Jolltax

HI @creamsoda - Welcome to the forums! I wonder if a separate post / thread outside the introduction area might get you more feedback on your app? J

Just bought your transcriptions, thank you, having fun trying some new tunes! J

I bought the ones @lemmywinks recommended and they have solved the problem. I could definitely have fixed it by just repositioning the OEM ones but the new ones are much nicer so it was a nice upgrade anyways 😃 J PXL_20230823_152801348.TS~2.mp4

Yeah, I think I will order some, the stock ones are fairly horrible anyway

Snap! Looks just like my Roadstar II, I found it through an ad my wife saw in the newsagents here when I had just started learning a couple of years ago. To me it has a surprisingly high output for a passive bass and plays nicely since I had it set up, I am fond of it and like the vintage look. Its well balanced and light, very comfy but I don't use it that much tbh. You don't see them come up for sale much in the UK. @Bassassin very kindly ID'ed it for me in the NBD thread I posted as a RB620NT, from August 1983, made by Fujigen Gakki The lights not very good in here but here is a picture :

Both the stacked pots on my Sire M2 stick to each other, its annoying as it means that adjusting main volume, tone (#1) and middle frequencies boost/cut (#2) is a two hand job. They were like this from new, but to be honest when I started playing I thought they were supposed to be like that as I didn't know any better 🤣 - I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to notice ( ***cough*** a long time ***cough ****) Any tricks I can try to fix it? Obviously I know I can change the pots out for different ones, I am hoping for an easier fix - I wonder is it possibly the buttons / knobs themselves rather than the pots? StackedPots.mp4

Agree with Gary on this one. I am in a similar position, been playing for 2 years. The problem with often very good used basses on here is that if you have never had the opportunity to play lots of basses then you haven’t yet homed in on what your likes / dislikes are. For example I bought a (non-StingRay) bass recently from someone who loves StingRays, I never thought I would own a StingRay because of the shape - but I tried one of his and now its on my bucket list, I was really surprised how much I liked it! The market is so full of basses, its a personal preference thing and there is so much conflicting information when you are starting out that I think you have to go to a shop and try them. Also : for sentimental reasons I suggest not selling your first bass, you will probably end up being sad about it in the future 🙂 J EDIT : Just re-read your post. As it happens my first bass is a Sire M2, its lovely to play and the pre-amp options make it super flexible and fun - definitely try one if you do go shopping!

Hi! I am now 2 years into my bass, er, thing. I mostly play my SIre M2, which I love. I also have a vintage Precision style Ibanez bass which I occasionally play (got it cheap) and a Harley Benton Jazz Bass I used to take with me while working away from home to practice on. I like the Jazz Bass but feel like I want to upgrade it to something that will last me for life (the rest of it) , but have not really tried another Jazz Bass. I live in the boonies (Tenbury Wells) so am going to have to drive somewhere. Two questions : Does anyone have any recommendations of a retailer in the Midlands who has a good selection of basses I can try ? Google suggests Guitar Guitar and PMT in Birmingham, anyone been to those? Is it worth trying to trade in my HB? It’s worth next to nothing as far as I can tell …. I am not a very confident / good player so would like somewhere ideally where I can disappear into a room or stick on headphones and spend some time. J

Hi Steve, welcome! I am also from Worcs ..... I live in Tenbury

I ended up buying these and fitting and they work OK, maybe not exactly the right size but doing the job fine. I did look at M5 washers and would probably try next time as they seem very similar

Hi, Looking for a bit of advice, on my Ibanez Roadstar 2 the D string machine head is very loose and I can't add more tension through the philips head screw on the shaft. I notice that there is a little nylon (?) bushing (see photos) on all of them and the one on the D string has snapped and I am guessing this is the reason, it may also possibly been replaced with something which looks incorrect. Does anyone know how to to replace these or where to get them? I can buy boxes of bog standard washers from anywhere if they are just general fittings, but if they are something specific then would prefer to get from reputable source and know how to change them out before ordering. Cheers J

Hi Mike, I live in Tenbury, just down the road. Welcome, I have watched a couple of your YouTube videos and frankly was blown away - amazing Jolltax

Wow, I'll look them up. The shape doesn't really worry me too much, I actually like traditional looking basses although I prefer active electronics and humbuckers. I actually just bought the components to knock together a copy of a 2 band stingray preamp, bit of soldering practice. J

