BigRedX

The biggest problem I've ever had with gigging in London is finding somewhere reasonably close to the venue for loading and unloading the gear.

@Linus27 that all looks perfectly believable and considering the age of the bass fairly minimal compared to some. However, how on earth did you manage to wear away a huge area of finish just below the jack socket?

For the last 30 years I've worn my basses low and they have spent most of their time being played aggressively with a heavy pick - the most used one got played like this for at least an hour every single day for 10 years, but none of them have even begun to look as worn as the ones in this thread. I must be doing it wrong.

@cheddatom Brilliant stuff, sounds like a great tour. How many more gigs have you got? Regarding the catering, I'm surprised that Steve Ignorant and his band aren't strictly vegan or at least vegetarian...

How do instruments get like this? I'm not particularly precious about any of my guitars or basses and the ones I use regularly have all picked up a ding or two, but none of them are anywhere near the state shown on here and in the other thread linked. I've owned two basses that were a bit battered but both had got that way before I owned them, and one went straight back to the person who made it for a full refurbishment. That was 15 years ago and despite being my main bass for those past 15 years has not picked up anything like the damage it received in the 5 years before I bought it.

The problem with Bandcamp as I see it is two-fold: 1. You are confined by the Bandcamp template and TBH no matter how much you tart it up with colours and header images it will still look like a typical Bandcamp page, that says more about Bandcamp then it does about your band. 2. Unfortunately Bandcamp is just an indie ghetto. Yes, as an independent artist (one not signed to a major label) you need to be on Bandcamp, but if you want to reach your maximum potential audience you need to be everywhere else too - Facebook, Instagram, TikTok as well as all the mainstream streaming and download sites. All the bands that I have been part of that have an on-line presence are on Bandcamp, but they all sell more downloads through iTMS and Amazon then they do from Bandcamp, and at least one of them makes more from Spotify streaming then it does from Bandcamp downloads (and consequently has a far bigger Spotify audience than the Bandcamp one). To me that says it all.

BD have form for wrongly addressing items they send out. If they are not earlier in this thread then it will be in one of the others complaining about their (lack of) service. I've had my own problem with wrongly addressed parcels from them. Back in 2015 I needed some rack ears for an amp I had bought off another Basschatter, and after looking on line and making a couple of phone calls I discovered the BD were the only supplier who had them in stock and more importantly could deliver them in time for me to be able to complete my rack system for a gig I had coming up. I had a telephone conversation with one of the staff (IIRC it was actually Mark) and confirmed everything in a follow-up email which contained all my contact details including my address. The following day my parcel from BD arrived, but when I opened it, I found no rack ears but instead a rather expensive pre-amp. I was immediately on the phone to BD so they could sort out the mistake and hopefully I would still get my rack ears before the gig, and was somewhat surprised to be asked to return the pre-amp at my own expense. I told BD in no uncertain terms, that if they wanted it back they needed to pay my postage and also confirm that the rack ears would be sent by a method that would ensure they arrived the next day (Saturday). In the end I got the right item and in time, but it was far from straight-forward and TBH should never have happened in the first place.

If you want to sell recordings then Bandcamp. If you just want web site visitors to be able to listen to the songs, Soundcloud.

I was thinking more Joy Division's unreleased third album.

Even Newtone strings have had a 25% increase in prices recently.

Have a look at what options the Audio MIDI Setup allows (it's in your utilities folder). You might need to make an aggregate device of the interface and the built-in microphone. If that doesn't work, see if Rogue Amoeba's Loopback will handle the audio routing you want.

Except for those of us who have been very badly let down by them...

With The Terrortones we always rehearsed the songs we were going to record with and without a click. It was usually obvious straight away which ones would benefit from having a constant tempo and which needed a bit (or occasionally quite a lot) of push and pull in order to sound natural.

The only place I've played that had noticeable mains problems, nothing short of a full UPS would have protected the susceptible gear from it. What the OP needs to ask themselves is have they suffered from noticeable mains problems at a gig?

There's no ugly instruments. Just boring looking ones - which IMO is a greater crime against aesthetics.

The way to get the best sounding recording is to make it in a way that is most comfortable for the band. For a band with a live drummer that does not play to a backing track I'd go for a live take of all the instruments and only overdub any mistakes or if there are any extra parts you want to add. I'd also go into a proper studio to do this. Unless one of the band is an excellent sound engineer and already has all the mics you need for recording drums (and decent acoustic space to record them in), you'll get far better results and in a much shorter time from a good engineer in a good studio. And this is coming from someone who spent 10's of thousands of pound on their home studio in the 90s. Ask around other bands in a similar genre for recommendations. Good studios are ridiculously cheap these days. The last time I paid for studio time (a couple of years ago) it was only slightly more expensive per hour than my fist studio session in 1980, and the standard of the space, equipment and engineer was a massive improvement. However for the purposes of getting gigs if you're not doing it through supports with similar bands and you haven't yet built up a reputation as a live act, then you will need a video of you playing live.

Although the synth engine is the same as that in the original Alpha Juno. I don't recall if the sounds it came with were different though.

SAW were notorious for getting hold of new synths just before they became widely available and plundering all the decent pre-sets for their next hit before everyone else had a chance to use them, so the synth in question may well have been something that was brand new just before either the Dead Or Alive, or Bananarama songs were released.

The arrangement on Bananarama's version of Venus was entirely inspired by SAW's production work on Dead Or Alive's "You Spin Me Round", which was their main reason for picking SAW to work with on that song. And in turn the Dead Or Alive arrangement was inspired by any number of HiNRG disco songs of the time. Edit. It almost definitely won't be a Roland TB303, as no one used them when they first came out because they simply didn't sound any good (for what was considered "good" at the time) compared with even the cheapest monosynth. Also their main selling point when released was the sequencer which was designed to compliment the matching TR606 drum machine. Unfortunately the programming was less then straight-forward, and the memory limited. My synth band at the time had one on trial from our local musical instrument store where one of the band members worked, and we not impressed. Weedy sound (in comparison to the synths we already had) and limited sequencer memory - IIRC we could only get one song at a time programmed in and there was no simple way of saving the sequences. We decided to wait another 6 months for the newly announced MC202which had a better on-board synth, was 2-track and could control a second separate synth and you could save what you had written as data to a cassette tape. The TB303 only became popular with the rise of House Music in the late 80s when they could originally be picked up fro a fraction of their original price.

The "systems" merely distribute the songwriting royalties according to the wishes of the songwriters and their publishing contract(s). Any "injustice" has nothing to do with them. Since both other members of the Police have song writing credits and co-credits for song songs on all the albums (mostly on the less good songs - so it is obvious what a talented songwriter Sting was at the time), we can only assume that at the time of writing the guitar riff wasn't considered important enough to the overall sound of the song to warrant Andy Summers getting credit. Also it's not as though he was a young naive musician at the time, and didn't realise the importance of getting a writing credit. What did surprise me was how few credits Stuart Copeland gets; I would have thought that with his brother managing the band he would have been able to negotiate better split for himself at least. This is why anyone who thinks they are contributing a major part to the writing of a song should insist that their contribution is recognised. And also why for the last 30 years every originals band I have been in, has split all the writing credits equally between the members of the band at the time the song was written. That was there are no disagreements, especially over the choice of which songs to record and release, since whatever we choose everyone benefits equally.

I always thought that part of Fender's USP was that they were less expensive than their main US-based competition - Gibson (and to a certain extent Rickenbacker). That was certainly my perception of them in the early to mid 70s.

Written by a man who never learned to drive.

Has he never changed his bass strings before?

For those who don't subscribe to the Torygraph, could you give us the gist of the article?