I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew this time. At least for now. But we'll get to that. First, time for a little retrospective...
Okay, so I know this is my first post in a while. When queried about my silence by a fellow bass player, I explained that there's no real way to make week after week of "today I played bass for an hour" followed by "I played bass for an hour today, too" sound interesting. Practice is an accepted part of learning to do anything, and in a lot of cases, there's no real way to make what is essentially enjoyable and rewarding but repetitive grinding sound interesting.
Not that I view it as grinding of course, I've learned a lot in the past couple of months, I've been keeping busy, and I've got to grips with plenty of tunes and bass parts therein.
I suppose one of the most important things I learned to do, as silly
as it sounds, is to play standing up. When I started out, I'd always
play sitting down. I could see all four strings, I could see the
fretboard in its entirety, no problems there. Figuring though, that very
few bassists get to play sitting down all their carreers, I thought I
should probably learn to play standing up.
Bam! Can't
see all four strings anymore, and I have to look down to see the
fretboard, like a driver glancing at the steering wheel to try and learn
where he's headed. There's still some of that, but thankfully, [my
small degree of] experience and muscle memory are starting to come to
the fore and I'm now in the comfortable fuzzy stage where I can play while staring out of the window, and still generally hit the right notes.
I haven't really settled on an absolute and distinct sound at the moment, I tend to use the preamp and boost the bass/mids/trebles by 50%/30%/20% respectively. VPF and VLE are turned to full, and the end result is generally a full warm sound with little finger scratching or twanging.
As well as getting to grips with the bass and the sound, I've been learning a few tunes too. The tunes that I regularly play well, or (in some cases) at least play well enough to enjoy playing along now number about forty. So that's an improvement as well. Some parts are more advanced than others.
I remember how proud I was when I learned to play my first tune, have a listen:
Nice simple tune, but when I got through it I still had a "yeah, now I can play something!" moment.
Looking back several months later, and I smile at how pleased with myself I was, considering that the bass part for the tune probably couldn't be any simpler and still be called a bass part.
But that's not the point, people change and people grow, particularly quickly if they're musicians. Today's hard-to-play tune is tomorrow's "that's actually pretty easy". 7 months ago, I didn't know anything about the Bass and I felt pretty pleased with myself when I learned to play my first scale.
And now I've set myself a huge mountain to climb, and I've done it on purpose.
Jamiroquai's Love Foolosophy, with its rather awesome bass part by Nick Fyffe (not Stu Zender, as I found out to my surprise - Stu left the band earlier than I thought, I guess), is my new challenge. And it's currently above my skill level in three main criteria. Have a look:
"Bloody hell", my common sense says. "You've been playing bass for seven months and you want to play that?!". Well, yep. That's how you learn.
What we're looking at here, is (to me) a pretty fast-paced part. Sure it's not a particularly fast song, but the notes/bar ratio is way higher than anything I've played so far. So the three problems, no, not problems, opportunities to learn here are:
Popping:In the pop, the bassist will use the index or middle finger of the
plucking hand to snap the strings (usually the higher D and G strings)
away from the body
of the bass, causing them to bounce off the fretboard; this produces a
prominent buzzing tone with a sharp attack and more high-frequency
vibrations than present in plucked bass. - Wikipedia. I know how to do it in theory, and I can do it one note at a time when I don't have to dance around the strings, but this's the first tune that I'll actually be required to incorporate it into. I'm not that good at it to be honest but I'll get plenty of practice, and I think it's only three seperate notes (repeated multiple times) throughout the tune.
Dexterity: Okay, so it's a busy tune as I've said. The bassist is all over the fretboard, dashing from one note to another at a speed that - at the minute - makes my eyes glaze over. I've never played anything this fast, so it's going to take a while to get up to that speed. There are a lot of mini notes that seem to fall between the actual notes, if that makes sense. Little accents and flourishes, and they're gonna be tricky to pick up too.
Double-finger Plucking: At the bridge (2:13) there's a lot of double-finger plucking, hitting the same (in this case) note over and over with alternate fingers. This, frankly, is not something I do well. None of the tunes I've played so far have included it, my middle finger dexterity is kinda weak (hah, fit that into a conversation). This kinda ties in with dexterity, and it's something I'm going to need to work on.
So it's quite the challenge, and I'm probably going to need to learn this thing bar by bar, in addition to developing the three skills listed above. Thankfully, like a lot of bass parts, once you get over the initial high-speed insanity, you find that a lot of it is actually pretty repetitive. Meaning that on the face of it I don't need to learn "the whole song", I need to learn the chorus and bridge, and repeat them where they're needed. It still amounts to the same amount of time playing, and I'm sure there are little differences in the various areas throughout the song, but at least it breaks the tune down into manageable chunks.
