BigRedX

Personally I wouldn't mic up a bass rig for home recording unless you have an excellent acoustic space to put it in and can turn up to gig volumes without annoying anyone.

That looks really uncomfortable and impractical for wearing any distance other than the short trip between the car and the venue. On the last wearing option you can see the case slapping against the backs of his legs with every step. Nasty!

And no MIDI. It should be compulsory for programmable musical devices ti have MIDI - and proper MIDI on 5-pin din connectors.

Exactly. The Terrortones vinyl sold well, but that's because we had an audience for it. Had we had a full year's worth of gigs after the album came out I'd have none left. I'm seriously thinking of getting new labels printed for all the records I have left over and passing them off as the new album by one of my current bands. After all the sorts of poseurs who by "vinyls" never actually play them.

My bands' audiences appear to be made up of people like me who sold all their vinyl and replaced the albums they couldn't live without with the CD version. CDs still sell very well, vinyl form those bands that do offer it doesn't appear to do as well. The only vinyl I still have are albums and singles that have never been re-released in a digital format that I haven't yet got around to digitising myself.

The volume has been given as 90 litres earlier in the thread.

It really depends on what your audience wants. Originally one of my bands made decision to only release our songs as singles for download and streaming, and while this strategy has been successful for the most part, we've spent the last 2 years being bombarded by requests at gigs for a "proper" album release on CD which is what most post-punk/goth bands seem to sell. Therefore this is what we are working on. My other band sold out of our most recent album on CD during last year's mini tour. When the few copies that are left of the two previous albums are gone, our audience will have to wait until the next one is written, recorded and released - right now we have 4 songs complete. As for vinyl. I still have over 300 copies of The Terrortones album. Everything was selling really well (I have just a few copies of the 3 previous releases left) right up to the point where Mr Venom became too ill to do any more gigs, and since then we have sold almost nothing. As a result, I'm very reluctant to invest the kind of money required for vinyl again.

Even as an artist I'm conflicted about the advantages of vinyl. Part of me says that if this is the format that our audience wants to buy, then we should consider releasing out music on it. However it's massively expensive compared with putting out the album on CD. When I last looked I could get 2000 digipack plus 8-page booklet CDs for the same price as 500 12" albums in a single sleeve. And even if I looked at the price for 500 of each format, the savings made by putting the album out on CD would buy us a considerable amount of additional time in the studio, and that's where I'd rather be spending my money. And that's not taking the practicalities into account like the fact that no-one in either of my bands has anything to play the test pressings on and there is no way I could contemplate producing vinyl without hearing and approving test pressings. Additionally the compromises in the running order for vinyl would mean that the track we'd like to end the album on won't sound as good as it could if placed at the end of side 2, whereas there are no restrictions like that for digital formats.

I don't like vinyl. IMO it's an inferior format. I do like the bigger packaging, but only if the design actually makes proper use it. Personally, I would only buy something on vinyl if it was unavailable in any digital format, and I certainly wouldn't queue for the privilege.

TBH the best way to get exactly the bell sound you want is to sample it. What is this for? A recording or live use? Is it a free-form intro or does it need to be synchronised to certain points in the song and in time with the other instruments.

What sort of bell? There's a wide gap in sound between what's on a cat's collar and Big Ben.

No MIDI.

You need to paint it black though...

For me radio and 3rd party curated playlists are all about discovering new songs and bands. If I want to hear old favourites I can simply listen to my iTunes library via Apple Music.

I've always found that the key to getting a good bass sound from multi-effects is to keep it relatively simple. If you want to explore using amps and cab models, start by creating a new patch and remove everything except the amp and cab. Then go through each amp and cab model on your device in turn making a note of which ones you like and which ones you don't. Try all the models even the ones that are supposed to be for guitar, remember that a lot of vintage bass amps are simply guitar amps with a different name on the front panel and maybe the EQ frequencies dropped an octave. Unlike their real-life versions you can't damage anything by feeding bass guitar into it; the worst that will happen is that you won't like how it sounds, in which case you can discard it as an option and move on to the next model. Also I have found that the default setting for nearly every amp model on a lot of devices has far to much drive/distortion, so start by turning that right down before making any judgements. As I said previously I rarely use any amp or cab models, and have found that a combination of Compression, Distortion, and EQ modules far more effective as I can pick and choose each one separately for how they sound and not be tied into any specific combination with a single amp model. Also remember that what sounds good on it's own doesn't always work as well once the other instruments are present, so be prepared to do some tweaking in technical rehearsal once you think you have found your core bass sound.