Jolltax

I like him and prefer him to the bass players online who take themselves very seriously, he makes me laugh. I think he is right about AI, and deserves credit for his comments. He did a kind of video collaboration recently with Wings of Pegasus (who I also like) which was cool. I can't comment on his playing other than that he is WAY better than me, lol.... I probably shouldn't have piped up because I also like Davie504, videos of Rico eating things and this 'Rotate your Owl for Science' video so I am clearly a dumbass, I think the internet has destroyed my brainz

I also have the Lekato WS-50, they have been excellent. After 4 years, full charge is good for 3-4 hours, the only minor gripe is if you forget to charge them!

I like Sires, my first bass was / is a Sire also agree with others not to ignore fan-frets and weight also important in the long term, I would also consider headless as it help with weight and balance and has no real downside (unless you hate the look). My main bass is an Ibanez EHB1505 but I also regularly play my 4 string (non fan-fret) Sire/Musicman, fan frets look more 'different' than they actually feel to play, it doesn't take much adjustment to play and you will forget about it very quickly if my experience is anything to go by. If I were looking for a 5 string with a nice neck that is not heavy then personally would be looking at Ibanez EHB, Sire M6 or maybe Cort Artisan Space 5. If you like Sire's (which I also do) the M6 looks like a must try to me - if it had been out when I bought my Ibanez I might well have ended up with one instead but now very happy.

Wanted to add my thanks to others for sharing these transcriptions, very cool Anyone looking for a new tune to learn - Whitesnake 1978 Album Trouble the band cover 'Day Tripper', I love everything about this track - its awesome and great bass line to play, really funky ... I prefer it to the original

Hi Thrillho I am also an intermediate player, I also started on BassBuzz with the video lesson series. After a while I started looking for a more 1-1 teacher. I think lessons are a really fantastic way of keeping yourself honest - I do the same and have lessons (currently monthly), my teacher helps me with my playing, gives me a objective feedback and is very good on music theory so he gives guidance there which is something I find it difficult to focus on. I often send him a list of what I am currently working on, sometimes I write down a series of questions, worth considering. No harm in trying lessons with others to see if there is someone with an approach that suits you better? There are some very good teachers advertising on here and lots of feedback from students as well. I think if you are having lessons and are practicing every day then one other thing you could do to push yourself is try finding some people to play with - it was nerve-wracking for me at first but I have learnt a great deal from my fellow band members who are very experienced musicians (much more than me), although I make lots of mistakes they are always brilliant about it and they give me very good feedback! Main thing is, keep playing every day ... J

I liked three things about the Bergerac BBC series in the 80's My gran loved it (miss you granny) Cool theme song with very evident cool bass line Bergerac's cool Triumph roadster I didn't really like watching the programme but always enjoyed the credits - its possible this was the first bassline I really got into as it had a very prominent fretless sounding bassline, I am guessing there are a few people of an (ahem) certain age who will immediately know what I mean - and a whole bunch of people who have NO CLUE what I am on about Anyway I started thinking about it / humming it a few days ago so today I bought the MP3 and made a TAB of it, just for fun - I have submitted it on bigbasstabs so it will appear there at some point (needs admin to hit the approve button), its a fun play, less than three minutes long and quite easy to mess about with ... I don't actually know if its a fretless bass but it sounds like one, I don't have / can't play a fretless bass - there's something about the sound though ..... I notice the TV version on Youtube is slightly different (and maybe better) than the one on Spotify, linky below and I uploaded a sample of me twanging it in case you want to hear roughly what it sounds like At 67 bpm, its definitely chillsome..... any other BC'ers have fond memory of it or other TV themed guilty bass-pleasures? Jolltax Bassline.mp3

I've gone a bit disco lately amongst other things : Money by Pink Floyd, interesting time sig and is OK until you get to the boring guitar solos (like most PF tbh) Staying Alive by BeeGees, have isolated the bass and its not really what I was expecting, glad I haven't tried to wing it You should be Dancing by BeeGees Stomp! Brothers Johnson - its cool but on a five string muting is a challenge Sofa by Wolf Alice - they have lots of nice bass lines / parts (Beautifully Unconventional also v cool) Flesh for Fantasy by Billy Idol - love this, its not hard but its fun Been working on getting Queen 'Its a kind of Magic' accurate and up to speed, I feel like i need it in my back pocket I need to get some flares .....

You can pre-order on Andertons, I've always wanted to try a Bongo, so weird looking ..

Was watching some YT and happened upon this Anderton video where they are playing HILS basses (never heard of them). About 15 minutes in they are playing a short scale, passive, headless bass with a humbucker and they cost £499. Would have though it would be perfect for travel :

I travelled with a bass quite a lot and lived in hotels for weeks at a time, I think a lot of the super-compact basses are a bit compromised although I have only 'tried' a Steinberger not owned one. I am with @Burns-bass and others, the secret is having a cheap setup and then not worrying about it being bashed about, I do also think headless is good because actually there is no real compromise in actual playing / fretboard, unfortunately they aren't cheap. The way I did it was I bought a cheap Harley Benton JB and had the neck bolts fitted with inserts so I could easily remove and restore the neck. Then I played through headphones, or occasionally I managed to play through the hotel clock radios line-in - the Bose ones pack serious bass for their size! The bass cost £85 so it didn't matter if it got bashed or broken in my baggage and I actually sold it for £100 a couple of years later!

Me too, I own an EHB and also a Sire cheapy 4 string (M2) and am a fan of both. Gut feel the M6 is probably just as well made and specced as the EHB and given that its literally half the price of the EHB looks like a good deal.

