BigRedX

There is no sound of "active basses". It's just plugging a passive bass into an amp except the wire between the pinup and the tone control is shorter.

The big money won't be in anything that has already started to become desirable as you are already too late to have got the best buying prices. If you want to play the long game you'll need to find something that is currently unfashionable and cheap and hope that it gets taken up by someone who goes on the become a famous or at least well-respected musician.

Warwick Red Label Or have a look at what Newtone offer.

Next Hurtsfall gig is onSaturday 5th April at Corporation in Sheffield supporting Deviant: We'll be on first, so get there early if you want to see us. Tickets available here.

How so? You can't define the sound of any cab from the number and diameter of the drivers it contains. Every cab sounds different. That has always been my experience when I have owned cabs with the same driver configuration made by different companies. If they didn't sound different there would be not point in having multiple manufacturers all offering supposed similar cabs. And it wasn't surprising that my similar cabs sounded different. They had different internal volumes. The porting was different. They had different brands of driver, probably with different specifications, inside. The only thing that was the same was that they had the same number and size of drivers. So why are we so hung up on the driver configuration when it says almost nothing about the sound and performance of the cab?

Not my experience either. The top three basses with the best sounding and feeling low B strings that I have owned were all 34". They were also the three most expensive basses I have owned. The two 5-string bases I have owned with 35" scale length were no better than equivalently priced 34" scale when it comes to low B. IMO it's all about construction. Scale length on its own only makes a difference when you get to 36" or over.

The only time you need an XLR lead with the same connector on each end is when you are using a passive DI box for re-amping in which case you'll want a female to female cable.

Friday saw Hurtsfall in Coventry at The Arches Venue for the Necroscope Goth and industrial night. Great venue although a little difficult to find if you've not been before, and a great promotor. Pity I can't say the same about the sound engineer. Set up and sound check went very well, we were playing last so sound checked first, but there appeared to be a lot of unplugging and moving of cables between our soundcheck and getting the other two bands set up including a lot of worrying sounding pops and bangs coming through the PA as unmuted channels were plugged and unplugged. When we came to play we were told that there was no need for a line check as none of our stuff had been moved since the original soundcheck. Come the first song there's no sound from one of the synths. We play through regardless, but pause to get the problem sorted before starting the next song. First the promotor has to go and find the sound engineer as he's gone outside. Then there is an almost point blank refusal on his part to accept that the problem isn't with our equipment. Finally when we persuade him to check the connections to the PA, and after even more pops and bangs through the FoH it turns out that the PA's XLR lead connecting the synth to the stage box is dodgy. Once that has been replaced everything is fine. I accept that if you work at a venue not every band that plays there is going to be to your musical taste, but you have one job and that includes being there in case there is a problem with the sound during each band's set. In a way programmable digital desks have made some less than enthusiastic PA engineers even more complacent. I didn't say anything on the night because we hope to playing there again and I don't want to see what happens if he deliberately messes up our sound, and anyway come the end of our set he was nowhere to be seen and his assistant who was very pleasant and easy to get on with was left to pack everything away. After all that we played really well, so it's pity that the audience was somewhat on the small side. We were competing with another Goth gig in Coventry that night and it was also the first night of Corrosion in Morecambe where more than a few of our fans were in attendance (they were all posting photos from there on Facebook). Still those that were in attendance seemed to really like the band, and we sold a surprisingly large number of T-Shirts and singles afterwards. The promoter is very keen to get us back later in the year when hopefully there will be a bigger audience. I'd saved posting this hoping that there would be some photos on social media over the weekend, but despite seeing at least one professional-looking photographer in action during our set nothing has shown up so far. Our next gig is in Sheffield on 5th April supporting Deviant at The Corporation.

Thanks. Not too late we're still deciding.

Or maybe they wanted something more musically interesting than a load a terrible metal/rock bands

One of the advantages of being in a band that doesn't have a proper guitarist and is mostly keyboards driven. I get the sound engineer to EQ the Bass VI so that it is sufficiently bright when I'm playing "guitar" parts on it and then it sounds right for the Peter Hook-style bass parts too.

So long as both bands aren't expecting to be out gigging every Friday and Saturday night you should be fine.

Funny how these bands are even on the bill.

I assume then that the rest of the band will be playing to you? Set the tempo as part of the patch and the tremolo to 1/8 notes. Make sure that you can all keep in sync. There's nothing worse than a sequencer part that sounds out of time.

Unless you are lucky and hit upon a combination that suits your playing style you are unlikely to be able to get an envelope to match a sequenced synth. I use a chopped up sound on the chorus of one song which is done live using distortion into the Tremolo with a falling sawtooth wave. However for recording it has been completely replaced with the Step FX in Logic which gives me a lot more control over the envelopes. The problem with trying to do this with Tremolo is that the waveform you really need isn't there. The square wave is to abrupt a cut off and the falling sawtooth wave doesn't have a sustain potion. Having said that the song you linked to appears to be slower than ours so you might get there by playing with the duty cycle of the tremolo waveform and hope there's a sweet spot that does what you want. Of course there's also the issue of synchronisation. I use MIDI clock from the computer that is our drummer and second synth player to keep the Helix in sync with the backing which works on our song, but I have had problems in the past with songs with odd bar and beat counts where using something like tremolo can end up 180° out of sync which is the last thing you want. What is really needed is a MIDI-controlled Filter and gate with full ADSR envelopes for each. I've put a request in on the Line6 IdeaScale but it needs more votes...

Duran Duran and Kraftwerk are not incompatible. I saw both within a couple of months of each other in 1981.

Thank you for all the suggestions. However, based on multiple recommendations on other fora, we're going to try Tim Debney at Fluid. He appears to have done lots of tracks we like.

That's why you also need to be a singer or songwriter or producer.

Have you used him yourself? If so could you post a link to a track of yours that he has mastered?

Thanks!

Looking for recommendations for someone to master our next single for CD and download. Genre is post-punk/goth/synth pop. Looking for someone sympathetic to the style of music.

IIRC on the Hagstrom/Futurama two of the switches were on/off for each pickup and other two introduced different levels of treble cut. With those Dimarzio(?) pickups it could be anything.

Haven't we already done this somewhere else on the forums? IME what you choose to play is as important as any change in sound. And sometimes you don't need to "fill out" the sound. Live bands tend to sound better with less going on. If necessary work on your harmony vocals.

I don't think that neck was originally on that body - look how much space there is in the neck pocket. The body and and bridge/tail-piece have a distinct Hagstrom/Futurama vibe, and would have had a similar inverted jack socket.

Surely this is a problem with every bass manufacturer that isn't Fender, Gibson or Rickenbacker. Do something that is too similar to the above and everyone says why do we need yet another copy of... and anything too radical and most musicians hate them.