NickH

An expensive option, but maybe good if you could use it for other drop-D stuff, it to pop a D-tuner in there. (Please dear God nobody post any Michael Manring vids up. We've all seen them now, thanks)

Oh wow dude, I have to get me a boob job, an all-over body wax, and a gig as a Sex-O-Lette. This is my new goal in life. Nothing else matters to me now.

I have this amazing trick where I take a really nice bass and amp, and make it sound [i]exactly[/i] like a steel dustbin full of spanners falling down the stairs.

[quote name='Protium' post='707274' date='Jan 10 2010, 12:15 AM']Once played in a band with a left handed drummer, massive pain in the arse swapping everything between sets [/quote] I've been there and yes it's a pain in the arse indeed. Given that when we pick up instruments for the first time we're all cackhanded buggers anyway, why don't people just learn to play right-handed guitars and basses? I've got massive sympathy for the lefties who learnt leftie and have to pay silly money for instruments or just get told "We don't make lefties". As rightly pointed out, orchestral players don't have any choice in it and they seem to get by OK.

Oh I like her. Pretty, unique style, great voice, and clearly as crazy as a bag of weasels. Reminds me of my ex actually...

[quote name='flyfisher' post='706061' date='Jan 8 2010, 09:41 PM']Watching the DVD of "Concert For George" can make my eyes a little watery. Who was it who said The Beatles were dying in the wrong order?[/quote] I'd imagine it's probably not McCartney or Starr saying it +1 to Dimebag Darrell - he was awesome. I was very drunk at Download festival the year it happened. Most bands were putting a shout out to Dimebag in some way. So into the comedy tent I go and tell some tasteless sex joke, get a giggle. The guy who went after me said the following: "What's metal and full of holes? . . . . Dimebag Darrell" The whole tent literally went quiet as a church. I thought the dude was going to get lynched right then and there.

I thought for a second that the bloke in the photo was my old guitarist Greg, an excellent chap and superb fret-wrangler. I did a comedy cartoon double-take. However Greg weighs all of 9 stones fully clothed and the photo-dude looks rather more healthy.

Aha! But she's dumped his sorry arse now and is once again available! All I have to do it suddenly become a lot more attractive, athletic, interesting, charming and funny than I currently am... then arrange a meeting when she's in an available kind of mood, and it's all good in the 'hood.

[quote name='OutToPlayJazz' post='128547' date='Jan 27 2008, 10:04 AM']We did a few very high class functions at the Dorchester on Park Lane in London & met Sarah Michelle Gellar, Frank Bruno, had a chat with Roger Moore & shared a drink in the bar with Rod Stewart (who was quitre predictably surrounded by a bevvy of rather tall looking blondes!)[/quote] Reading through this thread, and this caught my eye... I'm trying to think of a more disparate and otherwise unrelated bunch of celebrities than Sarah Michelle Gellar, Frank Bruno, Roger Moore and Rod Stewart! Wonder which one of those she went home with?!?

I absolutely have to agree.... .... that the jumper is an eye-wrenching monstrosity and should be banned from YouTube before it blinds somebody. I'm not joining in the debate about the music.

Was just thinking, if it uses 4x 4 ohm speakers in series, you could easily rewire it to make a 4-ohm cab (or a 1-ohm, lol) But, as correctly stated above, you'd blow it up unless you were very careful how you drove it. A lot of guitar extension cabs are 16 ohm - my guitarist's Vox modelling amp requires a 16 ohm extension, and can't drive an 8-ohm. Maybe it's cause a lot of cabs are 8 ohm standard and they want people buying a same brand cab? Sneaky buggers. I have the MB4210 combo which is the MB450 head you're considering bolted into a 2x10". It definitely kicks arse. If you want to downsizse your rig and like the MB range, maybe sell your existing combo and extension cab, and buy either a MB head and 4x10, or the 4x10 combo they do? (Be warned that thing is b45t4rd heavy though, seperates might be well advised)

Why is it girlfriends get all weird about this? I mean, if we went for a daytime 9-5 job they wouldn't be all "You're not working in an office with someone that pretty!" would they? (Or would they? Post your horror stories here!) An ex of mine tried to get similarly anti when we were trying out female singers for my old band. She was really off on one until I pointed out that she can't stop me encountering women in all parts of my life, and if she has so little faith in me that she thinks I'd cheat, she certainly can't stop it by monitoring who's in my band. She saw reason.

+1 to that. I got socks.

