BigRedX

On 05/11/2025 at 21:07, steantval said:

I thought I would have a go at some early Joe Jackson songs, started on Different For Girls, lovely tune and reasonably easy to learn.

The next one was Stepping Out, flippin eck, this is way beyond my capabilities, bass players must get a real feeling of satisfaction when they crack this one.

 

 

The original is all programmed - probably on a TB303 by the sounds of it and the way the bass line divides up neatly into repeatable 1-bar blocks. The song also relies on the bass and the drums being absolutely metronomically solid and each note being precise, and therefore while the bassist in that clip is way, way better than I'll ever be, I found myself wincing over every tiny hesitation and slightly fluffed note.

I'm currently learning how to play my band's Christmas song. We have a gig coming up on the 28th November which is our last gig of the year so we thought it would be good to include it in the set. It will be an interesting proposition to play live as it was originally pieced together in the studio. I don't think I've ever played the bass/guitar part all the way through in a single pass and the part was written first and foremost to make the song sound good rather than as something I would be able to perform standing up on stage. There's some big leaps from one end of the neck to the other between the verses and choruses.

2 hours ago, Supernaut said:

Does it benefit the artist? Are they given a fair payout? 

Streaming definitely benefits my band. It allows us to reach listeners all over the world. About 90% of our listeners are from outside of the UK. For better or worse it's where the majority of most artist's potential audience are. These days it costs next to nothing to be on streaming services, so why wouldn't you be there?

Does it give a fair payout? How do you even begin to quantify that?

Let's look at the "good old days" of record companies, albums and CDs... A new signed band might get 10% of the retail price of the record or CD, But that only came after they had paid off their advance, recording costs (often to a studio owned by the label), promotional costs like buying onto a major artist tour, making videos, paying photographers, record pluggers and all the publicity that a band with a record contract in the 20th century would have taken for granted. They would also have to sign with the record labels publishing company who would take one third of all their performance royalties. Most bands would never see any money other than what the label initially advanced them. And that was only for the very lucky few who actually got signed.

If you were going to put out your own record, in the late 70s if you cut every corner possible like The Desperate Bicycles you could record and press 500 copies of your single for just under £200. Back then it took at least 3 months to get your records after you had sent them off to be pressed. If you were lucky and John Peel liked it enough to play it more than once and Rough Trade gave you a distribution deal and you sold all the copies, you could probably afford to make a second single and not have to cut every corner this time. Or if you were unlucky like my friend's band it could take the best part of a year from making the initial recording to getting your 500 copies of the single and then your distributor would go bust taking all of your stock with them never to be seen again.

On the other hand streaming probably won't make any of the artists being streamed rich on its own, but if you do it right you should at the very least make back your aggregator's fees. Your music will be available for as long as the streaming service is running. Yes Bandcamp give you 90% of your download and physical product sales, but their reach is tiny compared with Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon.

IME the people who do badly out of streaming do so because either they have signed a deal that gives someone else (usually their record label) the majority of their streaming income, or because they don't do enough promotion. The conservative estimate is that 20,000 new songs are uploaded EVERY DAY. So when you release your next single not only do you have to compete with the other 19,999+ songs released that day but you also have to compete with almost every other song ever released in the history of popular music. The charts (for what they are worth these days) have to apply negative weighting to back catalogue otherwise new artist would barely get a look in. So if you can't/won't promote your music how can you ever expect to reach an audience of more than your close friends and family?

For me the short answer is that while I'm almost never going to make a living out of my music, at the moment my band breaks even overall in terms of what it cost us to be a band and what we make from playing gigs and having our music available to listen to or buy in various formats. And while it isn't a massive proportion of the band's overall income it makes an important contribution.

These days, the only originals bands playing mid-week are well-known ones with a couple of albums out who are on tour and have some sort of financial support from a record label or management company.

Here in Nottingham gigs by new bands are on average £10 on the door (and at some venues free).

21 hours ago, Supernaut said:

Streaming is a cancer. If you stream music, you're part of the problem. 

So how do you suggest that we listen to new bands?

There are many bands who only release their music on-line, are you saying that we should ignore all of them? Even if the bands can afford to release their music on a physical medium often the cost of sending them out can make them prohibitively expensive. CDs aren't too band but the postage and packing cost for an album on vinyl can double its price, and if you want it to reach its purchaser you have to package it well and send by a reputable service. Here in the UK it may well preclude sending to most foreign in destinations as I described in a previous post. That limits sales of CDs and vinyl to those at gigs.

