WinterMute

I had the 74's in my fretless Squier, really brought the thing to life, shame they're not made anymore.

I had a Geddy Jazz with the Badass bridge, sustained forever, had a Squier jazz fretless, the Jaco-esque one, which came with a standard bent tin jazz bridge, swapped it for a Gotoh hi-mass and it made absolutely no difference at all, unlike dropping a pair of Wizard pups in, which did. Was the sustain on the Geddy a function of better builds and woods? Maybe. I have MM SR5s now, the MM bridges do the job very well, and I think the posts let into the body that secure the bridge do play a part in allowing the string vibrations to act with the body, as they all sound great unplugged, as did the Geddy, the fretless not so much. YMMV

Back in the 80's I lent my pristine Aria Pro2 P bass to a friend who was appearing in a short run of "Oi for England", the play about skinheads, he was a very decent fellow and I assumed he'd look after it well, it came back with the front and pick-guard scratched to b*gg*ry, turned out he been playing with an aluminium pick. That cost the production company £150 for a refinish and a new pick-guard. I'll lend backline if absolutely necessary, but basses? No.

You clearly need a bigger sofa...

I'd always been under the impression it was a Synclavier direct to disc system that Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson had taken to using. Ealier Frankie work was engineered by JJ Jeczalik, a renown Fairlight user, certainly Relax was Fairlight driven, but Two Tribes was definitely Steve Lipson. Either way, it wasn't Ped and his P bass...

A little bit pricy, but FBT's Vertus system is brilliant and very compact, I installed a flown array from them 5 years ago, and they brough the vertus system in for a demo, we ended up keeping it as a portable gigging rig for concerts outside of the main theatres. http://www.fbtusa.com/vertus/ QSC's K series is very good too, depending on your needs, I use a K12.2 as a backline speaker, and it works very well, a couple of those on poles a sub or two would kick.

If you're lucky enough to have hardware, good for you, my favourite box was always the AMS RMX16, it's simplicity was it's strength. The 500 series version is very good indeed. If I had the room, I'd definitely be looking for an EMT stereo plate with a valve pre-amp, but I don't think the lovely wife would let me sacrifice the utility room to install it. I'm always very wary of adding reverb to bass parts, occasionally I'll put a bit of short room on a bass to tie it into a rhythm section, and the kick sometimes gets a touch too, depending on the genre and style of mix, but LF in reverbs muddies mixes, I always use an HPF set to around 100hz on reverb returns, it stops the LF in the track getting too waffly. Otherwise, add to taste, but remember that you are adding the illusion of space rather than real space, and what you are really doing is adding another audio layer to your mixes, one the needs treating in exactly the same way as anther guitar or keyboard part. Sparse tracks can deal with longer RT, denser mixes need shorter RT. Increasing pre-delay or early reflection levels makes a reverb space sound bigger without needing longer RT.

If you come out of the Mix Out on the front panel and connect to the Line In on an Active speaker, you should be OK, the back panel outputs are speaker outputs and should not be connected to anything but a passive speaker input. QSC K12.2 monitors would suit as they are excellent, but there are many, many other options available.

Hardware reverbs have no advantages over good plug-ins IMO, as they pretty much all use convolution or modelling these days, and unless you are going to invest in a GBS drainpipe or find an EMT stereo plate in working nick, they will sound, or can be made to sound, much the same. I'm a big fan of Altiverb for convoluted room and space reverb, not so much for copies of older digital units, I have the UAD2 versions of the Lexicon 224, which is brilliantly grungy, the Ocean Way Studios and the Capitol Chambers and I have Waves Abbey Road Plates, which I like a lot. However, I find combining reverbs to be a very productive process, very often I'll add a little bit of shimmer from a ARP plate into a darker Ocean Way room, or mess up the tail of one of the Capitol chambers with a delayed spring. I also use the old Kate Bush trick of triggering a longer reverb with a tight room, which allows the room to act as a complex early reflection for a simpler tail, she used to use the Quantec Room Simulator to drive the Lexicon 480 or 224, but you can use pretty much anything that'll tighten down to 50-60ms RT. You get a tight, bright space and a softer RT, which serves to place a vocal or guitar into the mix but still allow that distancing effect.