Yeah. Three new skills, one in-betweeny bit, one chorus, and one bridge. This's gonna take me a while to get to grips with folks.
But by the time I have, I'll be much more skilled than I am now, and I'll have spent hours enjoying improving those skills.
And that folks, is one of the reasons why I play :).
A Minor note, something I realised later on. When I manage to nail this tune, I'll have finally used almost the entire range of the bass, from (nearly) the highest note on the fretboard to the lowest. I guess that's something cool too :).
Well, after my last "it's still on order" email from the music store down in London, I had largely forgotten about the skillbook (as I call it, being an ex EVE player), choosing instead to run my pc audio through my FX box, and play along with tunes I liked/tunes that were simple enough for me to play well.
One day a couple of weeks ago though, I was pleasantly surprised by a package, that turned out to be my book. I didn't know it was coming, or that it had been dispatched, and it arrived without warning, explanation or apology. At least I have it now.
Having started working my way through it, it is indeed as the title suggested, a rather in-depth book (with accompanying CDs, which annoyingly, made turning the pages a pain in the butt until I took them out and shoved them in a CD case) starting with "How to hold your bass without hurting yourself" (no, really), and going through in depth tuition on everything from plucking and stopping, picking and slap, through various musical styles, to a kinda adventurous "final test" that crosses several genres of music, through fun (if rather stereotypical) examples of each. Having played for several weeks before the book turned up, I did find the first few exercises a little too simple, but technique is every bit as important as repertoire, and you certainly can't hope to be any good at writing poetry without having a pretty solid grasp of the alphabet first.
A few examples later, I found myself getting tripped up by some of the arpeggios, though I am progressing through them. So I do get a satisfying feeling of accomplishment with each completed exercise. When I was a kid, music books were chores. Now I'm a little bigger, I'm enjoying working my way through them. Money well spent I think.
I had a bit or a rather awesome day out on Saturday though, a nice sunny day, where I managed to get a lift to a newly-discovered music store along with my nephew.
Arriving at the store, I walked in with my bass over my shoulder and explained that I'd brought it with me, and so to avoid confusion, they happily put it behind the counter for me.
I had a bit of a wander round the place, making a beeline to the bass amplifiers, where I found several rather lovely stacks of Markbass amps and cabs, as well as a couple of combos including the one I was after. Having found it and eager to grab it before someone else did (it would have been just my luck to have the thing swiped from under me by someone else after many weeks of waiting), I asked the staff if I could "take a look at it". They handed my bass over, and I was shown to one of the little practice rooms, which I was pleased with, as having only been playing for 2 months, I didn't want everyone hearing how bad I am ;). The Amp:
The amp that I was looking at was - to give it its full name - a Markbass Mini CMD 151 J.B. Player Combo. Being very new to playing bass, all I knew about Markbass is that they're a fairly new but highly regarded Italian company, that as the name suggests, specialise exclusively in amps, combos, cabs and pedals for Bass guitars. Not having heard the amp, I was attracted to Markbass because all but the least expensive combos and cabs they manufacture have snazzy yellow speaker cones (like this) which look pretty cool.
The fact that the CMD 151JB would fit almost perfectly in the space I had available pretty much sealed the deal. I walked in not knowing what the amp sounded like but knowing that it was pretty much the only one that would fit. Fortunately for me, it just so happens that it's a pretty decent amp, as I found out.
Now amps come in several flavours, for both electric guitar and bass guitar. Generally, the more expensive/powerful ones consist of a head that contains all the electronics, connected to one or more cabinets that contain the speakers themselves. If you're after something smaller, less expensive, or just something easier to transport around, you can get a combo amp, which as the name suggests, contains both the speaker(s) and the amp head in a single unit.
Being new to bass amps, I wasn't sure what to expect, and I have been surprised in the past few days at just how different the amp can make my bass sound, by virtue of the tone controls on the head - the face panel of the actual electronics - itself.
The 151 has a "cute little" 250w (at 4 ohms, 150w at 8 ohms - we'll come back to this) head with a handful of quite important knobs (low, mid low, mid high, and treble), a pair of very important knobs (VLE/VPF), and a couple of knobs which if not correctly used, will result in either hurty ears, screaming neighbours, or worse, no sound at all. These would be the "GAIN" and "MASTER"
As I currently understand it, Gain and Master work as a pair, and one seems to affect the other. Gain, weirdly, seems to increase the volume very sharply if mishandled, so there must be some difference between the two that I have overlooked. In fact, I think I'll read up on them right now...
