EMG456

And here is the guy with what I personally consider to be the best proggy ‘70s Rick sound- down tuned as well! The excellent Neil Brewer in Druid. If you can last to where the singing starts, you’ll see what I mean.

Since I’m propped up in bed with a bad case of sciatica I’ll bite on this. My first decent bass bought bought new in 1975 was a 4001. As I was into Yes/ Genesis/ Renaissance etc. It was the obvious choice. Also everybody else I liked could be seen playing them- McCartney, Lynott, Graham Gouldman, Dave Paton etc.etc.etc. At the time also, everyone had fallen out of love with Fender. The ‘70s baseball bat production were scorned so unless you could pick up a “pre CBS”, nobody wanted them. That bass had a great neck and sound and was soon joined by a ‘72 4001 and briefly a 4080 double neck! At that point, I was starting to play fingerstyle instead of plectrum and many different genres of music and I felt the Ricks didn’t work as well so they all went over the next few years. The thing is though, if you’ve had that connection with Ricks, I don’t think you ever lose it. So many years later when my mum died, she left me a modest inheritance and I figured a nice way to honour her memory would be to use some of it to get an old 4001 again- after all, she had signed as guarantor for the hire-purchase on the original one! I knew I would be unlikely to play it out much but hey, I like them. So for the last 20 years, I’ve had a ‘72 checker bound 4001. It has been on one! gig in all that time but I love it all the same. It’s also a thing of great beauty!

I’m impressed but the dog is obviously harder to please lol!

Not familiar with Vulfpeck but now away to find out some more- love it! Thanks for posting.

Never seen it but it could surely be done. Since you'd be spending a bit of money, to do it properly so the bass played well and consistently, the action would need to be the same over the transitions from fretted to fretless. so the fingerboard would have to be higher by almost the height of the chosen fretwire at the fretless section and lower at the two fretted areas. would pose an interesting luthiery challenge I suppose... I'd love to see and try it if you ever go ahead but on a practical note, anytime I've modded an instrument to fulfil some odd esoteric notion I had, it has always proved to be not as useful in the real world as I had imagined and ends up being sold off at a large financial loss. YMMV!

Well I just saw Jim’s show last night at the Edinburgh fringe and had no prior knowledge of his misfortune. We had seen that he was on and remembered him from about 25 years ago. The show was witty, enlightening, shocking and poignant and yes, I did laugh out loud quite a lot as he said to me on the way out. He can’t play at the moment- still working on making a fist with his left hand but ‘Bessie’ the bass does make an appearance on screen. His recovery, whilst nowhere near complete, is nothing short of remarkable so if your going to Edinburgh for the festival, turn up and give the man some well deserved support.

The Glasgow scene was a small world for sure - as you say, nodding terms for lots of musos in the gigs where every one went to see everyone else or in McCormacks Music on a Saturday to make your HP payments!! I'm Eddie McGlone - in that band were guitar - Bill Alexander, a man who follows no conventions, Iain Aitken - Keys, sax, flute, Sandy Walker, our barefoot singer and Mick (memory fails me for his surname) on drums. Paul (now likes to be known as PJ) Moore was keys for the previous version of that band and so I did also go to see them performing their "cabaret" sets in Nico's as White hats and also a terrific showcase gig they did in the Dial Inn as Macintyre. If you don't know me from all that, I worked for a few years at the start of the 80s in Jimmy Grant's music shop at the top of Byres Road.

That band was Chaconne - pretentious? Moi? Lol. We had a keys player who looked a bit like Catweazle and played the flute and sax as well. a singer who sang in his bare feet and me flailing around on assorted Rickenbackers and fenders whilst trying to balance on my fx pedalboard and bass pedals! We were Yes/ Genesis wannabees. Used to gig in the usual pub circuit of the era - the Amphora, Burns Howff, the Maggie, Dial Inn etc.

Consider yourself struck! Yes - Celebrate rings a bell too. I was playing kind of prog- ish rock at the time so as you can imagine, this was all a bit of a revelation to me! Happy days indeed!

Hi Tomas - nothing I know about - it was a long time ago and even the 4 track cassette portastudios had not yet been invented! On a quick dig around the web though, I have his name wrong - he is John Manby. I had heard he had moved to London but he now lives in Australia and apparently is still playing. The band I remember him from were called Croppa and he and the singer from that band, Tommy Jackson seem to be facebook buddies. Isn't t'internet an amazing thing?! When were you in Glasgow?

Honestly, you look away for 5 minutes and then... Rare enough in the standard black / 4 string variety but a white fiver? And a bargain to boot- well done Paul S - that'll be a cracker!

85/86 I was writing songs with a guy who was an amazing singer but had difficulties with various addictions which had more or less brick-walled a promising career for him. We were taken under the wing of record producer who was well known up here in Scotland at the time and he bankrolled a proper full scale studio demo. He then hawked the tapes around various record companies and Polydor was the keenest. So he and I went down to London to meet with the record company. In the office, the A&R guy was going crazy about the songs - "This stuff is perfect for the States", "Fantastic Songs", "Great Singing and playing" etc. etc. As we left the meeting with hugely positive vibes, we held it together until the lift arrived and as soon as the doors closed, my producer friend was punching the air with delight. He had a lot of experience in the business and reckoned that a lucrative deal was virtually in the bag. Two days later, Polydor call him up. "It's XXX XXXXXX singing, isn't it?" was the question. Unfortunately, my singer's reputation for drug use and related unreliability cast a large shadow and the idea was dropped instantaneously. Fast forward about a year and I'm earning a crust playing for various cabaret acts. One is a Drifters tribute act and the promoter/ manager has the habit of bringing to the UK former stars of Motown or whatever who's careers have slid somewhat from the heady days of the 60s. One of these is Ben E King. As we're a Drifters band, we are chosen to back Ben E. for a tour. It all kicks off inauspiciously in the usual way for those things at that time with a smashed windscreen in the tour van in the middle of the night driving down from Scotland to the Isle of Wight- the first date of the tour is the end of season party for the staff at some holiday camp. That wild weekend was a story in itself but the tour went on at equally salubrious venues for a while till one day Ben got a call during the soundcheck. No mobiles - he was called away to the telephone. When he reappears, he says that apparently, due to the recent release of the Rob Reiner movie Stand by Me, his song of the same name which we open the set with every night has just gone to No 1 in the Uk charts! Suddenly, we're part of a 60s revival tour and are playing to packed houses in big venues that you've seen on tour schedules by the big bands - Liverpool Empire, Colston Halls, Bristol, Edinburgh Playhouse etc. Talk about 15 minutes of fame? Then Ben went back to the States and that was that. These two episodes in their own ways are my nearest misses but what the heck - I've now been playing the bass and gigging regularly since 1973 and I'm still going, still learning and still enjoying it!

