BigRedX

I didn't start listening to music until 1971, but retrospectively I've come to regard "Parachute" by The Pretty Things as the by far and away the best album released in 1970.

Personally I wouldn't bother with ProTools unless you are collaborating with an existing ProTools user and expecting to make serious money out of your recordings. The iLok copy protection system is beyond flakey, and ProTools' parent company Avid appear to stumble from one poor CEO and financial crisis to another. The only thing keeping it going is the inertia of the established user base built up from the days when it was the only serious proposition when it came to recording and manipulating digital audio. Plus these days when new users have never used a traditional multitrack tape recorder and mixer, the familiarity of the user interface that mimics this system is far less important.

I've had a quick preview of a handful of the songs, and the bass sounds (IMO) about right in the mix for the genre of the band. It isn't right up front, but if you are listening out for it, all the notes can be heard. If I was in a band doing a cover of one of the songs I'd be able to work out the bass part from these recordings. On the other hand if you think the bass needs to be louder and more prominent, the only way you are really going to be able to do that is to form a new band doing music in a genre where it is accepted for the bass to more heavily featured in the mix and then write and produce all the songs yourself.

Unfortunately there's no real alternative to experimentation, and seeing what suits you and bass(es) you are using. A lot of it will depend on how sensitive you are to the changes in tension and compliance which the different tunings will bring. If this was me I'd be looking at using two separate basses - one for the songs in standard E-G tuning and another for the D-F songs - and strung with the appropriate gauge strings. However I'm the person who has a separate guitar with a heavier "E" string that is permanently tuned to drop D because a single gauge string is too much of a compromise in feel for one of the tunings and even a "half-way" gauge is no good because it's "wrong" for both tunings. You may feel differently but you won't know until you try. I wouldn't even consider trying to retune a single bass between songs. The rest of your band and the audience are unlikely to tolerate it. And as has been mentioned already you need to pick your string gauges carefully. Consider that when going from A to E the gauges of a "standard" set go up from 80 or 85 to 100 or 105. That's for a 5 semitone drop. For a drop of a tone you are going to want to increase by around "7". Also bear in mind that lower strings could generally do with being a bit heavier to compensate for the fact that they are lower tension. If your preferred E-G set is 100-40, then for DGCF tuning I'd start by trying 110, 90, 65, 45 and go from there.

You've obviously got your own agenda which your are going to pursue despite people posting evidence to the contrary. I'm out and you are on ignore.

If your bass isn't doing what you want, then sell it and use that £150 to go towards a bass that does.

From my recollection of the late 70s (from 77 onwards) if you were playing bass in any sort of covers band that was doing Top 30 hits rather than "rock" you needed to have your slap bass chops up to scratch.

I don't know about Reaper, but in Logic you sort this out by making each track mono and then assigning the appropriate audio interface input to each channel.

I'd go for a K&M floor stand fitted with their 21231 Boom Arm which has both an adjustable counterweight and an extra-long telescopic boom.

"Alles ist gut" By DAF

IME it’s more about the programming than the sound themselves. Spend some time listening to what drummers play and then go about replicating it in your drum plug-in of choice. As far as signal processing goes a bit of common reverb and compression on all the drums helps to hold all the sounds together.

But he could sort it out in one fell swoop by simply registering “Gerald Bostock” as a pseudonym with the PRS, so I suspect that either the story is worth more than some missing royalties or the is more to it than we are aware.