Well, a cursory search seems to explain that Gain amplifies the signal before it is sent to the bit of the hardware responsible for making the speaker make noise. The practical effect is that it can sharply increase volume, but also adds distortion to the signal, changing the sound of the instrument quite sharply in some cases, and can cause clipping where parts of the signal go beyond the amp's capability to turn them into sound. Fortunately, my amp also comes with a snazzy clip light that flashes when the signal is not to the amp's liking.
Volume (or "Master" as it's called on my amp) only controls the output volume of the signal, and doesn't by itself change the sound of the signal, other than to make it louder. Or quieter. Folks tell me quiet is just as good Not yet being at the stage where I want everyone to hear what I'm playing, I'm inclined to agree.
So the next thing I do is to turn the amp on, twiddle the volume and gain to the 9-o-clock position, fumble for my bass, and plug in.
The resulting sonic boom from the speaker makes my hair stand on end. The amp might only be a 150w but a 15 inch speaker moves a lot of air when it's pissed off.
Yep, it turns out that you're not supposed to turn the volume up until after you've plugged the guitar in. I didn't know this, but it's a lesson I have now very effectively learned. Thankfully, no one came to shout at me, and the amp seemed to continue working quite happily. Some folks say it's not good for the speaker, other folks say "I do it all the time". Better to be on the safe side though, it's not even my amp yet.
So I'm part way through messing some tune up, when one of the staff comes over. I think "Uh oh, he's here to tell me off", but when I open the door, he's come over to announce that they actually have a used 151 in, for £249, instead of asking me to pay £369 for a new one. I explain I'd quite like to see/hear the used amp, and he rushes off to bring it over.
So I turn off the new amp and move it out of the way, and - carefully this time - plug the bass into the second one, before powering it on. Hmm. Looks exactly the same, sounds exactly the same.
I twiddle with the settings noticing just how much difference they make to the sound of the bass. I check the amp over, looking for any evidence that it is not in fact, brand new. I don't find any. It's pristine.
During my time playing, I continue to marvel at the size of the amp. My brother used to have a much smaller electric guitar amp, and I figured that there wasn't much of a middle ground between that amp, and the huge 6 foot tall speaker stacks. The 151 though, is a heavy (heavy for me, light for its size and performance) 15 kilogram box made from 20mm thick poplar laminate, measuring half a meter on each side. Smaller than a 6 foot tall stack, sure. Not something I'd want to carry to a buddy's house though.
It's pretty solid though, and it has hefty bash guards on each of the corners, so while my natural instinct is to wrap it up in cotton wool, it doesn't actually need such gentle treatment.
So I play for a few more minutes, playing with the low, low mids, high mids and treble knobs, and seeing a pretty fine level of control over the sound of the bass. I don't know what the VLE or VPF controls do, so I leave them alone. Seems I was missing out by doing so.
Having played with the amp for a few days, I've come to learn these functions a little better.
VLE or Vintage Loudspeaker Emulation is a very popular signature feature on Markbass Amps that cuts the treble/high frequencies, giving the amp (in Markbass's words) "a mellower, less modern sound". Combined with flats (which were more common in the past), the sound is well suited to motown, classic rock etc, it could essentially be named ye olde classic sound knob. But of course they'd have to print that very small to fit it on the head.
VPF or Variable Preshape Filter is the other signature feature (not including the snazzy yellow cones, obviously) that boosts the lows and the highs, while cutting the mids, resulting in what is known as a smiley face, partly because it makes the people who like the sound smile, and partly because the frequency response curve looks a little like a smile.
Of course, me being me, I wondered what would happen if I tried to use both together. And so I set my tone controls to the pattern you see in the photo of the head up there^. And the result?
The "twang" from the strings is gone. The metallic screech of fingers sliding along the strings is gone. The tone of the bass is now the musical equivalent of a chocolate milkshake with a load of fudge and ice cream floating in it. It's a thick, powerful gloopy warm sound, and it's a sound I'm learning to love.
So I turned the amp off, disconnected the bass, and went off, guitar in hand, to find the dude.
When asked what I thought of the amp, my answer was essentially that I'd never heard a bass amp firsthand before, and while I liked the sound of it, I might like the sound of all of them. But that was by the by, I added. I liked the sound of it, and told him as much, and he was nice enough to put it behind the counter for me.
Now what's all this watts and ohms business I was talking about earlier?
Well, as an enthusiastic vaper, I'm vaguely familiar with watts and ohms, but the general idea in this case is the less resistance (the lower the ohms) in a circuit, the more watts can be pushed through the hardware. The more watts means more speaker movement, more speaker movement equals more sound.
