BenTunnicliffe

Evenin' everyone, I always forget to make use of the gig section on here but finally got my arse into gear for the busy month I have ahead of me! I've been playing regularly with a Bristol-based group called Circe's Diner for about a year now and to promote the debut EP 'October' we're all hitting the road early next week right thru to the second week of February. Described in reviews as early Warpaint filtered thru America's acoustic tradition with a quirky dashes of glamour Circe's Diner is a 4 piece featuring lots of vocal harmonies, percussion and thoroughly honest storytelling. The dates are: January 10th - Folk House Bristol [EP Launch} January 13th - Brighton, Latest Music Bar with Paper Hawk January 14th - Battersea. Magic Garden January 15th - Cambridge, Hot Numbers January 16th - Camden, Proud January 17th - Oxford, Como Lounge Witney January 22nd - Coventry, The Big Comfy Bookshop January 23rd - Lichfield, George IV January 24th - Manchester, Mono January 27th - Bangor, Blue Sky Café January 28th - Chester, Telford's Warehouse January 31st - Bristol, The Canteen February 2nd - Glastonbury, The King Arthur February 5th - Cirencester, The Kings Head February 10th - Taunton, Handsome Harry's I'm playing an early 20th century upright and an 83 PBass with flats thru some nice preamps all bounced down into a DB751 and a Berg 112 if anyone's out there for gear nerdery! Say hello if anyone makes it; I'm the beardy bugger. Cheers!

Sounding great Spencer. Really puts perspective on my own intonation if you think that's even remotely shoddy!!! Great pitching, awesome lines, really clear sound and monster time feel even through the solo!

Cheers for all the feedback! Really great food for thought.

[quote name='Rabbie' timestamp='1449701503' post='2926199'] My action is not really mega low (7mm-11mm), but it was well high before (12-16mm and guts). [/quote] First of all - JEEEEEZ!! 12mm?! Secondly it's great to get a point of reference on what some people refer to as 'low' action etc. I was told a while ago that 5-8mm was pretty standard as a 'low' setup and when my fingerboard was flattened it could only get down to 7-10mm or something similar and was apologising quite a bit about it not being as low as other basses manage to go. Thanks to everyone for the responses. It's great hearing about these things. It does seem that there is more of an argument that action in fact [i]isn't[/i] as much of a bearing on the tone produced (acoustically or otherwise!) as some of us entry-level DBers are lead to believe. Would you agree with that or do you guys consider it more of a case that with modern amplification etc the cons of higher action and/or tighter strings are massively outweighed by the pros of going low? Also, while I'm here, I have been told on numerous occasions that it's worth slowly raising the action of your double bass (provided you have an adjustable bridge) as you slowly get your $h1t together and your hands get stronger and that it is the route to sounding more proper..... Myth?

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1447368708' post='2907234'] I have messed with action using adjusters. What did it for me was that with a super low action the bass just did not respond in the way I wanted. It was not a volume issue it was a "voice" issue for the instrument. [/quote] I am very new to the double bass thing but must admit that I found the whole action/tension/string/sound thing to be far more of a headache on DB than I ever have for electric basses and thus ended up asking the same questions to lots of people and thought my 2p couldn't go a miss! (Who knows, I might get some more answers!) First thing worth noting is that Yuri (I've had a lesson with him where I used his own bass) does indeed have undeniably low action so you're not going mad! Secondly, he uses low tension strings. Needless to say his bass is a beautiful instrument that has been well set up and maintained but I must admit that I've never found that low tension strings with low action makes for a easier instrument to play in regards to the things that really matter to me. I shouldn't be tense when I play with any kind of action or string tension but being that my own DB has medium/high action (7-10mm) I find that I can't play for as long before my hands get a bit pitchy due to getting tired. Conversely, the difference in pressure required to play a higher action bass actually means that I often 'choke' other people's basses at jam sessions if they have low action due to playing too hard. I also find that I overshoot when pitching due to the lack of resistance. From what I've gathered in the past couple of years of digging into the world of Upright it seems that the action thing is more trying to balance what sound you want with an element of practicality regarding how often you are able to practise to develop/maintain the muscles required for playing with higher action. Some people get really macho about action and I think that's really foolish because we've all still got to pitch, keep time and pick notes out of thin air just the same! Despite the personal preference element though, I think what Owen raised is very important from what I've heard other experienced DB players (and Owen knows his $h1t!) talk about in regards to all basses having a certain ballpark string/playing style that they naturally ask for. A friend of mine recently got a beautiful very old french bass and instantly took it to his local shop to have his usual strings put on it and the action brought to how he liked it - medium tension, medium/high action. He told me within just a couple of days how awful it sounded. The bass had been built in a way that meant that hammering away with a heavy right hand and beefy setup was overexciting the front of the bass and that the vibrations seemed to somehow cancel themselves out and gave him a thin tone that didn't project at all. He swapped back to lower tension, eased off with his right hand and immediately the sound was full and the bass sprung to life. Hopefully someone else here might be able to talk about that a bit, for my sake? I took in my DB to have an adjustable bridge fitted and was told that the fingerboard would need plaining to make it more even (it's a relatively old bass) to accommodate a lower string. The work was done but it was impossible to take it down to the somewhat standard 5-8mm setup as they would have to take off enough wood for the end of the fingerboard to start losing stability - it's meant I haven't had much choice in my action! Personally though - I have more often than not, found that the upright basses I have played with low action & low tension setups possess a sound in the realm of getting very pickup-y out front, on stage acoustically OR listening thru the amp. I can only hazard a guess that this might be because the wood of the bass is percentage wise having less of a say in the overall chain of events due to more amp having to be used to get up to more working volumes. I do occasionally do completely acoustic video sessions with a folk group which voids any option of even experimenting with super low action and I have admittedly heard people get [i]huge [/i]sounds out of low setups but in my short period of looking, they seem less common to my ears. I have also found it a tiny bit odd that while we can all agree that we could play for longer and with less pressure in our hands by having low setups that in any jam sessions with a couple of different basses present that everyone plays [i]their[/i] setup well but I never really see people executing things that are noticeably far apart even if one person has high action and one has low....

