Mediocre Polymath

There's also the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio. This KEXP live set is a fine thing.

Just realised I forgot to mention, the distiller is fitted to my Hohner "The Jack" (double humbucker model, not the ones with jazz pickups). All the recordings were made with both pickups on full.

I just thought I'd write a quick first-impressions review here, as I can't see any other threads in the BC archives on this system. The basics first. The Distiller is an active resonant-filter tone circuit, like what you'd find on an Alembic or a Wal. It consists of a low-pass filter whose resonant frequency is swept up and down using the potentiometer. Everything above the frequency gets cut, everything below stays unchanged. You can also switch in two levels of boost at the resonant frequency. Before I go on to the review bit, I should say that I didn't buy a filter preamp because I want to sound like Justin Chancellor. This is an unusual situation in the filter-preamp market, which I've done my best to illustrate with the venn diagram below. I mention this because a lot of the existing discussions on these sorts of devices seem to judge them mostly on the metric of "how cool does it sound when I play the riff from Schism?". I, on the other hand, have no strong opinions about Tool, and just wanted something that gave me a wide range of tones without covering my bass in knobs. By that measure, I think this does a great job. The best part for me is the regular low-pass filter (with no resonant frequency boost), which is a very effective but surprisingly unobtrusive thing. With a gentle turn of the Distiller, you can roll off just that annoying clicky highest of high end without muddying the musical treble you want to keep. Go beyond that, and you have effectively a very precise and controllable version of a passive tone control. It goes from "normal but with the edge taken off" to "reggae through the wall from a house party down the street". The two boost modes are, in my opinion, very usable at the top and bottom end of the range, but perhaps not so much in the middle. At the top end with both the low and high boost modes, you get some great aggressive sounds while maintaining the option of cutting out the clicky noises. There are some good sounds there – particularly in the lower mids, and particularly with the low-boost mode – but a lot of them feel a bit too nasal and odd sounding to be useful. As you get towards the low end, the low-boost mode gives you some great dub-like sounds while the high-boost makes your bass sound a lot like a synth bass. I can see myself playing around with those a lot. So yeah. Two thumbs up from me. Oh. Also, here are some very quickly recorded and very rough samples of the three modes. Each one starts with the frequency sweep all the way up, and then goes down through the range step by step. I apologise for both the quality of the recording (just straight into Audacity) and my playing (best described as repetitive, tuneless noodling). No boost. (I checked this against old recordings, and I can confirm that the starting point sounds indistinguishable from the bass when it was wired passive). Distiller_no-boost.mp3 Low Boost Distiller_lo-Boost.mp3 High Boost (might be clipping the interface a bit here and there). Distiller_hi-boost.mp3

Funny thing. For years I've been playing a home-made bass with a bartolini MMC and a jazz pickup at the neck. I originally added a jazz to my stingray copy back in the early 2000s, and have used those same electrics for years. Recently though, I came to the realisation that the jazz pickup has never really helped me get the sort of deep woofiness I was looking for as a counterpoint to the growly Bart. I learned to play on a my dad's old EB3, and I have been considering replacing the jazz with a mudbucker, but I've never seen that configuration anywhere. Well anywhere before now. How do you find it?

I tried a few of the cheap ones you see on Amazon/Ebay/everywhere else and they worked for about 2/3rds of a set-up. I tried to get by with those, and with regular needle files – I even built a few guitars with a zero fret precisely because that was easier than trying to get the nut right. I eventually carved and bought a set of StewMac files in 2018 or so, and they have served me well through about a dozen set-ups and six (seven?) guitar/bass/mandolin builds.

Many years ago I bought a secondhand Warwick corvette from the bass gallery that came with a simple, lightweight Levy's gig bag. That freebie remains the only gig bag I've ever owned with its straps at the right height to not smash your bass into every doorframe, lintel and overhanging branch. Was a sad day when it started to disintegrate.

I have an amp that could do with some tlc at some point soon. I'll keep that Dave Barlow chap in mind, though I am also far, far from Surbiton.

Dang, that's got to be worth a few bob. Tom's Guitars is a great little shop that has carved out a nice little niche. Tom Smith specialises in weird and unusual second-hand instruments, unique and interesting things that fit in well with a vintage/craft market like Greenwich. It's not an approach that would work in many places, but I think the high footfall he gets in that spot makes it possible to find someone for all his odd 1960s East German guitars, electric bouzoukis, 80s shred machines, etc. I think it helps that he gets a lot of bored blokes who have been left dangerously unattended while their wives are off looking at the market's excellent selection of jewelry, fancy soap, handbags and antiques. I sold a home-built baritone guitar on commission through the shop last year – the sort of instrument that would have sat for years on ebay or in most shops. Tom shifted it in about three weeks.

I've always had a fairly uneasy relationship with social media. I am of the right age to have joined facebook when it still felt like something fun and somehow private – around 2006, I think – but it jumped the shark some time in the late 2000s or early 2010s and never came back. I've not deleted my account, not really sure why, but I've also not looked at it in about seven years. I dabbled with a few of the other platforms, but always found they got both boring and addictive after a while. My dislike of the Skinner-Box psychological manipulation that's ubiquitous on the modern internet is actually what attracted me to this place. It's a forum. There are posts. You open the site and look at what's been posted. If there's something interesting, you read or respond. If there isn't, you close it again. Basschat isn't painstakingly engineered to monopolise my attention, it doesn't use the latest scientific research to try to serve me targeted content, to entice me into scrolling or paging through or whatever. It's a website. With stuff on it that I can look at, or ignore. It does have the unfortunate side effect of leading me to buy more gear, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make.

I recently rediscovered the Ben Folds Five Live at West 54th set, which is a great snapshot of them as a super-effective power trio. With Cake, apparently that style of "whole band" arrangement was something they always insisted on, much to the annoyance of various producers. John McCrea likes for each instrument to be playing something distinct, and for it to be possible for a listener to hear each part in isolation. As an aside, I was fascinated to discover (when I first got into them about a decade ago) just how completely the contemporary music press hated Cake.

I don't think you'd call it virtuoso playing, but I've always really liked Gabe Nelson's stuff on Cake's 1998 album Fashion Nugget. The band's arrangements are deliberately sparse and clean, and Nelson's bass always sits alongside the interlocking guitar and horn parts, rather than just being a rumbling noise underneath them. "Let Me Go" is a particularly good example, with a wonderfully bouncy, gappy bass line and the two very distinct guitar parts.

My best bass purchase – also my only major one – was the battered Hohner "The Jack" that I bought off here in June. It gave me a fun project to while away the summer afternoons and has turned out to be a really lovely bass. Here's the "before" pic. And here's the after: I've been pleasantly surprised by how good it sounds. My expectation was that it would be light, practical and a bit bland. And, well, it sort of is, but in a good way. I've never played a bass with p-bass pickups much before (these pickups are reverse Ps in humbucker cases), but I'm starting to get the appeal. My other fretted bass has a MM pickup and a really aggressive sound. It sounds amazing when everything's just so, but can be very finicky. The Hohner just sounds, er, solid, I guess. A nice smooth sound, almost like it's been compressed and tweaked already. I can just run it straight into my interface and be perfectly satisfied. The worst purchase would be Montana Color "Fire Red" paint. This turned out to be a shade of red no-one's ever seen in a fire or indeed anywhere outside of the Barbie dream house.