BigRedX

@bassmansam @Dood All the Shuker basses I have tried, felt dead and lifeless in my hands. It wasn't a question of of neck profiles or any single thing I could pin-point, just the overall feel of the instruments (to me) was completely uninspiring. Shuker instruments aren't the only ones that have elicited this reaction, but in all the other cases when I have felt this about an instrument it has been a single isolated case. It is only with Skuker basses that every single one I have tried felt "wrong". I'm sure there are some Shuker basses out there that won't give me that reaction, but I haven't played them yet. That's why I suggested to the OP that they try some examples of the basses by the luthier they are considering for their build. After my Shuker experience I would never commission another custom instrument based on some nice pictures on a web site and a specification alone. I would want to try lots of instruments to ensure I have picked the correct luthier for me.

I've recently made my first post-Brexit order from Thomann. Delivery times were exactly the same as before. Items arrived on the Wednesday the week after the order was placed.

In theory a really good idea. In practice they don't stock any of the strings I use or would consider as suitable alternatives to those I use.

To the OP, have you played any basses by the luthiers your are considering? While you can't really tell what YOUR bass is going to be like until it is finished and in your hands, playing other basses from the same luthier will give you feel for their strengths and weakness compare with what you yourself want. I loved the looks of nearly all the Shuker basses I have seen, and was in conversation with Jon to make me something until I actually had the opportunity to play some of his other instruments. Unfortunately I couldn't get on with any of the ones I tried as regards playing and feel, but I did save myself from making a very expensive mistake.

Which in itself is essentially a Les Paul Signature bass...

For that spec I'd be looking at either a GB Spitfire or a Sei.

I haven't actually owned basses by either luthier, but I have played lots of instruments by both, and unfortunately I have yet to play a Shuker that I liked in any way other than the looks. Having said that I wouldn't buy a J-style bass from ACG either, because IMO that's not where their USP lies (for me it's the filter pre-amp and the individual coil pickups). To the OP what exactly do you want? A "custom J type bass" cover a lot of variations from something that is essentially a Fender in all but the name on the headstock all the way to an instrument that only shares an approximate body and headstock design with a Fender Jazz.

Both my guitars and two of my basses were assembled in the UK. My other two basses (from UK and US based companies) were made in either China or Korea. But who knows were the materials and components used to make these instruments in the first place come from? And what about 3rd-party electronics and hardware? Some of my instruments have hardware from Schaller, Hipshot, and Gotoh, but are these actually made in Germany, USA and Japan? and even then where do the raw materials to make them come from? My Helix Floor is designed by a US company (Line6) who are owned by a Japanese company (Yamaha) and is probably made in China...

Visual idea completely stolen from the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, who IMO were a lot more interesting musically too.

Anyone looking for innovative ways to program a drum machine/drum tracks in a DAW should have a look at this video:

The tech might be better these days, but the skill still lies with the person doing the programming. Remember that the "drummer" on Marvin Gaye's Midnight Love album is the relatively primitive Roland TR808 - albeit backed up with some excellent programming and production.

I've always wanted to make an album where every track was to a slightly different tuning reference than the others, and none of them were A=440. However it would only be worth doing if you were an artist whose songs were regularly covered by other musicians, so it's not happening any time soon.

Series always sounds better when you play on your own, but as soon as you add the rest of the band the mid-scoop means the bass tends to get lost in the mix.

But with no drummer one of my bands can get all the gear we need to play live with all the band members and our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car.

Most tuning variations from A=440 on anything made before the mid-80s will almost certainly not be deliberate, but down to one (or a combination) of three things: 1. The tempo of the recording was altered by changing the playback speed of the tape machine at mix-down or mastering in order get the correct "feel". The change in pitch is a side-effect of that. 2. The only tuning reference in the studio was not set at precisely A=440. 3. The recording incorporated an instrument that could not (easily) be retuned and therefore that had to be used as the tuning reference for the rest of the musicians. If you are playing the song live, unless you are incorporating an untunable instrument ito the performance you should probably tune to A=440. If you are just playing along to the recording for your own enjoyment and in order to learn the song, either use software to retune the recording to A=440 (without changing the tempo), or retune your instrument to match that recording.

It really depends on the band, the type of music, the device being used to "play" the drums and skill of the person programming it. Most bands will play the songs the same way every time they perform (or at least try to), so if your band is properly rehearsed the fact that the drum parts are fixed shouldn't matter. Besides modern playback devices will allow you to loop and unloop sections manually. Have a look at the features offered by the performance section of the Studio One DAW. The drummer from one of my bands quite just before Covid last year. Having spent most of the past 18 months deciding whether or not to replace him, I used the studio recording to replicate what he played using the Drum Kit and Drum Machine plug-ins in Logic. I used Recyle! to extract a two bar timing template for each major section of each song from his performances and then spent a day or so on each song programming the drum parts. IME the most important thing to get right is the dynamics, rather than the timing nuances. I had to rein-in some of the micro-timing as it just sounded wrong on some songs. In fact once I'd got the dynamics right to drum parts sounded 90% right. The other advantage was that I could "correct" some of the mistakes from the original parts, where IMO the drums didn't quite gel with the rest of the arrangement. We've done one gig with this set up which went down very well and got us a couple of excellent reviews, although the genre (post-punk/goth) does lend itself more readily to programmed drum parts. Having said all that I have been working off and on with programmed drums since I first got hold of an original Boss Doctor Rhythm back in 1981, so I have plenty of experience of programming drums, know how to think like a drummer, and also know when thinking like a drummer isn't appropriate to get the rhythm part that I want.