I think importantly that it really is ok if you don't like Jaco's playing or music. If you wanted to add weight to your playing then checking out everyone from the instrument's history might be a route to take and that would inevitable include players you don't like. Whether you then choose to become a fan of the records is up to you! No one on this forum knows what you're trying to get out of music or more specifically the bass nor is anyone's taste better than anyone else's so ignore the quite high level of bashing that's going on albeit that this topic was bound to be a can o' worms!

I personally like his music and appreciate that it's not for everyone but would argue to the death that he brought an [b][i]objectively[/i][/b] undeniable contribution to how the instrument was perceived musically while simultaneously proving that the technical envelope could be pushed much further than it had been at that time. Yes Jamerson had an equally important mark on electric bass but that's fine too; there's plenty of room and time for us to have had more than one game-changer. Macca obviously gets a mention and we could go on and on. In any genres of music we can find people who took a tradition they grew up listening to and then found a way to push it somewhere it hadn't gone yet. I, like many bass players, had a period of a few years where I was completely obsessed with checking out his playing and then eventually overdosed on it and left him alone for a few years. I found myself getting distant from his particular style of grooving (the continuous 16ths thing) largely because it is what I'd consider quite an un-vocational means of supporting a lead line in a pop, rock, R&B or even straight-up funk setting (at least if you ask most band leaders). Being that most of the gigs I do aren't jazz fusion kind of stuff I don't really have a canvas to play like that and when I first checked out Jaco I was young and audacious enough to just shoehorn it into originals projects I was part of. I reckon it's easier to find ourselves polarised by Jaco in conversations like this than it is about other players because a great deal of people don't like that particular brand of jazz fusion which makes it a bit harder to just zone in on the bass playing. I hate the Beatles. Since [i]forcing[/i] myself to check out the key singles years and years ago to give the music a chance and understand what band leaders meant when they said to play like Macca I have not once put on a Beatles song unless I had to learn it for a gig. That isn't to say that I don't whole-heartedly appreciate that they were (whether I listen to the music [i]now[/i] or not) one of the most important groups of people in popular music writing and thus also instrumentally. I know it's off the beaten track a bit but I feel like it's easier to come down hard on more obscure genres of music and that is epitomised by how appalled people seem when I don't have a stack of Beatles albums knocking about! Back to the man himself though: I am now finding myself listening mainly to players who lay it down in genres more similar to those that I pay my rent with I did very recently listen to my Jaco collection start to finish and regardless of my now more in-depth sense of sound, time, theory, technique and all that stuff I've found myself doubly blown away by just how groundbreaking the man was and how he really did 'lay it down' with finesse - it just happened to have been in a genre that I don't occupy myself and that few people do. P.S. the lines and solos haven't got any easier at all either...... not one bit. Can't touch most of it!

Thanks for all the suggestions. My next question has been put to some engineers but I wondered if I was to be using two basses because they have distinctly different tones that some of the differences between them might be lost by sending them to the sound engineers mixer via one single DI built into my amp. Anyone know what I mean and had any experiences of this?