Personally I think once you've invested more than a few months (or at least done a serious project) in a particular DAW you are pretty much tied in for as long as you are going to be be making music using your computer. I ended up with Logic (in the early 90s) because that was what my songwriter partner of the time was using and it made total sense for us both the be using the same program. Left to my own devices I would have most likely gone for Opcode Vision and a couple of years down the line found myself having to start from scratch with another DAW after Gibson bought up Opcode and subsequently killed off all their software. And from that PoV Logic is probably one of the safest DAWs to be using since is is extremely unlikely to be discontinued or sold by Apple; and because it is tied to the Macintosh platform tends to far more stable than the competition. If you want an indication of just how badly software can fare once a closed system is "opened up" just look at the decline of the once mighty ProTools... Also Macs tend to last a long time. My "studio" MacPro is from 2010 and cost me £600 second hand a couple of years ago (it replaced another second hand MacPro that cost £350 and which I sold on for only slightly less than that!). The MacBook Pro that runs the backing for both of my bands when they gig is almost 10 years old and was £700 new as an EoL model. Also if you don't need to, there's no real need to upgrade software. I'm only running the latest version of Logic, because upgrades to my Macs for my day job (where I earn the money to be able to make music) meant that the previous version no longer worked. If my Macs were just for music, I'd probably still be running Logic 9 (or maybe even 8). And finally the "upgrade" cost of Logic has never been cheaper. I recall the days when I paid close to £300 just to upgrade the MIDI sequencing part of Logic and the "Logic Audio" extension upgrade was an additional £200. Compared with that current price is a bargain. Finally how cost effective the various DAWs are depends on what you require them to do. If all I wanted from a DAW was a glorified multitrack audio recording device and mixer, then Reaper would do the job admirably for free. However to replace the various plugins that I use regularly which come for free with Logic with 3rd party versions for Reaper would be in excess of the £199 that Logic currently costs. Edit: I have been looking at swapping to Presonus Studio One since the "Show" version of the DAW suits the way I use software for gigs far better than Logic or MainStage (which ought to be the obvious choice for me). Unfortunately the change-over is providing far more complicated than I envisioned, at I may well continue to use Logic even though isn't as flexible for running a live set simply because the new learning curve is too steep.

In the days when I was still recording at home, my method when DI'ing instruments was always to record clean/dry and if a particular effect was an essential part of the sound the slap it on the track in playback before doing anything else. Alternatively if I had the appropriate hardware (and tracks available) I'd record the instruments with the effects as well as a separate DI feed direct so I could always change my mind later if I found the the mix was suggesting alternative sounds. For demos to show the band how the song goes, I've stopped worrying about how they sound and simply concentrate on making something to showcases the song. For social media I wouldn't entertain posting anything that wasn't a properly finished and produced piece of music, and for the bands I've been in over the past 15 years that has meant going into a proper studio. Finally as I and others have said, recording is like any other skill. For nearly everyone it takes hours and hours of practice and trial and error. No-one expects to be even a competent bass player after a couple of weeks of playing so why should recording be any different?

I really don't see what the problem is. I've always been of the opinion that you pick your computer based on the software that you want to run on it. When I bought my first Mac it was because I needed to run Quark XPress which back then was the premier page layout programme (nothing else came even remotely close) and was Macintosh only. Yes there are alternatives to Logic out there, but unless all you are ever going to use your DAW for is a digital multitrack tape recorder, none of the alternatives IMO are anywhere as near as cost-effective. And besides the OP already has a Mac.

No the amp itself should have it's own fuse - either accessible from the back panel or somewhere on the circuit board and will probably be a "slo-blo" to compensate for in-rush on the power up. The fuse in the mains plug is just for the lead between the mains socket and the amp.

The fuse in a mains plug is there to protect the lead not the equipment it is powering (which should be fused separately) so if the cable is rated at 13A then it should be fitted with a 13A fuse.

Was that LaBella Steels? I've found that for me these pretty much solved the problem. Since then I've had decent (although not quite as good - but then they are half the price) results with Warwick Black Label (taper wound B) What I have found with other strings is that you need a much heavier low B to match the rest of the strings. I'd be looking at 135 as a minimum (to go with standard 100-40 E-G) for strings other than Warwick Black Label and LaBella Steels. Is your bass 35" scale length? That may limit your string options. If you haven't already, get in touch with Newtone and see about getting them to make you a clone of your favourite LaBella set (that's what I would have done if the Warwicks weren't a acceptable compromise for me).

