BigRedX

There is no formula for writing a "good" song. And most of the time people mistake "good" with "popular", not that there is anything wrong with being "popular" and anyway "good" is entirely subjective. And remember that every song you play in your covers band is an original song for the band/artist that wrote it.

No it doesn't. Maybe if you are stupid and lazy, but for everyone else it opens up an endless set of possibilities limited only by your imagination.

IME writing songs is something that improves the more you do it. In fact once you've reached a certain standard it becomes harder because you want every new song you write to be even better than the last one. You didn't start playing the bass well enough to be in a band overnight so why should song writing be any different? Also why rely on your guitarist to come up with musical ideas? You play a melodic instrument too.

If you really don't enjoy playing some of your old songs then simply stop playing them. If that impacts on audience numbers for subsequent gigs then you have failed at point 2 of my previous post. As a punter I might be disappointed if a band doesn't play one of my favourite songs from their back catalogue, but there will plenty of other equally great ones in the set to make up for that. If you only like one song by a band, it's probably not a good idea to go and see them play live.

Yes. Now that I have stopped obsessively collecting instruments and just settled on the ones I like and need for the bands I play in I have got it down to four. For one band I use one of two Gus G3 5-strings (one black, one CAR). For the other band I have an Eastwood Hooky bass and a Burns Barracuda, both different shades of red, but the Burns will shortly be sold and replaced with another Eastwood (maybe in red maybe not).

Yes, pretty much every bass I have ever bought. In my hands, in a band mix, most basses sound pretty much the same; so how they look is what differentiates them from each other. If you play live it is, IMO, important to have a bass that compliments the image of the band.

First of all, to answer the OP question: IMO if you don't like gigging then just don't do it. Give the band slot to someone who does like it and find something else musically to do. If you don't rely on music to make your living there are plenty of interesting musical-based alternatives that don't involve having to play gigs. Like many things in life there are aspects to gigging that are not so pleasant - travelling for hours to get to the venue, getting back home at 4/5 in the morning and having to unload the gear before you can go the bed (if you are lucky and you don't have to then get ready to go straight to work). What you need to do is make sure that enjoyable parts like playing music you love to people who are enjoying it, and getting paid for it, more than make up for the boring and less enjoyable bits. And lets lay that myth to rest that you can't make money from playing songs other than covers. IME there are three reasons why "originals bands" don't make any money: 1. They have chosen deliberately to play for free, or do gigs that are not paid. 2. They are simply not entertaining enough - in music or performance. 3. They are just starting out and have still to build up a reputation. (IMO this is allowable - every band has to begin somewhere, but if you can't start expecting to get paid 10 gigs or 6 months into the life of a new band then see point 1 and/or 2). If you want to ensure that all the songs in the set are ones you enjoy playing, then the easiest way is to write them yourself. Over the last 45 years, apart from two originals bands where I have chosen deliberately to be just a musician, I have been the principle composer of the music of the songs I perform, so if there's songs in the set that I'm not 100% happy about playing, then it is entirely my fault.

Or the second version of the P-Bass with the split humbucker for that matter. Or anything from G&L...

Unless you are going very very heavy gauges, the lower strings are always lower tension than the higher ones.

It would help if you could tell us why you didn't get on with the Helix, because of all the multi-effects I have owned IMO it's by far the easiest to use, most versatile and for most effects the best sounding.

I wondered why there was no new Andyjr1515 build thread...

Really depends on what works best for the drummer. In reality no headphones will completely shut out the sound of the rest of the band at typical band volumes, and often the spill through is enough for them to be able to tell where they are in the song. The other thing to bear in mind is that for most bands using a click track the songs are of a pre-defined structure and length, and therefore simply playing the correct parts will be all that is required. The rest of the band follow the drummer anyway.

135 is just about tight enough for low B for me!

MotU has a fairly substantial user-base in the UK. It's just mainly in the higher-end offerings. While I still had my big "home studio" I was using their 2408 system which was 24 channels of digital I/O and 8 channels of analogue inputs and outputs (and could be expanded up to 3 times that count with sufficient hardware). One thing to be aware of, is that unless it has changed recently, their software (including the routing control panels for their audio and MIDI interfaces) uses its own unique graphical interface which bears little resemblance to either Mac or Windows GUI and can be rather alien looking and unintuitive at first.

I meant one of these. Cut off the 13A plug and replace. The you can use any C13 mains lead with it. You could feed the cable through the pedalboard case (with a suitable strain-relief grommet) before fitting the new in-line socket. IMO you don't need any additional fused protection. The mains lead has it's own in the plug and any equipment you attach to the 4-way in your first post that requires a fuse will have its own.

