Mediocre Polymath

Huh. So, this is weird. I've been ambiently aware of that song for as long as I can remember – just as something that gets played on oldies stations. I don't think I've ever seriously listened to it, and definitely not noticed how good the guitar playing is.

I'm always in awe of the sheer speed of bluegrass players. This is a lovely little phone recording of three of the best around today – particularly Noam Pickleny (banjo) and Brittany Haas (fiddle) – roaring through an old folksong and managing to sound like a band twice the size.

Good to hear its not just me. I've bought one of those Ibanez gig bags, because they're not black and pretty cheap, which is important because I have half a mind to busting out the sewing machine at some point and try repositioning the straps or making a second set of anchor points further up.

Just to expand on my previous post. A big part of my job these days is research and fact-checking (and supervising others who do the same), so I've been coming up against the AI authorship problem quite a lot lately. I'm not claiming to be an expert AI-witchfinder, but I've edited millions of words of published material over the course of my career, and I've seen the breadth (and depths) of how people write. Stuff that isn't written by people at all tends to have a certain something that feels, er, off, to me. It's hard to put that vague hunch into words, but there are a few aspects that I'd highlight. The main thing is Large Language Models aren't able (at least at the moment) to write in a way that assumes a particular level of pre-existing knowledge in their audience. So, they always start with with the absolute basics – stuff that, in a lot of cases, no-one would bother to mention if they were talking to reasonably informed adults. To give an example from the linked website, ask yourself, would a person writing a review of a particular model of Rickenbacker bass (for other bass players, you'd assume) feel the need to start by saying "The Rickenbacker 4003 is a renowned four-string electric bass guitar known for its distinctive design and unique tonal characteristics"? Or start a piece about Jaco with, "Jaco Pastorius (1951-1987) was an influential American jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader."? That's how you'd start your presentation to the class if, for some bizarre reason, your middle-school teacher had told you to do a book report on the Rickenbacker 4003, or Jaco Pastorius. Those sentences also illustrate something else about AI writing – the waffle. Chat GPT is incredibly wordy, and often writes with a strange sort of pseudo-conversational tone that feels out of place in more formal, nominally print-ready contexts. Every sentence is full of filler phrases, adjectives and vague descriptive passages that don't actually contain any additional information. To go back to the book report analogy, it reads like your middle school teacher told you to do a 1000-word book report on the Rickenbacker 4003, and you only had 600 words worth of material. The overall impression is of someone vamping to fill space on a subject they don't really know or understand.

Publishing industry editor/writer weighing in to agree with @Burns-bass. There's a distinctive sort of slightly stilted, verbose enthusiasm to how the current generations of chatGPT write. Their prose is like badly written PR/Marketing copy, probably because that's a large chunk of what they've been trained on.

Just adding to the general consensus here, I think, but here's my two cents. I've bought two basses from them in the past (pretty distant past now) and sold one on commission through them as well. They're good blokes to deal with, but because I'm in London I've only ever used their website for idle window shopping. All my actual dealings with them have been in person. I get the impression that they don't put a whole lot of effort into the website itself, with most of their online activity (social media etc.) focused on luring people down to the physical store. The thing I find particularly strange, given the unusual and valuable nature of a lot of their stock, is how sparse their product descriptions are. Like, they'll have some esoteric 1980s custom bass made out of gold and walrus ivory or something, and with, say, eight knobs and four switches and a bullet-hole in the body and the description will just say "4-string, details to come".

Quick postscript to this build. I just replaced the Kent Armstrong jazz pickup with a Bartolini 9J-S1 that I bought from @loudspeaker. I did this for purely aesthetic reasons (I wanted the pickups to match) and I'm dead chuffed with how well the level of wear on the new Bart matches the one that's already there. I'd wondered if perhaps the new pickup would bring about some dramatic improvement or change in the sound, but honestly it's almost exactly the same. I recorded the bass before and after, and even with big monitoring headphones on, it's near impossible to tell the new and the old pickups apart. Something worth considering when you're next planning an electronics upgrade.