in fairness, I haven't really done any real mixing gigs for years and my skills and habits in that department were honed long before the birth of the internet and even a modest proliferation of "Music Technology" college courses but, yeah... 2.

Haha - you and me too then... the MC pickups to me are just what the doctor ordered - super defined, full range, clean clear and punchy and the perfect tone source for Alan's top flight preamp. he will tell you though, that they're not for everyone.

Double post - ignore!

Haha- very good but my Steinberger L2 has already proven its prowess in that dept!

Not everyone. I would be decidedly unhappy to be turning up to any situation with only a Fender P bass.

Let me think back... 30th Wal 5 40th Alembic 6 50th Chapman Stick 60th (coming up) ACG

Just bought a Phil Jones Bass Double 4 combo from Dan. Very easy to deal with. As described, well packaged and promptly delivered - you can't ask for more! Thanks Dan.

Yeah, I didn't really exaggerate (much)

I have an ACG EQ02 (only 1 low pass filter shared between both pickups) in my Status bass and If you like filter pre's then you'll like the EQ01. As you surmise, it does all the Wal/ Alembic stuff but with much greater flexibility. Both low pass filters have such a range that they can even be used a treble boosts as well as going down to virtually sub bass depths. If you're anything like me, you will need to spend some time with it if you're going to be switching loads of tones around in a live setting but it doesn't take long. For recording, it's excellent - you can dial in just about any sort of sound you imagine. In one of the bands I play with, we do house rehearsals and I play through a wee "busker" combo which is the most horrible, boxy sounding amp I've used for decades. The EQ02 equipped Status is the only bass I have which can completely cancel out all the bad aspects of that amp and provide a beautiful, full, rich and crisp bass sound with no help from external eq's etc.

OK- I'll bite. Back in the late 70s when I was young and foolish, I had joined a band run by a Keyboard player. It was generally a soft rock band, playing Steely Dan, early Toto... that kind of stuff. It was all a bit airy-fairy and I don't think we even made it to a gig so I decided to move on. Couple of years later, I get a call from said keyboard player to say they had a last minute gig on the Saturday night and their bass player couldn't make it - was I available? Well yes, as it happened I was and could they pick me up in the van? So on Saturday afternoon, they turn up and we load my gear in and set off. Keyboard guy, guitarist who is driving in the front and me and the drummer in the back. This drummer was a good player and a nice guy but he always insisted on wearing an ancient afghan coat which stank to the high heavens. The gig is apparently in Dunfermline which in those days was probably about an hour and a half's drive away. I made it without asphyxiating and we arrive outside the venue which turns out to be the Kinema ballroom - a big cavern of a hall which big name acts have been known to play in. I start to get that sinking feeling. As I wheel my Acoustic 301 along the corridor leading to backstage, I am passing posters advertising past and coming attractions - it seems there's something on every Saturday night- The Skids, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Rezillos etc. We set up on the massive stage - I can't remember what the PA was - something that came just after WEM columns no doubt - but whatever it was, it was totally inadequate to fill the space. We are trying to perform this sort of American tinged easy listening rock to a crowd who seem to have turned up to pogo, throw beer and spit at one another. It was never going to happen. We got paid off by the manager at half time and scurried out with our tails between our legs! I didn't ever play with those guys again.

This is a strange thread... DrT, you are correct in what you say about the general reach of Graham Central Station versus EWF or indeed the Brothers Johnson with their Quincy Jones connections. Up here in Glasgow, the talk was really all about Louis Johnson. There was a great player called (I think) John Mambie who gigged with a funk/soul outfit up here who was very influential with the local players simply because none of us had ever actually *seen* that type of playing being performed before. the impact was similar to going to see Weather Report at the time and watching Jaco casually strolling out to the front of the stage to play the opening bars of Birdland in false harmonics on the bass - everybody had assumed it was played by Zavinul on an ARP synth! "What?! That's a bass??" Mambie's main man was Louis Johnson so that's who we investigated. Also, here at that time, most of us who were playing came to it through rock music, not funk or soul. There were many more would be rock/pop bands than funk/soul. Bass players of the day who were interested in taking the bass out of it's traditional comfort zone had already been influenced by guys like Chris Squire, John Entwhistle etc. and had dumped the flatwound strings and extended the high frequencies to cut through the mix better. Stanley Clark, Alphonso Johnson, Jaco Pastorius were all heavy influencers as well and using similar clear, bright sounds So the funk crept in through the Jazz/Rock/Fusion stuff and from the rock side through the likes of Steely Dan with the Chuck Rainey/ Bernard Purdie/ Steve Gadd rhythm section and the likes of Little Feat etc. It's a big melting pot!