BigRedX

Gothic music has definitely had something of a resurgence in the last few years. You'd have thought it would all be people in their 50 and 60s trying to relive their youth, but some of my bands' most enthusiastic fans are only in their 20s! Besides all the great goth music is eminently danceable whatever your age!

In the late 70s I made a solid electric balalaika and a guitar in woodwork classes at school. Pupils weren't allowed to use power tools, and apart from the woodwork teacher cutting out the (very) rough shape of the guitar body on the band saw everything was done by me using hand tools. I probably spent more time sharpening plane and chisel blades then I did shaping the wood. If I was ever to have another go at making a guitar or similar music instrument, I would invest in every time and effort saving power tool available. Life is too short.

Do you actually need the space you might save for another pedal? If not and if everything is working fine with no unwanted hums and buzzes I'd leave it alone and stop worrying.

IMO the big problem with the Fender and Squier Bass VIs is that they are essentially Jaguar/Jazzmaster guitars with a longer neck and thicker strings and aimed at guitarists who want to dabble with bass parts in the studio. Those lighter E and A strings are part of the appeal to non-bass players. Out of the box it works fine with the lighter strings provided you have a decent guitar technique and a light touch. I didn't have any problems with mine until I started using it with my band where I play a lot more aggressively than at home or in the studio and suddenly the E, A and D strings were flopping about uncontrollably and I was forever tripping over the wrong strings due to the tight guitar-like string spacing exaggerated by the thicker bass strings. This is when you discover it's all a compromise. Switch to heavier stings so it feels more like a bass guitar and the vibrato stops working, the bridge no longer has sufficient room to intonate the new heavier E string. You might be able to eke out enough travel in the saddles by shimming the neck to allow you to raise the action and if possible reverse the problematic saddles. So as you can see heavier string make some things better and other things worse. You have to decide which features are important to you and which you can live without. If you can treat it like a guitar with a long neck tuned down an octave and play with a pick and light touch, you may well be able to make it work as it is. IMO the only Bass VI designed for bassists is the Shergold Marathon 6-String Bass and the modern Eastwood copy of it.

If you are looking at "proper" keyboards now then the advice is entirely different. The big problem with Piano, Rhodes and Hammond emulations is that the way you play the keyboard is a massive part of making them sound convincing along with having a user interface that replicates the performance controls of the original. For acoustic and electric pianos the performance controls aren't really important so long as your instrument is capable of memorising the various settings. For organs especially the Hammond, access to all the drawbars as well as controls for the (emulated) Leslie cab are essential. The other issue you'll encounter is the keyboard action. Your three examples all have very different keyboard actions, and trying to play a Hammond part on a fully-weighted piano style keyboard is not going to be a pleasant experience and it will probably show in the sound. You might get away with a semi-weighted keyboard as a bit of a compromise, but you need to find one that suits your playing style for all the sounds.

As a Squier Bass VI owner I found the following: When you change to heavier strings any action you had available in the vibrato mechanism will disappear. You may also then run into intonation problems. Most people take the opportunity when changing the strings to shim the neck slightly. This has the effect of tightening up the feel of the lower strings and the increased downward pressure on the bridge will help stop it from wobbling about. If you are still getting too much bridge wobble then you'll need to add some plastic or brass tube inserts around the posts to stop the movement. It might also just increase the string length to counter the intonation problems of the heavier strings. Ultimately for me the neck was just way too narrow for my playing style and mine has been relegated to 2nd backup after my main Bass VI - an Eastwood Hooky - and my main backup - Burns Barracuda. It will almost definitely get sold when I get my act together and list the few remaining instruments that I'm not using. However I'm after a Joy Division/Cure type sound and flat wounds are most definitely not for me.

By using your ears? Technically any note from the key you are playing in will fit, and technically any of the notes being played in the chord should be a better fit, but none of them will necessarily be the best fitting one. The best note to be playing at any one moment in a piece of music will depend on a number of things, and at least one of those things is entirely subjective (i.e. taste). It will also depend on what all the other instruments are playing at a given moment. What all the instruments were playing previously and what they will be playing next, how long the note you are playing lasts for, and even the genre of the music you are playing.

