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You've got to be careful about 'Daydream Believer' in certain parts of Glasgow!

Every now and then I get the urge to acquire a Keytar, even if only an inexpensive one. But then I remind myself that, a) I have no real use for one in a band context, and, b) I'd look a right tit playing one.

Well, that's further bafflement. There's heatshrink over the end of the outer insulation on the pickup leads, which I thought might contain the ends of each pickup winding, like on the BH2 pickups. No such luck. Slit the heatshrink and it just covers where the cable screen is run into a separate sleeve. No access to the internal coils. So I need at least one replacement MK1.

Sad to hear when anyone leaves a church. Hopefully over time they will take leading worship more seriously, and you will settle into your new home.

I’d love to try IEMs out. But for my gigs, which are mostly 3 or 4 band bills with sound check only for the headliner, and line check for the rest through whatever provided back line is there I can’t see it being doable.

That's strange. It sounds like bass guitar to me, even down to the string noise. It sounds good, but I can't picture it in my head as a DB.

...as long as the sound engineer knows what they are doing IEMs are great. If they don't - as is the case for 90% of the times I play - an amp is still necessary (and as I said above I always bring one just in case). I also have to admit I like the look of my stage rig... it makes me smile.

If there was a Ripper in line with the Thunderbird pricing then my wallet would be back in peril. Otherwise I think I'm out. Though that G3 is very lovely.

Hot Mess - Cobra Starship

I'm sorry to hear that - mind you I hope you symbolically sawed one of your guitars in half on stage instead of leading worship to make the point, as one of the (ex)worship leaders at my previous church did. Many years later I still very much respect him for doing that!

I’ve only left 2 that then folded, other than that replacements found/bands carried on. 1 - glam/heavy rock band. We’d been together for about 7/8 years, different lineups etc. We were gigging 3 maybe 4 times a year at that point, not enough for me so I went elsewhere and got a position in a regular gigging band doing punk covers. As they had a full calendar they had to be my priority. 2 - the punk covers band. They’d already been around for a while, we managed a few years, split for 6 months, reformed but it wasn’t the same. The guitarist could only do 4 gigs a year with 2 rehearsals for each gig due to his wife telling him this (turns out he and the drummer were forming another band which she seemingly didn’t mind, or more likely the afore mentioned limits were nothing to do with her at all). As such where we were super tight & good we became average so I left and the band folded. From those ashes the singer and myself formed Knock Off, the most successful musical thing either of us have ever done.

I can't speak for 'Logic', as I don't use a Mac, or any Apple stuff, but Reaper, even after paying the one-off licence cost, has, bundled, one heck of a lot of plug-ins, and any that one acquires after, either free, low-cost or paid-for, depends entirely on one's needs. I use Superior Drummer a lot (I'm a drummer...), and it costs what it costs. Maybe Logic has the same stuff for free; I doubt it (but could be wrong...). I use Reaper for direct recording 'real' instruments, recording with virtual instruments, treatment and production, and MIDI plays a large part in what I do. There are things it doesn't offer, certainly, but they are probably at the more esoteric end of the User scale; I've never found anything it can't do to my satisfaction after a coupe of decades of almost daily use. Is it better than sliced bread..? Maybe not. Is it rubbish..? Certainly not. It would, in my opinion, be hard to out-grow it, for all but intensive professional use, and even then it's hard to see how. (There now follows, below, a long litany of stuff that [whatever] is better at, at a bargain price...). Do I recommend Reaper..? Yes, I do. Does it suit everyone..? Maybe not, but it's certainly a contender for 'best value for money'.

The only band I've ever been in that properly broke up was very anti-climactic but pretty jarring - a band meet up in the pub was arranged, guitarist/songwriter/nominal band leader arrived last, told us he didn't want to do it any more, then left. Me, the drummer and the singer had a pint and absorbed the news (or the news was absorbed by the beer?). Band over.

💩 ?

Nope, if it's a wunkay night then it's a wunkay night. I refuse to live in fear of hypothetical drunken bams.

I don't miss having a bass rig behind me in the slightest. 1. I have never been in a band that needed to be so loud on stage that I could actually feel the air moving, and I've been in some loud bands in the past. I suspect if I had, I'd be even more deaf than I am. 2. On any decent sized stage the moment that I stepped away from standing directly in from of my rig I could no longer hear it and it turned into a big, heavy expensive stage prop. 3. At smaller gigs I was often asked by the sound engineer to turn down so much, so as not to affect the FoH mix, that I could hear myself better from the guitarist's wedge monitor on the other side of the stage than I could from my rig directly behind me. At some gigs we would deliberately aim the cabs sideways across the stage to minimise the FoH spill. 4. Most of the gigs I have done over the pst 45 years have had PA support for the whole band. On the few occasions that I have needed my bass rig to provide sound for the audience I have ended up needing to be so loud on stage that I could barely hear the rest of the band. It was not a pleasant experience. These days I have a Helix for my sound and an FRFR for rehearsals and personal monitoring for the smaller gigs where the foldback is strictly vocals only or unknown. For the bigger gigs I just use the in-house PA foldback. If I could organise the rest of either of my bands enough to go IEMs then I would. I do most of my composing using headphones and I always mange the get the songs sounding exciting enough at those kinds of levels so I wouldn't find it limiting or isolating in any way.

Thanks both. I'll admit, there's a twist in this tale, which is why I'm not yet being specific - I'll wait for a few more opinions on the sound! Aled

Hot Love - T. Rex

Thanks for the heads up