I seem to recall reading about a famour superfast shredder guitarist (Steve Vai?) who has great relative pitch but it frustrated him that he didn't have perfect pitch. What he did was to play himself a constant A=440 note as he went to sleep and all the while he slept. After a while this "tuned" his brain to that note so whenever he heard any given note in the future, he could name it relative to the note in his head. Of course, it's all a moot point as the guy clearly has FAR too much time on his hands, and no girlfriend. I can imagine what my other half would say if I wanted to leave a weight on the A key of a keyboard all evening and night...

I'm getting a covers band rolling at the moment. We have both male and female vocals which work really well together, but they're in very different ranges so when we pick a song to cover there's a lot of noodling about in different keys finding which works for both. The 5 lets me do that in ways that a 4 just doesn't, especially as we tend to drop rather than raise the key. (This is also excellent for p!55!ng off your guitard - to the singer "Key of E no good for you mate? Let's go to Eb!" - capo comes out, so do the swearwords ) I like to mess with songs anyway, learn to play it in a few different keys as an exercise for the brain, fingers and ears. Take a few songs in E or A, then transpose them down first one step to Eb or Ab, then two, and keep going til your E songs are in C or B and you're really delving the depths of the 5-string's range. Songs which previously had open-string riffs are great for this as you're forced to fret the root note and take the scale from there to play the rest.

Brass nuts? I got two of them right here... postage would be expensive though as they're rather large Best of luck!

+1 to Bon Jovi being a ton of fun to cover. We do Livin' On A Prayer and Wanted Dead or Alive and they're both great. I wish we were back in the days when rock n roll was silly, irreverent, sweaty and joyous*. Too many tortured "artists" worrying about if their angsty emo-dirge correctly reflects the sorrow and misery of their lives. Give me Lay Your Hand On Me any day of the week. * Oh sh!t, that was the 80's. Nevermind, disregard the whole post

I've not purchased one, but spent some time in a shop messing around with one. I found the action and intonation poorly set up, the fret ends badly finished, and the plugged-in sound weak and thin. Of course if you're going to upgrade the electronics and give it a good setup some of those might go away. The whole thing just felt "cheap" to me - little things like how the neck sat in the pocket, and the quality of the paint job, just made it feel like it was put together quick and dirty. Of course, if someone at FleaBass says this is getting fixed soon... 1) they acknowledge there's a problem. Why have they been shipping them so long knowing this, given Flea's "These basses are going to be great" blurb? 2) Doesn't help you if your good lady has already bought yours.

I make a conscious effort to be constantly moving and dancing, getting the crowd and the rest of the band going. It's been heavily discussed elsewhere, but playing well is only part of putting on a good show. Clothing and appearance, stage setup and lighting, how you move, and crowd interaction are all vitally important. Plus I have the added bonus of not having to sing live BV's as we have a good selection of far better voices in the band right now, so I can go hit the dancefloor and shake my money-maker...

Goes to show, you can never judge someone by what they look like or what they do for a living. Nobody seeing me in my suit doing the day-job would suspect I'm a rock n roll bassplaying behemoth OR an international porn star in the evenings

My fear in all this is that the hats will come in the same eye-jarring garish colour schemes as the FleaBasses themselves, making it appear as if the wearer has dipped their head into a vat of nuclear waste. It's been talked about elsewhere on the forum, but those basses really are hideous in colour, sound, and quality. Such a shame as I love the Chilis and find Flea himself pretty entertaining in interviews.

I've found when teaching youngsters, it's even more important to give them something recogniseable and familiar, and don't even think about scales, chords, any kind of theory etc. Make him feel like a little rock star in the making and he'll be motivated to play, which is 9/10ths the fight. Kids just absorb knowledge like a sponge at that age as long as you can hold his focus.

+1! What's this spectacular piece of shiny kit?

Yeah, didn't we just have a discussion thread about this guy which went on weveral pages of hotly debating Cool Groove Riding vs Insane Technique vs Is It Even Good Music? Think it's been done to death now, you either love him or hate him. Me, I'd love to be able to play like that, so I could NOT play like that but feel smug about my restraint... rather than not even being able to hit Mustang Sally in time and on key.

Although life is short and should be enjoyed full tilt 100% all the time, it's never too late to completely change things. I did A-levels, went to Uni, dropped out, worked in electronics, went to music college, made a living as a pro muso, started my own company, folded same company, and now have a career in accounts and banking. All before 30. So if you're going through a sh*t spot now, my sympathies, but a big life change can always be just around the corner if you go out and instigate it.