Since I started my first band in 1975 I have been in 17 bands that have either done at least one gig or made at least one piece of music available the public. Of these 17: 7 have split up, usually due to one or more member(s) leaving and the majority of the rest of the band deciding not to carry on. 5 morphed into new bands that I was still in. 1 is still going after I left. 2 haven't technically split or finished but we haven't played or released any new material for years. 2 are still going with me in them.

Well then they have been poorly briefed. Or they just don't care. I have a friend who creates 3D models of products that don't yet exist as his very lucrative day job. He won't know the ins and outs of everything he visualises, and when that happens he will ask. If he was working on this image he'd have asked Fender for some wood samples what it is important for him to show on the product, and would have done 3 or 4 low res renders and asked which shows off the product in the best light. He's also obsessive when it comes to details and things like machine heads would be perfectly straight and evenly spaced. Stings would be line up evenly to the edge of the fingerboard and pole pieces would line up exactly with the string paths. If the measurements he was given didn't allow this then he would ask why not and if he should fake it so that they did or if he needed to follow the exact measurements how he should position things to make them look the best. Fender probably couldn't afford him which is why the product images look like crap.

IME it very much depends on what you are playing and that you have properly targeted your audience. In the last 20+ years I've plenty of enthusiastic audiences, but that because I've picked my musical genres and gigs appropriately. If you simply turn up with a random band at a random venue playing to a random audience then be prepared for you and your audience to be disappointed.

The thing with the US is that the overall audience size is so massive that there are serious opportunities for all sorts of bands whose hight of fame here was a couple of plays on John Peel and Rough Trade taking a 100 or so copies of their self-released single. My first band who were strictly DIY cassette scene noise makers here in the early 80s, have a retrospective CD released on a US label based in Chicago as a result of a rave review by US music critic Johan Kugelberg. We get regular airplay on WFMU and other weird US based radio stations. Here in the UK I doubt if anyone has bothered with us since our John Peel plays and fanzine reviews in 1980/81.

ASHDOWN. Bought a new Superfly amp which after about 9 months developed the well-known high pitched whine fault, followed shortly by a reluctance to power on (about 1 in 10 attempts resulted in a successful boot up). When I contact Ashdown I was told it was essentially unfixable but for what I considered an unreasonable amount of money they would have a look at it for me. When I questioned this saying that it was a well known fault and essentially a design problem, I was ignored. I eventually sold the amp for "spares or repair" on eBay for a pittance. I would have chalked it down to experience and let it go, but... A few years later @TheGreek reported that he had bought a second hand Superfly with exactly the same problem and Ashdown had fixed it for free. When I bought this up with the Ashdown rep who used to post here, they were rude and sarcastic. That's not one customer service failure but two. I'm unlikely to be in the market for a bass amp from any manufacturer, but if I was Ashdown would be at the bottom of the list. I've also started taking a large black cloth to gigs to cover up any Ashdown products that might be located on stage behind me, so that they don't appear on any photos of me preforming. I haven't had to use it yet...

If the two inputs are on separate Mic and line connectors, there's likely to be a level mis-match between the two and you'll need a way to calibrate and compensate for the differences.

That's pretty much it. For splitting into individual tracks use whatever audio editor or audio editor in your DAW that you are most familiar and comfortable with. IME digitising tapes and vinyl is only worth the effort if the music hasn't already been released in a digital format. So if it is old band demos then crack on. For everything else it's simpler to track down a version that has already been digitised.

The best file format will depend on the graphical content. Vectors are ideal because they will scale to any size without loss of quality. However not every design works well in vector format. Of all the examples shown in this thread only the "Foxtrot Uniform" round logo works in vector format. Everything else would have been created and supplied in a bitmap format. The problem with bitmap formats is that they need to be at least 300DPI at the size you intend to print them. Trying to enlarge them beyond what was original created will result in pixelation or blurring neither of which is a good look. For really big items like backdrops or banners you may get away with a lower resolution as the printed item will be viewed from some distance. The other problem is colour gamut. Colours that look good on screen such as vibrant blues, greens and oranges rarely print as well, so the colours on your wonderful logo that you have approved on your phone will look dull, dirty and muted when printed on posters etc. The problem with most amateur designers is that they won't appreciate this as they spend most of their time designing on screen and on a home printer, and wonder why their fantastic logo looks blurry and dull when printed out on a banner for the band.

