BigRedX

That diagram looks very straight-forward except for the active part - what does it do? AFAICS it's just a buffer and doesn't add any active tone shaping (frequency boost) to the instrument. The rest of the wiring is standard 2-pickup with a three way pickup selector and series/parallel switches for each pickup. Apart form the active section, it's the sort of circuit that would be more common in guitar than a bass, but nothing really out of the ordinary. If your new pickups are only 2-wire, you won't be able to use the series/parallel switches, as there is no access to the individual coils with only two wires. What exactly are you hoping to achieve with your new pickups? Last time I tried swapping the the supplied pickups in a bass with EMG actives it made absolutely zero difference to the sound, and with this new system you will actually be losing some tone shaping characteristics, unless the new tone controls allow cut and boost. Edit: Follow-up question is there actually any difference in tone between the active and passive outputs with the bass wired with the existing circuit as shown?

At the moment we give the PA individual feeds for everything. We're only a 3-piece - vocals, 2 x synth, and Bass VI with drums/drum machine and some additional synths on the backing so it's not a difficult mix and we already have all the relative levels between the instruments and backing sorted out from rehearsing, so once the feeds have been adjusted for the room there isn't really anything for the engineer to do. IMO stereo isn't much use for the FoH sound as very few people in the audience will be placed to get the full benefit, so the stereo on the backing is very narrow and only really used for special effects. We will probably switch to a full on-stage mix done by the band at some point in the future which will most likely coincide with the band going full IEM. I done full mixes for the PA before with previous bands but it relies on fair bit of time spent in the rehearsal room to get all the relative levels right for each song. IMO once you start looking at this route pending time working on the mix in rehearsal is as important as being able to play the songs as a band. Both bands I am in spend about a quarter to a third of each practice working on the sounds and mix of the songs. This IME is where covers bands who don't rehearse fall down because once you start doing your own mix you need to spend time working on it.

My Pedulla Buzz worked brilliantly with an ACG EQ1 pre-amp.

Can you not get SIT strings direct from ACG? I'm sure I've bought sets from them in the past. Otherwise I'd second the Newtone suggestion.

No-one really. I was always more interested in the overall sound of the song then any one instrument. If there was ever a time I wanted to copy anyone it was at the beginning of my synth playing days in the early 80s when my influences would have been The Normal, Vice Versa, early Human League and Freur.

I’ve been amp free for about 5 years now, since I switched to using a Helix. I have an RCF powered speaker, but for the last year I’ve only used it for rehearsals with one band and not at any gigs with either. For at least one band the on stage sound is much more controllable with no back line. If I found myself in a band where having a rig was an important part of the image, I’d probably have a dummy set up that could be folded away for transport.

Not really. The whole point of the Juno 6/60 was that you could play more than one note at a time. To this end corners were cut from a sonic PoV in order to be able to get the price down to just under £1k (not an inconsiderable sum back in the early 80s). If you didn't need to be able to play chords there were any number of monophonic synths that had far more sound shaping capabilities for a fraction of the price. And these days you can buy a decent modern two oscillator two envelope generator polysynth for what in real terms is next to nothing compared with £1k in 1982. If you really want to emulate the weedy sounds of the Juno you can simply not use the additional features. There's certainly no reason to spend lots of money on either a vintage model, and all the associated (un)reliability that come with it, or on an over-priced recreation of the same.

