maxrossell

Dammit. I want a bass with a fat string too.

[quote name='XB26354' post='476411' date='Apr 30 2009, 09:37 PM']Well done. Good thing you can read and write English though, otherwise it would be quite hard to post here. If you'd learned to read music when you were young who knows what you might think? Like any tool, reading music is only of use if you know how to do it. As you can't then I won't be booking you to conduct any orchestras! [/quote] I suppose I could argue that the one single occasion in the twenty odd years I've been playing music where knowing how to read music would have been of use to me would have been to prevent a particularly prickish music teacher I had in high school from yelling into my face that I'd never be of any musical worth to anyone if I couldn't find the dot on the line that means C#. If I had the desire to do any of the things that would require me to know how to read or write music, I would have learned it. Like I said above and as you're saying now, it's a tool that is useful in certain circumstances. I have no particular desire to be involved in those circumstances, so it's all good for me.

[quote name='lowdown' post='476378' date='Apr 30 2009, 08:49 PM']No, you are not wrong, thats your opinion, You dont trust musicians who need to see something written down, Thats cool... I was just pointing out a situation where that would not work. Garry[/quote] Sure, and I was pointing out in my original post that it was my position based on how I prefer to work. But I'll bear your thoughts in mind if I'm ever required to conduct a recording of West Side Story.

[quote name='lowdown' post='476358' date='Apr 30 2009, 08:21 PM']Not sure that would have worked when Leonard Bernstein turned up in front of a 60+ Orchestra for the Recording of Westside Story.... And asked them to wing it with there ears. He trusted them... And look at the outcome. Different Musical situations require different Musical skills. Garry[/quote] Well sure, when you take my statement completely out of context and apply it to a situation that isn't relevant to the point I'm making then yeah, it looks like I'm clearly wrong.

That's hilarious.

I gotta ask - I don't mean to offend, but why so many of the same bass? Surely they can't all be so different from each other?

I have a 1st class degree in music. I have written, produced and co-produced four albums and a half-dozen EPs or original material all in association with exceptional musicians. I'm going on for my fifteenth year as a performing musician. I even briefly had a publishing deal. I've scored three plays and two short films. And yet I have never learned to read music. For me, written music is a convenient tool to be used in a handful of situations that don't allow for practical communication between musicians, such as when the musicians are not in the same location, or when you're having to show a lot of musicians how to play something simultaneously. But that's all. I personally have never had to use it and most likely never will, because it's used to work in ways in which I don't like to work. And I would never trust a musician who needed to see something written down rather than just using their ears.

I quite like the look of Mike Dirnt's signature bass though. The Fender, not the Squier with the rubbish emo star on it.

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' post='476206' date='Apr 30 2009, 05:25 PM']Maybe you are wrong. Did you try reporting it? Its not been withdrawn by them, as the listing stays, I tihnk. I report any stuff I see thats dodge if I have the minutes (which I do if I'm bumming about on Ebay), the more stuff they get reported, the less time they have to remove the things I want to buy.[/quote] I must have reported two or three dozen fraudulent items since I started using eBay, some for listings that contained blatant and obviously deliberate inaccuracies, some for items that were just bad copies advertised as the real thing. Every time I've received the standard form letter from them, but the items always stayed up, and more often than not some poor sod bought them. Special mention for a guy selling what he claimed was a Gibson Les Paul Zakk Wylde Camo Bullseye. The headstock was the wrong shape, the block inlays on the neck were uneven, and the bullseye was off-centre on the guitar. It almost looked like someone had gone out of their way to deliberately cock up making it. God knows whether it even worked. I told eBay, they did nothing, and some poor sap paid £350 for it, probably thinking he'd got the deal of the century. Unbelievable.

I just realised I've been posting like an idiot for a week and I haven't done one of these. Forgive my rudeness. My name's Max, and I'm the bass player and singer in a band called March. I used to be one of three guitar players but our bassist quit so rather than hire someone else I took over on bass. It's the first time I've held down bass in a band for about nine years, so it's gonna be tough, but I'll get there. My main job, or occupation, or whatever, is as full-time carer for my girlfriend, who has serious bipolar disorder. Before anyone accuses me of being a dole-scrounger, I get paid the tidy sum of £200 a month by the government to do this job, and considering that if I wasn't doing it the government would have to pay other people ten times more to do the job, the taxpayer's getting a pretty sweet deal. Before that I worked variously in administration, management, IT, graphic design, editing and a bunch of other stuff. Other than that, in my spare time I do production, I paint, I'll soon be making videos, and all sorts of other passing hobbies that are far too expensive for my pathetic income. Also, I lived near Paris from age 7 to age 20 and I'm fluent in French. I'm currently 28, a leukemia survivor and ex-alcoholic. That's me. Howdy!

