risingson

I haven't been impressed with the U.S ones I've tried and have been put off MTD basses for life, sonically unimpressive to my ears. Prices for these ones are silly!

BB, the first two tunes you listed are two of my favourites, I also love As and all the early Motown tunes. I love his ballads as well, Lately is just a brilliant piece of music!

There seem to be quite a few bass luthiers out there that need a bit of a reality check. Is it too much for them to be humbled by all the interest in their instruments without being egomaniacs?

Unless the rest of your band are being unreasonably loud then I would completely agree with the advice below. Mids are your friend, depending on the bass and room you're playing in but I find somewhere in the 300-500hz range helps (I experiment from room to room) in cutting through in a band situation. Also, I don't know of any onboard active EQ that boosts any one frequency independently, and it takes a bit of fiddling to find out what works best with your preamp. It might be that you just leave it flat and let your amp do the work, in which case see below again [quote]Your EQ and your gear isn't helping the new bass to shine. You've moved up a league with this bass and now you need an amp of the same quality.[/quote]

Gladiator is on ITV2. No gigs tonight, got all the time in the world to sit round and wait for this site to load! Relax, it's Friday night

Great, great bass playing, totally solid and rare to see someone solo with that much character and interest in their playing. I can't listen to Mike Stern for longer than a minute or so though, or Weckl either! Just not my kind of music, really jarring and uninteresting for me at least.

[quote name='Beedster' post='1263178' date='Jun 9 2011, 08:03 PM']Fair point, but I can think of lots of players who've gone from another brand to Fender, or to Warwick, to MM or Wal etc, but none that have gone [i]to[/i] Ric? Perhaps I've missed them?[/quote] Chris Wolsenholme went from Pedulla to Zon to Rik. Ricks are distinctive instruments and I think they've been tied, perhaps wrongly, to rock music, aethetically as well.

You've built up a complexity and taken a knock to your self-esteem because you can't get your head around a type of music that you need to live and breathe. Why? We (mostly) grow up with western music in our ears to the point where we're bogged down in it. I certainly wouldn't know where to start if I was suddenly moved over to Indonesia and was made to play Gamelan all of a sudden, but that's not exactly surprising, is it? I've not grown up about it and it isn't what I've learned and it isn't what I know. If you think about why most people pick up an instrument in the first place, it's probably because they have a love for music. Your talk of 'vanity, narcissism and selfishness' may exist for you, I don't know, but if it does then that will be a recent development of you becoming a competent musician and realising your strengths when you play live and the reaction you get from the crowds... it has a tendency to elevate you above modesty on some level. You clearly just need to remind yourself why you ended up playing music in the first place and persevere with it. The only reason you have a defeatist attitude about what you're doing at the moment is probably because you can't handle something so totally unfamiliar, but just remember the kick you got out of learning your first bass line or guitar part successfully as a fledgling musician and be humbled by the fact you get a chance to play some incredible music that not many western musicians get a chance to play.

[quote name='thisnameistaken' post='1262194' date='Jun 9 2011, 01:21 AM']Bass players who have heard Billie Jean should be able to play Billie Jean. It's one of those 'You obviously play it like this' songs. Anyone who can't play that song at the drop of a hat probably can't play anything without getting a tab off the internet.[/quote] I don't mean it's not straight forward to play (although I dare say I've seen more than a few people mess it up, maybe it's the repetitiveness of it that some people can't handle), I mean if you play anything else apart from what Louis Johnson put down on the record then it's most likely going to sound toss.

My word, that is stunning! Great job!

I depped a gig on Saturday night with 3 other people that had never played together before. We had around 40 tunes to pick from, of which I blagged all but about 2 purely from muscle memory. Learning basslines note for note is fine but the best thing for a bass player to be able to on gigs like the one you describe is to play something that resembles the bass line but is essentially your own, all without overplaying or it sounding wrong. Unless the bass line in a song is integral and has to be played note for note, e.g. Billie Jean off the top of my head, then learning bass lines perfectly removes a lot of the fun of sounding like yourself.

[quote name='Bilbo' post='1261493' date='Jun 8 2011, 05:31 PM']Jaco was, in many ways a lick player. If you listen to a lot of his stuff, you will eventually hear his cliches.[/quote] I kind of agree, however most musicians have their go-to licks that make them sound one of a kind. The difference between someone who just recycles old licks from other players and someone like Jaco was that they were his licks, unique to him and whilst clearly influenced by other musicians, they were of his own construction and were his own brainchild. I love hearing how he had an uncanny ability to leave his hallmark on so many records, even as a sideman as well. James Jamerson used to do the same, those passing notes he used as stepping stones to get to chordal notes was a technique so widely reused but the way he played it made him unique.

As someone who doesn't really love bass guitar 'soloing', I totally 'get' Jaco Pastorius, I think (know) he was an innovator and a genius. I also know that he's like marmite on these kinds of forums and of course everyone is entitled to an opinion, but I think it's quite impossible to deny his impact on the bass guitar. He was like Hendrix except jazz-inflicted: controversial, totally unique and widely imitated.