Have you actually been able to make this strategy work for you? My experience is that people won't buy directly from a band's web site and in fact unless you give then no alternative they won't even visit it. They want to stick with the platforms they know and trust (as a consumer) even if they know that buying or listening this way means less money goes to the artist in question. For my last band, despite the fact that you could buy our CDs/records cheaper, direct from our band website we sold almost nothing that way. People were happier buying downloads or stream the songs from Apple/Amazon/Spotify, and if they did actually want to buy physical product they went to Bandcamp.

You should go and post this question on the Mac Music section of the SOS Forum. I believe that there are some people running this configuration on there who will be able to give you some real world experiences. AFAICS the problem with the M1 MacBook Air's, isn't the processing power (my ancient 2012 MacBook Pro has plenty of processing power for Logic provided I don't go mad with the plug-ins), but the fact that RAM is capped at 8GB which may be a problem if you are running sampler plug-ins with memory intensive samples (like orchestras).

I've just realised that my Eastwood copy of the Marathon 6-string bass is essentially a signature instrument, as it's branded as the Eastwood Hooky Bass 6 PRO. It's a strange one because although it is supposed to be based on Peter Hook's favourite Shergold Bass, there's nothing really about it that's any different from the other 90 or so Marathon 6-string basses that Shergold produced in late 70 and early 80s. Even the colours it's available in are the same (or very close) to the colours available from Shergold.

I think the most I have ever paid to see a band was £40-ish for The Human League in London about 5 years ago. THB I don't like big venues (anything bigger than Rock City size) as they have for me very little atmosphere. It would have to be someone very, very special to tempt me back to Nottingham Arena for a gig. And to re-enforce how over-priced a lot of gigs tickets are, I have just paid £35.00 for Saturday night at WGW next weekend to see Peter Hook and the Light, The Last Cry, and two other bands. That's good value IMO.

It completely depends on the bass. If it's a standard model with a few (imperceptible to me) tweaks and a "custom" colour and graphics, then probably not. On the other hand if it's something very different from the standard model it is based on or something completely unique then so long as the bass fits requirements, maybe, and in that case the "name" attached to the bass is almost completely irrelevant. I've owned one signature instrument - Yamaha BJ5B - which is the Terry and the Blue Jeans signature bass made in a limited edition of 50 along with a matching guitar. The bass is the only way of getting an SVB shape in 5-string configuration, I liked the look of the SVB re-issue basses but at the time I was only playing 5-strings, so when one turned up on Ishibashi I jumped at the chance to buy it. I'm not really fan of the music of Terry and the Blue Jeans but the bass looks cool. Unfortunately when I actually got it, I discovered that it was essentially a TRB5 with the SVB body shape and ridiculously narrow neck. It was also the heaviest bass I have ever owned. Kept it for a couple of years and used it at a handful of gigs and then move it on when I had my big instrument clear out. And don't forget if you also play guitar, every "Les Paul" is technically a signature instrument.

What do you expect with a new originals band? The most successful originals band I have ever been in, had nothing but a handful of lyrics written by the singer and a vague idea about musical direction when we got together for the first time. We wrote all the songs that would be our initial set (8 in total) in the first 3 practices and then spent the following month tightening them up for our debut gig. The singer and the drummer had played together previously (in a band that had nothing musically in common with this new one) and I had been very briefly in the final line up of that band (a handful of rehearsals and one gig) but none of us had played together for almost a year. The guitarist was new. We essentially went from nothing to a cracking debut gig in 2 months.

It really depends what you want from a set of bass strings. Also just because a set give me a sound I like, suit my playing style, and work with the basses that I use them on doesn't mean they will be right for anyone else and the bass(es) they want to fit them to. I've discovered the following about Rotosound strings: 1. They go off really quickly. Even in the packets. The only way to guarantee that you'll get a decent life out of them is to buy them off the Rotosound stand at a guitar show and fit them to your bass as soon as you get home. From any other source you have absolutely no idea how old they are when you buy them, and they may well be well past their prime before you even get around to stringing a bass with them. 2. If you want 34" scale length round-wounds in gauges between 110 and 35 they are fine. Everything else is completely hit or miss. Great if your basses are all long-scale 4 strings and you don't down-tune too far. I've spent most of my bass playing life with short-scales, extra-long scales, 5-strings and Bass VIs. I've struggled to get consistently good stings from Rotosound for anything other than ordinary 34" 4-string basses (I have owned a couple). IMO it doesn't matter how cheap a set of strings are if I am constantly finding duff strings in a set. So far (about 5 years of using them) the Warwick Black labels haven't let me down. I also picked them because the low B-string is taper-wound at the ball end which suits the basses I am fitting these too, and which I don't think Rotosound offer as an option. If money was no object I'd be using LaBella Steels but they are twice the price of the Warwicks, and only marginally better.

No. It's when you try a bass out in the shop. Think you like it enough to buy it, but once you've spent a couple of days with it really playing it, you realise that there things about it that you simply can't get on with. It's happened to me the last time I bought a bass from a shop (about 16 years ago). Once I got it home I found that it didn't hang on the strap in a way I found comfortable and that when on the strap the G-string machine head was out of easy reach. The output was very low compared to all my other basses and the sound a bit on the thin side. These were all things that it would have been almost impossible to discover in the shop, but were very apparent after a couple of days of really putting the bass through it's passes. Had I got this bass from an on-line retailer I could have sent it straight back once I knew it wasn't for me. Instead I tried living with it's short-comings for a month or two, decided that I couldn't and then spent another 3 months dealing with tyre-kickers on Basschat before I was finally able to sell it on. It's replacement bought on the strength a couple of recommendations and some nice photos was exactly what I needed.

That's why it's better to go and see some young up-and-coming bands, rather than a bunch of has beens. Having said that I like The Stranglers, but their current incarnation is hardly the classic line up and I'd much rather remember them via those great early recordings.