Regarding protection form live mains connections, you used to be able to get a heavy-duty rubber shroud that fitted over the contact side of the C13 chassis socket completely covering all the wires. However with the up-rated electrical safety regulations this may no-longer be applicable. If you want to use a chassis socket as shown in the the second photo of the OP's second post, you will need to make sure that the bottom of the pedal-board is closed, so there is no easy access to the socket, and then use the appropriately rated heat-shrink insulation over each of the 3 contacts. It might be easier and safer to replace the standard mains plug of the extension with an in-line C13 male plug, to which you can connect your equipment mains lead.

Do you actually need to solder to the back of the pot for electrical (screening or earthing) reasons? I always thought it was done simply because it presented a suitably large area for attaching all the various earth connections which would include the braided screen from the pick up(s) which might be tricky if you were just rely on the pot contacts to make all the joints.

And just to prove that we all want different things from our instruments, I spent a very enjoyable morning playing all of the Sadowsky demonstration basses in the days when the company was still based in Brooklyn, but in every case I thought they sounded better with the on-board pre-amp turned off.

For me I can't see the point of active basses. In terms of tone controls I have far better adjustments available on my Helix. If I needed to cable long enough to be noticeably affected by buffering issues/signal loss/capacitance, I'd probably be going wireless.

AFAIK their "money" is entirely due to the share issue and any profits are due to the investment of that money in other things. As a service Spotify (like all other streaming services) barely makes a profit.

I got my first electronic tuner - a Boss TU12 - in 1983. Before that tuning (especially at gigs) was a bit of a nightmare. My first band was mostly a recording band, but we used a number of instruments with fixed or difficult to change tuning including two reed organs that were slightly out of tune with each other. Therefore we would tune to whichever fixed tuned instrument we were using on each particular song. As a result there are 4 or 5 different tunings used across all our recordings depending on the instrumentation for each song. At the few gigs that we played the set was often dictated by needing to stick to a single tuning for all the songs. By the time my next band were ready to gig I had acquired a Wasp synth, which although it had many short-comics in a gigging situation, it's tuning was not one of them, so the whole band would tune to this. I can't imagine that the "tuning song" would have been a pleasant experience for our audience, but since all bands without expensive strobe tuners had to do this it was back then accepted as part of the gigging process. IIRC I got the electronic tuner after 4 gigs with my next band, who were all synths. This time we had the added complexity of using taped backing with drums and sequenced elements on it, and in order to make sure the live and recorded instruments were in tune the first "song" was a minute or so of "Middle C" on the tape that we tuned the live synths to. IMO this was completely unacceptable so I scraped together about £35 for the Boss tuner. I don't think I've been without some kind of electronic tuning aid since then.

Since this thread has come back to life I thought I would update on my personal quest for the perfect drum machine (for me). If you've been following the thread you'll have seen that I was originally looking for a decent hardware drum machine and had been leaning towards the top of the range offerings from Roland or Akai. In the end my choice was made for me by dint of the keyboard play from my band writing a bunch of new songs over lockdown using his newly acquired copy of Logic Pro X and making full use of the various drum and drum machine plugins that come bundled with it. Add to this the fact that our first pst lock-down gig was at the Goth City festival on the same bill as my other band who were already using Logic to play back our backing, meant that the idea of getting a dedicated drummer machine was a bit redundant. So I've been using Logic along with the Drum Kit and Drum Machine Designer plug-ins. I also went out and bought VSDSX which is a Simmonds SDSV emulator and also comes with a virtual version of the Simmonds Clap Trap. I do all the main programming work on my desktop MacPro where I have the benefit of multiple large monitors and then transfer the files to my laptop for gigs and rehearsals. The relatively tiny screen on the laptop is just about big enough to make slight tweaks to the songs in the rehearsal room, and for anything more complicated, I make notes at the rehearsal and reprogram back at home. We've done one gig with this set up and it work fine. I already have a gig-proof MacBook Pro set up that I use for my other band, and having spent some serious time working with the various drum plugins that come bundled with Logic, I really couldn't see myself going for the limitations that will come with a hardware drum machine.

Good work! One thing to watch is that the sound of your bass when played with a pick doesn't disappear behind similar-toned guitars. In a previous band I found that using hard picks for the bass while sounding great on it's own, when I played with the band that included one guitarist who favoured a clean sounding Stratocaster, all but disappeared in the band mix. Changing to a softer nylon pick made the bass guitar sit in the correct place in the mix.

Bef0ore you go changing EQ or replacing pickups spend some time testing out all the different pick materials, thicknesses and sizes. The only difference you have made is to swap from using your fingers to pluck the string to using a pick, therefore the pick is the first thing you should concentrate on to get the sound you want. It will probably take some time and may work out expensive, but ultimately it will be the best solution. If it was me, I'd start by going to my local musical instrument store and buying one of every type of pick they have, and using that start narrowing down what you like and dislike about each one.

Easily managed with a click track these days as I mentioned in my previous post. TBH. IME the biggest problem with using a click is that often the drummer is completely unused to having to play in time to another instrument, as their default mode is to set the tempo and the rest of the band play to them.