So why is this important? Because as it's designed, the resistance of the 151 combo is 8 ohms, which means the "little" 250w head can actually only push 150w through the speaker. Add a second (it has to be an 8 ohm cab for this particular amp) speaker by hooking up one of the aforementioned cabs via the "speaker out" port, and two speakers = less resistance - the full 250 watts can be brought to bear. I'm probably oversimplifying a little bit, and you can actually damage hardware by connecting speakers with the wrong impedance (speaker talk for "resistance" I guess), but as an example, my point holds.
If you want to learn more about speaker impedance, amp wattage and cab compatibility, there's a pretty cool video here. You'll learn a lot, and you might save yourself blowing up your amp :).
So the bass and the amp are back behind the counter, and having saved money by choosing a used amp, I'm determined to make the extra cash count. So I wander round looking for other stuff I might want.
I notice that my bass is behind the counter on a rather snazzy looking Hercules self-locking stand. After my embarrassingly badly-built ebay special stand fell to bits (after a couple of weeks of use), I've been needing some way to keep the bass safe and secure, and this thing looked to be just what I was looking for.
But would I be better keeping the bass in a hard case where it would be safer? I only had room for one, not both, so I had to choose.
Asking the staff, I was basically told "If you're gigging, get a hard case, if you're practicing indoors, you don't need one. If you have a choice between keeping your bass on a stand where you can see and reach it instead of keeping it in a hard case somewhere out of the way, get a stand. You'll have more motivation/freedom to practice/play as and when you want".
I was a little inconvenienced by my last stand, to be honest. The mechanism to prevent the bass falling out was a catch that I had to close around the neck of the bass when putting it on the stand, and then undo before I could get the bass off the stand. It only took a few seconds each time, but as I'm fond of saying to folks, even the most minor annoyance repeated often enough can eventually become a big deal. The thing that I liked about the hercules self locking stand, is that the weight of the bass on the stand automaticaly closes locking lugs around the head of the bass, preventing it from being pulled off the stand by accident. That and the fact that not only did it look much more substantial than my last stand, but it was temporarily at a rather awesome price of £24 made the idea sound appealing.
My old stand supported the bass from below, whereas this one dangles the bass from the neck. Not normally something I would have considered to be a good idea, but as I looked around the store and saw every single guitar and bass dangling from wall-mount brackets or arranged artfully on the hercules stands, and all supported from the neck, I figured that if it wasn't safe, it wouldn't be done. I figured "If they can hang a £4000 guitar from one of these stands without complaining, I can put my bass on one too".
I asked him to put a hercules stand behind the counter for me, which he happily did, and I'm glad I picked one up. It's solid, it's good quality, it's well built, and - important to all new bass players (and a lot of experienced ones) it looks cool too. The hardware is pretty chunky, the leg footprint is nice and wide, making it nice and stable, and the foam padding on the legs and on the neck clamp prevent any scratches or marks on the finish of the bass.
That said, I still felt like I was missing out on something important by having nothing to keep the bass in while I was moving it around. Eager to have the best of both worlds, I asked about gig bags, and eventually selected a Fender gig bag, that would protect the bass on the move, without taking up too much room or preventing easy access to it. Said gig bag is basic but well built, and fits nicely out of the way down the side of the bed where no one can trip over it. I haven't had cause to use it yet as the bass is kept on the stand, but it's nice to know it's there.
Knowing that it would probably be a while before I could get back into the store, given its kind of out-of-the-way location, I figured that I should pick up anything else I needed, and spent a good long while wandering around looking for other things to spend money on. My journey to the guitar store had turned into an actual "If there's anything you want to sell me, now's your chance" situation. I had a couple of things I wanted to get my hands on. After playing the bass for 2 months I'd started to notice marks on the strings, and I wanted to see if I could stop them from deteriorating, and maybe clean them up a bit. I started looking for isopropyl alcohol which (i believe) is what folks clean the strings with, but instead I was directed to a package of MusicNomad String Fuel - a rather cool looking string-cleaner/lubricant dispenser that not only cleans the strings, but lubricates them to make them less grabby. "Fair enough", I figured, and added some to my shopping list. It seems to work, the strings do seem cleaner, and they're not as grabby which makes moving around the fretboard a little easier (and at this stage I need all the help I can get). Having seen people speaking well of the Big Stubby guitar picks, I decided to grab some of those as well, since my super duper bass teaching book has a section on learning to use a pick, and I didn't have any
Finally, just to be on the safe side, I grabbed a new set of strings for the bass. I didn't know what I was after, so I was happy to let the dude behind the counter decide for me. The strings pictured are apparently as close to a direct replacement for the strings already on the bass as we're likely to get.
