NickH

I wouldn't say you have to exactly copy the look a la the tribute band in the movie Rockstar, but you'd definitely want to get a big bouffant 80's wig (unless your hair is naturally like that already!) and some leather trousers. Ooooh yeah, that's how we roll.

Regardless of whether it would sound any good or not, you definitely do NOT want to connect an amp's speaker out to the Zoom's input. The speaker level signal from the amp will blow the instrument-level input of the Zoom all the way to hell. Don't even try it.

[quote name='lemmywinks' post='673299' date='Dec 3 2009, 03:46 PM']Cheers! I'll be getting this done to my fretless Jazz in the new year. With series/parallel switching and a piezo bridge it's gonna be ace![/quote] As well as putting the pups in series with each other, if you get humbuckers you can series-parallel the coils in each pup too. With a three-position mini toggle or (my preferred option) a rotary switch you can series / single / parallel each pup as well as have series / parallel between the two pups. (I figure any man who's gonna put a piezo in it will not be adverse to a bit of technical chicanery under the bonnet of the bass ) Going to install a seperate jack for the piezo output, or run an onboard pre and blend it in, or break it out with a stereo jack and lead into a belt box?

The screw holes are really obvious, so it's going to need something in there. +1 to transparent guard definitely. Lovely bit of wood that, bet it makes a sexyful bass, keep us up to date?

Enough about female sound engineers, what about female drummers? I've played with a lot of drummers in my time, the huge majority of whom have been blokes, but 3 of the top 5 best ones were women. What's up with that?

[quote name='XB26354' post='672660' date='Dec 2 2009, 11:25 PM']And purple really doesn't suit him [/quote] Oh that's a shame, his shirt was the thing I liked most about that clip

[quote name='peteb' post='672659' date='Dec 2 2009, 11:25 PM']The Fender Precision is undoubtedly a design classic and is THE reference electric bass sound to which all others are compared (I always think of the intro to Money from Dark Side Of The Moon as the definitive P bass sound) much beloved by record producers, guitarists and apparently many bassists who just think that is what a bass guitar should sound like! I’ve owned a few in my time and indeed still have one, thru I’ve only gigged it once over the past 12 years or so However the do have faults that many here seem to celebrate for some reason: crap bridge that needs replacing, missing fret, poor access to upper register and not to mention those ridiculous ash tray things that get in the way of your right hand and make changing a string a major chore! For some strange reason there are still some people who insist on keeping these – why??[/quote] Well I guess some folks keep the arse one on to hide the fuglyness of the stock bridge!

Let's have a piccy of the bass then, so we can see the bit of walnut in question! I love my natural finish walnut Status with black hardware. It's a gorgeoud wood, so unless you got a nasty bit I'd say show as much as possible with a see-thru guard or none at all.

Become mates with a good PA guy. Follow him round gigs (carrying gear to help), then sit at the desk as he adjusts his rig for the room, and then mixes and EQ's the instruments into a good band mix. This will teach you a great deal about not only how to EQ your bass, but also what the other guys in the band should be doing too.

Here's a circuit I drew up for Muzz for his JAzz, which is to be fitted with Seymour Duncan Vintage single coil pickups. Normally the pickups are in parallel when both volume pots are fully up. This switch puts them in series instead, which gives a much fatter, edgier, louder sound. Tim Commerford from RATM / Audioslave wires his Jazzes like this all the time (I'm reliably told). Give it a go and have fun! Excellent way to get more tones from a twin sc/pup bass. (This will work with humbucking pickups too naturally) PM me for any wiring help / technical advice Nick

Holy crap! I was just thinking "that looks useful, might give one a go..." then I saw the price of it. For a black 5-string one to match my Status, plus tracked shipping, it's £120. I'm liking the mouse mat version right now.

Fondle a bum would be better!

The only such system I have any hands-on experience with had a little PCB which sat inside the control cavity and has a tiny trim pot for each string. If such a thing isn't provided on said bass, you could try taking it to bits and swapping the B saddle with another string. You'll need a delicate hand with the soldering iron though as such things tend to be very small and fiddly.

[quote name='chris_b' post='669738' date='Nov 30 2009, 08:20 AM']Do both.[/quote] Both girls?

[quote]Bass guitar unbalanced - Headstock falls towards floor when I let go of the neck[/quote] Having resolved that issue, there's now this burning problem... Bass guitarist unbalanced - head falls towards floor when I'm let go to neck lots of booze Please nobody recommend drilling new holes in me, the piercer has already done that quite enough.

They're generally OK kit, and at that price you can't go wrong. If you don't like it sell it on at minimal loss.

Yeah, as soon as I read "have my daughter most weekends" that's going to throw out being a part of such a hard-working band... and obviously she's more important. Unless, of course, you can take her with you and get her to tune and polish your basses, carry the 8x10", work the mixing desk and beat the drummer sober when the set's about to start?

A sneaky trick I learnt from a very wise man. Instead of one big vocal foldback speaker, get two cheapies. Make sure they have a phasing option. Put one out of phase with the other. If you're running one active monitor with a slave cab which has no phase option, custom-wire yourself a phased speaker cable. Mark it clearly as the phased one though! Ditto with two active cabe fed from XLR's from the mixer, or if one has a signal out XLR (As will be the case with the Mackie SM450 mentioned) - solder up a phased XLR lead and use that between the out of the first cab and the input of the second. Set them up a distance apart, both toed in towards your signer. This should nicely point them into opposite back corners of the stage or thereabouts. The trick works because a mic is a single sound-receiving source whereas your signer has two ears a distance apart which can work very well independently. The mic receives two signals from the monitors in antiphase which means it feeds back very little.

