Heartland

anyone ever missed a bass player playing in the band? sure as f**k i do when i hear the sisters of late...for heavens sake Von you need a bass player and usually i swoon over the male bass player of bands.... BUT ... there is a really good talent that would suit perfectly in TSOM now and she is in the Facebook fan pages...

anyone else heard her play? i think we need her.

There hasn't been one for thirty years so I've managed to get used to it. That said I wouldn't say no to a live bass player and the return of Emma.

If we can have build on bass Lucretia then we could have Emma

The Bass is one of - if not the -most 'signature ' sound of the girls (argument could be made for the Dok as well !) .. Until there is a live Bass player it's a karaoke version of the girls... The days of Craig standing there menacingly are sorely missed

It's like New Order playing without a Bass player - it's just not right

Speaking of Craig I saw the m*****n the other week and realised something I hadn't previously realised - the man is an absolute bass machine monster. Just imagine..

deirfiur wrote: ↑24 Oct 2024, 11:10 The Bass is one of - if not the -most 'signature ' sound of the girls (argument could be made for the Dok as well !) .. Until there is a live Bass player it's a karaoke version of the girls... The days of Craig standing there menacingly are sorely missed

It's like New Order playing without a Bass player - it's just not right

As @ribbons69 have wrote: it three decades since there is no live bass in each and every song, people have more than enough time to learn to live with this.

too soon....still hurts

Bartek wrote: ↑24 Oct 2024, 12:53

deirfiur wrote: ↑24 Oct 2024, 11:10 The Bass is one of - if not the -most 'signature ' sound of the girls (argument could be made for the Dok as well !) .. Until there is a live Bass player it's a karaoke version of the girls... The days of Craig standing there menacingly are sorely missed

It's like New Order playing without a Bass player - it's just not right

As @ribbons69 have wrote: it three decades since there is no live bass in each and every song, people have more than enough time to learn to live with this.

Would I like to have Chris playing the bass? Sure
Do I actually miss a bass player? Well, no.

Craig was the real deal, and wrote dozens of iconic bass lines, and the pre-FALAA stuff is one of those places where the Bass defined what the sisters sounded like.

Now, I'd argue that neither Floodland or Vision Thing were recorded with a real bass, maybe a couple of tracks here and there. Whilst we had a bass player between 90 and 93, It's kinda hard to make a case that it actually sounded good/better than the Dok nowadays.

For most cases, I think Von is aware that some songs require a proper bass for dynamics reasons such as Romeo or Never Land, I'd add Driven like the snow to that list but as we know it was never played live.

The current version of Lucretia being played live has the bass line played loud again after the first chorus, and it sounds pretty close to the OG recording, which also corroborates with my theory that Floodland was recorded without a real bass.
(Does that mean Patty never played the bass? Ofc not, we saw the pics/videos! It just so happens that her bass wasn't connected to anything )

I'll repeat it over and over again: Von sees himself as the bass player in the band now. He can't play bass and sing, so he lets the Doktor do it. He used to say that if they had a live drummer they'd just do what the Doktor does anyway; so too with a bass player.

People are fully entitled to feel that there hasn't been a "real" TSOM since 1991 (just as they are to say the earlier date of 1985), but nostalgia is crippling and contagious; if I felt like that I'd stay home with the albums and not bother with the contemporary band. There are a whole heap of covers bands out there who sound like Sisters 1985 or Sisters 1991, some of whom are excellent and worth following.

Although I'd think it would be hilarious if they got Tony James in for a guest gig, à la Terri Nunn or Duncan Kilburn.

Husek wrote: ↑24 Oct 2024, 14:18 The current version of Lucretia being played live has the bass line played loud again after the first chorus, and it sounds pretty close to the OG recording, which also corroborates with my theory that Floodland was recorded without a real bass.
(Does that mean Patty never played the bass? Ofc not, we saw the pics/videos! It just so happens that her bass wasn't connected to anything )

Von played all the instruments on Floodland, except for the guitar solo on This Corrosion and the sax solo on Dominion.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Lucretia bassline were sampled/sequenced, because surely you'd get bored as hell playing that indefinitely in the studio and you would be hard pressed to get the "eternal loop" feeling right. There are arguments that the bass on Vision Thing was sampled/sequenced too, since Tony James said he only spent a very short time in the studio.

As someone said above, Craig Adams in his day (no idea about now) was a monster, the missing link that probably made TSOM what they became. It wouldn't surprise me if the Sisters have never had another studio bassist. Tony James was only there because (a) the Doktor wasn't up to doing it live yet; (b) Von was repaying a favour.

H. Blackrose wrote: ↑24 Oct 2024, 21:39 I'll repeat it over and over again: Von sees himself as the bass player in the band now. He can't play bass and sing, so he lets the Doktor do it.

Agree. Not only is he the bassplayer, he's also (partly) composing on bass. Some of his (best?) compositions are around a bass hook, Lucretia and Driven like the Snow being the most obvious ones, but of course there are many others. I think he started composing the way he does now on Floodland and doesn't give away only the slightest bit of control over the creative process easily.

So, in a band where the bass is such a core part of the song structure, a bass player plays a much bigger role than in other bands, where he/she is only responsible for the low end "thump" in the sound. I can see why he does shy away from involving someone else here.