The Last Bass Outpost

I get a kick out of the term "short scale." 34 inches only intonates the harmonic series of the G-string properly, which is why a lot of Fender basses can sound like total mud otherwise but have an ear-bleeding trebly G-string. The only widely available fretted basses to my knowledge with scale-accurate intonation across all the strings are the Dingwall Voodoo's. Even their Jazz-type bass is still off-scaled to keep the upper harmonics in check so that it will sound like a "traditional" electric bass. Shorter scale basses will always have more fundmanetal relative to the upper harmonics because the string does not have the "proper" period of movement to have an equal harmonic series, hence the Hofner 'boom' that lends itself so well to melodic lines without stepping on the guitars. I don't like 'short scales' personally because I'm a big guy and they feel cramped to me, and their lower relative string tension means I can't dig in as hard as I like to.

http://www.mojotone.com/amp-parts/Grillcloth;jsessionid=0a010c641f438fff0f1feee244a98503d9b2ea1f9e5f.e3eSc3mSaxuPe34Pa38Ta38Mb350

AFAIK they still have a big fan base. It's fine if you and some others aren't a part of it any longer, but I'll bet they will continue to be popular even if they're a shadow of the original band.

Hell... it works for Metallica! 

There's never anything like that around here. I probably have more GOOD bass gear than every shop in town put together. I don't say that to brag, but to underscore just how rarely I encounter cool old amps nowadays. I won't go to the only shop in town that has vintage amps on a regular basis. The owner has lied to me too many times about things he had no need or cause to obfuscate. To put this in perspective, this is the store where I got my Sunn 2000S for $75 about five years ago, and there may be similar bargains in there now, but I will NOT deal with the guy anymore, nor would I reccomend anyone else do so. Your best bet is eBay, Craigslist, or the online music stores with searchable used inventories.

I love the Bass Driver DI and the VT pedal sounds good. I can easily tell the difference between it and the real thing, but what it does, it does extremely well and for people who want a wide variety of different amp sounds without a wide variety of amps, it's super. I'm seriously considering getting that Leeds pedal just to see what it would sound like in front of my Ampeg, and Trace and Aggie tube poweramps.

I'm guessing that is was not plugged into an amp at all, but instead plugged straight into a computer and recorded. These pedals seem to be just the thing for home recording for people who live in apartments or who can't afford the space and cost to build a real home studio. They provide a reasonable tube tone without having to mike a cranked amp.

"Plugged straight into a computer" doesn't necessarily mean that is what the pedal sounds like. If that is the case, who knows what the sound of the interface or what kind of editing or plug-ins have been applied to it. A band I am currently producing recorded all their basic tracks live, and all the bass tracks were a DI out of the amp. The bass player had a passive OLP Musicman copy going through a Nemesis 200 watt combo, but by using plugins, on different tracks, his tone varies from P-Bass through a B-15 to T-Bird through an SVT, just by judicious use of compression and EQ.  Even my audio interface itself imparted part of the sonic signature, with a nice bit of warmth coming from the preamps.

I'm quite happy with my modern Hiwatt DR201. Guys on amp forums all hate 'new' Hiwatts, except guys who are using them.

No hate on my part, just passing along what I've heard more than few times: the new ones, especially the 405's, are horribly unreliable. I got that directly from guys who had them crap out on them, not secondhand. The bass player from the Killers was not one of those guys, but I heard what I said about his use of the 405's from more than one other person, including an amp tech whose band had shared a bill with them.  If the new Hiwatt 201's are good, that's cool. According to Bass Player magazine, new 201's are what he's using now instead.

I could also sell my Wizard Bass 400 serial #2 (Cliff Williams of AC/DC has #1) and buy some goodies, too, but it ain't going anywhere either.

As a kid I had occasion to be in TV studios a dozen or more times during live broadcasts. Whatever problems cameras had, and I'm sure they did, I never once saw anyone wearing yellow as a substitute for white.

Yup. Just clarifying the facts behind the myth. It's bullshit.