I am a bit of a have-a-go sort of person and like the idea with experimenting with making my own bass - I mean from actual wood as opposing to building from parts (which is also cool). I have no intention of ever becoming a luthier or proper guitar builder, its just for fun. I like the idea of doing a guitar bass building course, the kind when you show up with a bunch of bits of wood, materials and they provide workshop equipment and expertise to help you turn it into a bass guitar. The one I am aware of is at Crimson Guitars but there may be others so I thought i would ask here .... I was also thinking of finding carpentry workshops or woodworking places near me, ideally somewhere where they have the big machine tools necessary e.g. table saws, pedestal / belt / rotary sanders etc etc. Presumably the wood working skills are the same / similar to things like furniture making. All I really got at home is hand tools and a router, I think the whole process would be massively better in a proper workshop, although I am toying with the idea of just finding a chunk of cheap pine and having a bodge at making a body from a template. Even if its a disaster I can just transfer the hardware to the next disaster and evolve it into something. If anyone had any experience of these kinds of courses or could recommend places that would be cool, I live in the Midlands in Tenbury Wells so nearer is better. There is a moderate likelihood I might be made redundant soon so could have some time on my hands and this would be fun... Jolltax

Been lurking around the internet trying to find one of these, my first non-budget bass purchase, after much googling and research I had decided a Sabre seemed to be a perfect match for all my wants (looks, the sound etc), I was particularly taken with the videos made by Lobster on the Sabre I wrote to Musicman and asked if they would be re-issuing the Sabre again and they replied saying "no immediate plan to reintroduce the EBMM Sabre" The bass, manufactured May 8th 2013 according to serial number, had been bought new by the owner and stored immediately and still had the shop tags, plastic wrap and stickers on when I picked it up for the first time, the strings had corrosion on them making it a bit unpleasant to play but were replaced by the seller with some nice zingy nickel ones. The seller is a professional musician and a big Stingray fan, he let me look at / try his Stingrays and tbh this has changed my pre-conceived ideas about Stingrays - was particularly taken with a blue 90's stingray he had, added to my bucket list for the future 😀 Its still early days for me and I am still getting used to the pre-amp and options, but I think its a keeper! J

I wanted to post a personal recommendation here for Tom Kenrick as bass teacher, a post to people (like me) who are looking for someone to help them improve their bass playing, technique and musical knowledge. I found Tom through recommendations on this forum and through his website whilst searching for bass transcriptions online. I have been taking Zoom lessons with Tom for about 10 months now, other than that I have no association with him at all and have never actually met him in person so I am writing this review entirely from the perspective of being one of his students on Zoom, I am biased though - because I think he is an excellent teacher! In addition to being a working professional musician in the UK, he also teaches, is an author of several books on bass and a Music Academy graduate. Tom is also the owner FreeBassTranscriptions website where he has published many articles and also runs a YouTube channel where you can read his bio or look at the uploads, teaching videos, reviews and lessons! Check out his playing on his Youtube channel, here is one of my favourites : Tom is a great guy and ultra-professional in his approach to his teaching, has a high quality video-audio setup which he uses to provide lessons, he is very disciplined about documenting our lessons, he always sends me a written plan and objectives following up on lessons and when I send him recordings he always comes to the lesson having listened to them and with comments. My initial reservations about learning over Zoom are gone completely, it works great! Tom is extremely patient (I am 56 years old and have been playing for just over year), he is very flexible and understanding of my other commitments (I have a rather demanding job which means I have a very unpredictable schedule). In lessons I can see he is very focused on making the best use of our time. One of the qualities I most value from him is that he is careful to point out my mistakes and give me the guidance I need but is always motivating and positive about it, I always leave the lessons feeling energised and encouraged, never demotivated. Oh, and he's good at bass, obviously ...... 😀 If you are looking for a teacher and want to talk to Tom about it - he does free consultations, have a chat with him - I can guarantee you will be impressed. If you are interested in more feedback from me on his lessons then feel free to send me a PM J

Hello, My thoughts : I spend a lot of time wrestling with PC and other devices, audio interfaces and encountering latency - by no means am I an expert though. In your original description its not really clear to me what you are describing - when I connect a bass to an audio interface I hear latency as an audible delay between when I pluck the string and the sound I hear on the computer through the DAW (not when monitoring). In general with unacceptable latency its very hard to play in time with anything on the PC / device because it means I pluck in time but the sound I play is always behind the beat - this completely addles my brain and drives me mad On a PC the following things are the things I fiddle with : ASIO drivers (make your DAW has the right ones selected) bit / sample rate (too low and you will get distortion and too high you get latency) Audio / sound card drivers and audio interface drivers What I have also learned is that low powered devices struggle generally e.g. unlike some others on here I have never managed to get my iPad Pro down to acceptable latency levels with a DAW. If your audio interface has a 'monitor' (the focusrite 2i2 does have this) then you can compare signals as the monitor output should not have any latency to speak of .... A high powered PC definitely helps, if you have an old PC then a lighter OS like Linux might help as suggested above EDIT : I just noticed you are not connecting your keyboard to the PC via the audio interface which means the above probably doesn't apply here! J

I mainly use online, since I subscribed to spotify I really stopped buying MP3's and CD's - so something connected will probably work better, but it seems like a pretty cool device! I think its really down to the Waza's or the DarkGlass Element, so i am pondering, I really like the idea of full wireless (Waza) but the appeal of the Darkglass is the idea that I can change out the headphones if (when) they break on the road.