Download sales on Bandcamp, which is about the main source of legal downloads for most bands these days are generally insignificant for new bands. To give you an idea of how insignificant they are last year my band's Spotify streaming payments alone were far greater than our Bandcamp income. Download sales on Bandcamp are generally good for the first week or two of a new release and then tail off to nothing with the occasional sale of our entire catalogue to someone who has just discovered us. On the other hand our income from Spotify is steady and continuous, and that's just from Spotify and not taking into account any of the other streaming services. Also great as Bandcamp is, the audience is mostly other musicians and a few die-hard music fans. Unfortunately these are are not sufficient for most bands to grow their audience in any meaningful way. To do this you have to be on a streaming service.

My understanding of getting the best fit of a neck in the pocket was to slacken off the strings so they are exerting very little pull on the neck and to loosen the neck bolts very slightly.

Then tighten the strings back up to pitch, allow everything to stabilise for a couple of hours and retighten the neck bolts. This has the effect of pulling the neck as far into the pocket as possible, the transfer point being the end of the neck pocket and not the bottom.

Agreed. Before doing anything else the OP should get a decent straight edge and check:

1. The fingerboard. With the stings off it should be either flat or have a slight back bow.

2. the top of the neck extension between the end of the finger board and where the bridge attaches. This should be perfectly flat

3. The back of the same from big to heel. This should be perfectly flat

4. The pocket that the neck extension fits into. This should be perfectly flat. This could be the problem if the others are all correct and bolting the neck in place is imposing a curvature on it.

14 minutes ago, Beedster said:

That's increasingly not the case Steve, much of it is done in the box in offices. The digital voice processing tools these days mean that you can record a voice in a kitchen and it can be made passable. To a degree it makes music production more democratic and accessible which is a good thing, but there are negatives  

You don't even need post-processing. Find a decent-sized room, through a couple of duvets on a clothes horse and you have enough acoustic treatment for recording great-sounding vocals. 

1 minute ago, Supernaut said:

Highlighted in bold. This was discussed yesterday. 

So how do you decide which gigs to go to?

This is not an attack, as someone who has been an avid gig goer and seeker of new music for the past 45 years I am genuinely interested. I told you my method in the post you quoted.

I still get to see loads of bands live although these days it is mostly bands who happen to be playing on the same bill as mine.

4 minutes ago, SteveXFR said:

At least with the formulaic pop music made by humans, it keeps recording studios, producers and session musicians in work.

But does it? 

In the 80s SAW did everything in house and most of the artists they produced were signed to their PWL label.

These days I suspect most of the money goes to Max Martin or one of his associates.

27 minutes ago, Supernaut said:

I'll counter with this - there was a time Spotify didn't exist, you know? 

In those days I would go and see bands I had heard and liked on John Peel's Radio One program, or someone who looked interesting in the music press (mostly NME and Zigzag) or even a local band that had an eye-catching poster. Most of the bands I heard on Peel lived up to their recorded promise at gigs, the others were a mixed bunch, some excellent, many terrible. The great gigs made it all worthwhile.

These days none of those things really exist. What is left of the music press on-line is depressingly mainstream, there are no radio shows as eclectic as Peel's, and hardly anyone puts up posters for gigs and those that do are mostly dull. The internet has given us access to bands from all over the world and that is both its strength and its weakness. I get to hear loads of interesting new bands but lots of them are not from the UK and are unlikely to be playing here any time soon. I could order a CD or record from one of these bands and hope that it reaches me in an undamaged state, but with the current postage situation regarding UK and US in particular, this is becoming more and more difficult. From the other side of the transaction, I have had to stop selling physical copies of one of my previous band's back catalogue to addresses outside of the UK, because for the last 5 years not one has reached its destination and those that did eventually get returned were no longer in a condition here they could be resold.

In these cases streaming whether it be Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube is the only way of being able to hear these bands. Each stream may not add up to much but at least the money will eventually reach the band. If I buy a CD the chances are that there is no profit to be made once international postage and Bandcamp have taken their cuts.

And so I ask again how do you discover new bands?

I don't think the pickup route is the problem. It looks as though the bolts for the neck attach either side of this which should counter-act any weakness at this point.