[quote name='EBS_freak' post='476148' date='Apr 30 2009, 04:26 PM']When you say "key" do you mean "score"? If so, the answer is no. If I was going shoot a coat over the existing gloss finish, I would take the high sheen off the finish with lower grade paper until I had a perfectly smooth, even, satin base coat. I would degrease the surface to make sure there is absolutely no oils (e.g. from you hands, pubs that the bass has seen etc) present. One word of warning though, if the existing base coat is nitro, it's a bitch for reacting. Expect discolouration to occur with your new paint. Anyway... The key thing for getting a good paint job is lots of thin coats with lots of sanding between coats. When the final poly/nitro coat goes on, that will seal your paint job... then you can start with the buffing.[/quote] When I say key I mean, as you say, take the smooth surface off the existing finish so the paint has something to adhere to. So you're saying that's okay to do? What I'm painting definitely won't have nitro on it.

[quote name='EBS_freak' post='476064' date='Apr 30 2009, 02:52 PM']Nitromors and an orital sander are your friends [/quote] I now have an orbital sander, but that doesn't change the question - can I just key the surface of the existing paint job by hand and paint over that? I know it's not uncommon - the Pino signature P-Bass has a fiesta red coat shot directly over a sand-coloured finish.

[quote name='skankdelvar' post='475943' date='Apr 30 2009, 01:02 PM']Hendrix, a notorious out-of-concert-pitcher didn't have a guitar tech, and it showed.[/quote] You're darn right it did. I saw a video of this one show where his guitar just burst into flames! Shoddy workmanship, that is.

From production experience, I'd say that bands who are using only hand-tunable instruments a lot of the time just tune to each other and don't give a crap if they're in perfect A=440Hz Personally I don't see a problem with it if it sounds right, unless you're likely to want to add fixed-tuning instrument parts to it later. Damned if I'm gonna retune a whole piano just because the guitarist was a quarter-tone out.

[quote name='skankdelvar' post='475916' date='Apr 30 2009, 12:40 PM']You're absolutely right that it's possible to be technically gifted and musically dextrous without knowing squat about carving a tone. And vice-versa. But it's so much nicer for the punter when it all comes together in one package. Y'know what the problem is? Orchestras have a bloke who stands at the front and faces the musicians, so he's sort of hearing what the punters are hearing. If it doesn't sound nice, he sorts it out. Bands don't have those, and I think we should. Every band should hire a conductor. No need to thank me.[/quote] I think every band has an inbuilt conductor (or two) anyway. In most bands there's one or two members who make the majority of the decisions - in most [i]good[/i] bands, those are usually the guys who have a good idea of how stuff should sound.

[quote name='sgt-pluck' post='475886' date='Apr 30 2009, 12:16 PM']From what I've read you can, but you still need to sand it ultra-smooth - which means you'll probably end up going through to the wood somewhere, which means primer. Pluck[/quote] Really? On the couple of guitars I've worked on I've had to sand the bastards for a bloody long time to get anywhere near the wood.

[quote name='Steve_nottm' post='475895' date='Apr 30 2009, 12:21 PM']Interesting topic. Whilst i'm aware that guitarists sometimes use a "bedroom tone" that doesn't work in a band situation I can struggle to say clearly what needs to be done to change it. I tend to tell them to boost mids and highs to avoid "my" area. Any pointers?[/quote] I also struggle to explain it with words. I guess you could draw a picture showing EQ curves and such, but I think that might be even more confusing. For me it's an advantage to be able to say "can I try" and just haul on their guitar and sort their amp out, and give it back, and let them realise that it does in fact work. I think the best way of explaining it would be to appeal to the guitard's sensibilities. Tell him that by backing off the gain he'll be able to get down to "his real tone", explain to him that by cutting bass and treble and adding mids he'll sound louder and clearer and everyone will hear what he's doing.

[quote name='skankdelvar' post='475880' date='Apr 30 2009, 12:11 PM']You're scary. I bet they're terrified of you.[/quote] Not really. I think they find it funny more than anything else. I also agree with the pedalboard thing. It's kinda the point of what I'm talking about, also. A lot of guitarists "make" their tone using pedal after pedal, not realising that without a basic decent guitar/amp interaction it's gonna sound crap. The first time the guitar player in my old band got a distortion pedal he couldn't figure out why no matter what he tried it sounded bad. It was just that he hadn't paid any attention to how the clean channel he'd put it into was running. As you say, I don't know why magazines don't go into this more frequently and more in detail - and in fact seem to occasionally push the opposite view, that as long as your guitar sounds awesome on its own that's all you need to worry about.

