What's on your iPod?

A rough tally... 5 Fenders, 2 Alembic, 1 Gibson (Thunderbird), 1 Hofner, 3 Music Man, 1 Lakland, 2 Ibanez, 2 Rickenbacker, 1 Yamaha (MIDI capable), and 1 Steinberger. The top-picture instrument (Post #502) was custom built according to my design and specs.

I endeavor (keyboards/bass) to better clarify and expand upon germinating ideas. Be advised however, music is not my professional vocation.

Love that rendition. I've seen Celine a few times in Vegas. An extraordinary talent

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Evanescence - Bring Me To Life

 

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Atlanta Rhythm Section - Spooky

 

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OMG Xotica. A veritible plethora of awesome instruments. Yes, I see the custom look to your beautiful natural wood bass in the lower photo. I was immediately stunned. I'm strictly amateur myself. I got my first gig when I was 11. I was asked to bring my guitar and sing at a "small church picnic". It turned out to be some huge deal, with thousands in the crowd, up on a big stage maybe 10 feet high. It was all miked and everything, I just had to step up with guitar in hand and let it fly. A friend loaned me this big jumbo 12-string after the event manager asked me if I had an instrument that could make a lot of noise. So I had a few weeks to learn to wrap my little hands around this baby:

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It's not a very good pic but it's a jumbo body, really deep, too, sized for a large adult. And you can see how wide the neck is. So it was like a crash course for me and by the time I was supposed to play I was all calloused up and had strength in my fingers to mash those strings down all the way without getting fret buzz. Of course I was surprised by the size of this stage and the crowd, but the manager came up to me and said "Don't even look at them. Look over them and just concentrate on staying close to the mic. Play as loud as you can, and scream if you have to, so your voice comes through." Something like that. Somehow that settled my mind and I don't remember having the heebeejeebees.

But when I was finished the crowd went wild which surprised the hell out me, since I hadn't put much effort into it, thinking it would be a small circle of folks. So I of course got the bug after that and figured, wow, if I actually tried I could maybe get somewhere. I started working Saturdays for a relative who got past the child labor thing, so I could gradually acquire stuff. By the time I was 14 I had a little band. We'd do home parties, dances, an occasional wedding, whatever. Over the next couple of years we changed a few band members an added a badass female vocalist. That same manager followed me during those years and he's the one who sponsored this studio demo we did. By that time I had this Silvertone. Somehow I'd managed to get it to sound like a Les Paul, especially by attacking the strings really sharp, even clawing them with the little bumps on the grip side of the picks I used, plus nailing it way up close to the butt of the fingerboard. I also like to play without a pick for a completely different sound, not to mention a little counterpoint.

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I ditched the pick guard and the white knobs so it didn't look so much like a zoot suit. Plus the pick guard just got in the way. The other axe I bought when I was about 16 was a Guild Starfire XII. Here's one. It sounds just like the electric-12 that punches in on Stairway to Heaven

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I also got rid of that pickguard. I went into it a separated the pickups into a stereo jack, and did the same in my amp, which happened to be stereo, bridged to mono. I didn't really know it at first, but just figured it out from the dual symmetry inside the head. I spent a couple of weeks tracing the circuit into a schematic, and that was when I discovered that I only had to clip one wire and Ouila! Channel separation. I tore the speakers out of the cabinet and made a pair of towers. That first day I had it all working, and I plugged in my stereo 12-string and hit a chord, I practically broke down in tears it sounded so good. I could hear the phases circulating in space, aggravated by the unison strings beating against each other. Of course I didn't really know what phase meant back then.

I like the moveable/adjustable bridges. Intonation is everything and I like to have control over it.

As you can see I'm kind of cruising down memory lane.


Ah... Evanescence and Spooky, both huge hits. And I remember that vid. They got down on that.

To follow Atlanta Rhythm Section, and in tribute to your awesome bass collection:

I'm a Man


And following Evanescence, how about

Crash Into Me

 

Peter Wolf—Come As You Are

Peter Wolf, Come As You Are.

I adore this album, and actually haven't heard it in years. But I happened to be flipping through the cable listings and noticed a showing of Run Silent, Run Deep, the 1958 Robert Wise film starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster.

It's also the title of one of my favorite songs on Come as You Are.

And since I could, I went out and got a new copy of the album.

And now I'm playing it via Banshee, on my Linux system.

I missed this one. I can't believe it took me so long to get a new copy.

[video=youtube;zDw2fxziSI4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDw2fxziSI4[/video]
[video=youtube;I4onKIKvy78]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4onKIKvy78[/video]
[video=youtube;4b-wzOP8n2k]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b-wzOP8n2k[/video]​

 

It wasn't always this way. Despite being trained as a classical pianist, I always loved the role of bass guitar in soul/pop/rock music. So I saved my allowance money and purchased a Hagstrom bass from the little music store in town. I knew that Randy Meisner of the Eagles used this instrument and figured that if it was good enough for him.... Looking back now, I'm a bit astonished at his choice. The ergonomics were terrible and the twin pickups were cheesy. But I did learn the fundamentals on that instrument. I still have it somewhere, tucked safely away in memory lane.

