Waiting on packages...

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!

That happened quickly...

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!