The Funk

It only just occurred to me to tell you guys that I get Duracell "Coppertop" 9Vs cheap from a web company called [url="http://www.battery-force.co.uk"]Battery Force[/url]. You can get a Duracell 9V for around £1.65 if you buy in bulk. I laugh at my guitarist when he tells me he pays over £5 at a corner shop for a Duracell 9V. I bought a whole bunch of AA, AAA and 9V Duracell batteries from them in summer '05 - I still haven't had to buy any new ones. My spare 9Vs have now run out so I'm going to put in a large order. When you think of each effects pedal and your bass's active preamp it makes sense to have a few sitting around in your gig bag and a few more sitting around at home. So I just thought I'd share that with you guys. Hopefully you don't clear them out before I get a chance to put in my order! I'm sure there are plenty of other online battery suppliers but these are the only guys I've dealt with before.

Hah, excellent. I'd love to hear how that sounds!

I can't believe I haven't posted in this review thread earlier. The EBS MBII is an awesome pedal and I agree with all the positive comments above. Sure, there are probably a couple of features I'd want to tweak slightly to suit my specific purposes but I've never had a situation where I thought "damn, why can't it do this?". I'll sit backstage with it and warm up before I go on, then I'll use it as my DI onstage and I don't worry about power supplies - I just run it off the phantom power from the board that most engineers don't even ask about turning off. If one of the valves goes in my Aguilar DB680 preamp onstage, all I have to do is take one cable from the EBS MBII and plug it into my power amp as a backup preamp. And if I want to switch between two basses of different output levels, I can EQ them separately on the EBS and balance the individual output levels accordingly - and just switch between the two channels. I couldn't really ask for more. Well, I may as well tell you the one thing I'd change - I'd make the FX section foot-switchable. I love the fact that the FX loop means that your effects will go to the DI and into the PA but I just wish there was a foot-switchable option of taking the effects out of the loop in one go (rather than stepping on each pedal individually). That is the one change I would make.

[quote name='GremlinAndy' post='145375' date='Feb 22 2008, 11:22 PM']I think the only fault with the Aggie is that it doesn't really do a great deal of sounds, but the sound it does do, it does *really* well. And it seems that most people who try it like it.[/quote] I agree that you'll never get an Ampeg overdriven sound out of it but I do think the EQ is extremely powerful and flexible on it. I have a rather extreme mid-range bump in it that sounds immense. The fully parametric EQ is something special - I don't think I've seen it on anything else. I think there are something like 10 valve stages in the preamp too, which could help to explain why it sounds so full and thick.

Apologies in advance for dragging up a very old thread but I just received a vintage Mu-tron III in the post yesterday morning courtesy of TimmyC. All I can say is bloody hell, that is the sound I have been dreaming of for years. Amazing.

Do you need any specific effects for anything there? I can see a good overdrive being important for Garbage maybe. Or a good synth pedal for Goldfrapp or the Sugababes. The Boss TU-2 is a must. Got to have a tuner. The GLX Bass Overdrive would probably come in handy, as would the Digitech Bass Way Synth (not that I've tried either pedal). If you are going to be playing synth, keyboard or programmed basslines on your bass guitar, those two would be useful for replicating that kind of sound. I don't think you'd need any of the rest - especially not the reverb pedal. The DHA pedal is very nice but if you wanted you could get the VT2 or the Dual Custom by DHA and use that instead of the GLX Bass Overdrive. I think save some money and just get a tuner, an overdrive, and a wah/synth/envelope filter type pedal - unless there is a specific sound you need to recreate.

I bought a Warwick Corvette Bubinga 4 from a fellow forumite last year. He had upgraded the pickups to Bartolinis and upgraded the preamp to an Aguilar OB2, I think. I think it sounds great but I can't really compare to the original sound with the stock MECs. If you have a specific sound in mind, I think a pickup upgrade could be worthwhile.

[quote name='jjl5590' post='174886' date='Apr 11 2008, 10:37 PM']If i have a head thats 450W at 4ohms, and plug two 600W 8ohm cabs into it, does each cab get 225W out of the head, or the full 450W each?[/quote] Each cab gets 225W

Awesome. I'd love to be able to sit in a studio control room with a multi-track recording of it and mess around with the faders.

It puts out about 300W (260W in the US). I was planning to use it on acoustic gigs and multi-band club gigs where stage space and turn-around time is at a premium. For anything bigger I'd need to take the big rig (or at least half of it). The cab only arrived today so I haven't had a chance to put it through its paces yet (want to break it in a little first too). I need to try it with our drummer on his mini kit and see how it fares. I reckon it should be fine if the guitarist uses a small combo. As a rule of thumb with the Amce cabs, I think they sound about half as loud as you'd expect from the number of watts going in. So it should easily handle the kind of job a SWR Baby Blue or a GK MB150 could do - just with a fuller, more even and deeper sound.

