If only I knew what to do with them, lol. For now I’m just leaving the EQ knobs in the middle. 
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Same here. I have an SR500E with the fancy 3-band eq and whatnot, and I don’t remember the last time I turned it on.
(In related news, my next bass is going to be passive.)
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You’re going to love it
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Same here.
The only time the EQ gets switched on is if I accidentally hit the switch when I’m wiping the bass over 
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Play with them! They are fun!
Your bass is way more tonally versatile than a passive P, J, or P/J, and those (and the pickup balancer) are the tone controls.
The price you pay for that is needing to learn what they do, but that’s fun and not very hard.
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I’m half way Dan and it is worth every penny!
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I feel you on band mates not doing funk! Singer just turns off when I do! But, we make it work and still play other stuff we all enjoy!
As far as you getting lost in the mix…several things can cause this. First is simply equipment. However many watts your guitarists amps are, you want to be about at least 3-5x more wattage in your bass amp. So if they have 50 watt, you want at least 150w amp. For cab you want at least a 115, or 210s or 212.
Second is mids. Mids help you cut through the mix. If you scooped them out on your amp EQ it will be harder for you to cut without going too loud.
Finally, perform an EQ. If your drummer has an acoustic set, they have the least volume control. Start with them playing as loud as they will play. Then have the drummer listen to you playing the bass. They should tell you to come up to where they can hear you gone over their drums, but STOP when they can hear you. Then keep playing and have the guitars come in until they can be heard but don’t drown out the bass. Finally the vocals till they can be heard clearly over everything.
Final tip, sometimes raising the amp speakers off the floor (closer to your head) by putting it on a chair or table can help make it more audible.
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To further stir up the mix, here’s an ESP Grassroots J-bass with a P pickup and a MM pickup 
About $250 used, quality will be probably roughly high end Squier or MIM Fender, or higher.
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Ah, a fellow funk lover
Actually, in-between songs, myself and the drummer sometimes start something funky and the other joins in. If it’s good enough the guitarist relents and joins in too so while we haven’t got far enough for a track yet, we’re sowing the seed!
Great tips on the amps - thanks so much for that. And I have been messing around with the stack recently as I’ve been taking p and j basses down and I think I’ve found the sweet spot for all types now.
I’m leaning towards a slightly brighter sound recently to match the music we’re playing, so I might be using the bridge pickup on my p/j with tone right up to get a cutting sound along with tweaking the amp a bit to suit.
And yes the drummer uses my acoustic kit, so when he turns up we have to do a level check with him as the master volume so it’s getting there. Plus we’re recording sessions too and can hear when the levels are out.
Also, we have a gig next week! It’s only a zoom meeting for the ‘crowd’ so to speak and there’s only about ten of them, but one of them is a guy that I used to work with and one is the original bassist from omd before they went famous!
Small world!
Thanks for the tips again, invaluable!!
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Happy to help! Awesome you are doing a show! I dig a bright sound too. Round wound strings, treble and mids up, and of course punchy striking of strings!
The funk is happening now though. Drummer and I actually had our first practice of our side project Intentional Density. Drums, bass, boomy funk. Our guitarist will hopefully be down, but fun stuff. I just have too much funk in the soul not to let it out.
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Yeah, I’m the same with the strings and the tone. Gotta have that sound!!
Sounds great about your funk! I’m jealous! I love what we play but I seriously dig the funk. But when we do non-funk songs if you like, I still put some grooves down and everyone enjoys it so it’s all good I guess.
You’ll have to share some on here! And I’ll do the same
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Here is some funky me. Was feeling so funky, the funky bassline needed some funky wah lead over it!
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Also, I have a lot of stuff in post your practice fragments, original songs and compositions, and original songs and compositions lab threads.
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Love the funk nice one!
We really must get our tracks finished soon. I’m running out of patience!
@quadfather that would be awesome man, I found the hard part was balancing the “song is done” with making tweaks and perfectionism. At some point you just have to decide the song is good as is and move on! For us anyway, I imagine other bands have the same struggle.
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That’s exactly what we’re like. But eventually someone just says "that’s it* and we try and leave it at that
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Yeah, you could pretty much eternally never finish a song if you don’t just let go lol.
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I leave it to the guitarist most of the time. I chip in with changes to drums to suit the rhythm section now and again, but the guitarist is bad enough as it is with tweaking so I back off to let him finish it without distractions
Good plan to just assign it to one person though.
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Yeah too many cooks and all that.
Meanwhile, slightly away from funk, we need a sort of gallop bass line for one of our medium paced tracks.
Christ, I’ve just gone through Josh’s Steve Harris bassbuzz vid, and while it’s excellent as usual, and I’ve picked what I need (powerslave type of run), it’s incredibly hard to play at the original tempo. 135 ffs doing 16ths!! I can’t do that just yet.
I’m also having difficulty doing the Index, Index, Middle placement when doing the gallop. My head just wants to alternate.
Always something to do and learn isn’t there. I love it