BigRedX

Are this mechanical royalties (from record/CD sales, downloads, streaming etc.) or performance royalties or both? Why the ability to write a good song is far more important financially, than being able the play technical complex stuff on your instrument of choice. And yes, I'm currently involved in writing a "Christmas" song.

Looks great as usual. I just had a quick scan through the thread to see what the controls do, and I couldn't see anything about pickup selection. IIRC the slide switch is a coil tap, so are the two knobs volumes for each pickup, or are they always both on?

You don't need to VPN. Your best option is Ishibashi's U-Box where they list all their second-hand stock. Here's a handy link to the bass guitar section. The other option is Digimart, which is appears to show the stock from all the Japanese musical instrument stores with an on-line presence. And here's a Jupiter Bass for sale that is very similar to the one in your OP Be aware that some Japanese shops simply will not deal with sales outside of Japan even on-line ones, and the only way I have found to get around this is to have someone in Japan who is willing to buy the instrument for you and then organise the shipping. This is why Ishibashi are your best bet because they are one of the few music stores prepared to deal with foreign sales. The only downside is the time difference between Japan and wherever you are combined with the fact that all the instruments sold are also on display in one of their shops, that by the time you have made your initial enquiry the instrument in question may well have already been sold. Good luck.

TBH this is the simplest and IMO best approach. It's an all in one solution, getting your MIDI files into the DAW will be easy and you'll get more options for drum sounds that way. I wouldn't chose a laptop unless the portability is required, as you get far better value for money when your computer isn't being built with being small and light as the primary design criterion.

What tuning at you using? B-C or something else? Do you like the feel of the extra space between the frets?

What MIDI file player are you looking at? I have to admit it's been 25 years since I last owned one, but it was the most useless and unreliable piece of music technology that I have ever had the misfortune to own and try and use.

Interesting, if brief, and rather tactfully doesn't come out and say that the real problem with the lack of streaming royalty is two-fold: 1. There are simply too many artists all competing for tiny individual shares of the pie. It's all very well that it's easier than ever to make your music available to anyone who has an internet connection, but of course the downside is then that everyone does it, therefore the streaming royalties pot is divided up in ever diminishing chunks to ever increasing numbers of artists. 2. All the artists who are getting their music streamed a lot but aren't receiving very much money for it do so because of the contracts they have signed with their record labels. They only have themselves and/or their legal advice to blame. It's no longer the 50s and 60s and any artist who doesn't get proper legal advice before signing anything to do with they music is a fool. So what can the UK Government do? Nothing. You can't stop musicians from uploading their music to the streaming services, you can't make record labels (most of whom aren't even based in the UK any more) go against contracts already signed just because they might not be entirely "fair" to the artists involved. You can't legislate against stupidity.

OoI other than music what will your computer be used for? It might just be worth looking at a second hand refurbished Mac from a reputable dealer. My main computer (and the one I also use to earn my living doing graphic design) is a 12 year old MacPro that cost £650 (with 64GB RAM) a couple years ago. Apart form a couple of marks on the casing and the fact it didn't come with the original Apple packaging, it was in excellent condition when I bought it. It won't run the latest Mac OS (or the latest Adobe CC for that matter), but so far that hasn't been a problem. It has yet to run out of steam on any of my musical projects. I also have a 10 year old MacBook Pro that is used to run the backing for my bands' live set (that's up to 4 plugin instruments and 10 audio tracks simultaneously plus some external MIDI) which was £700 EoL from John Lewis 7 or 8 years ago. I've seen newer and better models for much less than this second hand.

If your interface and keyboard connect via USB the important phrase to look for is "class compliant". This means that they work with the USB drivers built in to the OS and therefore should be fine. However if they rely on having to install separate drivers you might be out of luck.

Very much this. To me the "front" pickup would be the one closest to the bridge.

I was under the impression that Alembic kept very good records of where their various materials came from - especially those subject to restrictions, and IIRC have helped out at least one other member here who was having problems authenticating the provenance of MoP inlays on their bass when they were selling it. Have you been in touch with Alembic regarding this yet?

Paging @Bassassin

Just a reminder that Hurtsfall will be playing The Lending Room in Leeds on Saturday 3rd December supporting Skeletal Family:

What is the external drive for? Audio or archival/backup? Going wireless for the keyboard and mouse doesn't spare you any USB bandwidth as the Bluetooth adaptor for them will be on one of the USB buses. And yes USB 2 and 3 should be on separate buses.

I don't see this as a problem. Coming from synth playing background, I have never found any presets much use to me, and also I have my own ideas about how my bass should sound. Consequently, when I got my Helix I started with a blank patch with just the volume pedal enabled and then started adding modules one at a time. I found having one of the EQ modules far more versatile than any of the Amp sims, so I only really use them on a couple of patches where they have been chosen specifically for the drive sounds rather than any particular EQ (but that's just my preference). I then added a compressor and chorus and got a basic sound I like, which I then tweaked at the next band rehearsal until I (and the rest of the band) was happy that I had the right sound for our instrumentation. Only then did I start to add specific effects and EQ tweaks for each individual song. I rarely take any notice of what specific devices the various modules are supposed to emulating and simply ask myself is this giving me the (EQ/chorus/delay/filter) sound that I want? If it is then good, if not then try another of the modules from the same range until I get something I like and that fits with the rest of the band sound. This whole process took about 4 rehearsals for about 12 songs, building up patches between practices and then tweaking them with the whole band playing. Now when we start work on a new song I already have a few "core sounds" one of which will be the correct starting point for the song depending on the overall feel.

