BigRedX

It might be a good idea since the most usual place for a feedback link - in a user's signature - is no longer as effective as is should be, due to the fact that lots of people have all signatures hidden, and they are not visible at all to anyone browsing Basschat on their phone.

I'd probably get a second Eastwood Hooky 6 to use as a spare for gigs. What I'd really like is a Gus Bass VI built using the their G3 Baritone shape, but last time I enquired (pre COVID) I was looking at in excess of £6k for the spec I was after... Edit: After buying the Hooky I'd use the rest of the money to buy one of my bands in the studio with a decent producer who is sympathetic to our genre/sound and get as many tracks recorded and mixed to best possible standard until the money ran out.

I can't help thinking that you must be playing the wrong venues. Since the mid 90s almost everywhere I have played (that's pretty much all over mainland UK) with originals bands has had an in-house PA and lighting system. The few times (around 5) when there hasn't been a PA on site was when we deliberately chose to play venues that don't normally put on live music. And while I do get to play some big venues, my bands still play places with capacities of 100 or less.

Play in an originals band that doesn't need much gear. Firstly you don't need to carry a PA or lights because they will already be there at the venue. Then replace your drummer with a computer or drum machine. One of my bands has exactly 8 pieces of equipment to pack and carry and two of those are stands. The rest of the equipment is: 2 synths each in a lightweight hard case, a bass in a gig bag, Helix in it's backpack, a 3U rack case that holds the computer and audio interface that is our drummer and second synth player and a small bag of leads and bits for connecting it all together and to the PA. Between the three of us in the band we can carry everything between the venue and the car in one trip. Both setting up and packing down takes no more than 15 minutes. No backline means that the sound both on-stage and FoH is much easier to balance. Win all round.

For me the two are equally important and completely interlinked. I know the music I want to create and play and I require the correct equipment to be able to achieve that.

Very much this. Also the problem with video reviews (and tutorials) is that you can't skim-read them to find that one piece of information you need. I'm very reluctant to sit through minutes of introductions and the presenter telling me to like and subscribe and then the over-long "content" in order to qualify for YouTube's monetisation program, and sometimes after all that it doesn't even cover the information I am after. I could probably skim-read the written content of the average 10 minute video in under 30 seconds to find whether it contained what I needed or not. It also doesn't help that the "presenters" have either an image best suited for radio, or a voice that should be heard, and won't have considered the idea of writing a script first. Nothing puts me off a video quicker than hearing the phrase "I don't know". It's not as though these videos are being created live. Cut; and go and find out, and then come back with the information. It's as simple as that!

I always mention which of my two bands are playing. I don't use any backline and the basses will be obvious from the photos I also post, besides these days I only use two - an Eastwood Hooky with one band and a Gus G3 with the other.

OK, but that wasn't what you appeared to be saying in your OP. If you want a wide variety of sounds that are easily accessible then it might be worth looking at a programmable effects unit that includes one or more decent EQ modules. I've never really got on with on-board pre-amps, as I find them too fiddly and tricky to accurately change mid-set. Instead I have a Line6 Helix which does everything I need and more, with a separate preset for each song my bands play that has been EQ'd and level adjusted to match the sounds of the other instruments. I'm sure there will a cheaper device that will be suitable for you.

But there's musicians in their 20s who probably think that anything made in the 20th century counts as vintage.

I've owned bass guitars with pretty much every scale length from 26.5" to 36". I don't have any problems moving between them, in fact I went from playing a 30" bass for most of the 80s to a 36" for most of the following decade. I do prefer a 30" scale for my Bass VIs though. So I voted for everything except 35" and 32" as the only 32" bass I've had was a cheap and nasty Futurama 1 Bass, and I've yet to play anything with a 35" scale length that had a better sounding and feeling low B string than a well made 34" scale bass.

IME there are just two ways to ensure that you have as little messing about to should you need to change basses mid-way through the set and not be wanting a different sound. 1. Have two identical basses, or at least two basses with the same pickups (in the same places) and electronics. 2. Use so much signal processing down-stream, that the contribution the bass itself makes to the sound is negligible.