There on the stair?

Bass related, I got the Amphion FlexBase25 system for my studio, it's a stereo sub with bass management that turns my One18 near fields into a full range monitor system, it's spectacularly good, solves the LF issue in my small room studio. Not cheap, worth every penny.

er... that's not a Fender bass...

You'll probably need them in .jpg format, not .heic. Try importing your pics to Photos on the Mac and try dragging from there, if that doesn't work, export from photos as .jpg then drag. I've noticed airdropping pics from my iPhone results in an .heic file, functionally useless. I've sync'd my iPhone library to Photos via iCloud, this works well.

Best stage sound I ever had was the Barefaced Big Twin T, vertically stacked 12" with an 8"mid and a tweeter, exceptional dispersion and reproduction. almost didn't need bass in the front monitors.

You only need to punch the information into a drum machine once... ...I'll get me coat. I prefer the experience of playing with a live drummer, and will always try to record with a live drummer whenever possible, however an awful lot of modern production is done with programmed drums (not necessarily a drum machine per se) and it's often difficult to tell if you have someone who can programme in BFD or Slate Drums. Entirely contextual I think.

End of season 1 of Sons of Anarchy, the funeral scene with John the Revelator playing, bloody excellent choice. I had no idea it was Curtis Stigers till a while afterwards, who knew he was really quite good?

Fine work, sir.

No, he's right, Warwicks shipped with a particularly aromatic wax that left the bass smelling very distinctive.

Production sounds dated, yes, but the songs? Some of those early metal albums were just godly, even if they sound a bit weedy by comparison with modern recordings. Take a listen to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours on a good system, or Dire Straits first 2 albums, properly brilliant production and recording. I think the more original an artist is the slower they date, Jeff Buckley's Grace is timeless.

I had an 87 Thumb 5 with the single-piece Schaller style bridge, it was a monster, balanced, powerful, beautiful to play, not a hint of neck dive, they changed the body shape and the headstock design quite a bit over the years, the curved body went slabby and the woods changed. I'd still say that was worth a look at though.

I don't think songs date, per se, I think production techniques date massively, to the point that you can nail a production down by a snare drum sample sometimes. Songs get endlessly covered, some poorly, some extremely well, but music can be adapted into almost any other style, and so can be presented in a "modern" idiom fairly easily. There are some timeless productions, Sgt. Pepper, some of Joni's work, particularly Shadows and Light, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love and Sensual World era, some of the iconic metal bands best work maybe. I'm sure there are timeless jazz recordings too, but I don't listen to much Jazz. B*tch*s Brew sounds like it was recorded yesterday.

Like the triple dots, not many designs carry the width of the 6 string neck well, for instance I've always though 6 string Thumbs look odd, but Alan's body designs seem to scale up and down really well. That's going to be a proper looker.

I love watching Alan's work progressing, regardless of wether it's my bass or not, he does some cracking basses.

Latest from Alan today, Neck ready for mounting.

I've been struggling with the sub 120hz content in my studio for a while, the problem is that the room is too small and the nodes interact dramatically in that band. In order to combat that I've bass trapped all the corners and put absorption liberally at the ER points. The room sounds pretty good above 120hz, a little HF tweaking but otherwise reasonably even, but the LF drops off a cliff at 120hz and the software room equalisation can only do so much, basically the Amphion One18's just don't carry the weight in such a heavily trapped room. I'm going to lose a couple of the bass traps on the front wall to see if I can't open ehLF up a little at the listening position. So, enter Amphion's FlexBase25, a single pillar stereo bass management system that controls the amount of LF in the main speakers and adds 1400w of seamless bass amp and speakers. Essentially it turns a pair of very capable near-field speakers into full-range 3 way monitors with bass management. It's going in tomorrow, I'll let you now how well it does.