And artist endorsements? Yep, it seem rotosound strings are enjoyed by a variety of rather cool bass players, including Steve Harris, Billy Sheehan, and Chris Squire (who sadly passed away in June). So it's nice to know I'm in good company.
And that was it, that's everything. I had a brief look around, couldn't see anything else I wanted (or at least nothing else I needed), and so we put the purchases through the till. And thanks to buying the amp used instead of new, the entire order came to £328.96. Not bad when you consider that I'd budgeted £369 just for the amp by itself. So we got the stuff home, I arrranged it artfully, and took a rather overprocessed photo of it.
At this point, I'd like to say a little about the store itself, Rich Tone in Sheffield, as the staff were very good to me and I enjoyed my time there.
I was in the store about 90 minutes and got talking to pretty much every member of staff at one time or other, all of whom were polite, enthusiastic, friendly and eager to help. I was advised on what stuff I should buy that would benefit me, as well as what stuff I wouldn't really see any benefit from. Rather than there being any kind of pressure to sell, the emphasis seemed to be entirely on giving me the best service/advice, and they seemed just as happy to advise me not to buy stuff if they thought it would hurt me as a player ("put your bass in a hard case somewhere out of the way and you'll just end up not playing it. You'd really be better off with a (£46 cheaper) stand. You can always get a gig bag if you really want one". I asked about getting some stuff to clean and "feed" my fretboard, and the advice was "The bass is fairly new and you've not had it long, you're not gigging daily with it, so you probably won't actually need to feed or clean the fretboard for several months yet" (I paraphrase a little). So rather than the sell sell sell at any cost that I've seen in some stores, these guys were going out of their way to save me money, which I liked a lot. "By musicians for musicians" is the phrase that comes to mind. You can even walk around inside the store thanks to google street view, which helped me know where the bass amps were before I'd even set off! The place has a huuuge stock of cool stuff, and as I've already said, the staff are fantastic. It's a wonderland for guitarists, and I'm looking forward to returning.
I'm pretty much set for kit for the forseeable future, but I'd happily go back. In fact, next time I need an amp or whatever, I'd likely insist on it.
Heck, maybe when I get myself that nice RBX775 as a present sometime next year, I might see if they can get me one in somehow. I don't think they're made anymore, but I can always ask.
So yeah, a busy week. I would have posted closer to saturday, but I've been distracted by celebration beer ;).
And my amp? Fits perfectly in the hidey-hole I've created for it:
Unless you're paying for a copy of "Absolute Beginners Bass Guitar - Omnibus Edition", in which case you'll have paid for it on the fourteenth of june, and still not received it (as of today, the 8th of July) because it's still currently on order with music sales, also known as "we're still waiting for it, so you can too"*. This from the same company that was friendly and helpful with my tuner being out of stock. I guess the "friendly and helpful" bucket has run dry.
But today's moan isn't about those guys, it's about my guitar stand, which, chosen in a "I don't know what things cost/this's cheaper than I thought it would be" way, chose yesterday to spontaneously break.
Yep, you get what you pay for, and I suppose it should have come as no surprise to me that the neck support on the stand was held to its retaining bolt by a pair of tiny and badly-done spot welds. A real Friday Afternoon piece of work right here.
The seller, to their credit was pretty apologetic (not that they really needed to be because they're not responsible for the crappy welds), and say they're going to fire off a refund, which at the minute, I have yet to receive. So I started a thread on the bass forum, as well as looking at the local music retailer's selection of stands, which (being made by reputable companies that specialise in making guitar stands) look well finished, reassuringly sturdy, and cost about six times what I paid for mine. Expensive? No, that's just what these things cost, it turns out.
So I'm looking at another tripod style-stand. This time, I'm after a self-locking one, so it secures the bass as well as holds it off the floor. That should set me back about £30 and I think it'll be money well spent.
So there we go.
*In fairness, I should point out that I didn't order the book through Amazon, their link was just the first one that came up. That said, I do trytoavoid buying things from Amazon where possible.
Well, another cool gadget turned up a few days ago.
Having learned early on that you can't just plug earphones into a bass and expect to hear yourself playing, I resigned myself to having to wait for an amp, which is still several weeks away from being ordered. Eventually though my finances took a small detour, as I took some money out of the "saving for the amp" tin and put it into the "I need to be able to hear myself play" tin. And only a couple of days later, the nice delivery woman turned up with something cool and shiny for me to enjoy playing with.
Having been told they were "good" by the folks on the fine bass forum that I seem to be spending a lot of time on recently, I went and grabbed myself a Zoom B1Xon. This little gadget has a whole host of useful features including a metronome, a tuner, and (importantly) a headphone out. It also has 8 banks of patches all of which are customisable, so I can change the sound of the bass to within an inch of its life, and to top it all off, there's drum accompaniment in there as well, so if I just feel like practicing along to a digitised drumbeat, I can do that too.