I won a PC-2 at a Roland/Boss event in late 1984. At the end of the evening they did a draw for a few of the cheaper devices they had been demonstrating and my name came out of the hat. Out of everything they gave away this was the least appealing and after playing with it for 5 minutes at the next band rehearsal it went back in its box and was PX'd for another device they'd shown - the Boss Super Distortion and Feedbacker Pedal.

I that case anything you like the sounds and user interface of will most likely be fine. Get something that supports MIDI clock, and ideally MTC (MIDI timing Code) to you can run it synchronised to GarageBand or Logic. If it supports MTC it will also pickup at the correct place in the song without needing to run it from the top every time you want to do a drop in. There maybe some delay with the pickup function, but you won't know what it is until you try it. One thing you might want to think about is how your chosen device backs up whatever you have programmed into it. Hopefully it will support something like a SysEx memory dump. Of course the other thing to remember is that a backup is only any use if you can actually retrieve the information at a later date. Just because the backup has occurred successfully doesn't automatically mean you'll be able to do a restore from it. The devices I used to own (see above) that did tape backups also had a verify function which compared the playback of the tape with the contents of the device memory. Having owned a room full of MIDI (and before that CV and gate plus clock sync) gear in the 80s and 90s, it would have to be a very special device that would persuade me to go back to working outside the box. The headaches I and my band use to have trying to get all the devices to talk to each other properly is something I don't miss. Even MIDI didn't solve all the problems: there would be clock glitches that would cause synchronised effects to go out of sync and massive delays on pick-up for timing codes that meant a lot of the time it was simpler to run the song from the start even if all I wanted to do was drop in a section right at the end.

In the days when I was still using amps and cabs and not all of them had standardised on Speakon connections, all my speaker cables were made using heavy duty orange mains cable, so they could be easily identified.

My second main bass was an Overwater Original 5-string with a 36" scale length. I never noticed the extra two inches, although that might have been because my previous main bass was a short scale. The first time I realised that it was longer than standard was when I tried fitting a 34" scale set of strings and found that the silks started in the first fret area. Back then (in the early 90s) finding extra long scale sets with a usable low B was very difficult. These days it's much easier. Since then I've owned basses with all sorts of scale lengths and my experience has been that scale length on it own only makes a difference for the sound and feel of the lower string when you go 36" or longer.

Late 70s more like. The damage to the finish around the neck pocket is what happens when you remove a tightly fitting neck. This body has obviously come from a previously assembled instrument.

Is there a "Wal sound"? The three players I most closely associate with the basses - Mick Karn, Leigh Gorman and Justin Chancellor all sound very different. Can you get close to all the sounds that three use with any of the current crop of Wal-alikes?

Any thread marked please ignore is guaranteed to run for at least a week here on Basschat!