My suspicion is that the problem is due to the fact that all the "neck" bolts appear to be beyond the end of the truss rod, and the flexing point is between the end of the fingerboard and where the first set of bolts attach to to the body.

I wonder if fitting two more bolts that definitely attach the neck at a point where it is also being affected by the truss rod will overcome this flex point.

Glad to be of assistance. Now where's my share of the prize money?

12 hours ago, Mrbigstuff said:

Probably because it wasn’t a proper P bass 😉

I know that's said in jest, but the main reason I never recorded with it was because it wasn't as effortless to play as this:

or this:

Neither of which are remotely like a P-bass in looks feel or sound.

(and for a lot of the songs I was playing it didn't have enough strings)

The theory is fine but it has been mis-applied in the case of a bolt-on neck guitar.

This is because the forces acting on the joint are not all in the same direction as the screws. If you were just attaching a neck to a guitar with no strings then the clearance hole idea makes sense. However the strings are also pulling at 90° to the screws which means that the clearance holes are going to allow possible unwanted movement of the neck in the pocket.

20 minutes ago, tegs07 said:

I would also ask that with out the good old days of music press and A&R men and local radio and local newspapers and all of the other things that made a local music scene get national attention how does anyone get people to their gigs? I’m not sure that TikTok works well for everyone.

In the case of my band we have up until recently for the past 4 years only played supports to better known bands. We do the usual social media postings, but we have mostly relied on the pulling power of the bands headlining. It's worked pretty well, we have managed to build up a big enough following to start headlining ourselves and we have started getting requests from other bands looking for supports.

11 hours ago, tegs07 said:

and really does it matter if I buy a CD or a TShirt at their gig? It would only be one or the other in any case so T Shirt it is.

Most bands will probably make more profit from a T-shirt sale than they would from someone buying their CD or record, so if you can only afford to buy one thing, a T-shirt supports the band to a greater extent.

It is, however, sad that this is the case.

12 hours ago, Supernaut said:

Just because it's there we should try to use it? 
 

Woof - no thanks. 

So how do you discover new music other than by going to gigs?

7 minutes ago, iainbass said:

Link? Would, very much like to have a listen.

Sorry, I don't own it any more, and it only got used for a handful of gigs and never for any recording.

3 minutes ago, SumOne said:

Yeah, spot on soo far (I'm halfway through it).

Really? I've dipped in and out of this because IMO it's way too boring to watch all 45 minutes in one sitting, but the overall impression I get is that maybe instead of making videos worrying about AI, he should just knuckle down and make some more music of his own.

And rather than watch the whole video that's what I'm going to do.

Yes, although it is a Bass VI.

1 minute ago, Supernaut said:

Touched a nerve have I? I'm a regular gig goer and always attend local unsigned acts. Bare in mind, I will never attend one of your gigs because you're only one gig from superstardom, right? 😁

No you haven't touched a nerve, it's just that IME most people who claim to boycott streaming also appear to have given up listening to anything made after 1976 and in that respect your avatar wasn't doing you any favours. So it's gratifying to hear that you're out supporting new bands. For me (and my band) streaming is essentially advertising that actually pays us, so I have no problem with it. I know that it pays a pittance, but it does pay and we actually get to see the money from it, unlike releasing records and CD in the 80s and 90s where unless you were massively successful the record company ended up with everything.

If you really want to cut out "The Man" from benefiting financially from music we'd probably need to go back to the DIY cassette days of the late 70s and early 80s. On the other hand instead of spending the best part of 6 months duplicating cassettes in real time to reach less than 200 people, I can put up a new song on Spotify and reach that number in less than a single day.

Warwick StarBass

3 minutes ago, Supernaut said:

Streaming is a cancer. If you stream music, you're part of the problem. 

So what are you doing to support bands - person whose avatar is an album cover from 1972?

I hope you are out at least once a fortnight going to see new bands and buying a T-shirt from their merch table.

21 minutes ago, prowla said:

I purchased and downloaded Peter Gabriel's "So" from there a couple of weeks ago.

There's also some Bill Nelson there.

Exactly. You're a musician so you bought from Bandcamp. There's loads of well-known and mainstream artists on there. However I can guarantee you that as a proportion of their overall sales, those from Bandcamp are minuscule.

My band's music is available there, but we sell more CDs at gigs than we do downloads from Bandcamp. There's a good chance that at the end of this year our income from Spotify will have overtaken that from Bandcamp.