Phasing is REALLY hard to explain in words but dead easy to explain with a picture. Musical notes are a sine wave signal. If you put two on top of each other, as when you use both pickups on a 2-pup bass, the waves sit in line with each other and reinforce the sound. The sine wave of one starts on the up-ramp part of it's cycle, so does the other, both go up, win. Problems arise when you introduce any kind of delay, such as a signal goes through when heavily FX'd. Say your played note has a frequency of 100 hz. Each full wave takes 1/100 of a second (10 milliseconds or ms) to go from the start point, do an "up bump" of a sine wave, a "down bump", and back to where it started ready for the next wave. Each "bump" therefore takes 5 ms. The unprocessed signal goes from your bass into your amp. Then the signal goes to your FX chain, and picks up 5 ms delay from the processing. This means that your pure bass signal starts an up-bump the same time the processed signal starts a down-bump. If the signals were identical, you'd get zero sound at this point. Luckily for you, FX'ing the signal means they're not identical anymore but a significant amount of the signal strength is lost. Of course this only affects the 100hz notes if your FX chain has that much delay. The 300 hz notes will be affected less, and as frequencies get higher and higher it's harder to "line up" the phased and non-phased signals to cancel everything out. That's small consellation to us as bassists since it's the low frequencies we're generally interested in. The above phenomenon isn't solely linked to frequency-specific delay phase. If one of the speakers in a two-speaker cab is wired the wrong way round a similar effect happens. The same electrical signal from the power amp moves one speaker forward and the other backward. The result? Crap tinny sound. Same if the neck and bridge pickups in a bass are wired out of phase - or, even worse, the two coils in a single humbucking pickup. Thus endeth the physics talk!

I've never liked the sound of 15" or 18" spealers, despite being a low and rumbly 5-string slinger. For me 10's just have it. I'm collecting pennies for a second cab to put under my Marshall MB 2x10 combo, went to the store, tried a 4x10 against a 1x15 (both in addition to the inbuilt 2x10 naturally). The 10's just kicked the arse of the 15 from here to next week. Something to bear in mind is that a single 15" speaker only has very slightly more surface area than 2 10's, but a 1x15" cab generally tends to be the same size (albeit lighter and cheaper) than a 4x10 with almost twice the air-moving surface. Plus 10's respond faster so give more clarity. YMMV of course, but I'd definitely recommend doing what I did. Go to a local shop, pick a head you like the look of and try a few combinations of cabs out.

When I was running my live PA company, I trained up my (now ex-) GF in how to do it, for when I had to go to the bar / toilet etc. She was pretty good towards the end. Had an ear for metal herself though, so she wanted to treat every band like a metal band and mix accordingly! Although I guess we all put our own stamp on the music, but hear it as nice n balanced and neutral...

Something else to bear in mind, (unless you're very disciplined) when you come to play the songs live you'll go through them a lot faster than you do in practice. So time your set when you rehearse it then add at least another couple of songs. We played a gig on my old drummer's birthday once, to a crowd at his hometown venue (the Royal Squadron on the Isle of Wight). He was treated like a homecoming conquering hero by all his old mates and his money was no good at the bar all night. Then (unbeknown to the rest of the band) some tosser gave him an E. Our first song was a cover of Foo Fighters "My Hero" with that slow poundy drum intro... he launches into it at a tempo that would do most techno tracks proud. It's literally about twice the BPM it should have been. Bastard! We finished the whole set in 3/4 the planned time, recycled a couple of songs, went offstage and gave our man a sound bollocking for being a f***wit. Then we got drunk and staggered onto the ferry back to civilisation

[quote name='Pentode' post='667375' date='Nov 27 2009, 02:04 PM']How did my first gig go? I'll let you know after Thursday night..... [/quote] Go on then, full report! [quote]No. Two bad life choices. Note to self; take up lead guitar.[/quote] Get out!

A P-bass is like a buck knife while a modern bass is a Swiss army knife. If you just want to cut something, awesome. When it comes to opening a tin, or undoing a screw, or getting a cork out of a bottle, or... erm... whatever the hell this gizmo on my knife is for... you're a bit screwed if all you have is a knife. BUT if someone jumps you in a dark alley and you have to screw around finding the sharp bit on your Swiss Army knife, when what you need to do is quickly whip a Crocodile Dundee style great big shiny knife out... Horses for courses.

[quote name='PaulWarning' post='666210' date='Nov 26 2009, 01:36 PM']A lot of these might be easy for the bass palyer but what about the poor guitarists[/quote] Anyone who's read The Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy will be more than passingly familiar with the S.E.P. drive. This unique starship drive enables ships like the [i]Heart Of Gold [/i]to break lightspeed by convincing the universe that, although the ship is breaking a fundamental law of physics, this is in fact Someone Else's Problem. The universe whistles to itself, ignores the problem and lets the ship get on with it. This wonderful concept can be applied to a number of problems both in the workplace and when playing in bands. Picked a song with an easy bassline but a bugger of a guitar part? Someone Else's Problem matey! Go about your business The advanced version SEPBHAGASFH field (Someone Else's Problem, But He's A Guitard Anyway So F^ck Him) is being worked on as we speak.