My point is that having gone to the trouble of actually making a multiscale bass with so-called custom pickups to then ergonomically compromise it seems an odd choice and reflects the fact that the market is still developing. Perhaps its just a matter of time as the multiscale market appears to be growing if recent new models by Sire (M6?) and others are anything to go by. Mind you, the new ones all seem to have the same issue - the market will decide, I guess. My instinct is that very few players swap the pickups on their basses (more likely to swap the bass) and I think the 'standardisation' argument has already left the building years ago - my Ibanez pickups are already 'custom' so the point is moot anyway. Its like arguing 'everyone should have a P-Bass because I've got one'. I bet some enterprising individual with a 3D printer could knock something out that would be an improvement ....

Question for you fellow multiscalers out there : I enjoy playing my Ibanez EHB but the pickups annoy me as they are not good as a thumb rest, when playing they are not straight and at the moment its annoying me : Ever more annoying is that Ibanez seem to have recognised this problem as they give you a thumb rest which is a parallelogram creating a weird mountain range for your thumb. WHERE are the parallelogram shaped pickups which run parallel with the strings, surely this is what we need? Do they exist? Grumpy today (must be my age) J

Go with the bass with the nicest neck and that feels the most comfortable, as a learner it doesn't really matter about the pickup configuration as long as you got somewhere comfy to rest your thumb whilst playing the bottom string - decent basses all sound similar enough for pickup configuration not to matter. For me, comfort and the neck the most important thing. I think some of the best necks on (new) budget basses are Sire, second hand Yamaha (not the super cheap ones) are also lovely

Really cool, headless is the way to go imho Love the fact that it has a truss rod wheel for easy adjustment, nice little touches

Very true, I am an intermediate player at best, I often end up making tabs for tunes for which I can't find songs I am learning for my band (my music skill level not good enough to make transcripts) My teacher very good at encouraging me to use music, its just not always easy to find ... which is why I appreciate the work you have put into this

Just me reflecting again on this thread, if you got an active bass, a preamp / pedals, EQ on your amp (and / or maybe even going into a desk) then most of us are playing through 3 or four stages of tone / EQ adjustments, its no wonder it gets confusing (for me anyway). It makes me wonder how much of my bass am I actually hearing and how much is just electronics e.g. I wonder how many times I have cranked the treble on active bass without realising I have it turned down somewhere else in the signal chain, probably a lot of the time Conspiracy theory : maybe we are all secretly playing exactly the same sounding bass and the only difference is in the electronics and we are being scammed by bass manufacturers

Very cool website, love the emphasis on music transcriptions rather than TAB

<sorry duplicate post>

The gig economy unfortunately not known for its pension provision. I worked offshore with someone who was a bass guitarist in a sixties band which charted a couple of times he left to pursue a career in the Oil business, reached a fairly senior position. He didn't like talking about it.

I love that this thread is 3 years old and the vote is basically 50/50, which as it happens I think is the correct answer . I switched to a 5 string headless Ibanez EH1505 which has multiscale neck bought about a year ago, really like the bass. I think one tries to weigh up the pro and cons of any innovation to conclude whether they are a net improvement. My conclusion / opinion : Headless is the way to go, better balance, lighter bass, same playable string length with shorter neck, good tuning, no obvious downside I have found yet Multiscale is of marginal benefit (if any) and for me has downsides, I'll probably prioritise other things in future purchases. I do like the way it looks though. For me, its a wash - I am 50/50 on it To elaborate - the downside of multiscale for me is subtle : the fan frets mean I feel like I am having to stretch / adjust my hand more at the extremities of the fret board particularly at the low end of the neck where I am already least comfortable and perhaps making it a bit more difficult to accurately position fingers at the fret. If you have huge hands, I guess this might not be an issue ! Worth bearing in mind I am an intermediate level player only, not super experienced. As other mentioned I would like to try the new Sire M6 as in my experience the necks on Sires are nice... my Ibanez will be hard to beat mind you

OK, good point, I get it. I have PowerDrumKit (which is very cool btw) for that kind of stuff but I guess my (the lazy) way is to get the stem

That's awesome if you play all the instruments, I only play bass I see two usage cases for remixing my own tracks from stems: High quality practice tracks customised for myself (without bass) or for others (excluding their parts), possibility to add click track and prompts for in ears in future Current band has guitar, bass, drums, vocalist - could use STEM's to build custom tracks to add keys and additional guitar Also easy to create the tracks in the correct key as the band often decide to pay in different key to the original. I downloaded the stems for three tracks yesterday and have since been messing around in FL Studio, its going quite well! J

I am exploring the idea of using stems to create backing tracks, filling in missing instruments. Currently the band I play in just lost its rhythm guitarist and has no keyboards. I also like the idea of making my own custom practice tracks. Where would you go to get good quality stems, so far I found this place, Karaoke Version seems OK I also use Moises, its an AI separation tool which is very good for practice and helping making tabs / transcriptions for music but the stems it creates are not of high quality so I wouldn't want to use them with a band etc Any thoughts? J This long video explains the process I am looking at pretty well except ill be using FL Studio as a DAW and probably my phone to play the tracks :

I still practice on mine most days (sorry about the dust and dog hair in my shed, lol) - awesome! @djk Although cosmetically mine is a bit primitive I deliberately made it quite beefy so its not that light, if you going for lightweight suggest you think carefully about construction with that as a priority, I am sure other more experienced builders can advise here. J