The Last Bass Outpost

Fender has released a new fretless Precision, in the Squier Vintage Modified series:

http://www.fender.com/basses/precision-bass/vintage-modified-precision-bass-fretless-ebonol-fingerboard-3-color-sunburst/

It's funny how a simple photo can generate GAS - Bananas at Large (one of my local independent retailers) posted a photo of a newly arrived on on facebook:



Today I am planning on driving up to check it out. The VM stuff has been getting good reviews, here and elsewhere, but it looks like the fretless stuff requires some caution. Ebanol fingerboard, so artificial, and apparently some haven't been made so well, with the lines sticking up, etc. I'll post a review if I am able to check it out.

This isn't new news but haven't seen it mentioned here - a CD/DVD of an early stop of the Perfect Strangers tour has been released!

http://www.deeppurple.com/index.cfm/pk/view/cd/NAA/cdid/442336/pid/400088

It's pretty good - the sound is good (though bass is slightly lacking) and it's nice to have both the CD & DVD - listened in my car first, then watched the DVD to see what was going on. I saw them on this tour in 1985, in Tokyo, at Budokan no less! By then they had lasers, my fondest memory being Beethoven conducting during "Difficult to Cure" and crossing his arms and tapping his foot impatiently during Ritchie's guitar solo. I also remember what seemed like a wall of rotating speaker cabinets, at least one of which you can see in the DVD - not standard Leslies, these were like a rotating plate. I seem to remember them all being in sync too.

Definitely worth looking into if you liked this era of Purple! (there's a youtube video in the link)

No affiliation with the seller, just saw it and immediately thought OUTPOST

https://hashb.ag/_billywarren_/567022830529364573

(Discovered it by checking out hashbag - type in a term and it checks hashtags to find things people are selling on instagram - apparently people are using it as an alternative to evilBay, craigslist, etc.)

Happened across this - interview with Dweezil Zappa, including some nice performance footage:

http://www2.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/News/en-us/Dweezil-Zappa-Talks-Frank-Zappa-Roxy-SG.aspx

I have a new favorite album - the eponymous debut of Matching Mole. Anyone familiar with the bassist, Bill MacCormick? Rather than search the internet for everything, I thought I would ask - there is so much esoteric knowledge in here.

Matching Mole grew out of the drummer/singer Robert Wyatt leaving the Soft Machine. It came out in 1972. The first three songs are classic Robert Wyatt ditties. Then the album goes into suite mode. Oh yeah, it has David Sinclair of early Caravan on organ doing what he does best. It has a song called "Dedicated to Hugh, But You Weren't Listening" and Bill MacCormick is pictured with a slot-head Gibson bass! Hard to tell what it actually is, but I dug up a picture:



I would guess EB-3 but not confident.

Anyway, I considered putting this in the Gibson section, but it isn't necessarily Gibson-centered, though he does get an amazing sound and it wouldn't surprise me if it was a short scale Gibson bass!

It's kind of crazy, but here's the entire album on YouTube - skip to around 11:10 or 21:30 for the best bass-bits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsj4vY0kiPE&feature=share

Thanks for any info!

I finally have a steady band after getting back into playing 11 years ago! Of course I've had the hieronymous project since 2002, but that was always long distance - drummer in Massachusetts, me in California or Japan. But now I'm playing with a couple of local guys and feel really lucky. The guitarist is amazing - there's nothing I like better than backing up a great guitarist - and the drummer is very flexible and knows how to listen and improvise.

I'm also finally getting to put some of my basses through their paces for the first time other than in the studio or at home. The Triumph has been getting a lot of use, so I thought I would post some stuff here. I'm thinking I want to put roundwounds back on it, but for now it has LaBella flats and I think it sounds pretty good. For a while we were playing pretty loud - originally we were much quieter - so I'm playing pretty hard and pushing my CAJ tube compressor:

https://soundcloud.com/hieronymous-seven/noel-and-billy (I've posted this one before elsewhere)

Here's a different version of the same tune - we've gone back to playing quieter, so it's more the sound of the bass with less fur:

https://soundcloud.com/stanleylighthead/noel-and-billy

And here's a video:



I don't see myself ever getting rid of this bass. The sound is really even across the entire neck, and the pickups get a wide range of sounds. And I've said it before and I'll say it again, as heavy as it is, on the strap it really balances well and is actually very comfortable.

Saw this over at the Guitar Exchange website - a "Gibson Centennial Collection":

http://www.guitarexchangeonline.com/details.aspx?item=2961865

"We are pleased to offer a unique opportunity for the savvy collector / interior man-cave decorator; One of only 2 known complete collections of the 12 special issue guitars Gibson created in 1994 to commemorate their Centennial."

Wonder how much they want for it? Wonder if the person that bought it had the intention of eventually selling it?

I know I'm asking for trouble with a thread title like this, but I'm not making it up:



I wasn't planning on starting a new topic, but I put a lot of work in to document the two positions of the infamous "suck switch" found on early-'70s Guild basses for the "Let's Talk Guild" forum, so I'm just going to repeat the post here. Or, you can read the original post here.

With ProTools LE 8.0.1 I recorded my M-85 II fretless in each position. I played both fingers and pick, but for the sake of this demo I just included fingers, with my thumb resting on the corner of the fretboard. I recorded each position - the neck pickup soloed in each "suck switch" position, then with both pickups in each position, then just the bridge pickup. I also used the EQ section of a mastering program called Ozone (the link is version 5, I'm still using Ozone 3) to capture a snapshot of the EQ curve of one of the notes. I also have a screenshot of the two switch positions next to each other for another (albeit less accurate) visual.

So first, here are the soundclips. Position A is with the switch up (towards the bass side), Position B is with the switch down (towards the treble side) - I think this matches Frono's terminology in previous posts in this thread.









So far so good - use your ears to listen to the various positions in relation to each other. My subjective impressions from just playing the bass since I got it were that 1) the A position is much bassier than the B position, and 2) the neck in position B and the bridge by itself sound really thin.

Then I decided to take a screen shot of some of the soundclips in ProTools:



The top is the neck in the A position, the bottom in the B. The problem with the signal images in ProTools is that amplitude and frequency are combined, so peaks aren't necessarily related to only one or the other. But you can still get the basic idea that the two settings have some differences. You can see that neck B is louder - when recording I didn't use any compression and just played each clip without any gain adjustments. See Granny Gremlin's comments later on in the thread.

So I used the EQ section of Ozone to take "snapshots" of the low A being played at the 5th fret of the E string. In this first image, the purple curve is the neck pup in the A position and the yellow curve is the neck pup in the B position:



The lowest frequency is several decibels lower in the B position, while the midrange from about 200 hz and up is higher. You can really hear it in the soundclips.

In this second image, the purple curve again is the neck pickup in the A position, and the white curve is both pickups with the switch in the A position:



With both pickups, you retain the bass, but still get increased midrange/treble response, though there's still not a lot of treble.

Ideally I would provide snapshots of each position, each note even! But I didn't get that far. This will hopefully help illustrate the differences between the two settings of the suck switch. There is still a lot of work to be done, but this is a start.