BigRedX

The way that I look at it, no matter how poor the amp I am playing through is, it's still better than playing an electric bass with no amp.

The thing with recorded "rock" music, is that's its almost never performed entirely from a pre-composed score, in the way that classical music or a musical is. Often significant portions of a recording will have been improvised in the studio, and the version that ends up being released is just the combination of notes that the musician(s) played on one particular take. Fills and passing notes in particular may have been different every time the part was played, and if the person who "wrote" the part played it differently every time who's to say the version that appears on the released recording is any more definitive then any of the takes that didn't make it because something else was deemed to be sufficiently wrong? And what of parts that have been composited together from multiple takes? Either because the musicians didn't have the technical skills to play the whole song consistently in a single take, or because the musicians and/or the producer decided that they'd like to mix and match the part from various different versions, which can sometimes result in a great sounding part but which is far beyond the average musician's ability to play as a single continuous piece. A prime example of this is Fripp's guitar parts on the Heroes album which are stitched together from multiple unconnected takes at the whim of producer Brian Eno. And then consider the differences between the "definitive" studio version and what the band actually play when they perform the song live. Parts will often change to make them easier to play consistently (especially for musicians who also sing), or because without all the intricacies and overdubs of the studio version compromises need to be made in order for the song to have the same impact when played with just 3 or 4 live instruments. Check out the differences in the bass line on Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town" between the studio and live album versions. Which one is the "right" version? This is why I always find threads like this perplexing. Much of the time for baselines in particular the minutiae of the part are totally random. I don't play in covers bands any more, but when I did, my philosophy was always that if I couldn't make out what was going on with a bass in particular section, so long as I played something in tune and in time that was in keeping with the "spirit" of the rest of the part it would be more than fine.

If you can hear the part well enough to be able to work out the tab is wrong then you should be able to work out the right thing just by listening. If you still can't get it exactly, then it probably doesn't matter. Play something that fits with the other instruments and no-one except the bassist who played to part on the original recording will know. And is @Rich has demonstrated notation is easy to follow. You don't need to be able to sight read if you are going to learn the parts, so take your time and work it out one note at a time.

If you need to ask for other people's opinions on a public forum where the rest of your band can potentially see what you have written, then you probably need to go.

I buy the basses I want. So long as I can afford them the price is irrelevant. I've spent anywhere between £35.00 (second hand Futurama III Bass in 1982) and just under £3k (Custom-order Sei Offset Flamboyant Fretless Bass in 2008)

Unless you are the songwriter, arranger or producer, as a musician you should fit around the music. Musicians with a "signature sound" will have been picked specifically for that sound by the songwriter/arranger/producer.

No one tone is the BEST. Sometimes you need the sound or round-wounds and sometimes you need the sounds of flats. You use what the music dictates. A good bassist will know that.

Haven't you already got a pre-amp in your amp?

Even more heavily modified than the one I used to own. And that is saying something. Replaced nut, fingerboard (top), scratch plate, bridge, electronics (may use some of the original components). Missing one Tri-Sonic pickup, bridge cover, the original finish which would have probably been red (with a black burst on the back of the neck) and the Burns logos from the head and body. Strangely enough it still has the original machine heads which I had to replace on mine due to the fact they wouldn't hold the string tension under standard tuning. I really liked mine, but IMO the main USP was the sound of both pickups together which wired them in series (something you can't do on this example).

I would have thought that the compression algorithms used by YouTube would have rendered this test useless.

Is there any reason to have space for photos on the Basschat server? I've nearly always used an external host for any photos I thought worthy of posting on here. I've occasionally used the Basschat space for photos that I know are for ephemeral threads, and I try and clear them out on a regular basis. I've just checked my profile and there were about 30 currently on there which I have now deleted. I know in the grand scheme of things my 500/200GB of space is all but irrelevant, but feel free to remove my quota completely to free up space and I'll stick to using externally hosted images.

No notifications for me either. I wonder if it is linked to the server running out of space? I've also had two posts stall on the "saving" stage and although they have appeared in the thread, neither have turned up in my list of posts and reactions in my user profile.

It would have been less than a tenth of that price new back in the 70s and even then you were being robbed.

I knew I'd forgotten something! Also I've found that unless you can hear the audio quality deteriorating due to oxide build-up on the heads, don't bother trying to record each track separately. Do a whole side in a single pass and then chop the audio up into individual tracks in Logic.

When I last did this (which was for a retrospective CD compilation of my first band's recordings for a US indie label) I found that apart from a couple of tracks that had been recorded with weird EQ peaks that required taming, simply reducing the digitised files from 24 bit to 16 bit was all that was needed. Anything that wasn't correcting an obvious audio error on the original recording made them sound worse to my ears. There wasn't even a lot of level balancing between tracks required since the original tapes had already been recorded hot and tape saturation had taken care of the usual mastering compression.

Personally I wouldn't touch that cassette player in the Amazon link with a bargepole and certainly not let it anywhere near the only existing copy of a tape I was trying to digitise. Some extra things I forgot to mention yesterday: Digitise your tapes without any audio compression (.wav or .aiff files formats) and record at 24 bit. IME when you then reduce the bit depth to 16 bit it significantly reduces the amount of background noise and tape hiss. If the tapes were made in the early 80s the NR will either be Dolby B or C (Dolby S wasn't available until 1989). As I said in my previous post, you will probably get away without using any NR or playback for Dolby B tapes, in fact it may restore some top end frequencies that have been lost over the years, and if you need to compensate for the missing NR a bit of corrective EQ will be more than adequate. However trying to play back a Dolby C encoded tape without the correct noise reduction switched on will result in a harsher and sibilant sound which no amount of corrective EQ will fix.