[quote name='steve-soar' post='1260584' date='Jun 8 2011, 12:45 AM']Just had to listen to that again.[/quote] Get your ears round this Steve, unbelievable bass playing if you've not heard it already

[quote name='51m0n' post='1260558' date='Jun 8 2011, 12:04 AM']Can I point something out to all those here who have some belief that a compressor will remove all dynamics and render your playing lifeless, and equally to all those here who believe it will eradicate any kind of bad technique. You are all wrong. Really really utterly misguided and proof beyond any doubt that you don't really know how a compressor works compared to a limiter say, how it can and should be used in a live context and have not ever used a serious compressor to achieve any specific goal. In which case, don't buy a compressor a few days before a gig, and expect it to work miracles. A compressor, unless set up to completely extreme settings of either threshold or ratio or both, will not either iron out all the dynamics, or render poor technique unnoticeable. Set up properly a compressor is pretty near transparent. By which it is meant that you cannot hear it in operation. You can measure it, you can hear it in the context of a mix, but you actually cant hear it soloed unless you really know what you are doing. Set up properly a compressor can achieve 6dB of compression and you can't feel it when you play, you can't hear it when you listen, yet your quiet signal is 4 times louder than it was. 4 times louder compared to you loudest signal. Or to put it another way, your average RMS level is increased by around 3dB. This is HUGE. You cant feel it though, when you dig in you still perceive the louder note as louder, as a result of the change in the transient, the amount of treble and the decay of thee note. Its all still is there to hear, the compressor will not magic that away. If it is set up right. Any crappiness in your technique will be made far more obvious. Any dodginess in your groove, any excessive fret noise, any bum notes will be made as loud as can be, and will be heard. By everyone in the audience. DO NOT BUY A COMPRESSOR IF YOUR TECHNIQUE IS NOT SORTED ALREADY!!!! Next point, a compressor without a limiter as well is nigh on useless in a live context. You need to set up a compressor to allow the leading edge of the transient to pass, so the attack must be fairly long (say 100ms), otherwise you will rapidly lose those all important clues to the nature of the attack that psycho-acoustically fool you into hearing the dynamics perfectly. This long attack allows the transient to be uncompressed, but the makeup gain you set to raise you overall level also takes up the level of the peak. Without a separate limiter after the compressor you cant stop the most over exuberant peaks from clipping your rig. So you cant get the most out of your compressor. A limiter is different from a compressor, not in what it does, but in the way it is designed to do it. Both devices prevent signal over a set level (threshold) from increasing in volume by their natural amount. A compressor may sniff signal over several tens of milliseconds to determine if the level has crossed the threshold, a limiter may do this over several nanoseconds. So the limiter is all about the peaks, a compressor is more concerned with the averages. A limiter attack setting may be measured up to a millisecond or 10, a compressor attack is typical from 10 ms up to as much as 500ms. Again limiters catch peaks. A limiter will have a ratio near infinity to 1, certainly no less than 10 to 1, a compressor will have a ratio settable from 1:1 to 20:1 typically, some go higher. Compressor are far more gentle devices. A limiter has a threshold set less than a dB from maximum a compressor can be set with a threshold as low as 40dB from maximum and still be useful. I typically set up my compressor with an attack time of around 80 to 120 ms, a ratio of as little as 1.4:1 and a low low threshold. The release is usually around 100ms to 200ms, sometimes less. I aim to get around 6dB of gain reduction, I use the makeup gain to add this in to my level. I turn the compressor off and set the limiter so it just lights up when the loudest peaks come in, then turn the compressor back on. I then have transparent compression that adds some punch and keeps disparate techniques at a similar output volume from the speaker. Yet I still have total dynamic control. The issue I have to deal with with this set up is that if I make a mistake everyone can hear it.[/quote] Can we sticky your posts somewhere? I really do think stuff like this will help people understand more about how compression and limiting works outside the sea of misinformation that gets bandied around on the internet!

[quote name='Bilbo' post='1259415' date='Jun 7 2011, 10:31 AM']Jackson is left with no nuts after grooving them off w. Robben Ford (guitar), Jimmy McGriff (organ), Bernard Purdie (drums), and the horn section of Phil Woods (alto), Bob Berg (tenor) and Art Farmer (trumpet). If you don't 'get' it, you have no pulse. [/quote] I think Anthony Jackson is one of the few bass players that I would describe as one of the greatest players of all time. Amazing bassist!

[quote name='dc2009' post='1259557' date='Jun 7 2011, 12:21 PM']Congrats, what a great brand to get an endorsement with. So out of interest, how do you go about getting one of these, how big do you need to be etc? There are plenty of bands I've never heard of that get endorsements, yours being one of them (though I did just go have a look on your website and I guess I have now), so how big do you need to be for them not to scoff in your face and not even reply to you. Are you guys signed and doing headline european tours, with record sales in the tens of thousands, or not at that stage - just curious ?[/quote] All you need to do is contact the distributor of Sandberg in the U.K. I contacted Sandberg directly a few months back and they passed my details on to Synergy U.K distribution and offered me a good deal on any custom build I wanted with a really good discount but I decided not to take them up on it just yet. You don't need to be incredibly big; what they want to see is you promoting the Sandberg brand in any way you can and it always helps if you're a touring artist as well so that the brand can make the link to your fan base. As far as I can gather, Sandberg are a good brand to be tied to and offer a good amount of discount, providing you do the best you can to push them.

[quote name='uke' post='1254841' date='Jun 2 2011, 11:40 PM']For me, as a bassist, watching Queen without John Deacon is like watching The Who without the Ox! They are the people who inspired me to play bass in the first place![/quote] It's probably total blasphemy to say this but I got to see The Who with Pino Palladino on bass who is one of my favourite bass players and it was brilliant! I was never keen on Entwhistle's playing, although I understand he was integral part of their sound and a really unique player.

[quote name='73Jazz' post='1254827' date='Jun 2 2011, 11:33 PM']How many types of bluejeans do Levi`s need? They all look almost exactly the same and you pay much for for those than other bluejeans eg those from japan sry couldn`t resist [/quote] Ah you see I don't get Levi's jeans! I buy Japanese denim from a shop in Sweden every year at a snip of the price... 16oz denim, good indigo dye and the fit I want. I have the same issues with all sorts of companies that do this. I love Fenders, classic design that are totally functional and very usable but their product range is ridiculous now.