I'm still waiting for my skillbook to turn up, and I've opened a seperate support ticket with the retailer - still waiting for them to get back to me though, which is a bit of a pain.
Following lessons on youtube is pretty cool and all, but there isn't really anyone offering a full variety of free and comprehensive tuition, which is kinda why I ordered the skillbook in the first place.
Oh well, I hope it turns up soon.
Finally, as a humorous aside, I went searching for a guitar case a couple of days ago so I could keep the bass safe if I wanted to take it out of the house. I found one I liked the look of, and scrolling through the specifications, I had to giggle at some of the stats.
That's a heavy guitar case! Obviously it's just a typo, but it made me giggle all the same.
Mini disclaimer: I apologise for the layout of this entry. While blogger seems happy to let me move images around the page and fit text around them, it's not nearly as accommodating when it comes to videos,
The spending of course, didn't stop with the Bass itself.
A couple of things jumped out at me as being necessities, even for - perhaps especially for - a new dude just starting out.
I figured that there'd be little point placing my fingers on the right frets and plucking the right strings if the whole thing still sounded terrible because it was badly out of tune. Not only that, but I needed a way to learn which frets were the right ones, and how to actually pluck the strings in the first place as well. So with that in mind, at the same time I ordered my bass, I also ordered a tuner, and a "learn how to play bass in 1024 simple lessons" book.
Of course, after a few days of waiting, the music store I purchased my bass from got in touch to tell me that the Yamaha YTC5 tuner I'd ordered was likely to be out of stock until early July.
In an effort to smooth things over, they offered me an alternative. A Snark SN-2 multi-instrument chromatic tuner. I took a look, watched a few videos, and liking the look of it, I agreed to take one.
The fact that it was supposed to be more expensive than the one I originally ordered was a cool bonus.
So what's a tuner? Well, it's a device for making sure that the notes each string plays are the notes each string is supposed to play. Kinda important, right?
But what's a "chromatic" tuner?
Well, a quick look online and it seems that a chromatic tuner identifies the closest note by its "name" (e.g. A or C#) and indicates how far the individual string is from being tuned to that specific note, whereas non-chromatic tuners seem to assume simply that the guitar's strings are (in the case of a bass at least) being tuned to E, A, D, and G, and only show how far each string is from its intended note.
Like anything else I suppose, some people - the ones that grew up with them I guess - seem to prefer non-chromatic tuners. Most folks that didn't grow up with non-chromatic tuners will probably be buying the easier-to-use chromatic tuners instead. I'm sure I'll learn more of the backstory as time goes on, but for now it's enough for me to know that it's a simple to use gadget that helps me make sure that any wrong notes are my fault, and not the guitar's.
The tuner itself arrived today in a shipping box far too large for it and I wasted no time in opening it so I could play with it.
My first impression is of a well made and well finished sleek little device in a rather awesome metallic red. A nice sturdy spring-loaded clamp at one end firmly grips onto the guitar headstock with a couple of soft rubber jaws, and on the end of a double ball-jointed arm is a bright, colourful and clear LCD. The entire thing is finished in a rather awesome matte/metallic red that seems to suggest good quality.
I learned a few things about the tuner while playing around with it, the first and most important of which is to make sure that you only pluck one string at a time. The tuner has a very sensitive vibration microphone on it, and even catching a second string accidentally is enough to confuse it.
Other than that, using it seemed to be pretty intuitive, and provided you know what notes your strings are supposed to be playing, it's an easy enough little gadget to use.
See here, where I inexpertly tune my bass (making something of a meal of it, since my attention was divided between the LCD on the camera, the display on the tuner itself, and the tuning hardware on the bass.
Notice the tuner got a bit confused towards the end, where my untrained sausage fingers manged to catch a couple of the lower strings while tuning the G.
The SN-2 also has a couple of other features. Being a multi-instrument tuner, it has a second mode of operation where it uses its microphone to identify which note is being played without the tuner being physically attached to the device. The benefits of this are unclear, though I'd imagine that with some instruments you simply can't clip the tuner to your instrument and tune up.
The tuner also includes a metronome (albeit one with no audio feedback), as well as a calibration function.
Why would you need to calibrate a tuner? Isn't it the tuner's job to be in tune?
Ah well, it turns out that the majority of the music world (or at least those that follow ISO standards) have decided that the note A4 is exactly 440 hertz. But some countries don't follow the ISO standard, and so their "A4" can be anything from 415 to 466hz. If I tuned my bass here in the UK to the A4/440 standard and went over to another country where they used 466 for example, my bass would sound slightly flat because every single note would be 26 hertz too low.
