BigRedX

Ideally you should have everything. A web site, a presence on ALL the social media networks, and everything as far as possible linked to everything else, so that you audience can chose which way to get their informations and if necessary interact with you. None of them have to be complicated, but they should look good and be kept up to date, which generally means something to post every week on social media even if you don't have any gigs in the pipeline. Also keep on top of changes to the design and layout of your social media pages. There's nothing worse than a page that looks broken on Facebook etc. because the layout and graphic specifications have changed but the band/business haven't bothered to update the user elements on the page to take advantage of this.

Carpet will go some way to taming the room. Is this just going to be a rehearsal space or will you be recording here too? If you hope to do anything better than basic demos, it may be an idea to have some of the carpet removable, so you can create a "hard surface" area in one part of the room for recording instruments that will benefit from it. You might also need to look at any spaces between the floor metalwork and the ground. Unwanted resonances can build up in any untreated space.

A sample size of one for each type of body renders this "study" scientifically meaningless. All it proves is that these two different bits of wood sound different. For it to be worthwhile not only do they need to show consistent differences between multiple bodies made out of the same two species of wood, but the bodies made out of the same species of wood should sound the same. As I have said before it very easy to make two solid wooden bodied electric instruments sound different.

Sometimes you don't know what options are actually going to turn out to be the useful ones until you have tried them all out (and also tried them when playing with your band). When I built my first guitar back in the late 70s I fitted as many passive tonal shaping options as I could to make the most of a single (coil-tapped) humbucker as I couldn't afford a second pickup. In the end I only found three of them useful, but there was no way of knowing this in advance. If I was doing the same again, I'd try and find some way of making all the options easy to try out, but also being able to just have the controls I actually needed once that trial period was over without the front of the instrument being full of unwanted knobs/switches/holes.

He's wrong. In the early 80s it seemed as though every third gig I went to had A Flock Of Seagulls as the main support band. It was obviously a strategy that ended up working well for them, but in my case I wasn't particularly impressed the first time I saw them (before, what was even by the standards of the day, the adoption of the ridiculous haircut) and I was no better disposed towards them or their music by the 6th time, by which time they were also on heavy rotation on the radio.

That's interesting. When I used to run The Terrortones website we sold fair amount of merch and CDs right up to the time that we also started selling on Bandcamp, at which point sales from our own site dropped to zero despite the fact that it was cheaper than buying the same things from Bandcamp.

I can most definitely relate to this. When I got my first really good bass - an Overwater - the step up in playability was massive. I then realised that any short-comings in what I was able to play and how I sounded would be entirely down to me and not the instrument.

Each machine head is geared differently so that turning the tuning peg 360° will turn the post the required number of times to produce a 1 tone change in pitch of the string. However, to accomplish this on the bass version they require a scale length of 34" medium gauge strings and standard tuning intervals between the strings. Changing the scale length or string gauge while losing the 1 turn per tone ratio, should mean that same amount of turning produces the same pitch change per string, but those of us who use non-standard tuning intervals (such as always having the lowest string dropped an extra tone) will lose some of the benefit. Guitarists who regularly use all sorts of different tunings won't really see any benefit at all.

If that's the case, use your audio app of choice to record the audio. Then use QuickTime Player to record the screen while the audio plays back. You may be able to add the audio directly to the QuickTime recording at this point depending on what audio sources QuickTime can see while doing this. If QuickTime can't directly pickup the audio playback you might want to look at Loopback from Rogue Amoeba to facilitate this. If that's not possible you can combine the two in any video editing app.

Actually you are mistaken. All the early Roland guitar synths - the original GR500 and the subsequent GR100 and GR300 (one of which is being used in the video) used a mixture of pitch detection to drive the synthesiser sections (or out put CVs and Gates) and basic audio processing - mostly polyphonic distortion, EQ and auto filter - and very little like the complex signal processing/modelling that goes in on in the current V and SY devices.

He gets around the latency problem by using sounds with a very slow attack, ones that are doubled up with the processed guitar sound, and by playing in the upper register where pitch detection is much faster.

It can be useful to have a (easily found) domain name with a single page that highlights any important information and then includes links to all your social media and on-line sales sites (Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/YouTube/Bandcamp/etc.) You used to get more than enough web space free with your domain name registration to be able to do this, but that appears to be a thing of the past.

One thing to be aware of is that projects saved in the very latest version of Logic X are not completely backwards compatible with earlier versions. Previously you would get a message saying that the project was created by a newer version of Logic X and may not be compatible, but it would open even if there were elements that the older version didn't recognise because they used features only available in the newer version. However since the last update I now get a message saying the project can't be opened at all. This doesn't appear to affect Logic users on Catalina yet (the affected Mac is only running High Sierra), but could become issue in the future.

I'd say that Tuba Smarties was far worse.

One of my bands has a proper web site with CMS and everything, that hardly anyone ever looks at. For the other one I just have a domain name which points at our Facebook page and costs about £10/year.

Surely this only works for a given scale length, string type, string gauge and tuning?

Any supposed benefits of esoteric HiFi are completely and utterly negated by: 1. The end user's listening environment. 2. The 100's of metres of (comparably) very ordinary cables that the audio signals have passed through (not to mention the number of high-density circuit boards full of surface-mount components) before they reach the end user's chosen delivery medium.

Depending on what you want to do, you might be able to all (or at least some of it) using QuickTime Player.

While I like the decoration on both, that pedal board would drive me nuts. Wonder how visible all the controls will be under typical stage conditions?

Don't get me wrong, I like Underworld, although the quality IMO does drop off around "100 Days Off", but I like Freur and the original version of Underworld a lot more. I'm surprised you didn't get that from my user name...

There shouldn't be any customs implications for a warranty return, although there is a load of additional paperwork, and you may have to pay VAT and duties upfront and then claim them back. That's why in my previous post I said it's only worth it if there a substantial savings over buying the same item from a proper UK source or if it is something you can't get without importing.

I've been accused of this. My defence is that for an artist to become popular enough for enough other people to like then, they have a generally change their musical style to one I am not as enthusiastic about. Cases is point: Firstly I really liked the first U2 album. After that it's been steadily downhill with each subsequent release. Secondly no-one can convince me that Underworld are superior to Freur...

Yes they are.

IME multiple pickups are one of those things that sound great when you are playing on your own, but seem to weaken the sound in a band mix. I always end up using just one of the pickups on its own. However I don't know which pickup as going to sound the best until I am playing with the other instruments, so having more than one is useful for getting the right basic sound. The exception to this is having two pickups wired in series which sounds good on its own and in the band mix.

Yes, I've done myself with previous version of Logic X. There are two methods: 1. If she knows someone that she trusts who has a suitably up to date Mac, and will let her create a temporary user account on it. Then she can sign on her temporary account, and use her Apple ID to access the store and purchase the latest version of Logic. Back on her own Mac she can then get the most recent version that will run under Catalina, by going her "Purchased" list in the app store. Once that has worked she can delete the temporary user account off the other Mac. 2. Alternatively she could buy the cheapest suitable Mac she can find form an on-line retailer. Create a user account and buy Logic as before, and then download the latest working version on her Mac. Once that has been done, wipe the new Mac and return for a refund under the distance selling regulations.