BigRedX

Here's an mid 80s article about George Peckham: from One Two Testing...

Impressive. But... Looking at her other videos she's already got some serious woodworking skills and a very well equipped workshop, plus these days all the information you need to make a guitar or bass is easily available on-line, so it shouldn't really be any surprise that the finished bass turned out good.

IIRC either International Musician or Sounds International printed an article on Porky and Bilbo and the art of cutting vinyl sometime in the late 70s (or maybe early 80s).

In the pre-digital days the mastering and cutting were pretty much one and the same since vinyl was the only serious delivery medium. The only time you would perhaps need to use some mastering techniques prior to cutting would be if you were making a compilation LP with the tracks coming from disparates sources, although I used to have several such albums from the late 70 and early 80s where the only attempt to homogenise the tracks appeared to be making sure that they all peaked at the same level. This is why cutting engineers like Porky and Bilbo (almost all my albums from the 70 were either "Porky Prime Cuts" or "Bilbo Boppers") were so respected and in demand. Incidentally regarding the messages on the runout groove, the first record any of my music appear on is a "Porky Prime Cut" even though none of our band attended the cutting session. However I believe The Instant Automatons who were also on the record and essentially our record label were there.

For many stereo was a gimmick. Remember that for Sgt Pepper all the time was spent on the mono mixes and stereo version was dashed off in an afternoon afterwards. I think that if the recording has been conceived from the outset to be mixed in 5.1 that's good, but anything else is an artifice.

It's no longer the 60s, 70s or even the 80s, and these days the only bands who need their own PA are those playing covers in pubs. On the originals circuit any venue putting on bands on a regular basis have their own in-house system. The only time in the last 30 years that I have played originals somewhere that didn't have an in-house PA system (and we needed to hire one in) was when the band in question deliberately chose to play a venue that didn't normally put on live music.

The problem with vinyl is because it is a mechanical delivery medium there are various limitations as to what can actually be reproduced and they all have to be checked for and fixed if necessary, and that's before you get into the complications of optimising the running order of an album so that you get the best possible reproduction for each track in relation to its physical location on the record. This can often require a compromise between what the artist wants and what will give the best overall listening experience.

IMO both parts are less good than before, although they may have slightly reduced the possibility of user error resulting in catastrophic failure. I personally don't think I have managed get the new nut system as tight with the allen key (before it snaps) as I could with a the right sized spanner on the old system. And the locking mechanism requires a jeweller's screwdriver to do up the grub screw. That means two less practical tools compared with one (and you still need a set of mole grips to hold the other part firmly in place while you do up the nut).

For the first three bands I was in it was very easy, as we did all our own recording and I was personally responsible for the design and printing of nearly all our gig posters and other printed material such as cassette and record covers. Therefore I had all the "master tapes" of everything we recorded, plus proper copies in their packaging with all the inclusions, of everything that was made available to the public. On top of that we took a lot of photos, and one band even had its own photographer who shot at least one roll of film at every gig we played. Unfortunately I managed to lose a lot of printed material and photographic prints during one of my house moves when I had a bit of a clear out of what I thought at the time was the less good material and for the photographs at least I think I chucked out the wrong pile. Luckily I still have all the negatives of the third band's photos which I have been digitising as and when I have time, and the best of the posters has been preserved forever by the Victoria & Albert Museum in their permanent collection. Also the third band kept a scrap book of all our press and other "memorabilia" - mostly record company rejection letters. As for the music, The Midnight Circus had a retrospective compilation CD released by Chicago label Hyped To Death which meant that all our recordings got digitised in order to decide which songs to use. I'm currently working on a similar release for the third band including our promo video (which when we got it digitised turned out to be much less good than we had remembered). Most of the second band's music is getting repurposed with one of my current bands. Everything that I still have for these bands that hasn't been digitised is in safe storage, waiting to be transferred to a digital medium. Since then everything I have done both audio and graphical has all been digital. This of course brings its own different set of problems. I have artwork for posters and CD covers from the 90s all created in Quark XPress which I can no longer access since I switched to InDesign and stopped upgrading XPress, and a load of Logic Audio 3 and 4 projects which don't open in Logic Pro X. Also for The Terrortones we were gigging almost every week and I wasn't responsible for most of the posters. For a while tried to collect a copy of everything, but after I failed to get a couple of posters for gigs I stopped bothering. These days I've stopped bothering to collect everything that my bands are involved with. For me the music is the important bit, so as long as I have physical copies of everything that was made available to the public and digital copies of everything I have created myself for the bands I am happy.