So, for context, my experience is all from an infamous south London comp (most of the notable alumni on its wiki page are murderers) between 1997 and 2004. I did school music classes (as in the academic subject, not instrument-specific lessons) during my first three years at secondary school. We just had the one teacher during that time, who I'll call Mr Johnson. Looking back, Mr Johnson was a sad, haunting sort of a figure. He had a big bottle-brush moustache, side-parted brown hair and a pinkish face that was always shiny with rage-sweat. I remember being told that he was apparently one of the country's finest players of an instrument that there's absolutely no demand for – like a contrabass Saxhorn or something like that. He'd typically start his lessons by yelling at a volume that sounded genuinely painful. Once everyone had shut up, he'd start working through some rote lesson, interrupting himself at increasingly frequent intervals to do some more red-faced shouting. Eventually, there would come a point in every lesson where he'd completely lose his temper, slam the lid of the classroom piano down and scream "SILENCE!". Then we'd sit for the rest of the lesson in tense, terrifying silence. He'd glower at us; we'd stare at our hands; and the clock would tick away in the corner by the door. Sometimes he reached that tipping point less than 20 minutes into an hour-long period. It was white-knuckle stuff. I dropped music at GCSE, and I think Mr Johnson was encouraged to find a new career about a year later. I believe his last term of teaching was the one where the lid of the piano finally broke, though the actual final straw was when he gave a kid a concussion by repeatedly slamming his head in a door. --- There are two parts to this story though. After Mr Johnson left, he was replaced by an NQT – a guy who had done a teacher-training degree in his early 30s because he was fed up with life as a touring musician and cruise-ship performer. I'll call him Mr Smith. About six months after Mr Smith started, I agreed to record a bass part for a friend who was doing a music GCSE. I'd been playing for less than a year at this point, but this kid didn't know anyone better. I went in after school, set myself up, and we recorded a bunch of takes for a (truly dreadful) song he was working on. Mr Smith was around during this process, and came up to me after the session. He said he thought I sounded really good, and asked if I'd be willing to play on some other projects people were working on in the music department. I explained that I wasn't doing music, and he explained that this didn't matter. I ended up as part of a sort of spotty-teenager wrecking crew that backed singers and played at school events all the way through sixth form. Mr Smith led rehearsals and occasionally filled in on guitar, and also dispensed more musical education in ad-hoc explanations of chord changes or walking basslines than I think I'd gotten in several years of classes. When I started a noisy rock band with some other members of the group, he helped set us up with rehearsal spaces on the school grounds.

Just recieved an old pickup off I bought from John. Everything went smoothly, and he was very patient with my Basschat newbie confusion.

Huh. I didn't know that. Makes sense though, those videos look like they take a lot of time to write, record and edit. I know from colleagues who work in digital video production that the bottom has completely fallen out of the YT business. The per-view revenue share rate is about half what it was a few years ago.

Hah. Resurrecting this old thread to say that I am the sneaky devil that nabbed these. They're now part of my headless fretless.

The only one I'm really a regular watcher of is Adam Neely. He's a great bass player, but he's also a conservatoire-trained jazz musician who has an in-depth knowledge of music theory and composition. He's also just a far more articulate and thoughtful person than seems reasonable for someone who makes YouTube videos for a living.

If I'm learning songs or playing late at night then I plug into my Focusrite interface and use a simple (EQ and compression) patch in Ableton. My wife has no problem with my playing, but I'm conscious of the fact that hearing someone playing through the middle eight of Kid Charlemagne over and over and over again is going to drive even the most tolerant person crazy. I used to play through my big-boy rig at home as well, mostly because it's not very big (jumbo custom 1x10 ported cab and a MarkBass head), but I recently switched over to using my guitar amp most of the time because it is literally right next to my desk (I work from home, and that's also where my personal computer is, so that's where I spend about 70 percent of my time). The guitar amp in question is a home-made 5w Fender Champ-style head running into an equally home made sealed 1x10 cab. I picked that kit from AmpMaker because it has just a gain knob and nothing else – my logic being that no tone stack means no tone stack to be voiced wrong for either guitar or bass. The can just has a celestion guitar speaker that's good down to about 80 Hz, but it sounds really really good as a slightly overdriven low-volume amp.

Just stumbled across this thread and thought I'd raise my hand as another person who plays in both GDAE and EADG. I've dabbled in mandolin since I was a teenager (my dad also plays both), but I didn't really take to it with any particular enthusiasm until about six years ago, when I realised that a guitar I was making for someone else would leave exactly enough waste material to make an electric mandolin. I made this, which is has a excessively thick and heavy ash body based on a design by a 1970s British luthier called Peter Cook, and a cheap ebay piezo pickup running through a perfboard-and-splotchy-solder buffer circuit. I don't know if this is anyone else's experience, but I find that playing the mandolin for a week or two makes me come back to the bass with new ears and habits. The experience of looking at the same scale patterns the other way round makes me notice inversions and shapes I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. It's also just a fun instrument to play. I typically go through cycles of playing the mandolin constantly for about six weeks, then putting it aside for about six months when the strings get manky and I can't bring myself to go through the monumental hassle of replacing them. Like seemingly everyone here though, I've also found myself eyeing tenor mandolas and octave mandolas/mandolins. For me it's not so much a question of size (though I'd be lying if I said I could play much of anything above the 9th fret) as it is one of pitch. I just don't find the sound of the top string on a mandolin to be musically useful. I think that's partly to do with the quality of the instrument (the high E sounds better on my dad's Nigel Thornbory acoustic mandolin than it does on my electric one) but it think it's also just a taste thing. It's like the plinky top keys on an old upright piano. This is the design I've been toying with. Not sure if I'll actually bother to build it though.