bassman7755

2 hours ago, Reggaebass said:

I’m confident to set up most my basses, perhaps not a vintage one, I would leave that to a professional, but all the basses I’ve ever had have never needed anything done to the nut , it’s one thing I wouldn’t touch 

Interesting, In my experience the nut is the most common thing I see wrong on guitar and bass setups. Every bass and guitar I've ever had has had the nut cut too high so I've had to cut the slots down and/or lower the nut on pretty much all of them. I'm probably a but OCD about it to be honest but a high nut grinds my gears something rotten.

17 hours ago, DaveFry said:

Try searching for ;

 

Melody Generator

Haha thanks, obvious in hind sight, anyway found this ...

https://random-music-generators.herokuapp.com/melody

Absolutely brilliant for my intended purpose of practicing hearing and playing random tunes cold.

On 20/09/2021 at 17:28, bass_dinger said:

I tune my open strings on a Boss TU2, using the strobe setting.  Open strings are spot-on (apart from a wavering low B).  I then fret the string at the 5th fret and it registers as sharp - the strobe moves upwards, slowly. 

 

Of course, I may be only looking at a few cents out, but it is odd to see the tuning is not the same all the way up the fret board. 

 

The strings (a £5 set from eBay) are about a year old and are 45 to 125.  The bass was set up for a set of Dunlop steels (40 to 120).

 

So, should I simply tune so that the 5th fret note is right?  Should I change the intonation?  Should I buy a better tuner?  Fit new strings?  Should I simply not worry?        

 

Even on a well set up instrument open strings and fretted notes are always slightly out of tune with each other, its down to the basic physics of the instrument - a fretted note always has a slightly higher string tension than an open note. Despite what people may tell you you cannot fully compensate for this with intonation adjustment because its a non-linear effect, if you intonate the instrument to open and 12th fret then notes except open and 12th will be slightly out, if you intonate 1st and 13th frets then all frets will be in tune but the open will be slightly flat.

This is why things like Feiten Tuning exist - it uses a "compensated" nut which slightly decrease the distance between nut slots and first fret to compensate for the open string flattening effect.

Making sure that your nut as cut as low as possible will mitigate effect. I'm not completely sure but I think a higher action at the bridge actually helps (in combination with a low cut nut) as the tension increase would become more linear as you move up the finger board.  Theoretically higher gauge strings also help as the fretted/unfretted tension disparity causes a smaller pitch error with higher tension strings. mind you I still use light strings and and a low action being the wimp that I am 😁

As per title, have been trying without success to find something that does this. Just to add than I do NOT want something that explicitly tests me on the melody by making me enter the notes on some on screen keyboard, I just want something that I can hit a button and it plays something random maybe within configurable upper and lower notes, then hit it again for another random phrase etc.

Any suggestions welcome.

On 19/09/2021 at 21:49, Crawford13 said:

To be fair to him I think he has found his niche and that's showing off his frankly rediculous chops. 

He is a monster player no doubt about it, a genuine virtuoso, and highly entertaining to boot. A know a lot of "serious" musician rag on him and davie504 but these are the guys who are getting the attention from the youtube generation of kids. I mean davie504 has nearly 10 million subs, that astonishing for a niche musical interest, only slightly less than BBC news !.

On 19/09/2021 at 21:44, SteveXFR said:

 

Does that include his slap version of the original?

Why would it not ? do you seriously think this dude is coming at it from a perspective "oh look at me I can improve on the original" ?.

3 hours ago, SteveXFR said:

 

I watched that video recently and really disliked it. Three bloody awful versions of a great classic. 

Well they are awful but thats kind of the whole point, its musical comedy.

5 hours ago, Reggaebass said:

Thanks for that bassman, I’ve only ever had 15s so I guess that I’m just a bit sceptical

Your just going to have take a punt, Alex's recommendations are generally on the money and you've got a 30 day trial so...

On 16/09/2021 at 16:48, Reggaebass said:

Thanks, it was Alex that suggested the 2x10s to me, he said they were fat and warm sounding, I was just wondering if they would go deep enough for what I play, I’ve never had 10s before 

A well designed 10 loaded cab will have plenty of bottom end. At one point I scaled down my rig from a 4 x 10 plus 1 x 15 monster stack to single 2 x 10 cab (of much higher quality) and it was still plenty loud and deep enough for any conceivable pub/club gig with a suitable gutsy amp. EDIT: I say this as a 5-string player (low B) as well.

On 02/09/2021 at 22:54, Downunderwonder said:

If you're seeing large excursion you need a highpass filter. 

If you can "see" any excursion at all you need a high pass filter as your eyes can only see something move up to about 25hz above which it should just be a blur, so if you can see it then by definition you cant hear it and its just wasted energy and speaker compliance.

RE the OPs point - using a well setup high pass filter will allow you have a lot more usable bass volume and depth from any given speaker to the point where you might not actually need to preplace them. 

Also worth noting that in cab design size matters but weight does not  - all other things being equal a bigger cab can go lower and louder (more efficient) than a smaller one but thats purely a function of its size NOT its weight. 

I've always liked my bass sound through headphones and hifi speakers more than how its sounded through "bass" speakers, of the latter my barefaced cabs as are least objectionable ones I've yet tried (within my very strict weight limit requirements). I set my tone using my IEMs and trust the speakers to do decent job of projecting that sound to everyone else. Pretty sure I would get on just fine using decently specced PA speakers if I really needed to, I recon a hi end pair of 12" PA speakers will handily outperform most bass gear for both sound and portability.

Got me thinking that traditional bass speaker form factors were possibly driven more by the requirement to produce lots of noise cheaply and efficiently (as amps of the day didn't have power to spare) than to actually sound good.