Long story short - Joined a band a year ago playing covers, the bass player and i wanted to eventually do originals so we peeled off together about 6 months ago. During that time we've come up with a bunch of material which i love with the shared goal of recording an EP.
When we recorded ourselves something was off but i couldn't put my finger on it. About a month ago i played around on his bass and noticed the strings were cooked and the neck was all over the place. Sure enough he hasn't changed strings since he bought it 6 years ago and the intonation by the 12th fret was about half a step out, i had finally found why our recordings sound a bit off. I asked him to change his strings and service his bass before we record, stressing the importance of both instruments being in tune with each other. I even showed him on my tuner how badly intonated his bass was. He's taken this personally and feels as though i'm attacking his playing or musicianship in some way as well as putting pressure on him to spend money, i've stressed this isn't the case. He's now gone cold on the whole EP idea and wants to play casually. Am i being unreasonable here? I'm an amateur so if anybody with a bit more experience can weigh in that would be greatly appreciated.
Other things to note is he's been using his phone to tune this whole time, i've asked if he could buy a proper tuner or at least tune from my tuner and i can tell it doesn't go down well. He also likes to pump his midrange to where i struggle to hear myself in the mix, once again when i ask if he can tweak stuff a bit to try, it doesn't go down well.
Give me some wisdom please, extra brownie points if we can turn this into a political thread.