Last time I looked at Windows machine specs, laptops, all-in-ones and the small desktops were all pretty much the same inside the cases for a given processor. A desktop machine might have room for more RAM and a PCI slot or two but that's it. Also unless you are running multiple instances of huge sample library instruments along with a convolution reverb on every channel any modern PC should be able to cope with the demands the typical DAW throws at it. Also don't assume that just because a particular model sports more USB sockets, it actually has more USB buses and therefore won't have any benefits (and may actually be worse than a good quality powered USB hub). Also remember that both the laptop and the all-in-one will have lots of "hidden" built-in devices already on the USB bus(es). Mac OS has a handy utility built in which allows you to see exactly how the hardware is configured, the spec of each USB bus and which sockets are on which bus (and what built-in devices are also on the bus). Is there something similar for Windows? I personally wouldn't buy a laptop unless portability is essential, as you generally get more performance for the same price when the manufacturer is not concentrating on fitting everything into the smallest and lightest form factor. Remember also that All-in-ones are essentially laptops with a bigger screen and limited portability.

The only bass I've owned with neck LEDs had a separate battery for their operation.

Two different cabs might sound fine to you on stage or in the rehearsal room, where you are probably only really hearing the one closest to your ears, but unless your FoH sound is from the PA they will sound very different out front and different in different locations in the venue.

Do you already have a drum machine? If not what's you budget? I assume that you already have a drummer (since you talk about percussion rather than drums) have you considered how you are going to keep the drums and programmed percussion in time? Can your drummer play to a click track? Edit: And if you have all of that sorted out why not program your own percussion parts? If you are copying existing parts off recordings it's hardly difficult (and free).

How about a Bass VI? If you're going to play solos then get a bass aimed at guitarists.

Guitar type humbuckers without coil taps in the typical guitar bridge and neck positions. All the "popular" Bass VIs tend to follow the Fender model of having 3 single coils and although they include a "bridge" and "neck" pickup they tend to be set in slightly from where they would be on a guitar. Also all the best "bass" sounds use the centre pickup either on its own or in conjunction with one of the others. You can get a decent bass sound out of pickups in the typical guitar bridge and neck positions but they need to be single coil (or with coil taps) and be capable of being wired in series when both are on. This instrument appears to offer none of those options. It is simply a standard parts bin guitar with a long neck.

Fenders have never been on my radar, and TBH until I start frequenting internet bass forums I never knew that there was supposed to be something extra magical/special about the Fender compared with basses from other manufacturers. I think for me the problem is that they are pretty anonymous as instruments. When I was first getting into music the bass players of the bands I liked seemed to be playing Rickenbackers, Thunderbirds, EB3s or something custom (probably made by John Birch). To give an example of how anonymous I found Fender basses, one of the bands I really liked in the early 70s was The Sweet; my memory of Steve Priest has him playing either a hollow-bodied Long Horn copy or a Rickenbacker, but looking through all the videos of them on TotP that are available on YouTube, AFAICS he only played those basses once each and the rest of the time he appears to be playing a Jazz bass. When I bought my first bass I ended up with a second-hand Burns Sonic, which I played all through the 80s. This was replaced by an Overwater Original 5-string in the early 90s and that by the first of my Gus Basses 10 years later. Having spent all my bass-playing "career" using instruments that had little in common with either the Fender P or J, when I bought a Squier VMJ because I wanted to play fretless and I'd heard good things about them, I found it very alien and uncomfortable to play and it was quickly replaced by a Pedulla Buzz. In some ways my experience with Fender-derived designs must be similar to those Fender players who try a Rickenbacker bass for the first time and discover that everything about it is "wrong" compared with what they are used to. I couldn't get on with the Squier Bass VI either. I liked the concept enough to switch over to using one exclusively for one of the bands I play in, but the neck was just far too narrow for me, and it was been replaced first by a Burns Barracuda and more recently by the Eastwood copy of the Shergold Marathon 6-string Bass. I've never had any problems with my less than conventional choices of bass guitars mostly due to the types of music I have chosen to play over the past almost 50 years, because I always pick something that is visually appropriate for the image of the band and finally because no matter what the bass I have chosen to wield looks like I have always been to deliver the sympathetic bass sounds for the music being played. So to the OP, if you have managed so far without a Fender bass then you really don't need one. There are plenty of alternatives that will supply the correct sound(s) and image for whatever you want to do that don't have to have the magic "F" word on the headstock and these days the over-inflated price (for what is essentially little more than a pre-assembled Ikea flat-pack instrument) that goes with it.

Rehearsals are for learning how to play the songs as band as opposed to a number of musicians who are all playing the same song at the same time. Also for those bands who care about such things (and you should) for sorting out the correct sounds for all the instruments and deciding what to do between songs.

I suggested this because my Helix and FRFR has replaced both my bass and guitar rigs for practice and live use, and after selling the equipment that they replaced I came away with an overall profit!

Helix and the smallest FRFR you can get away with. Seriously. For headphone only practice you just need the Helix, and you can even use it as your gigging rig. The only thing it won't do is the wireless streaming, but what's wrong with connecting your practice source with a cable?