Well, the calibration feature works to get around that. By recalibrating the tuner, you make sure that you're always playing the local notes.
Which is good. Maybe it will come in useful in my sellout tour of South America in 2038. Or something.
Having seen enough people throwing their guitars around and injuring themselves, their guitars, or other people, I wanted to make sure that having spent all this money on the bass, I wouldn't go and damage it by doing something silly. Not that I intend to swing my brand new bass around my neck because frankly I think it's a bit of a gimmick that's had its day, and if that weren't the case, it's still demonstrating a lack of respect and and a lack of concern for the well being of the instrument. Of course, there are plenty of ways to drop a guitar while not playing silly buggers, and one of those ways is to pick the guitar up by the strap, when the strap ends are either worn or have worked loose. Yep, that's an easy way to drop a guitar.
I did some reading about the problem, and plenty of people seem to have fallen foul of it. I've read about "Strap Locks", and a quick search turned up several examples.
All the strap locks I saw seemed to take the form of modifications to the guitar - removing the existing strap lugs and replacing them with newer larger ones. Well, I didn't much like the idea of taking tools to my brand new bass, much less voiding the warranty, and so I decided to keep searching for a solution.
An alternative to the strap locks would be to get a strap that incorporated the locks as part of the strap itself. A few people had good things to say about Planet Waves' "Planet Lock" guitar strap, and - again after a little research - I decided to go and grab one. The idea is simple enough, a kind of ratchet mechanism at either end means that the strap can be "locked closed", and shouldn't open itself, allowing the instrument to be securely attached.
I kinda like the system, it seems pretty effective. I don't like that I've got two plastic buckles swinging around next to my bass's shiny pearlescent paintwork, but I guess it's better than running the risk of dropping the thing. Update, 2nd July: I read on another review that the side of the buckles facing the instrument is in fact soft rubberised plastic, and it is. The buckles are designed to avoid scratching the bass.
You can see a simple demonstration of me fixing my Planet Lock strap to my bass here - you'll see how it works and why I like it.
And that's it really. Not a whole lot else to report. I've got a few more things on the way that should be pretty cool.
The only other thing that arrived was my guitar stand. Thanks to the miracles of mass production, this little beauty cost me about £4.40 including shipping, and seems to do a pretty decent job of keeping my bass off the floor without scratching it.
Well, at least I don't need to keep the bass in its cardboard box anymore :). Bloody hell, the picture/video layout tools on here are diabolical!
Thanks to Drummer5359, of Talkbass.com for the blog title suggestion.
The problem with being a drummer and living in a semi-detached house is that keeping a kit in the house, much less playing it, is not likely to endear you to the neighbours. Nowhere to store it, nowhere to play it, and no way to move it around.
Now I consider myself something of a music fan. Not particularly "hardcore" as the stereotypes depict, but nevertheless I enjoy a fairly comprehensive range of music across an equally comprehensive range of genres. As my mood takes me I might listen to Bach or Borknagar, Muse or Mudvayne. Music is something I enjoy regularly and over the years, the set of circumstances I found myself in - and the subsequent lack of opportunity to play my instrument of choice - was an itch that became more and more maddening.
With that in mind, consider that I had started daydreaming about the possibility of taking up something more practical, that is, the bass guitar, which I considered to be a much more practical instrument, much less expensive, much easier to transport, more convenient to play, and with much smaller demands on my finances, time, and storage space. I started "daydreaming" several months ago, and the more I thought about it the less opposed I was to the idea. My inner voice crying "I'm a drummer not a guitarist!" is all well and good, but a drummer is no good without drums, and a musician is no good without an instrument.
And life went on, and playing the bass remained in my "one day, maybe" box. Until one day something happened to change that.
What happened to change that is a matter of opinion. One of my IRC buddies suggests that my subconscious "reached out to me". I counter that I simply had a dream. A rather good dream. Where I was playing bass, in a band, and having a very good time of it. Letting the music flow through my fingers, expressing emotions through sound, like some kind of musical jedi.
It was quite a good dream.
And so, inspired by the dream, or perhaps frustrated to the point that I was no longer willing to accept being without a musical way to express myself, I went online and started searching for a bass guitar, with a view to buying.
I read a few articles, most of which made little sense to me. Did I want four strings? Five? Six? Did I want a bass with active pre-amp, or passive pickups. Did I want a precision bass, a jazz bass, or neither? Why was one bass guitar £130 and the almost identical-looking one next to it over £800? Were the strings more magical on the expensive one?