If the power amp only route isn't doing it for you then your LM2 is probably influencing the signal even though you have all the controls on their supposed "no effect" settings. This is true of all bass amps IME that they all have some baked-in tonal effect. Otherwise there would be no point in all the different manufacturers offering different amps.

Musique concrète

Those sorts of mistakes can happen anywhere in the world as soon as you take away the need for the people running the machines to actually understand the basic principles of luthiery and why certain construction decisions are being made. Leo Fender started it all.

IME it's the long scale length that makes the higher strings sound like bad jazz guitar rather than a high bass guitar note. Certainly I was never happy with the sound of high C on any 34" scale bass when I was dabbling with it. High C does work for me on bass VIs with a 30" scale, but that be because I tend to use that and the high E for more "guitar"-like parts...

Like this?

What's the point of it then?

Update: I've just looked at @lownote's profile and I can't see his "waffle box" content either...

That only exists if they have actually typed something in the "About Me" dialogue box. Since there is no requirement to do this, not everyone will have something to see in their profile other than their posts and reactions.

As you have got to the stage where you need to vent on the internet where anyone else in the band can also read it, then these are probably not the musicians you want to playing with at this stage in your musical "career". If it's your band sack the musicians who don't agree with you, and if it's not leave and find some who have the same objectives as you do.

I've been playing musical instruments and doing other music related activities for almost 50 years now. Even at a very basic 1 hour a day that takes me to almost twice the magic 10,000 hours and given that for the first 25 years I probably spent nearly all my time that wasn't occupied with school/university/work/sleeping doing musical things I've probably racked up somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000. Unfortunately I'm still very average. That might be because I haven't spent all that time concentrating on just one instrument, but my time has been given over to guitar, bass, keyboards, synthesis & sound design, sequencing/DAW, recording, producing, graphic design and printing for everything a gigging and recoding musician might need as well as building instruments and other musical devices and hardware, so really it should be no surprise that I haven't mastered anything yet.

Just to let you know that wearing a tinfoil hat makes you more susceptible to government mind control. There's even a proper MIT study to prove it.

Even more important then, that you know exactly how other music sounds through these headphones. Spend plenty of time listening to stuff you like on them. That will enable you to make more informed opinions about how your music sounds in relation.

I'd look for a second hand MiK Starbass. I used to have the 5-string version and IMO it was vastly superior to all the MiG versions that I had tried in both looks and playability.

At this point the most useful thing you can do is not to get bogged down with specific plug-ins. In fact as a starting point stick with the plug-ins that came free with your DAW and get to know how they work and what they do to sound of the track inside out. It might also be worth getting one of your songs professionally mastered to a standard you like, and then try and replicate that sound yourself. While you are unlikely to be able to copy and paste settings from one song to another with no further tweaking necessary, it should get you much closer to th required end result. The other thing you need to do is to know the sound of your monitoring system and listening environment inside out. Most people recording at home, will either be sharing the space with other living requirements, or if they do have a dedicated space for it, it will be too much small compared with a professional facility, and the overall sound will be compromised as a result. That's why it is important that you know how your space sounds. Spend time playing other people's music through your system so you are completely familiar with it's strengths and weaknesses. In the days when I was still recording at home, I discovered that my monitoring system had a peak at the frequencies that enhanced the sound of our vocalists voice, and therefore what sounded right on my system would result in the vocals sounding too quiet or indistinct on almost anything else. Therefore I had to learn to over-emphasise the vocals when mixing/mastering in order to get the right sound and balance. That's something you will only discover when you are completely familiar with how your speakers/room sound.

Any song that has a similar overall sound that you are aiming for with your compositions (and that you think is well produced/mixed/mastered. Also as Dad said it's not a constant A/B between the reference track and yours. The way I would work is to listen to your reference track a couple of times and then start working on yours. When you think your are getting close to your final version, have another listen to your reference track, so you can hear what more you need to do.

The reference track is a song or songs you listen to in their original form so you can compare your mix/master to. Normally you'd just run it from the source CD player or record deck through the same amp and speakers as you are listening to your mix on and then switch between the two different sources. That way you can hear how the song you like the sound of sounds through your system in your listening environment and compare and contrast your mix/master. If there isn't an easy way to hook up an external CD or record player then you could import the song(s) off CD and drop it into a spare track in Reaper, but import as a WAV/AIFF and NOT MP3 because you need to compare like for like. Also make sure that this reference track is not being processed in any way in Reaper, so that means you won't be able to use plug-ins on the main stereo bus. This is generally why it is better to play the reference from an external source, so there is no chance that it is being affected by anything other than the amp, speakers and room.