Anyone taking money to work on your bass should be insured against this kind of thing happening. If they are not I don't think I'd been letting them anywhere near it.

Seriously for a moment. And disregarding the fact that eventually any instrument will pick up a good "collections" of dings and scrapes during its life time. You're big problem is that you didn't notice when the damage was done, and therefore have no way of knowing who is responsible. In this case put it down to experience. However... IMO there is no way that it would be acceptable for a tech to inflict any damage on your instrument. If this happened to one of my instruments and it was 100% attributable to the tech while they worked on it, I would demand that the damage be made good in a way it would be impossible to tell it had ever happened. If this meant that the bass need a complete respray - then so be it. Maybe they will be a bit more careful in the future when working on something that is not theirs.

Pay a human being to design you exactly what you want. There's even some graphic designers here on Basschat that will probably be able to create what you need.

A couple of better photos from Friday's O2 Academy gig:

Ableton's core market is people making loop-based beat-driven electronic music. Automatic tempo detection will depend on there being a good rhythmic source to follow. Do you have this in your instrumentation? I'd spend all of the 30 day trial trying to make the tempo detection fail before deciding whether it is suitable for you. If it goes wrong at a gig it's generally worse than the live instruments going out of sync with a backing track.

Most likely a custom drum map. Which DAW are you using? On that has it's roots in MIDI sequencing rather than audio recording should have tools to automatically re-map the MIDI notes of your files to the ones that you want. Also there's nothing inherently special about MIDI Channel 10 for drums. This is a legacy hangover from the first Roland drum machines with MIDI which defaulted to MIDI Channel 10, and that default became baked into the GM spec. In fact, if you are using MIDI hardware it would be better to have drums on MIDI Channel 1 as they get processed first. If you're working in the box MIDI channel number shouldn't matter. When I first switched to using a DAW all my drums were assigned in a way that made sense for how I programmed my drums and the drum playback device was set to MIDI Channel 1 on MIDI output 1 of my interface. These days because I work entirely within Logic, the MIDI channel is irrelevant and I use the Logic drum assignments because they are already labelled in the grid editor and changing they would be far too much hassle.

Hurtsfall played the O2 Academy in Leicester as part of the first night of HRH Goth 2. Both myself and our synth player were still less than 100% fit having had to cancel the gig we had on Tuesday. However this was potentially too important to miss and I suspect that only death (our own) would have stopped us playing this one. There was some weird hum/buzz problem that affected two of the bands before us and also our backing and no combination of leads and DI boxes would make it go away. In the end it was EQ'd out at the FoH desk, as there was limited time between bands to set up and to troubleshoot problems. Strangely it only appeared to affect FoH and not the monitors. Setting up the Bass VI and backing controls: And here we are playing our opening song "Lucid": Nice big stage, and by the time we were on stage there was a decent sized and vocal audience. I felt a bit sorry for the band that opened the evening who played to less than 50 people and a smattering of polite applause. I could see people dancing and singing along to our better known songs which is always gratifying. And lots of nice comments about our performance afterwards as well as plenty of people asking about when we'll have an album out - we're working on it right now! And it's always good to see your band's name on the Festival T-Shirt: There were several professional photographers in attendance so I hope to be able to post some better photos soon.

Here you go: We're in the post-punk/goth genre where using programmed drums is just as common as having a human drummer.

Ours has replaced our drummer. Less stuff to take to gigs, and now we are able to lots of interesting things with synchronisation that wouldn't be possible with a human drummer unless we were also using a click track.

I have a M80. As a case it is fantastic. It's protected my bass when a heavy 2x10 fell on it. It is possible to squeeze it into tight spaces in the car where a hard case would never fit. However as a gig bag it fails miserably. For me the whole point of a gig bag is that I can put my bass in it and then walk 30 minutes to the rehearsal room or local gig. However, unless you are very tall the bottom of the case slaps against the back of your legs while you are walking with it. Bearable for about 5 minutes after which it is both painful and annoying.