Time to share a bass hero of mine. Carole Kaye is phenomenal.
That said, Carole is a rare exception to the no pic rules. Carole dampens her bass strings with Velcro and sponge, both behind the pickups and at fret 0 or a soft capo on fret one. With all that damping a good pic technique is essential to get a good sound.
I don’t recommend pics for learning bass. Enjoy.
Magma fan, I love that bass line and the sound
and this one with its excellent up-tempo near the middle !!!
Oh monstrous regiment! I would be hard put to think of a bass line from TV and film that wasn’t hers. And she’s spot on: the bass line is what ties the music together. I mean, Mission Impossible!
Man, I loved that discworld novel. 
It’s a term I was familiar with long before Terry Pratchett used it. I didn’t know the origin (apparently a pamphlet by John Knox complaining about the English and Scottish monarchs, both of them women named Mary) but the feminist theatre group of that name operated in Bitnik-adjacent political territory for a while. I’m sure he was familiar with the group, as would any English person with slightly leftish views.
Anybody say string-driven? Got a pretty good deal on a 2019 sandberg California TT passive. Been wanting a J-style bass for a while now, this will more than do 
Really nice !! It is a passive one I guess (edit : if only I couls read). My last 2 bass are active and I must say it is not really worth it. It can get pretty noisy
Yep, I was specifically looking for a passive one! My current bass is active, and it has entirely too many knobs I’m not sure what the function is of. This one is a real work horse, virtually indestructible.
I’m considering converting my other bass to fretless, but that’s a story for 'nother time
I prefer passive too. I do have one bass with a lpb-1 style boost built in but i’m thinking of taking it out.
I don’t use the PhatII EQ on my Ibanez bass and anyway it wouldn’t do anything to the audio that I couldn’t do in the Orange preamp or further down the pipeline. I’m going to try just removing the battery and temporarily shorting between the input and output terminals of the EQ board. If it works okay I’ll probably solder a jumper in there so if I change my mind it only takes seconds to restore it to the factory settings.
My original thought was to use a push-pull pot, but I think that would be over-engineering a problem that can be fixed by a length of hookup wire and a 2.54mm jumper.
I did convert my first bass, Ibanez, to a fretless one.
It worked and the fret slot/groove helps a lot to found out where your finger is now supposed to go.
Only thing its that the overall feeling of it is not really fretless. It has the nice and mellow sound of fretless bass but you can feel that is was not meant to be.
Nice to see that I am not the only one that is not super fond of active bass.
I’ve heard about this, but looking at videos about the process it seems to be far too much work. I’d rather just buy a fretless bass or install a fretless neck on my existing bass.
Well it’s not quite that really. I’m still “finding my feet” in this new world. Some people like passive electric bass, and I like to apply the KISS principle, so removing an unnecessary item from the analog chain seems worth a try. But maybe raising the signal level above the noise floor before it enters the patch cable is worthwhile.
I bought a couple of footswitches (latching, to switch the Orange bass amp’s blender on and off, and non-latching, with polarity switch for a sustain pedal for my synths).
Also a pitch shifter. Yes, I want that mid-range sound for solos.
Easy now, a small step from keen is GAS .
Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
It started as guitar acquisition syndrome but some drummer slept with a bat and now anyone can get it.
Revel in what you have, suck the marrow out of every fret and knob and then make whatever will work with what you have.
As you were …
The pitch shifter (Donner Harmonic Square) seems to be quite versatile. My son borrowed it and used it to cheekily mimic my bass practice on his strat. It does pitch up, too (or else it wouldn’t be much use to me and my bass.) You can control the wet and dry volumes independently. I’m not sure how well it tracks chords because bass players tend more to arpeggios so I won’t need that feature.
However the blender footswitch was more awe-inspiring. The blender is a feature of some Orange bass amps based on the old school practice of splitting the bass signal and sending half of it through an overdriven guitar amp, mixing it back in to get a “dirtier” sound. The footswitch allows the player to alternate between the blender sound (seems a bit Hendrixy to me, I do love it) and the clean, beautiful bass amp sound. You can really have a lot of fun with the gain and blend controls.
I really love what I have. Using a no-nonsense, serious bass amp with this pretty blue string thing has brought it to life.
I showed my daughter the basics of the electric bass. She spontaneously started playing very decent notes using a hammer-on/pull-off technique, left hand only. Nothing to do with me. A violin thing, perhaps? She loves the majestic sound of the bass, and how sensitively it responds.
Violin tuning on a bass is fun and quite intuitive.
If you have a bow and rosin that 45° position is ideal.
Enjoy
To be perfectly honest I think she’d rather do without reminders of her violin. She wanted to play it because Sherlock Holmes (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is depicted playing violin in the BBC TV series (and, of course, in the original stories by Conan Doyle, which she read .) But that was more than a decade ago.
I’d have no hesitation in helping her to choose a suitable instrument if she becomes interested in bass or guitar. She seems to have an intuitive feel for string instruments. To see that smile as she lightly plucked the four open strings, precipitating a thunderous cascade of sound, was inspiring.
At first thought I’m tempted to suggest a short scale (if she chooses bass) but honestly that’s a bit condescending when thinking of somebody who has successfully trained herself to play classical violin. Compared to that, playing a well designed long scale bass must be like switching from a unicycle to a Harley Davidson.
Nothing wrong with short scale, though. Good enough for “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” or “Rain.” Good enough for anything.