We have had a Yamaha Clavinova electronic piano for 20 years, it was quite expensive (was £1300 new when we bought it) but it plays beautifully and nicer than any 'real' piano I could afford or fit in my house -and with the benefit of not requiring any maintenance. The keyboard is lovely, weighted and touch sensitive. My mum and my sisters all have always had 'real' pianos, personally I would rather have a Yamaha like ours although I suppose its not quite as nice to look at as a piece of 'furniture' I don't know anything about other electronic options but as a result of this post I googled ours and am surprised to see it sells for more now secondhand than when I bought it, they obviously keep their value. Not selling it though .... 😀

My daughter has been home for the holidays from University and working in a cafe to earn some cash. She worked hard all summer, having amassed said cash I asked her what she was going to do with it. I am not sure what I expected her to say, but for sure I almost fell off my chair when she said "I think I might buy a drum kit and learn to play the drums" She has obviously been thinking about it a lot and done her research, and wants an Alesis electronic drum kit - she can't have an acoustic drum kit where she lives. She wants to make sure she has room in her accommodation before buying any kit. I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how she can get the best possible start and whether the above kit is suitable - she is a bit shy, so I doubt she will want to have face to face lessons with someone she doesn't know but would probably do online lessons or a course. I don't know any drummers and figured there are bound to be some on here. I haven't told her, but I will buy her the gear in any case if she thinks she can fit it in her room. I am trying not to show how excited and pleased I am, as it will probably put her off! Before anyone asks, I have tried to get her to try / play bass so many times, not in the slightest interested ..... 😢 J

Googling now ... Looks really cool, I guess the advantage of wired headphones is I can change them out when I break them, headphones have a tough life on the road so in some ways a small robust metal box with separate headphones might have a longer lifespan. Thanks

I travel a lot on business, and sometimes live in hotels for extended periods. To be more clear I spend literally half my time on the road or away from home, so its not just the odd few days. When I am away I like to take my beater-bass (a Harley Benton) and enjoy practicing along to YouTube videos or mp3's. Carrying the bass, my suitcase and my hand-luggage is bad enough so I have been through a lot of iterations in pursuit of a cheap light-weight options which sound reasonable, this means headphones : I first bought a Sonicake Bass Headphone amp and tried it once, I have never used it since because the first time I tried it the sound quality was so terrible that I never plugged it in again. You get what you pay for I guess .. For a while I used a laptop (I always travel with 2 Dell laptops) and a Behringer UMC204HD audio interface, this works OK but its clumsy, latency can be a bit of an issue once you are running a DAW plus other apps and you need power supplies for everything. It also takes a long time to get setup which is annoying and has spaghetti problems. I tried using iRig Amplitube on my iPad Pro, this proved fruitless as I never managed to solve the latency issues, Apple devices are also devoid of any ports so powering an interface, plugging in headphones etc is a pain, you have to use an adapter and the battery is not really up to it I tried using so called 'ultra low latency' AptX wireless bluetooth headphones to reduce the spaghetti, forget it ... (latency again) In one hotel I was able to my Zoom B1 four into the line in on the Bose bed-side clock radio as a speaker and this worked surprisingly well, lol, not sure what my neighbours thought was going on. Full credit to Bose on building a very robust bedside clock! Currently I am using my phone for music source, a Zoom B1 four powered by a USB power supply and headphones, its OK but not brilliant, the sound quality / effects are adequate but even with IEM's it doesn't really deliver the volume and has limited options to mix music and bass. Its probably the lightest portable option so far though ... For someone who is only making the occasional trip I think this setup is a reasonably priced / average performance option : For me though, I think I have run out patience and fed up with the cables and fudges, I can't do it on the cheap and live with it. So I am going to have to spend more money and get something better. Open to ideas / experiences but these two seem to be well recommended and its my birthday soon https://ashdownmusic.com/products/tone-pocket-bluetooth https://www.boss.info/global/products/waza-air_bass/ I particularly like the look of the Waza, completely wireless, no spaghetti! Only issue is I have never yet found a wireless solution that doesn't have latency issues (to my ears), so I need to read up a bit more, expensive too. Unsurprisingly I could have saved myself most of the above learning process by following the advice on these forums in other threads, duh. Maybe another traveller will find / read this and it will resonate ... Hate spaghetti .. Cheers J