I understand perfectly well my friend and I thank you kindly for sharing them with me. Love the pics! Keep those memorable days close to your heart and cherish them forever.

I love that recording for its rawness. Released in 1968, the double-disc CTA album contained some material of a political nature. At the time, Mayor Daley was ultra-sensitive about any form of criticism stemming from the police riots at the 1968 Democratic convention. The folklore is that he ordered the Chicago Transit Authority to sue the band over its name. Rather than deal with court hassles, the band simply shortened its name to... Chicago. The rest is history.

Evanescence is one of my favorite bands. Amy Lee is awesome. I like Dave Mathews & Co. Check out the bass lines in - Ants Marching - sometime

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I purchased my two Rickenbacker stereo-basses with Chris Squire in mind. One of my Yes favorites...

Yes - Wondrous Stories

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q9q6zl3WIs&feature=my_liked_videos&list=LLKnTppulNLhBOD3rkM8ywbQ
Welcome to the Black Parade

 

Here's what I play, I have the same instrument. (not my video). I figure if I can make that sound good, I can make any banjo sound good.

[video=youtube;HTjmy8wWXZw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTjmy8wWXZw[/video]

 

Dave Matthews Band - Ants Marching

 

Ooops. Forgot one. I have 3 Rickenbackers. 4001/4003/4005. All are stereo/Rick-O-Sound capable instruments.

 

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Eagles - Wasted Time (Live)

 

Hey spidergoat,

That was a clean bright sound for such a small head and what looks like no resonator. I had handmade 4-string long ago. How bout Earl Scruggs. Here he is with some wild and crazy guys, as Steve Martin might say:

Foggy Mountain breakdown

Earl Scruggs, banjo - Glen Duncan, fiddle - Randy Scruggs, acoustic guitar - Steve Martin, 2nd banjo solo - Vince Gill, 1st electric guitar solo - Marty Stuart, mandolin - Gary Scruggs, harmonica - Albert Lee, 2nd electric guitar solo - Paul Shaffer, piano - Jerry Douglas, dobro - Leon Russell, organ - Glenn Worf, bass - Harry Stinson, drums

That reminded me of a mandolin I played for maybe a year during my banjo totin' era. Here's a guy that got somewhere with his:

David Grisman Quartet

 

Hey Xotica,

Classical piano - the best all around foundation for music education. I was a latecomer, with a few years of immersion in college. I would have to get down to the music building before sunrise to book a piano room. I had to have a grand, and they were first come, first serve. The serious pianists considered me somewhat of a nuisance.

And geez, the repertoire. It's endless. Bach alone. Liszt. In that other thread, "why are we so responsive to music" there were several buffs who chimed in about the symmetry, harmonic ratios, all that, that we are driven by something organizational. Of course there's just a certain feel, which just transcends all analysis. Here's a particular one that exploits a constant sense of suspension. It's remarkable, it lifts you up and pulls you along through this fog, never really putting your feet down. I hear Chopin maybe conversing with Gershwin. But it predates Gershwin, so there's some fodder for the alien-cosmic-mentalist threads. Of course not every one goes for this kind of music. It definitely requires letting one's guard down, and just sucking up sound like a vacuum.

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2.


DMB: sheer genius. And Ants Marching, how insane is that? It's quintessential DMB, I can't play it just once. There's so much going on there, all the vocal coloration, with falsetto and gliss, the unlikely instrumentation for his audience, the fiddling cadenzas, the soprano sax fills, that addicative syncopation, the breaks and overlays of second melodies, the freaking quasi-scat vocals, and yeah you gotta love that bass. Under all the bravado he has a kind of reckless spiritual quality. That's maybe the most indescribable part. A different worldview, but also eccentric might be

Brave Combo.



Yeah, I was thinking of Chris Squire since we started talking about bass. What chops.

Heart of the Sunrise.



Precision Bass? Another classic. Check out those strings. That's a nice clean pic. Rickenbacker? Really nice. I know you can get the dual output model. Here's the inimitable Jaco Pastorius being totally out there. He sometimes would put on war paint.

Improv on Portrait of Tracy

 

I really like that A-man. ThankQ

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Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten

 

Bad Rabbits - Walkin' On The Moon

 

Vamps—Vamps

• Vamps, Vamps

The self-titled 2009 debut Lp from what can reasonably described as a J-Pop superband featuring L'arc en Ciel vocalist Hyde and Oblivion Dust guitarist K.A.Z. Session bassist Ju-ken, nearly legendary in his own right, joined the band at least for the album.

I picked up on the band while looking into Hyde's solo single, "Season's Call", featured in the opening credits of the second season of Blood+.

Japanese pop in recent years reminds me of some strains of American pop from the 1980s, and Vamps seems, in this context, a mix of what we on the east side of the Pacific would call pop, glam, and alternative rock. Vamps is a fun album.

[video=youtube;W31MC6-P4pg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31MC6-P4pg[/video]​

 

Safire - Thinking of You

 

A Song For You

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...74CwAg&usg=AFQjCNHTOjf2hvOPfKZ9uGxebPnQRChFhw

 

Taxi

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...woHQBg&usg=AFQjCNHVJmLEEMOkuaMQkTcPo-F9TLFK3A