[quote name='waynepunkdude' post='475881' date='Apr 30 2009, 12:13 PM']Sorry, I just didn't prime my fretless enough and the colour really suffered, I didn't make that mistake on my latest project and it looks amazing.[/quote] No worries. As I said I've done a couple of projects, and to be honest I want so save myself some labour if I can (I hate hate hate sanding). I just want a bass that's a different colour to what it is, it doesn't have to be a masterpiece of craftmanship, but I also don't want the paint to peel right off.

[quote name='waynepunkdude' post='475865' date='Apr 30 2009, 12:01 PM']Primer, Primer and more Primer.[/quote] Ummm... Okay? My point was that if the bass is already primed and painted, surely I can just sand into the existing paint and overcoat it?

[quote name='51m0n' post='475859' date='Apr 30 2009, 11:56 AM']Guitarists _always_ underestimate the need for midrange, and overestimate the need for gain. They never understand the concept of frequency mixing until it is actually drawn for them (ie little graphs). Worse still they always try and sneak back to their bedroom rock god sound unless you stay on their case. And dont get me started on over use of delay and reverb by guitarists in a live situation, what are they on????[/quote] That's quite interesting. With one of my guitarists, I showed him how to get a decent tone out of his sh*tty Ibanez Toneblaster stack. I found that since the gain channel on those things is so completely horrible, the only way to do it is to use the boost function on the clean channel - with the clean gain already at max - to break it up into some responsive tone. So I show him this, and then show him to use his distortion pedal into the amp as another boost, by turning the gain on it way down, but cranking the output volume. So there's his clean channel, which is clean but warm and even breaks up a bit if he forces it, and then a boost takes it into smooth, responsive, mid-high gain. The first thing he does is to switch off the boost on the amp, which takes it back to a thin, shrill, sh*tty clean sound, and then switches on the distortion pedal, which makes it worse. Eventually I just disconnected his footswitch, threw it away and told him that from now on it was a single-channel amp.

Umm - not really sure if this is the right forum for this. I've refinished guitars twice in the past, with mixed results. I'm just wondering if any of those of you who make or refinish basses have any useful tips on repainting a bass with a rattle can. - Would I need to take the original finish back to the wood, reseal, reprime and repaint it from scratch, or can I just sand off the top to get a key, overcoat with a different colour and clearcoat afterwards? - Using Plasti-kote acrylic spray paints - good or bad? - How long do I need to let the paint cure for before clearcoating? How long do I need to let the clearcoat cure before I sand and buff it?

[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='475804' date='Apr 30 2009, 10:56 AM']Good grief yes although band members taking criticism too personally can also act as an obstacle to improvement too. Its important for the band leader to find a way of couching their comments in a way that makes them palatable (spoon full of sugar and all that...). Jools Holland is superb at this, from what I've heard. Also the band leader needs to be accepted by the rest of the band as the leader. There's no point in someone charging in and critiquing before the rest of the band have understood why he's a better leader than any of the rest of them. They've got to take the rest of the band along with them and that, to some extent, is influenced by the pace of the least cooperative member of the band. The other thing I'll add is that knowing your gear intimately can also help save you money. I was all set to look at another effects unit in addition to my MPXG2 because I needed something with twin inputs. I did a bit of digging around in the user manual and discovered I could use the Insert loop as an extra pair of stereo inputs in parallel with the input jack, instead of just a stereo effects loop switched in series! So now I get to combine the stereo signal from my MIDI bass rig with the dry out and apply stereo effects to both. Bloody amazing little unit.[/quote] Fortunately I'm friends first with the guys in my band, and bandmates second. Not to say that I'd avoid a difficult decision if it might upset a friend. But I write most of the material and I suppose I occupy the position of general leadership, although the other guys are by no means subordinate to me if you see what I mean. It's not a case of "what I say, goes", more a case of I'm usually the one to come up with a good solution to something, and the other guys quite like that. I also agree on the cash front. One of the guys who rehearses next door to me goes through whole new setups every six months trying to find a sound that works, not realising that the problem is the way he uses the gear in the first place. But he's not the kind of guy who lets other people give him advice on stuff like that.

[quote name='OldGit' post='475782' date='Apr 30 2009, 10:27 AM']Don't offer this as a service do you? Both the guitarists I play with have no idea of how to work their gear.[/quote] I do some production occasionally, but I'm not sure that your guitar players would appreciate some random guy telling them how to set their amps up [quote name='BigBeefChief' post='475800' date='Apr 30 2009, 10:48 AM']It's a shame none of the pissed punters you play to will give a sh*t though. Oh well, I'm sure it massaged your ego all the same.[/quote] Yeah, actually I mainly did it for my benefit (I don't enjoy practicing if it doesn't sound right), although I would add that if your experience of live performance is playing to drunks who don't give a toss what you sound like, you may be playing the wrong gigs.