Rosie C

Well, I pulled the trigger - ordered the Dimarzios from Thomann and my bass is with my local guitar technician. I've a couple of studio sessions coming up, so I'm looking forward to how they sound!

yes, I've been thinking about buying an Elf...

Welcome to BassChat!

I can imagine! The bit of my brain that manages low back pain is screaming "NO!!!!" but I'm just overriding those negative thoughts as they look so cool. Even if I didn't gig them, they'd look good in the corner of my practice room.

I need some!

I love the look of those speaker cabs. Is that how they came from the factory, or have they been 'ruggedised' ?

Sam Vimes Boots theory!

For the last few years I've played in a church band and it really was ideal for me: * 10am rehearsal, before the gig at 11am, home in time for lunch, no loading in the dark * large car park close to the back door for unloading * nice people, no drunks * free coffee and biscuits * fabulous acoustics 🙂

My last service included a send off for a pilgrim travelling to Rome, and the hymns were: Oh-Oh the deep, deep love of Jesus All for Jesus Brother, sister let me serve you Blessed now , O God the journey Brother, Sister stook in my head as an ear-worm for days afterwards! But that may be the last time I'll be playing bass in church as I've begun the process to convert to Catholicism. But I also play keys and I have an interest in early music, so I'm sure I'll still be involved in church music, just differently!

Yup. I'm an aspiring songwriter and I'd have been pretty pleased with myself with a couple of those Rick Beato AI songs. I will definitely have to up my game. Rick showed a song that was nearly completely machine generated, but I can imagine people feeding in their own lyrics, then have the AI system generate the tune & harmony, and learn to perform the song themselves, and it becomes a very blurred line between human and AI art.

For me it started at about age 14. A friend was front man boy in a high school band and they were short of a bass player. I played keys at the time, but he lent me his bass, and overnight I learned "Teenage Kicks". We rehearsed the next day and I was in. I still have the enthusiasm. It waxes and wanes though. I sing and play a bunch of other instruments. But it seems there's a shortage of bass players, especially upright players, so bands tend to want me to play bass. Also, since picking up the microphone I'm not content being in the shadows at the back, I like being up front. Lately I've had my own home studio though, so I multi track more than play in bands these days. My musical tastes moved away from pop/rock into classical then jazz then country, early music and most recently folk. I've no idea what that very first bass I played was. It was a four string, black gloss body with white scratch plate. My main bass now is an unbranded laminate upright that's had a fair bit of work done, and set up "just so".

Very nice. I tried to learn lute but without a teacher I didn't make much progress and ended up playing mandolin instead. One day I will build a lute though, and learn to play it!

Something like the Behringer Power Play would do what you need I think. I've used one for many years to amplify my double bass signal for my IEMs. https://www.thomann.co.uk/behringer_powerplay_p2.htm

Similar to wondering why my amp is silent, when the Speakon cable is still in my bag.

Have you considered a bass ukulele? They're very portable and have a great tone. Before I bought mine I was told it had a "double bass sound" and I didn't believe that, and arranged to meet up with an old band mate to try his - and I was amazed at the tone.

Bass recorder and piano accordion. The acoustic accordion has the very cool 'Stradella' button board which lays out the bass and chords in 4ths/5ths but of course just makes accordion sounds. But I also have a digital piano accordion which can generate bassoon, double bass etc., or drive a MIDI synth. The bass recorder isn't that low in pitch, there are great bass and contra bass which actually get low down. In the picture below is the great bass recorder I used to own...

We have a very good keys player who deps with us, and I make his life as easy as I can. He was particularly pleased that each way on our PA is colour coded, the XLR cables have matching colours and the mics have coloured leccy tape on them. It doesn't make me sing any better, but setting up & taking down is a whole lot easier.

... and Icicle Works for me, a fair few years ago. I only made it through the first song. AC/DC were also loud, we were right at the back of the arena and I had my orange builder's ear plugs. Not loud enough to leave, but loud enough to to wonder about the people at the front without hearing protection!

We did one, where the head lining band provided the PA and sound engineer. It was so loud I did the gig with my 19dB ACS IEMs and 30dB ear defenders over top. That was the last gig I did with that band. When the headliners came on they turned the levels up, and even outside the venue it was too loud to not have hearing protection. Me at the gig, looking p***ed...

For an extra £3 or so you can get a gel holder for them, and the 4 pictured above have diffuser gels fitted to spread the light more.

Yes, they've enough light for a small venue, though I tend to point them at the ceiling rather than at eye level. Back in the late 1990s I was part of a heavy rock DJing team. Our main lights were on a goal-post shaped tri-lite truss with 6x 300W halogen PAR56s, 4x 250W gobo projectors with moving-mirror style mechanism, 2x 250W moonflowers, fog machine and UV fluorescents. In comparison I can get the same amount of light from a bunch of lightweight and relatively cheap LED units. That said, even though MP3s were more efficient, I missed dropping the needle onto vinyl when we moved to laptops instead of turntables. In the same way there's something about the halogen PARs I miss - even though they were heavy, and lighting gel melted every few weeks and the bulbs would break and cost a small fortune to replace. But I'm sure this nostalgia would disappear within minutes of having to load that kit again

For the last few years these 'Stairville' LED lamps from Thomann have been hanging from the ceiling of our practice space. But with a house move coming up, they're on a T-bar now, and ready for our next gig. We abandoned using a DMX controller and went with built-in automatic programmes. Two lamps are running sound-to-light, with slightly different settings. DMX cables let the 3rd and 4th lamps duplicate the 1st & 2nd. https://www.thomann.co.uk/stairville_mini_stage_par_7x4w_rgb_ww.htm

I was going to say J G Windows. My dad bought me my first bass there, around 1985. The photo doesn't have the shop name, but it's on the right with the "gramophone records" sign

That doesn't seem an unreasonable question to ask

I'll second this. I also have the 3-way one: