Hi Suntower,

TLLDOB is one of my favourite albums and I saw them at Newcastle City Hall way back then... superb stuff.

Mike R never played a Precision Bass - he was mostly a Rickenbacker man around that period, moving on in 76/77 to the famous Shergold Masquerader custom twin-neck for Trick Of The Tail and Wind & Wuthering albums/tours.



From memory he was playing a customised Rickenbacker twin-neck 4-string Bass with 12-string Guitar at the top (see photo I found on the net from that tour), and Lamb was covered all over in MXR Phase 90 and Distortion (Plus?) fuzz-box.

A lot of the staccato, punchy bass sound resulted from Steve Hackett doubling up the bass lines on his lowest E and A strings, also through a fuzz-box - however, Steve had been using his EMS Synthi Hi-Fli guitar synth on Selling England album and the quacky sound I believe came from the Envelope shaper part of the Synthi Hi-Fli, which incorporated some sort of Octave divider circuitry as well. It might well be that Hackett used an octave divider to drop his 6th string to reinforce the bass.



I do recall reading at the time that Mike dabbled a lot with direct injection of bass guitar (as did Graham Gouldman of 10cc, who was also a Rickenbacker player at the time).

I loved the bass sound (still do) and would love to know of any special recording techniques John Burns employed -- if there's anyone out there in forumland connected with the project reading this, do chip in and enlighten us.

cheers,
Ian G

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