Things we didn't know or do in the 60's and 70's

[Wisebass]

Hi Paula

Nice thread!

There was no vintage basses. We called them used basses.

I was a kid in the seventies. So I can' t tell if there was a real used market for instruments.

But I remember that the 70s were about shiny and new. Used was just old
and usually ended in the attic, in a humid basement, in a barn or on a landfill.

Tube radios were replaced by solidstate. My Pa' s tube radio was moved to the garage.

My grandparents "old" but beautiful kitchen furniture was replaced

by a white Resopal (fiberboard) cupboard with orange!!!!! drawers.

The word "vintage" was only used for wine.

Coil cords!!!!

Shames me to admit I still like them (especially those shiny red ones) even though the were among the worst cords I ever used.

They were still in use when I started in the early 80s.

They made a perfect antenna when you plugged them into a cheap practice amp!

You could pick up some weird radio programs in Europe that way.

Most of it was Armenian or Russian folk music during the day

and sometimes those weird "rows of numbers" in the evening.

I had a small bet riding on it that somebody would show up in fairly short order to Do the Troll.

I am in!!!! We have to find a bookmaker for that!


greetings


Wise(b)ass

 

[cnltb]

Things we didn't know or do in the 60's and 70's
Who is 'We'?

 

[Nevada Pete]

Playing my bass through a guitar amp on gigs. My first guitar amp was this little 007 gem. My second guitar amp was this Gibson Falcon.

View attachment 3486950

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

Thanks for that picture! Brings back fond memories. Those early Gibson amps of that style sounded real good! Don't remember exactly what model it was, but I used to rent one from Dana Morgan Music in Palo Alto California to use at gigs, because my tweed Fender Deluxe couldn't cut it on stage. The amp I rented that looked very similar to your photo had two 12" Jensen speakers I'm pretty sure. I know it had a pare of 6L6's. Me and the other guitar player in the band I was in at the time would both plug in to it. We were playing surf music, all instrumentals, and it was perfectly satisfactory for our gigs. Played surprisingly loud, actually. Saved my nickles and dimes until I could afford a Fender Showman. I thought I was hot #$%$# with that! But when I got a Dual Showman, I was probably insufferable! Young, and full of fire.

 

[PWRL]

I never set up my first bass. I never even changed the strings, and I had it for 8 years. I never even adjusted the neck. I tuned it to C standard after a while, just for the heck of it. I didn't even know that was a thing, because there was no internet to tell me stuff, and I was self-taught. Other than that period, I used to tune to the guitars and vice versa, or tune to a keyboard.
We used to all use the same amps. I didn't own a bass amp for a long time. I played through my friend's Peavey twin and used to crank up the tremolo while the Wurlitzer 140B went thru the other side at the same time. I had no clue you weren't supposed to do that. The tremolo and the Wurli's vibrato competing with each other had an effect like a seasick tornado, but it was great.
I loved just figuring stuff out that way. No blueprints, no instructions.

 

[micguy]

We had small pedalboards - before led’s were added to effects, if you tried to keep track of what was on or off on a big pedalboard, you’d invariably try to turn off the phaser when the flanger was on, and now rather than 0 modulation effects, you had 2.

 

[Paulabass]

So I write a post just for fun, a little nostalgia, and to get some good natured rapport going.
There will always be a few that say 'How dare she say that, or why live in an imperfect past'.
Like they are looking for a big bowl of granola to crap in.
Even I don't believe everything I write, sometimes I just want to stray from 'What's 8 ohms plus 8ohms' for a minute.
For the people who didn't get the entertainment intended. I do not sit around remeniscing, I don't have rose colored glasses on, and not ALL the good music was written last century. And Santa Claus is not real, but it's fun to pretend he is.
Most of you got it. Bravo, you're probably fun to be around.

 

[Wisebass]

And Santa Claus is not real

Of course he is!

And he is a bassplayer!


Wise(b)ass

 

[mexicant]

We didn't have you tube or tablature to help us learn new music, if you wanted it ,you had to woodshed! I wore out a few albums in my day playing and replaying a certain passage until I figured it out.

 

[socialleper]

As a Boomer myself, I am so utterly and completely sick of this rose-colored glasses view of yesteryear. My generation is so full of themselves, it's incredible.