I actually once had Nick Fyffe ex-Jamiroquai buy my old MOTU 828 Audio Interface. He was very polite and didn't seem in the least offended that I hadn't recognised him.

Two reasons I can think of: 1. Weight 2. Flexibility (say if you want to have different speakers, for example) If I were you, I'd go to shop which has one in stock and just try lifting it. It's a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Ask someone before you do it though! From what I can see it is basically the same head and same cab stuck together but £200 cheaper.

The new mini rig for when I need to travel light. [attachment=7497:10_04_08_2044.jpg] It's my new Eden WTX-260, which fits in the pocket of my bass's gig bag, and my new Acme B1. Sounds pretty damn good. Weighs a grand total of 34 lbs.

There was a nice looking Tele bass for sale at The Gallery which was ex- Jeff Beck and Ron Wood, amongst others. It was tempting just for the fact of who'd played it before.

It's all about cognitive dissonance isn't it? That's how we learn. We're used to experiencing it a lot as kids but much more rarely when we're older. When we reach a certain age, we just don't want to have to go through that painful process anymore and just enjoy knowing what we know and doing what we do - ie. enjoy the fruits of all those years shut away in a bedroom, trying to figure out how to do whatever it is you wanted to do.

The combo weighs 8 lbs. more than your 70lbs maximum and is £200 cheaper than buying the head and cab separately. You could actually get the combo and a second cab for just under £1000 combined - brand new. You might be able to find it secondhand somewhere.

[quote name='Born 2B Mild' post='174199' date='Apr 10 2008, 10:34 PM']In an earlier thread, someone posted that they had an amp once used by JJ Burnel.[/quote] Aye. I bought it off him a few weeks ago. Didn't get to meet him though - bought it through Wunjo on Denmark Street who were selling it on commission. I don't really know much about JJ Burnel (I know he's very well respected by some folks on here though). It looked a very interesting quirky amp, the Fender 400 PS. A 435 Watt Valve Fender bass head from the 70s. It also includes a seperate guitar preamp channel too.

The Gallien-Krueger 700RB is a good head. I think I recommended it somewhere to someone. I used to have the 400RB. The Gallery will match all legitimate prices. The price listed on their website is quite high. If you get them to match the price at [url="http://www.gak.co.uk"]GAK[/url] then you'd save just under £150 on the head. I'm sure you could make similar savings on the cabs.

To be fair, I think it's just me who keeps suggesting the XLs. And the only reason is 'cos I think they sound great. They are very marmite though.

If you could stretch just above that £800 budget, I'd suggest: - a [url="http://www.guitarampkeyboard.com/options.php?id=12085"]Gallien-Krueger 700RB[/url] head (480W @ 4 ohms): £399 - a pair of [url="http://www.guitarampkeyboard.com/options.php?id=69236"]Hartke 2.5XL[/url] (200W @ 8 ohms): £239 each Comes to about £77 over budget but if you haggle you should realistically be able to get somewhere between £40 and £80 off that.

Well, I love slap bass, I play fingerstyle, slap and fretless. I'm quite happy to go through another person's gig without slapping a single note. I also write all of the songs in my band: all the music, including guitar parts, keyboard parts and drum parts, and the lyrics and vocal melodies. And you know what - slap bass sounds good on a fair few sections of a few tunes. It's not a niche technique. I don't use it all the time but I use it a hell of a lot more than 1% of the time. And I never listen to Mark King, Marcus Miller or Victor Wooten. I think your point about a lot of players' slap technique being underdeveloped (ie. playing grooves in E) says nothing about the validity of the technique. Just because people use it badly or haven't put enough thought into how to use it effectively that doesn't mean that it therefore shouldn't be used at all.

It's a different bass sound. As valid as fretless, as valid as pick playing, as valid as fingerstyle, as valid as harmonics, as valid as overdrive, as valid as chords, as valid as anything else. I get the point of your post and agree that playing slap all the time and on every type of song can sound corny but I disagree with two other things you said. First off, one guy playing slap only sounds the same as everyone else playing slap if they're one of the 1000s of clones you claim to have heard. Second of all, your harmonic choices aren't limited in any way. You can play exactly the same notes in exactly the same order when you're slapping and popping as when you're playing fingerstyle (or using a pick). Also how can you say that someone can slap for days but not hold a groove or lock with a drummer? If they can't do those two basic things then they can't slap for sh*t either. I just think there's a big grey area between the "used very sparingly" end of the spectrum and the "overused" end that you talked about. Every technique and sound is a legitimate music-making tool. I think it's extremely limiting so say "slap sounds good in a very specific area of music and is a niche technique". If we all thought that way then music and our instrument would never progress or develop.

I swear I read somewhere he was 15 and his folks were paying for this. Maybe in the previous thread - the one about Marshall v Ashdown?

Slap doesn't have to be aggressive or in-your-face though. It can be subtle, fluid and even slinky. The only way we'll get there is if we play slap more and don't think of it as showy tricks but an expressive right hand/left hand technique.