How effective a drum machine will be for you and which one you decide to go for will depend very much on how you work, whether it's studio only or if you expect to use it live, and what sorts of sounds you want. How do you work? One song at a time and once it's complete and recorded you'll never come back to it? Or do you need to be able to put together a set's worth of songs with different sounds and patterns available for each one? I've been using programmed drums in one form or another since 1981 when my band bought a Boss DR55 Dr Rhythm. Despite the small number of patterns and the fact there was no way to automatically join them together to from a song; we were able to make it work for us live by creative programming using the A/B rhythm and Hi-Hat switches along with the trigger outputs for controlling the synths and the fact that we also had a live percussionist and our set never had more than 10 songs in it. However it was quite a complex set up for gigging and the home-brewed devices we used to connect everything together would often go wrong. My next band in 1983 had a Roland 808 when they were still relatively new and expensive. The only way this could be used live was to record it. While composing the individual patterns was easy there were only 32 one bar patterns available, and even if you could fit more than one song in that, there was only one song chain which had to be programmed in real-time a process which was almost impossible to edit and generally it was easier to wipe and start again if you made a mistake. Backup consisted of hundreds of photocopied sheets on which we could mark which beats fell where for each pattern and another A4 sheet showing the structure of the song on relation to these patterns. While the drum sounds were editable to a degree, we nearly always supplemented them with triggered synth sounds for more variety. Next we got a Yamaha RX11. While this boasted a 99 pattern and 99 song memory, the reality was that it was dynamically allocated and even with fairly simple rhythms you would run out of memory long before you reached pattern number 99. At least this drum machine had a tape interface for back-up. However in retrospect the photocopied sheets could be used to program any drum machine with suitable sounds whereas the tapes are only any good for loading into another RX11. After that I had an Alesis HR16. This actually got used at gigs, although only for about 5 songs in the set in conjunction with a standard drum kit and drummer. This was my last hardware drum machine for a long time because it was replaced by an Ensoniq EPS16+ sampler which had a built-in pattern-based sequencer. This was for me far more versatile than anything I had previously. I could sample any drum (or non-drum) sound and use it for my rhythms. I could also sample loops off records so the only limit was my imagination. Everything loaded off 3.5" floppy disks, and with the expanded memory I could get all the drum sounds, sequences and songs loaded in simultaneously for a complete live set. Then in the early 90s I got my first computer and DAW (although back then it was just a MIDI sequencer program) and upgraded the Ensoniq to an Akai S2000 with 32MB RAM and 16MB of Flash RAM which meant that all my samples were available as soon as it booted up. No more time spent loading samples from disk(s). Sequence programming was done on the computer and saved as MIDI files for each song which could all be loaded into the Akai. I used this system live for about 6 years until I joined a band that was live instruments only. Currently one of my bands uses programmed drums instead of a drum live. Everything is done on a Mac using Logic's drum kit designer and drum machine designer plug-ins as well as the only 3rd party instrument plug own which is an emulation of the Simmons SDSV, because I found the samples I had made when I used to own the real thing weren't versatile enough for our current requirements. Before settling on this route, I did look at several hardware drum machines. Several were dismissed almost immediately because they just didn't look robust enough for gigging use. In the end I didn't think any of them were simple enough to be able to use live when it came to selecting songs on stage. One of the things I wanted to avoid was lots of fiddling about with gear in between songs. I could get away with it in the 80s (just) but nowadays I want a slick flowing set of songs. My current system is controlled by two footswitches one for stopping and starting the songs and another which runs a macro which closes the current song, selects the next on in the list and loads it up, a process which takes less than 5 seconds and which is complete before the applause for the song we have just finished playing has stopped. Plus it means that we can change the set order simply by changing the number at the beginning of each song name, something that can be done just before we play if necessary. The computer also sends MIDI patch change information to my Helix and when I get around to adding a decent MIDI Thru box to the rack will be able to do the same for the live synths too. I've yet to see a drum machine that's a simple and versatile for me as my current set up.

But do your trousers flap? Not withstanding the fact that the last time wore trousers with enough surplus material to move in the wind was some time in the 70s; even when I was playing rock covers or in a psychobilly punk band with a 1kW rig I have never needed so much on-stage volume that I could feel the air move.

