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Knob placement and Rod Stewart

I got blindsided at tonight's gig when my singer called the next tune while we were on the outro of the previous one. That's not unusual, and something I normally have no problem dealing with. Smile and go. At this juncture he evidently had his eye on a particular girl and had the hots to perform Rod Stewart's Da Ya Think I'm Sexy. OK. Also something I'm used to. However, my band consists of three musicians and singer, so I don't have a keyboardist to do all the rest of the bass line of that tune. I play a 5 string Spector Legend Custom (set neck, Korean built--sweet instrument btw. trying to find another...anyone have one you don't like? lol).

Anyway, on that tune I have zero free time on my right hand to change settings on knobs that are just three or so inches from my fingers. It's all disco octaves: boom ditta boom ditta boom ditta...I'm moving my plucking fingers higher up the neck to try to get the sound I want, but I know that to really make it happen I need to dial back the bridge pickup, pull off a lot of treble, add some mid, a skosh of bass and some neck pickup.

It was really weird, playing that line, looking down at those knobs and thinking "poopie...it could only tweak that one, that one and that one, I could just relax and dial this groove.

So that made me think further: why are those ****ing knobs so far away? If they were on the top side of the strings instead of the bottom, I could reach them more easily...
You get to wear the "I Am a Bass God" t-shirt, for your musical handling of the situation.
Myself? I am not good enough to play in a band that does Knob Stewart songs and cares to get them right.
The next time your singer wants to feel as sexy as Rod Stewart thinks he is, you should play the bass part from "I'm Too Sexy" (for my shirt, or myself). :)
 
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That's another thing I love about the Yamaha Attitude Limited: all the controls fall right under your fingers.
 

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I remember a story about rod Stewart a couple years ago that in a round about way that had something to do with "knob placement "

Best reply to this epic thread!

I was going to make a pun about Rod and knob placement, like "He's right there singing" or "Rod and knob placement? I'm sure he's had many many knobs placed in one of 2 places."
 
Since this is turning into a Rod Bash party, here some info on his exes.
He has grown up though and at 70 he is now dating older women (29).

"His first wife Alana Hamilton, whom he married in 1979, has two kids with Stewart: 21-year-old Kimberly and Sean, 20. His ex-girlfriend, Kelly Emberg, has one child by Stewart, 13-year-old Ruby. And with Hunter, his second wife, he has two children, Liam, 6, and Renee, 8. On Christmas, the whole group assembled at Stewart’s $5 million estate in Los Angeles.

“Yeah, it was quite remarkable,” Stewart said. “I was married to two of them. But they all offered off their own back to cook me dinner, and they all turned up and did it, and I was very honored. And I thought, ‘Well, I must have done something right with all three of them.’ And it’s now gone down as the evening of the three blondes and a turkey.”

He speaks to all three exes every day.

“You know, when you’ve been in love with someone, you always hold them in the highest order, and you always want good for them and well for them,” Stewart said. “And they all live within three minutes of me, and we’ve all got children together. So we’ve got to be in each other’s lives for the rest of our lives.”

He was recently separated from Hunter, though they are not divorced. Both Hunter and Stewart maintained that she was just too young to get married when she did.

“Yeah, I should have known better,” Stewart said. “She was 21 and I was 45.”

Had they met at a different age, things might have worked out, he said.

“If it had happened now and she would have been 30 and I’d have been 56, I think it’s a little easier because she’s done so much — she would have done so much in those nine years when we weren’t together,” Stewart said.

And he doesn’t mean sex, but rather independence.

“It’s just living the life, you know, choosing your own bathroom soap and being a girl, and she never did that. And she was totally swept up in my life, swept along with a hurricane, and lost her identity,” Stewart said.

‘A Good Shagging Song’

Despite the breakup, Stewart said he’s pleased with the way his life is going.

“I’m very happy. I’m going out with a girl who’s a photographer, 29, 6 foot 1,” Stewart said.

The woman, Penny Lancaster, lives in London and like his other exes, she is a stunning blonde. But unlike the others, she is far from the Hollywood limelight.

“And for the first time in my life, I enjoy being on my own, you know, waking up on my own, and doing things on my own,” Stewart said. “I’ve always been, I think, a bit co-dependent on women. But at least now I’m enjoying my space. I know that’s a corny word, but I love the space. “
 
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Hammer on my wayward son,
There'll be peace when you adjust tone
Play your weary Rod Stewart tune your best
and don't you cry no more...