As a 5-string player since 1989, I'd say that it's a combination of both the bass and the string and how they react to your playing technique. What works for me and the basses I currently use, is a very stiff neck with through-neck construction coupled with a taper-wound B string. Unfortunately as you have discovered what the combination that works for one player won't always suit another. First things first. What bass(es) are you experiencing this problem with?

This is what makes a professional sounding recording. Someone with a good set of ears who is going to objective about the songs/arrangements/sounds and whose job it is to coax the best possible recording out of the musicians playing on it. Since I've stopped trying to have my own studio, the quality of my recordings has improved massively, not only because someone with the right abilities is now at the controls but also because I can simply get on with playing knowing that the technical side of making a recording is in a safe pair of hands (and ears).

IIRC the sound used is exactly one of the pre-sets that came ready programmed into the synth when you bought it.

In: Some new strings, A case for my Line 6 Helix and a stand for flight case that holds the computer that runs the drums/backing track Out: some old strings.

While I am sure there will be a number of people recommending Reaper, if you are already familiar with GarageBand and like the way it works, then Logic is by far the best upgrade for you. Reaper may be technically free, but the amount and quality of the bundled plug-ins is not a patch on those that come with Logic. You can quite easily cover the £199 cost of Logic just by considering what additional software you may need to buy to get Reaper up to the same level of functionality you are already getting from GarageBand.

Go to a professional studio to record your bass parts. Seriously. I see this all the time in all sorts of situations - not just recording - where the suggestion is that with the right hardware and/or software anyone can can do anything and get fantastic results. It simply isn't true. Perhaps if you spend many hundreds of hours working at it you may find that you have the right aptitude and ability to produce great recordings, but it's more likely that you will spend a load of time and money and not be any better off at the end. Trust me, I've been there. I started out recoding at home because back in the 70s if you had very little money there was no alternative. Most of what I produced from a technical PoV was rubbish, but because the equipment I was using was low quality, I was able to easily convince myself that with a better multitrack/mixer/more outboard gear I would be able to produce recordings as good as those of the bands that I liked. By the time I got to the 90s, the gap between the "home studio" and the professional one as regards equipment had all but vanished, and finding myself in a position of having lots of disposable income, I threw a lot of it at building up a very serious recording set up. However, no matter how much money I spent, my recording still didn't come anywhere close to the quality of the records and CDs I was buying. It turned out that I simply didn't have the ability to produce recordings of the quality I wanted. This was brought home to me with a bang when I joined a band with a drummer with an acoustic kit, which I didn't have the facility record at home. So we went into a proper studio. There the engineer was able to produce a great sounding recording almost instantly and using equipment that, technically, was actually slightly lower quality than what I had in my "studio". It wasn't a one-off occurrence either. Every studio I went to over the next 5 years the story was the same. Eventually I had to concede that the weak link in my studio was me, and that I had wasted the best part of £30k over the past 15 years, buying hardware and software that I simply did not have the skill to get decent results out of. Since then I've sold almost everything (at a considerable loss) and my studio exists for me to do drum programming for one of my bands (something that I can do well) and very basic demos for songs, where the sound doesn't really matter so long as all the instrumental parts can be clearly heard. If all of that hasn't put you off then I suggest the following: 1. Don't spend any more money. What you have already from a technical PoV is probably far superior to the equipment that was used to produce some of the most memorable recordings of all time. Learn to use what you have, and get to know all of it inside out, before even contemplating opening your wallet. 2. As others have said, the weak link in your recording set up is most likely the listening environment. Learn its strengths and weakness. Spend hours listening to your favourite recordings on your set up so that you know exactly how they sound. Only when you are completely familiar with how great recordings sound on your system can you start to make objective judgements about your own recordings. By the time you have put in the hours doing the above you should be able to tell whether you have the aptitude to make recordings yourself that are up to the standard that you require. I know if I had my time again I'd take all the money I spent on my "studio" and hired a proper one along with a decent producer. At least that way I'd have come out of it with a finished album that sounded great, instead of a handful of recordings that I have never been completely happy with and a load of half-finished tracks that are lost forever. I'd probably even have enough left over to spend on effective promotion.

Got to agree. That body shape is minging.