to draw attention to themselves, be they a YouTuber or virtuoso. Neither of them do stuff that I enjoy. 

 

I can't do much of what they do, but then I don't want to. I appreciate technique, don't get me wrong. It just doesn't float my boat.

 

YouTube is all about bringing attention to yourself. You won't get millions of people subscribing to a chanel where players are just playing roots or doing stuff anyone can do at home themselves. 

2 hours ago, badger said:

half the people will always be below-averagely educated though.

That doesn't matter. As long as 80% of people can understand the basics. It's when they can't understand the basics and then question them you have trouble. 

8 minutes ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

From different, strictly logical, perspective popularity will always be a strictly a quantitative parameter/statement, and can never be a qualitatively parameter/statement.

 

Doesn't matter. Popular is right. 

If you have a qualitative statement you want people to agree to you need weight of opinion to agree it. That's why education is so important. If the uneducated outnumber the uneducated you have a serious issue. 

12 hours ago, tauzero said:

 

I think it boils down to the engineer aspect being the recording of the instruments and voices, and the producer aspect being putting them all together in a pleasing way. Both may be subject to a degree of interference by the musicians involved, especially the latter.

Pretty much all unsigned bands will be producing themselves. 

The engineer is just there to capture the noise. 

Then there's the mix and mastering stages... 

In my experience just leave the engineer to do the mix. Letting the band have any input will lead to everything being louder than everything else.

As per my post of several pages back, the band must be fully rehearsed and know 100% what they're playing and have agreed what everyone is playing fits. Hearing the separate parts for the first time in a studio and finding out the guitarist is playing a minor chord instead of a major chord is too late. Especially when it then descends into an hour of studio time while everyone works out who is right and who is wrong.

The great thing about democracy is if you can find enough people to believe you are right, then you are right.

The popular opinion is always correct. 

19 hours ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

You forget than in many a bass players view here bass being anything but root notes is unnecessary flashy meaningless noise and heresy, regardless if it serves the song or not, according to these people it is simply by definition not possible to groove if you play more than just 1 note, and all songs should groove, if not they are simply to be categorized as meaningless noise!  

 

Well I suppose as it's the Internet you can either only ever play root notes or be a flashy show off. 

I'm obviously one of those flashy show offs as I have been known to quite often play as many as 4 notes in a bar...

I once played 8! 

Tons of 80s tracks were taken directly from the 50s originals. And tons of 50s tracks were taken from the 30's originals. 

It's a tradition handed down through the generations in my house. My grandad told my dad what the originals were, my dad told me, and now I'm telling my son...

Struggled to help lift the large 2 seater sofa from the side room to the area we had been playing in. 

Then, I carried my bass amp 100m home. I got into bed and didn't get out of bed for a week. Went back to work, but I was just going through the motions for the next 2 weeks. Can't remember much of the gig. I'm pretty sure I had coronavirus.  Took a month to recover fully. 

1 hour ago, BigRedX said:

In the days before electronic tuners the practice would be for the rest of the musicians to tune to whatever instrument was the hardest to retune. Normally the the studio piano.

 

However many recordings would have their speed (and pitch) altered in order to get a better feel, usually being sped up, so it is very common for the final released version to somewhere between a quarter and a semitone off standard pitch.

Quite. Anyone not tuning to an electronic tuner nowadays would get some odd looks. 

I'm not sure I've ever tuned to a 'computer'.

1 hour ago, pst62 said:

Billy Sheehan. A nice enough bloke, but to me, he's just a ten a penny 80's guitarist arsing around on four strings.

In the mid 80s when he was playing with Steve Vai for Dave Lee Roth, it was ground breaking. They're still among my all time favourites. 

 'ten a Penny 80s guitarists' describes him quite well, but no kne was doing that on bass.

Now it is a bit tedious. 

1 hour ago, jonnybass said:

The thing I dont understand on this thread is the people judging playing and players because someone's definition of bass doesn't fit with theirs. 

That's specifically the point of the thread. 

Music is subjective and appeals to each of us differently. 

I went to see Richard Bona a few years ago with a group of bass players (in real life!).

They were raving about him, I hadn't even looked him up on YouTube. He didn't come on until 9:30 on a midweek gig (doors open at 7pm). Half the audience left before the second set to get their last train home. 😂

That kind of primadonna behaviour didn't impress me. He walked up and down the balcony for a half hour from 9pm.

I stayed to the end but really he didn't do anything different after the first 10 minutes. I still haven't listened to any of his recorded material.

Finding musicians who work together musically is hard enough, before you put gigs into the mix.

People's lives change as well, when the join a band they may be free to play lots of gigs and happy to play for not much money, but I think what often happens is people are less free and so want more money to put off what ever else they (or their significant other) has planned. 

Also you have to factor in the people who want to be able to tell their freinds they're in a band, but don't actually want to be in a band. They're the ones who will do any low paid local gigs at the drop of a hat. 

Then there's the band leader who thinks the band isn't ready even after 10 years of weekly rehearsals where they change the arrangements each time a song is played. 

48 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

You should never be using a shim to counteract neck. That's what the truss rod is there for.

 

 

No you don't. The whole point of using a partial shim is that you can get away with something really small and thin (and probably invisible once the neck as been re-attached) that changes the angle at which the neck fits into the pocket which allows the saddles to be at a sensible height to get the right action.

 

I once did a series of diagrams clearly illustrating this but they appear to have been lost when Photobucket started wanting payment for image hosting.

When building a guitar why would you route the pocket at an angle?

If you're shimming the pocket to take into account of neck bowing then you have to have that angle, so just shim one end. 

If you're shimming because the whole pocket is too deep (in this case), then you have to shim the whole pocket.