One of my bands uses Cram for our CDs and we have nothing but praise for their services. However I can't speak for how good vinyl organised through them will be, although I suspect that should we decide to realise something on record in the future they will be our first choice. The problem with vinyl still is that there a relatively few cutting facilities and pressing plants, so nearly everyone offering vinyl will be out-sourcing the actual production, and where that production takes place may well change depending on cost and capacity. Although all the brokers I've used for vinyl in the past 15 years have been UK based the actual production took place in The Czech Republic, France and labels for one record were actually printed separately in the far-east. The waiting times for getting your pressings back have increased significantly since I last was involved in putting a record out. And if your production schedule in any way overlaps with the run-up the Record Store day then forget it! Getting test pressings done is an absolute must. Don't skimp no matter how much it adds to the final price and production time, and check them all before signing off. One thing to look out for and bear in mind when making an order, is that vinyl is bulky and heavy to ship. Because one of my bands wanted to do something a bit out of the ordinary when it came to the packaging we ordered our records in paper sleeves only, with the packaging being produced separately and we would assemble the final product. On both occasions the shipping cartons were too flimsy to properly protect the contents and we ended up with some damage. 500 copies of a 12" album was delivered on a pallet that had been smashed to pieces by the time it arrived at my house. Luckily it looked a lot worse than it actually was and we had to get the broker to send us an additional 100 paper sleeves to replace the ones that had been damaged. All the actual records except one were OK. However had this happened to records in their sleeves I would have been demanding a complete repress of the whole job. Loosing 20% of our stock would have have serious consequences for how were would have been able to price the records, because the actual production cost is just a fraction of the over cost of making a record, all of which ideally needs to be recouped. HTH.

Afternoon and early evening gigs are weird. When I was in my covers band we used to do one that started late Sunday afternoon and was over before 8.00. The strange thing was that even though the pub was open all day it would be almost completely deserted until 5 minutes before we started our first set when the "rock crowd" would turn up en-masse, order their drinks ready to enjoy whatever band was playing that week. The kind of music I'm playing at the moment doesn't really feel right being performed during daylight hours. Having said that we have at least two afternoon gigs booked for this year. One of them is in a large windowless venue so there's no real sense of time once you are inside. The other is in a brewery where they open the large glass doors along one wall so that the people in the courtyard outside can see and hear the bands too. I've been to this one as an audience member several times and it seems to work, although in the past it's always been as a "warm up" to the main events happening elsewhere in the town in the evening. This time around the evening entertainment is significantly less than normal, so it will be interesting to see if it affects the atmosphere in the afternoon.

At least they are holding their second-hand value a bit better these days then they did back in the pre-internet age when I originally bought it second hand. This was in the early 90s when I spotted it in my local musical instrument retailer priced at £575. Spent about 30 minutes trying it out, thought it was very nice, but a it more money than I wanted to pay for a bass back then. I told them I'd think about it and left the shop. By the time I'd got home I decided that I'd been an idiot to leave it at that, and I would nip back into town during my lunch break on Monday and put a deposit down, with the view to paying the rest at the end of the month when I got paid. Unfortunately work suddenly became so busy I didn't have any time either during the day or on Saturday (this was in the days before Sunday opening was normal). When I finally had time to go back, I expected the bass to be long gone. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only was it still available, but the price had been reduced to £350! I didn't bother putting down a deposit, I paid in full there and then, and managed to persuade the shop to thrown in a suitable hard case for an extra £20. I hate to think how little they gave the original owner in cash or PX value in order for it to still be profitable at the price I paid.

The problem with playing music with the intention of earning money to be able to live off, is that unless you are very lucky you will need to take pretty much any gig that is offered. That will normally mean playing music you don't like in dodgy places with people you don't really get on with. I've said before I do something creative for my day job - graphic design - and while I would love to be able to spend all my time working for one or two clients who are keen on cutting-edge designs and think everything I do is fantastic first time around, the reality is that most of what I do is an exercise in trying to get the logo, the product shot and the USPs as big as possible without it looking too horrible, for people who wouldn't know what good design was if it slapped them around the face. Because what I do earns me enough money to live and have some fun, I put up with it. If a client wants something that I think is seriously wrong/bad, I'll politely suggest what I think would work better, but only once and if I'm over-ruled then the client gets exactly what they have asked for. However I like music too much to treat it in the same way. Having to treat playing music in the same way as I treat my design job, would mostly likely kill off any interest I have in playing or composing. No wonder the "giving up" thread is so busy!

There's only one thing there that would point to a slow down problem and that's if the system drive really is an HD rather than an SSD. What model is this Mac? It will be in Apple Menu > About This Mac And while you are their click on the System Report button, and when the system information panel appears select Storage from the left-hand column and see what it says about your system disk.