Each question seemed to lead to more questions. And so I joined a forum that specialised (well, half of it does) in bass guitars. That turned out to be a good choice.
Thousands of bass players from veteran bass teachers to session musicians, plenty of folks experienced at playing in bands of all genres, and yes, plenty of completely new guys wanting advice and answers, all in one place. I had found the central source of knowledge of the bass playing kingdom, so it seemed.
Being a fairly impulsive type, I had narrowed my choice of bass down to three criteria:
I wanted a "midrange" instrument of good quality. Price was secondary to the reputation of the manufacturer, and of the instrument itself. I didn't want a £79.99 "baby's first bass" starter kit that came with the amp/strap/book and whatnot. While such a kit might be suited to my skill (or lack thereof), I wanted something I wouldn't outgrow for a while, something that wouldn't need to be replaced. I am not sneering at owners of such basses by any means. They're an excellent and comprehensive way to get into music. But I wanted something more.
As a drummer and a biker, I've been fond of Yamaha for many years, They make very good quality products with attention to detail and without cutting corners. When I was drumming, I dreamed of owning a Yamaha drum kit, but I was/am in no position to own a drum kit, Yamaha or otherwise. So I decided for no better reason than this, that it would be a Yamaha bass.
Research on the internet suggested that five and six string basses were not really suitable for new bass players, and while I wanted something I could grow into, I didn't want something advanced enough for me to find it difficult to play. I wanted a four-string bass.
Remembering the glossy and sparkly posters and advertising literature from my teen years, I remembered that Yamaha made a wide variety of basses of varying types and configurations. Even half a lifetime later, I remember technical sounding designations like TRB, and RBX, two lines of bass guitars that (still) seem to have incomprehensible differences. A quick search on their UK music site clarified the situation.
Over the intervening years, for some reason, Yamaha decided to stop selling TRB basses (the RBX line is alive and well). They did, however, introduce a new line of basses called the TRBX line, which was intended to combine the best of both the TRB and the RBX lines in a single line of instruments.
And so, after comparing differences between the two lines - differences that seemed to lie in details that I didn't understand and comparisons that I wasn't informed enough to draw - I asked the forum about TRBX basses, for no better reason than that the majority of RBX basses seemed more expensive for no easily understandable (to a new bassist) reason.
People seemed to speak well of Yamaha TRBX basses, and so that settled it. The new bass would be a Yamaha TRBX. But which one? To further complicate matters, I found that the TRBX line consisted of three types, each type further split into individual models with varying numbers of strings.
Each bass was assigned a type number that identified its "place in the pecking order", followed by a number that showed the number of strings. For example, the TRBX304 is a less expensive model with four strings. The 305 has the same hardware and electrics/electronics, but five strings.
The TRBX304 seemed likely to become the successful candidate. It was relatively inexpensive and seemed to fit the criteria I had set out. I saw a few presentation videos and reviews of the bass that highlighted its cool features, one of which is a five-position selector switch that chooses which of the five active equaliser presets (think rock/classical/acoustic GEQ presets in itunes) the guitar would output. I thought this was quite cool.
I wasn't sure that I liked being "locked in" to 5 predetermined presets though. Me being me, I much preferred the idea of being able to set the bass exactly as I liked it.
Not only that, but I had read that in order to have these presets, the bass was essentially an Active bass.
As I understand it, there are two types of bass, where this characteristic is defined:
Active basses use a battery-powered amplifier to tune and amplify the output signal before sending it down the cable to the amp on the other end. Passive basses have no internal amplifier, and output only the signal generated by their pickups.
This may be a simplistic explanation of active/passive basses, but this is currently the situation as I understand it.
So where's the problem? Well, the two types of instruments seem to have two different sounds, with passive basses sounding warmer and rounder, and active basses sounding harder and more powerful.
But what if I wanted a choice?
So I kept looking. Close to the top of the model lineup lay what seemed to be the best bet. The TRBX504. No EQ presets, only complete control. A selector that switched the bass between active pre-amp and passive "pickup only" modes, and - as I found out - superior pickup circuitry (the benefits of which I am still unclear about), and the extra price of the bass seemed to make sense.
But it was a lot of money for an impulse buy.
And it was exactly what I was looking for.
A night of drunken "Woo I'm gonna be a bass player!" and "Woo, new toy!" coupled with a little "I can't believe I just made a £400 impulse purchase!", and a couple of days later, and the new instrument arrived at my door.
10:02, Wednesday 17th June, 2015. The time and date that my new musical "career" as a bass player began.
I'd learned a lot in my research, and I'd spent a lot in acquiring the bass itself.
Of course the learning - and the spending - have only just begun!
