The Last Bass Outpost

Like Nadine, another memory from my high school years.

Love this song.  The Stones did give it a bit more swing, but it also proves the point that Macca was right: they are a blues cover band (I mean the hole dang first record, but that was normalish for the time).

I’ve been mostly playing short scale basses , bought some interesting long scales since  , but continue to prefer short scales .
The exceptions were a Yamaha Flying Samurai and a Riverhead Unicorn . Interesting basses !

Man, I have been dying to get me hands on a Yamaha Samurai ever since I got into the Polysics/saw them live.  They got pricey though.  Pauls Boutique gets them all the time (6 and 4 bangers; mostly 6).  Also ridiculous number of pup config options.

It never occirred to me that Midnight OIl's bass tone was Tbird.  These guys always defined it for me.

Yep.  Pretty cool that the  dude made the Aussie parliament.  Always liked this one a lot too:



edit:  heh, playing those back to back now... somehow never noticed before.

OK, cool.  I just have a hard time with this bit (makes the dude sound like he's not a musician to any degree at all):

"Second, Motown was constantly re-recording material. If you look at Motown albums from this era, you have the Supremes and Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson doing each other’s songs, and everybody doing everybody else’s hits.

“The singers were often not in the room when the session musicians were recording these songs – so if you’re the bass player, and you’re playing on what you think is Get Ready, for example, how do you know if it’s the hit version? Is it a re-recorded version? Is it an album version? Is it for a movie or for TV? And Motown also recorded lots of stuff that was never released. So you can’t really blame any of the bass players for not knowing if it’s them or not.”

Like, Ok sure, but you'd think the people themselves would be able to hear it and say - yeah that's what I played; my style. Granted Kaye's not gonna sit down and listen to all those songs in a row with a checklist so fair enough.  That's a lot of material and if you remember playing on (some version of) it that can be confusing if you don't actually sit down and critically listen to it on a reference system.

Like there's weekend my-folks-are-out-of-town-lets-rent-an-8-track sessions I was at when I was younger and maybe it was a boozefest and I don't remember whether I played drums, rhythm guitar or bass on a given song... or anything at all - was just there, but I can listen to the damn song and be like - nope, that ain't me, I wasn't using a pick at the the time (or, I wouldn't be caught dead doing the disco octave thing).

working on some.  Did this one before I started on the headshell, but it's using guitar and just showing the concept behind the box (like how it gives you up to 3 switchable dirt levels - clean/bypass > Champ/Herzog > +fuzz).  with bass I find this thing super touch sensitive.

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Thanks guys!

It's beautiful. Hope it does what you designed it to do.

It does!  It can get dark and doomy through brighter than I care for.

The fuzz is great but can fizz out a bit at the top of the dime depending on yer pickups. with the dull cap (plate load bypass on the fuzz tube) I put in to tame the oscillation it's not nearly as unwieldly as old school hoser rockers say about version 1 Garnet Stingers. If the gain is dimed, turning on the fuzz takes it to that next level where it's not more distortion so much as compression and evening things out (and top end maybe, depending on normal path tone vs fuzz tone settings).

I was surprised how much the NFB switch being engaged cleans the thing up (still get dirt but less for the same setting). I haven't played with that very much yet, but that part of it was immediately obvious even at lower gain settings.

A great learning experience - for example, at least in lower powered single ended amps, tube rectification is a waste of parts and space.  I'm going to take it to the studio to see if I can push it to sag but I don't think it will.