Hi everyone, I'm doing more and more work these days where I have more than one bass-y instrument on stage with me. The setups vary but the more common ones I'm having to employ are: 1 Pbass & 1 active 5 string 1 Pbass & 1 Double Bass 1 Active 5 String & 1 Synth (keys bass) I have an amp setup that I like (Aguilar DB751) but most of you will be aware that this amp only has one input. What I have been doing for the PBass & Double Bass gigs is plugging the PBass into the DB751 directly and sending the DI from that straight to the PA desk but separately plugging the double bass into an Acoustic Image head that I essentially just use as a DI and I then rely on getting some of that signal put back into a monitor wedge. The issue I have is that this seems relatively clumsy but more so that it leaves me in quite precarious situations if there is a small monitor not capable of pushing out a clean, bass-heavy sound or even worse off if there isn't enough monitors for me to have my own purely to hear the double bass. I'm sure that quite a few other people are playing 2+ basses on their gigs and I was wondering what you were using to bounce them down (Eventually) into one amp? A/B switching is no good to me due to the instruments all having different output levels. On top of that I actually find that the DB751 (like many bass guitar amps) doesn't sound particularly great with the double bas going into it so having the ability to do some basic EQ'ing before signal gets to my amp would be a bonus. I guess another nice feature would be to be able to mute the unused instrument too.... I seem to remember EBS (or someone similar?) used to make some kind of floor-based DI box/preamp that tried to tackle these issues? I've thought that a mixer would be a very simple fix but then to pass on a quiet, clean signal might require quite a nice mixer? Logistically a mixer would also mean that I'd have to dump the mixer on top of an already flight cased amp which is another headache..... On top of all of that there's also the issue that I would like to have the signal chain going: Instrument > DI Box of choice > Splitter/Mixer/Magical Device > Bass Amp > Ears And so I'm not sure what the simplest means is to shoehorn the DI stage into the chain! Needless to say there isn't any moments where I'm playing two instruments at exactly the same time in case someone was picturing some odd Michael Manring scenario going down. Really interested to hear people's thoughts! Cheers, B

Hello everyone, I have done searches for power supply advice but was finding it difficult to find anything specific for what I'm after so I thought I'd put a thread together. I've recently mounted my pedals onto a pedaltrain Junior HC and have been until now using a 1-Spot with a splitter cable as a power supply for everything excluding a moog pedal that's in there on account of it having its own power supply. Pedals are: TC Polytune > MXR Bass Octave Deluxe > Boss OC-2 > EHX Deluxe Big Muff Pi > Moog MF101 Low Pass Filter > Off to my amp I'm currently finding that I'm pushed for space in the pedals' hardcase on account of the one spot power supply being sat in there and just overall the whole setup is a bit untidy every time I get it out of the box. It's also not the quietest setup of pedals in the world but I'm not convinced that's entirely down to the power supply. Regardless, what I'd like some advice on is what power supply I could get that I could mount on the underside of the pedaltrain to save space that could power all four of the 9v pedals I have or even better still, one that could power the Moog as well by utilising variable voltage or something? Ideally I'm looking for something reliable, quiet and that would fit on the underside as mentioned. Would be great to pull out the pedaltrain and just plug it into one socket and be able to start playing! Any thoughts? (Pics to follow) Cheers, B

Bought a Bergantino cab from Ian and he was completely reliable, communicated really well and the cab arrived amazingly well packaged, as described and as quick as I could have possibly imagined. We had an issue with Parcelforce which 100% was neither Ian's fault nor mine but Ian communicated through the whole cockup they planted on us and was kind enough to work with me as soon as he possibly could to re-arrange a delivery service and kept me posted all along the way. Great communication, dead genuine, quick sale and the item was exactly what he posted on the forum. Would happily and confidently deal with Ian again. Cheers mate!

Hi all, I've been using my Aguilar AG500 SC more than happily for years now and suddenly it decided to stop working and rendered its self completely useless in a pretty odd way. Connected to mains the amp head switches on, its blue light below 'status' lights up as normal, I can then mute to set the channel live and the first issue is that no matter how much gain used the 'clip' light does not light up to indicate an overload of signal. Activating/deactivating the -10db pad makes no difference. The amp is actually not sending any signal from its speaker outputs to my cab or any other cab I've tried neither via the speakon connectors or the jack connectors. I can however get the DI to send a normal signal but only when the post/pre EQ button is depressed which is really weird. Even when the DI is sending signal the 'clip' light is still impossible to illuminate. I have rang two repair guys who on account of never having heard of Aguilar (facepalm) are unhappy to look at the amp. That said the second technician said it could be an issue with the FX loop being a bit faulty and even though I have no means of knowing if that's the case the amp did give up the ghost a day or two after I had experimented with using the FX loop. I can confirm the leads, bass, bass' battery etc are all in perfect working order; just to rule them out as the issue. Anyone know what the problem is or know anyone near Bristol who could help? Cheers, B

Great suggestions here and I wasn't surprised that Tribe Called Quest appeared very early on in the discussion! In regards to other suggestions from myself I've actually found very few hip-hop albums that DON"T have at least a track that has sampled double bass in them. Tying in nicely with the Robert Glasper suggestion is this tune by Common which features Derrick Hodge on double bass with what (to me) is an insanely nice upright tone and a pocket to match. Derrick Hodge is the bassist on Glasper's albums and tours and is definitely flying the flag for sounding authentic on both upright and electric in today's scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJwAkpfcEj4