Recent content by Martin Beer

I don't know if I'm just particularly unfussy, I play through a PF50T and none of my pedals are particularly exotic. I have a Mosky MM silver, a light overdrive that I think is based on the Timmy circuit. I set that where it's only slightly driven by itself but a few dB louder than the bypass...

I've also wondered this - while for someone to trace and publish the actual schematic would be poor etiquette for a product that's in production, it would satisfy some curiosity if someone knowledgeable could take a look at the input stage and describe the basic topology. Is it something...

Hmm, seeing myself on page 1 from 2008, I've come down a long way since then. Now at 5.5mm G to 8mm E, back on Spiro Mediums again.

Have a close look at the ball ends - on most steel core strings, it's the core material that forms the loop around the ball end. Does it look like a very fine spiral braid, or a single thicker strand of wire? It's not impossible for solid core strings to be low tension, they're just stiffer for...

I have a hunch that the Pyramid tapewounds might be a solid steel core rather than spiral or rope style. They're relatively inexpensive for a European made string, and they don't mention having a spiral/rope core, and a string in that price range would absolutely mention it as a selling point...

What's interesting to me on this is how polite McLaughlin's approach to guitar was at this point. There's a rough, loosely jagged quality about his playing that I really notice around the late 60s (Extrapolation, Tony Williams Lifetime and the Miles albums), and that he started to move on from...

I wonder if that's one more rabbit hole than I want to get into. Rightly or wrongly it always struck me as I one of those seemingly straightforward but nuanced tasks where you only get good through repetition. I went up to see the local rehairer with my current bow, he's happy to rehair it and...

I think they have several different metals involved between the core, outer winding and intermediate windings (I'm sure I've seen something copper coloured glinting through a kinked outer wrap). So I presume they can tweak the mass and resulting tension at a given thickness by varying the...

I mean, I keep the bow I use for the daxophone separate from my bass bow. It's rough on the hair and usually covered in more Pops than I would use. I was just mentioning it as experience of the Thomann carbon bow.

I neglected to mention, I actually have the very cheapest model carbon bow from Thomann around too, and for some reason I don't like it at all, just can't get a sound I like with it. I don't know if it's exactly the same model as your son's or if they've changed over the years, but this one...

Indeed, the environmental/ethical aspect had occurred to me. Without getting too far into politics, that can be less than transparent with some of the products coming from China. And I'm not wildly consumerist with the rest of my gear - I tend to use the same stuff for a long time and get it...

To be honest, I haven't played enough other bows to have a definite feeling as to whether I like or dislike this one. Most local bassists I meet play French so I don't have many points of comparison. I haven't had a teacher for a few years, but the last one played German too and thought mine was...

I'm a fairly casual player these days, absolutely no classical aspirations, I either dip into the local free improv scene or play in folky acoustic or singer/songwriter type situations. I do bow a certain amount though, either for more melodic parts, textural stuff in improv or to work on my...

His 2021 album Another Land had quite a few tunes on electric bass. I was almost a little wary, but I liked the sound and approach he went for, a darker tone than I'd expected though it had a hint of clear highs that made me think modern active bass rather than P-bass.

I feel like there's a juggling act between core stiffness and tension at pitch, and when you're at the lower end of pitch for a given scale length the useful sweet spot gets narrower. Heavier B strings can sound powerful at the lower end of the neck, but there's a sour, inharmonic property...