Don't know why Kansas sprang to mind.

*****

I'm glad Jim C brought up Stewart's many wives and kids, which came to mind simultaneously along with grade-7 ski bus trips where Rod Bashing was quite popular. The most epic bash I heard way back then was how Rod had PO'd his band and they refused to play so he had to "coerce" them, which later involved having his stomach pumped at the local hospital after the gig. How these types of rumours/urban legends start... well some people have pretty good imagination, I guess.

*****

Yoda-level wisdom this is.
Stealing that I am!
:roflmao:

Go whole happabore you should, FTFY I did. :woot:
 
OP, what you need to do is relax. You are stressed out over hitting every single note in a cover band?

You described the part as "boom ditta boom ditta" which is pretty accurate actually. You could have started the song and then simply tapped two or three "booms" in a row without the "dittas" and nobody would have even noticed. Even the ones who did would not have thought twice about it. That would have freed your right hand up for tweeking knobs. (I used to tap a lot so I would have probably doesn't octaves anyway...... "boom di boom di boom di".)

Funny story. We played a club once that liked to force crazy competitions between bands that played there regularly. One band did a 4 hour show with no breaks and no repeats. We had to outdo that. Not only did we do a 4 1/2 hours show one song right after the other with no repeats (52 songs). We ordered a pizza from the stage and had it delivered. I tapped out bass lines with my left hand while eating Pizza with my right. Hilarious. So learning how to fake with your left hand cormes especially in handy!
 
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"I'm a drummer, and normally, I carry three sets to every gig: a Slingerland for that jazz feel, a Ludwig for that nice warm woody low end, and a Premier for the bright treble when I paradiddle. Anyway, at a gig last night, the singer announced the next tune before I had time to change kits. Normally it takes about twenty to thirty minutes to tear down one set, bring up the other and tune all the drums just the way I like. I think he had imbibed one too many and was trying to get to the toilet before he relieved himself in the tip jar. So we tore into Let It Go (from the Disney movie Frozen), and I had to play on the wrong set (the Slingerlands, as we had just finished our Dave Brubeck medley). It was so frustrating, not being able to use the Premiers! I could see them, a few yards away stacked up behind the keyboards, but I was unable to reach even the rack toms. They have the nicest, 'thump' on the glisses! I felt so humiliated! Afterwards, nobody said a word, but I knew they didn't have to. I'm tempted to ragequit the band by texting the horn player tonight on the way to the gig. It's my brother's wedding, but I'm sure he would understand."

This is a joke, right? I mean, it reads like a joke, but it's hard to tell for sure.

I'm not sure if this whole thread isn't a joke.

I can promise you, exactly ONE person will notice if your bass tone isn't dialed in as tight as you'd like it, or if your paradiddles aren't as snappy as they oughta be.

Care to guess who that person is?
 
This is a joke, right? I mean, it reads like a joke, but it's hard to tell for sure.

I'm not sure if this whole thread isn't a joke.

I can promise you, exactly ONE person will notice if your bass tone isn't dialed in as tight as you'd like it, or if your paradiddles aren't as snappy as they oughta be.

Care to guess who that person is?
Yeah, you're not at all important to the music, nobody gives a rat's ass about your sound, and you should go away and sit in a corner and eat worms.

Why do we as bass players do so much to discourage those who actually care about the job they're doing? Don't we get enough of that BS from guitarists?
 
I've been thinking about moving the knobs off the bass altogether and putting them on a pedal... or something. Unfortunately I know nothing about electronics, but I'm imagining an onboard bluetooth transmitter/receiver that can transmit the audio signal and a pedal that would receive and amplify, control the pickup balance and volumes and forward to the rest of the signal chain.

No no no, you're overthinking this; gotta go old skool, analog...mechanical analog:

Electro-Harmonic used to make a gizmo called the Hot Foot which was a wah-sized pedal connected via a long mechanical armature that slipped over the shaft of whatever potentiometer you needed to control via footpedal. Ostensibly you would use it to tweak the knobs on your fuzzbox or ring modulator or delay pedal etc etc ...but no reason you couldn't have one -- or two, or three, or four -- connected to the knobs on your bass.

You'd look like some steampunk version of Squidward (from SpongeBob SquarePants) but at least you'd be able to play "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" without missing a note.