I'm about to do this very thing to get some ancient recordings from my 80s synth band digitised along with any of the local band demos that have IMO stood the test of time. 1. Use a good quality cassette player. Ideally one with dual capstans and separate motors for the capstans and tape tension. Nakamichi, and the high end Aiwa or Sony decks should be suitable. (I've got an Aiwa F660.) 2. Play the tapes as little as possible. Once to set the levels and then once to actually record the contents. If you can set the levels so that you are just under 0dB in your DAW for the hottest off-tape signal then you can just get on and play them all once. Be aware that the tapes may have been recorded at up to +10dB for a good quality Chrome or Metal tape so attenuate the signal at the interface appropriately. 3. For leads, I can't help you. I have phono to just about everything leads so I'll be experimenting to see which gives the best match. I'd probably start a phono to jack line level and take it from there. 4. If the tapes have been recorded with Dolby B, turn it off for playback and use EQ in the DAW to re-balance the bass and treble. However, if they have been recorded with Dolby C or S then you will need to have it activated on playback. Make sure your cassette deck has the appropriate NR. 5. There are all sorts of tape enhancement/restoration plug-ins available. Start by having a look at the mastering tools available in Logic. You shouldn't need any compression as the recording process should have already taken care of this for you with tape saturation. Certainly all the analogue tapes I've digitised in the past have already had plenty of tape compression on them, and apart form hard limiting some very excessive peaks I've not had to used any compression at all.

I had a post take ages to go through this morning, and although its there in the thread it hasn't shown up in the list of my posts on my profile page. Refreshing the page has made no difference.

Actually for any album released in the days before CDs, the track order was considerably dictated by the limitations of vinyl as a playback medium. As both the bandwidth and signal to noise ratio decrease the closer you get to the label it means that tracks with less frequency information would be put there. Ever wondered why the last track on each side of an album tended to be more "mellow" than the ones at the start? It's got very little to do with what the artist wanted and much more to do with what the cutting engineer would be recommending, to get the overall best sounding record. Also there's the need for each side of an album to be roughly the same length and ideally under 20 minutes at 33rpm. Not a problem if all your songs are 3-4 minutes long, but it does cause a problem for the placement of your band's 8 minute or more epic in relation to what else it will share the side with. Of course you can ignore all of this and sequence the tracks in any order you want, but it will result in an less than ideal sounding record. I always used to wonder why some supposedly high energy songs at the end of side two of albums I liked never quite packed the punch of the version that was released as a single. Well that's why, and had they been placed at the start of the side they would have sounded much better.

@Bassassin Thank you. It all makes sense now. My lack of understanding compounded with my dyslexia wasn't helped by the fact that @NikNik had typed "pips" instead of "pickups"

All Fender basses look enormous on normal sized people.

IMO there are very few albums where every track is a "must-hear" every time you play it.

Getting vinyl to sound good (if that isn't an oxymoron) is mostly down to mastering and cutting. When vinyl was the only delivery medium (compact cassettes very never really taken seriously) all the mastering and cutting engineers knew exactly what they could and couldn't get aways with to the best quality signal onto the records. Remember also that in order to press records the cut acetate goes through at least another process to create the stamper(s) and often two more for high volume runs. Because it is a mechanical process there will be a slight loss of quality with each process, so the cutting of the acetate has to be done with these losses in mind. While there are some new good cutting engineers about these days, they don't handle the sheer volume of work that was being done in the 60s and 70s (backlogs are mostly in the pressing plants rather than the cutting rooms) and there are no well-known names like Porky (George Peckham) and Bilbo (Dennis Blackham) who back in the day were probably as important as the musicians and the producer of the records that they cut. When I looked at my record collection in the early 80s nearly every disc was either a "Porky Prime Cut" or a "Bilbo Bopper". There is also the problem that masters for vinyl, CD and digital downloads (and cassette should you be hipster enough) all require different techniques, and there is no "one size fits all" master that will make the best of each delivery medium. I think also that for a lot of consumers vinyl is an artefact rather than a music delivery medium, and will never get played. I have on a couple of occasions toyed with the idea of releasing an album on vinyl, which would simply be cheap second hand records with new sleeves and labels. I wonder how long it would be before someone complained that the record didn't contain the music it was supposed to?

Specialised CD transport mechanisms are a complete con. All the data off the CD gets read into a buffer first to allow for the error correction, so any talk of minimising digital jitter and the like is bollox. So long as the drive spins at approximately the correct speed and the DACs are decent you won't hear any difference between a cheap CD player and an expensive one.

These days the only reason that a CD sounds inferior to the same music on vinyl is that the wrong master has been used to produce the CD. Vinyl, because it is a mechanical medium, has lots of built-in problems with what it can and cannot reproduce compared with digital formats. Anything with excessive bass or stereo phase differences will be impossible to cut, and if by some miracle you can cut it most people's record decks simply won't be able to play it no matter how many 2p coins you put on the tone arm. On top of that, both the bandwidth and signal to noise ratio but decrease the closer you get to the middle of the record, so the audio fidelity of a record decreases with every revolution. When I last had any of my music pressed on vinyl the advice from the cutting engineer was that for the best audio fidelity the record should be cut at 45rpm and the running time per side should not exceed 10 minutes (for a 12" record) anything beyond that would be compromised. I wonder how many albums meet these specifications? IIRC, Genesis in particular used to boast about the long running times of their albums.