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On The Road Again - Willy Nelson

@sifi2112 maybe? I think?

Always surprises me when eBayers (and others) put "Location = London". Big place, London. Very big. Really very big indeed. In terms of travel times, it's the equivalent of giving your location as "somewhere in the Midlands". I'm in Harrow, NW London, and I can get to Birmingham faster than I can get to Catford or Dagenham. Not really a rant, as such, more a vague musing about how inept some sellers are.

You're far from the only one who feels this way! I read a very good piece the other day which was built around a similar argument: that an awful lot of tech "solutions" are trying to convince you that you shouldn't need to put any effort into writing reports, reading your emails, deciding what to eat, or even making music...when actually, the sense of reward and satisfaction is far greater when you've put in the hours to master your craft, work through the mistakes and the dodgy first drafts. That far from being an inconvenience, the process is the point. Not to spaff out an album and push it to market as quickly as possible, but to take the time to work on something you'll be proud of. (Plus, early studies suggest your brain is far healthier if you don't use AI as a crutch, so you were probably wise to put those hours in after all!)

Is this some kind of hybrid air guitar thing? An air guitar with substance and noise?

Do you feel the same about software engineers who have spent years training, getting a loan to see them through uni and can now be replaced with ai generating code at the press of a button? Or about language translators who find their work drying up, or ai assisting doctors with identifying cancer cells that they would have missed when looking at scans? Sure this is going to make life difficult for original songwriters looking to break through, no question! But it's already happening. Do you ever use ChatGPT? Ai is not performing music live to an appreciative audience who don't want a hologram playing for them, so your time and the rest of our time and effort learning an instrument has definitely not gone to waste! And there's nothing stopping you having fun collaborating with pals writing music - if it's decent, people will want to listen to it when you perform it live - something ai ain't going to be able to do.

I really don't but obviously didn't intend to be insulting. If you get joy from music crafting songs and performing them with your friends AI doesn't change that at all. Why should the joy from music creation only come from the way a particular group define it to be ? The processes are different but the end point is the same.

I was going to just order a black pick guard but I’ve just seen this vintage mint green colour with a wide bevel, this could work couldn’t it?

If Colin Furze made musical instruments?

I've been an Ashdown fan for many years. I love their customer relations, I love the visual side of their amps, I love the philosophy of their creations - although their ideas are not always intuitive. I had one of first hundred of Little Bastard 30, although I've decided to mod it and later let it go to get my first real vintage bass I missed being part of the family. I briefly had ABM300, which I stupidly sold. Recently I got myself a little present ABM 400 NEO was briefly made around 2014, I guess in quite limited quantity by Ashdown UK Custom Shop. It is equipped with EVO III Preamp and class-D power amp combined in full size rack mountable case with around 8,5 kg of weight.

Is it April already? 😄😄

To get a passable piece of AI generated music you still have to be able to write a decent prompt (or more likely a decent set of prompts) in the first place.

Then they shouldn't be "making" music in the first place. Sorry to get all "gatekeeper-y" on you but do you not see how utterly insulting this is? What an idiot I must be to have put the hours upon hours of effort into learning an instrument, to spend hours upon hours collaborating with my pals, trying stuff to see what works and what doesn't when creating/refining a song! It was all for nothing - you can just rock up to this bit of software, tap a few words in and hey presto! I know you're going to consider this pure histrionic theatre, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.

Welcome to forum! I'm also a newer.

Fixed. There's a world of difference between what @edstraker123 has explained he's doing and what my brother-in-law, who's not a musician, got Suno to produce the other day (yep his was defo slop - but didn't stop it bringing a smile to family members!) And the stuff that's been crafted with care and attention with ai input is likely to be a hundred times better than quite a lot of the "original slop" that's too often foisted on audiences, which should leave no one wondering why no one's turning up to their gigs.

I'm an unreformed fiddler, nothing I ever do get's finished. I always have mods I want to try. In this case I thnk you could set a limit/tolerace of 2% of cab volume and be perfectly safe and maybe 10% would be liveable with. There's always more mods I want to add so I'm finding publishing designs and seeing them live on as a stable design a new experience. I decided early on that designs had to be built and tested before publishing and nowadays I have to refer back to my own designs on BassChat to answer questions

Bass arrived yesterday. I didn't have much time to play with it last night (early night in preperation of today's early radiotherapy appointment), but first impressions are good. Straight out of the box it seemed to be set up well, perhaps too well, very little relief in the neck - almost dead flat, and pretty low action, and almost in tune! I immediately noticed the tightness and tone of the B string, even before plugging it in - this boded well. Plugged it into my little Blackstar practice amp, switched the bass to passive mode and heard a nice full range tone without any of the mud of my EHB's Bartolini's, and more top end. Switching to active mode sounded pretty much the same, with everything set flat. The EQ centres seem well chosen - the bass knob in particular adds girth without adding subby boom. I noticed a little buzz at the third fret and grabbed a fret rocker. There are indeed a couple of high frets low down, but I'm not totally surprised at this price point - my more expensive EHB has high frets too. But I'm hoping I can mitigate this by introducing a little more relief and setting the action to my preferences before I think about a fret level. The neck pickup looks a little low too and needs balancing, but I also need to match the volume to my G&L JB2, my main gigging bass). I haven't tried it on a strap yet, but it appears to balance well when I held it by the top strap button. I'm not sure about the fret markers. Whilst they aren't as bad as the EHB markers, they are a little difficult to see, but that could just be my preferences. Oh, one last thing. The tuners are a bit stiff and sticky, but see there's a solution available, by adding some small bearings But I have to say, so far, so good. The small issues I have found so far are not surprising at this price point and straightforward enough to remedy.

So. After three-odd years containing knee surgery, a pulmonary embolism, torn rotator cuff, additional knee work and hand surgery, Sunday sees me back in the studio. I'm genuinely feeling energised to dip my toe into things. It's a blank canvas, we just go in, write in the fly and hit record. Old school.