Westenra, Last July, Play/Dead at Whitby Brewery on Saturday

It's the same with nearly all musical instruments - a blind nostalgia for the past. It's not just confined to guitars and basses, where in reality the development of the actual instruments over the past 70 has been minimal. Those innovations described in the OP are mostly red herrings and don't contribute much in the way of improvements to the overall playability or sound. If you really want to be astounded by backward looking thinking you only need to look at the current state of the synthesiser market. The obsession with vintage (and re-issues) of budget instruments that back in the day were only popular because the synths we all really wanted were way beyond our financial reach. The current obsession with the Roland Juno 6/60 amazes me. Absolutely no-one I knew in the early 80s bought one because they thought it sounded fantastic. They bought it because it was the cheapest poly-synth available. Given the funds we'd have all bought Jupiter 8s, Prophet 5s or Oberheim OBXs. No-one really wanted the weedy sounds of a single oscillator and EG, and not even a unison mode for beefing up the sound. In fact the only real selling point was the on-board chorus because as soon as you turned that off everything sounded thin, weedy and lifeless. But despite that and the fact that almost every DAW comes with sonically superior synths built-in, the Juno 6/60 "sound" appears to still be popular with original instruments selling for far more than their real value, and numerous hardware and software recreations now available. Madness...

Are you sure that you haven't either set the track in question to be mono (I don't know how you do this Cubase, but is definitely an option in Logic so it may be possible) or applied a mono effect to the track (which would have the same result)?

I think this mostly comes from the way that the effects would have added in a traditional hardware recording/mixing setup. In this case the master output would have been split two, ways between the monitors and the stereo mastering recorder and often there would be no insert points on the stereo master bus, so no opportunity to add effects at this point in a way that could be applied both to the mastering recorder and the monitors. Mixing in the box doesn't place any restrictions on how you route the audio and where you apply the effects. However you'll get more control over the final level, the various effects levels in relation to the dry signals, and be able to avoid digital clipping more easily if you apply your effects individual buses before the master bus in the traditional way.

My experience of various exotic stringed instruments is that the moment you stick them through any kind of distortion/overdrive deice they sound just like guitars. The only advantages you get is that if it's something with very different tuning intervals to a standard guitar, it then opens up possibilities for playing/writing parts that would normally be difficult to play. I built myself a solid electric balalaika in the late 70s (it was a practice run for making my own electric guitar the following year). Musically there was very little I could do with it that wasn't sonically close enough to playing the same thing on my guitar.

This. IMO there is no such thing as "a setup". Every setup is unique to the person who owns the bass. I wouldn't except a bass setup to my specifications be acceptable to anyone else looking for a "setup". However as has been said I would expect any instrument to be playable, and if the nut has been cut too low that's a QC issue and the bass should never have left the factory that way, since the only way to rectify it is to fit a new properly cut nut.

Is this for a covers or originals band? If it's covers does it matter that you are doing the same set every month? Is your set even very different from all the other covers bands that play at the same pub? This isn't a criticism, just an observation that may make you realise that you are over-thinking it. As a punter, not being that interested in covers bands I only knowingly go and see them when one of the musicians involved is a friend of mine. The one go and see most often only vary one or two songs per gig and often the only difference since the last time I saw them is that one or two songs are in a different place in the sets. If you're an originals band, then you can keep it interesting by inviting over bands to share the bill. Back in the early 80s Nottingham Avant-Garde Jazzers Pinski Zoo had a residence every Friday night The Heart Goodfellow pub. They would allow any band that came to see them and sat through the whole set (it could be challenging at times) to opportunity to play support at a later date. At the time it was the only weekend gig available for bands playing their own compositions so the was a lot of interest, and often the next available slot would be 2-3 months away. I've been involved with something similar with "D!ck Venom Presents" where The Terrortones had a monthly Friday night residency at The Jam Café in Nottingham. In this case we'd put on reasonably well known garage rock and psychobilly bands and then play support. The benefits were three fold: the band would actually make money even after paying the headliners and cover expenses; it gave us the opportunity to try out new songs in front of a relatively sympathetic audience; we built up a very impressive "portfolio" of support gigs that we could use to impress promotors to get decent out of town gigs and supports. Before the band had to stop gigging we had built the evening up to the point where the Jam Café was hopelessly under-sized for the kinds audience being attracted, and also on several occasions we'd gone down better and had a bigger audience than the supposedly better-known headliners.

It's a synthesiser. Probably something cheap and monophonic from the late 70s or early 80s.

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.