Digital high five

 

[buldog5151bass]

As a Boomer myself, I am so utterly and completely sick of this rose-colored glasses view of yesteryear. My generation is so full of themselves, it's incredible.

I don't see it as rose-colored. More tongue in cheek humor, and remembering how we dealt with it.

 

[socialleper]

I didn't see rose colored glasses in the original post. I saw nostagia for what might have arguably been a simpler time, when the music we made was possibly more important than the gear we made it with, and before anyone was able to monetize every tiny inconvenience that we had to solve organically. I mean, seriously. People pay money for a little strap to channel their guitar cable behind their feet now. Talk about a need that doesn't exist.

I posted a picture of a ground lift adapter. Back then, I wouldn't have been able to play half the gigs I had without one or three of those. If I tried to plug in something like that today, I'd be vilified, and rightly so. We did the best we could with what we had or knew at the time, and we're lucky it worked out okay.

It's funny because one of my personal pet-peeves is the "kids today" mentality that people in my age group (I'm 60) often display. "Back in my day, we made music on real instruments," grumble grumble. Yeah, every generation hates the way the next generation does things and reinterprets life. And I really dislike the "change is bad" mentality. But that's not what I saw in this post. We're allowed to have nostalgia for our own youthful times without that meaning that we're all a bunch of curmudgeons.

The OP literally said "best music of the century." That is a little more than waxing nostalgic.

 

[Mannyinnewyork]

I did not know wearing my girl friend’s dress and beads would look pretty silly fifty years later.

 

[The Owl]

View attachment 3487190
I did not know wearing my girl friend’s dress and beads would look pretty silly fifty years later.

Fixed up the color some.

 

[Mannyinnewyork]

Fixed up the color some.View attachment 3487192

Thanks, maybe that dress doesn’t look so bad after all!

 

[Robert B]

We didn't have digital tuners, and we couldn't afford a Peterson strobe tuner, so we tuned to each other.

This was our tuner in the '60s. The guitar player would tune using a pitch pipe, and we would all tune to him. Or we would tune to the keyboards.

 

[40Hz]

The OP literally said "best music of the century." That is a little more than waxing nostalgic.

Ooo! So serious!

 

[redstrand]

The ringing in my ears reminds me: "Tinnitus" was not a word commonly used among anyone, much less musicians. And no one wore earplugs or any kind of hearing protection. We just "got used to it."

Now we "get used to" the ever-present eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

WHAAAAAAAAAT?!?!!?????

 

[4dog]

Still have A440 tuning fork from the 70's, and occasionally use it for acoustic guitar - old school tuning!

its called...your ears

 

[DanGroove]

We used a lot of these in really old buildings and somehow survived.

View attachment 3486462

I still keep 2 or 3 of those in my gear bag. In my last band the keys player had ripped the ground pin out of every single power strip he owned because apparently he didn't know these existed. He could never understand why the keyboards were super prone to buzz. I would swap his power strip out for one of mine and it would be all better, then he would show up with his trashed one at the next gig and be confused by the sudden reemergence of the buzz.

 

[40Hz]

So I write a post just for fun, a little nostalgia, and to get some good natured rapport going.
There will always be a few that say 'How dare she say that, or why live in an imperfect past'.
Like they are looking for a big bowl of granola to crap in.
Even I don't believe everything I write, sometimes I just want to stray from 'What's 8 ohms plus 8ohms' for a minute.
For the people who didn't get the entertainment intended. I do not sit around remeniscing, I don't have rose colored glasses on, and not ALL the good music was written last century. And Santa Claus is not real, but it's fun to pretend he is.
Most of you got it. Bravo, you're probably fun to be around.

Yeah. So it goes around here sometimes. You start a thread where people get together to celebrate and laugh at themselves and their old foibles a bit and it’s only a matter of time before someone with, as you noted, no sense of humor - (and who is seldom within the demographic of the thread) shows up. And having no fun stories of their own to add to the slush pile, decides to be all offended and troll it.

It’s kinda the web equivalent of someone who crashes a party and tries to pick a fight with one of the guests. What can I say? You get ‘em.