BigRedX

I play and compose first and foremost for me too. But there would be zero point in playing live or recording and releasing my tunes if I didn't also care what my audience will think.

Well worth reading the (fairly recent) SOS thread on sine wave inverters and why most of the the cheap ones are crap for the average musician's needs and at best will add loads of noise to your signal and at worst can damage your amp. I'll post the link when I have more time.

Solos are for boring old fashioned bands. Every note I write and subsequently play has been carefully considered and orchestrated ahead of time to to be the best possible note (IMO) to go with what the other musicians are doing at any given moment in the song. The song is the most important thing.

Even on a Bass VI chords of more than two strings tend to be muddy and indistinct unless played high up on the neck. If you want to play "guitar-style" chords use a guitar it works and sounds a lot better. For 2 note chords so long as you know where the notes are on each string the intervals between strings doesn't matter.

As a band member and composer the audience reaction to our performance and our songs is very important to me. Whether anyone thinks I have a "killer bass tone" less so. I personally think that I have the right bass sounds for all my band's various songs, but playing the right notes is more important. My choice of instruments is down to band image and playability above all else. TBH if a non-musician notices the bass tone then there is probably something wrong with the mix.

Really depends what and how you play. Most ERBs are tuned with all the strings a 4th apart. It means that you can play the same patterns whatever string you start on and still be in tune. A Bass VI will normally be tuned the same as a guitar but an octave down. However there are no fixed "rules". I tune my Bass VIs EADGCE simply because it some of the songs we play require a drone "C" and overall it's a good compromise tuning that doesn't require me to retune between songs.

Since the late 80s I've always gone bass direct into the amp. All my effects have been in the FX loop of the amp...

Yes it is a problem. And add to that, the fact that the specifications change every six months or so, and what works under the old spec will almost certainly look rubbish on at least one platform under the new one. There are web sites that will give you all the relevant specs for the various platforms and the better ones will show you the area that you need to cover so that your image is not resized to fit, and the area that will be visible in all formats for that image size. The unfortunate truth is that the area that is common to all platforms is generally fairly tiny compared with the overall image size required to suit everything, and this in particular tends to render it fairly useless for displaying lets of text. I have a feeling that this is done deliberately so that the cover image cannot easily be used as "free" advertising in the way that the OP wants.

Unfortunately it only clicks twice if you use a TRS jack plug. Otherwise it's no more secure than a normal socket.

Everything gets good reviews in the magazines otherwise the manufactures stop buying advertising space.

The answer to Question 10 is because the forum software stupidly assumes that you want a smilie rather than an figure 8 followed by a bracket. Previous versions allowed you to turn off automatic smilies, or tweak the text by hand, but the last 2 or so have left out that functionality.

Although both bands I currently play in are in roughly the same genre (post-punk/goth) I use completely different basses for each. One band is a traditional vocals, two guitars, bass and drums with synths and effects on backing; I use my Gus G3-5 strings for that one. The other is much more minimalist with just vocals, synths, bass and drum machine and I use an Eastwood Hooky Bass 6 for that. I have the same amplification for both but because it is a Helix into an FRFR, the patches on the Helix are completely different for each band, and apart from mostly using the same compressor and chorus models they don't have any other modules in common.

Yes it is, but while "vintage" doesn't have a strict definition like "antique" does it tends to refer too anything more than 25 years old (but less than 100) so all those 80s things are indeed vintage now. As are most of the 90s!

Are you sure? I've no experience of 34" sets but all the Bass VI sets I have tried (30" E-E) have a wound high E string. If this was me, I'd be looking at getting Newtone to make me a 34" set based on their Axion Bass VI strings

Surely round-wound strings have now been around long enough (since the mid 60s) to also be considered "vintage". Same with "high-mass" bridges - the original Badass Bridge dates from the 70s.

But it's got nothing to do with the mass of the bridge and everything to do with the improved engineering that normally goes along with these designs.

You might possibly be able do something with EQ if you are also able to automate the bands so that they follow the pitch of notes you are trying to remove, but it's going to be much more long-winded and very probably not anywhere as effective as Spectralayers. If a piece of software does what you want then you need to weigh up the cost of paying for it against either not having access to the features anymore or using something that is cheaper but not as good. That's what free trials are for, so you can weigh up if it's worth the money. IMO if you need the features of Spectralayers and nothing else is good enough, then pay for it.

I get around this problem (and the one of people wanting to borrow my amplification) by having instruments and gear that is strange and unusual, and one look at them are enough to put any prospective borrower off. Having said that in the days when I played guitar, I did lend one to the guitarist of the (reasonably well known) headlining band after his Telecaster suffered a catastrophic electrics failure (I don't know either). Since I was playing a Gus G1 as my main guitar and a Custom FretKing Esprit as my backup neither were a particularly good fit from an image, sound or playability PoV. IIRC he settled on the FretKing, and the band were able to complete their set although their guitarist looked seriously uncomfortable the whole time. In my early playing days, I found myself in a similar situation where I broke a string on the opening song and not having a spare string or bass had to use the support band's violin bass copy which was strung with flats and attached to a strap so long it hung at about knee level on me. After that experience I made sure I never gigged without a spare guitar or bass and a full set of replacement strings.

It depends what "vintage tone" we're talking about. Perhaps they mean the sound of a 70s Fender fitted with an after-market Badass Bridge? The "mass" of a high-mass bridge makes almost zero difference. Once it is attached to the body it effectively becomes part of it, and therefore the overall increase in mass of the body plus bridge between the BBOT and a high mass bridge is negligible. However the improved engineering of a typical high-mass design will give several practical advantages to stability and ease of intonation adjustment. And just to show that most high-mass bridge marketing departments know nothing about physics, the benefits to string vibration are nothing to do with energy transfer but are about minimising energy loss. The better engineering of these bridges mean that there is less chance of string vibration energy being used up making the intonation and height-adjustment screws rattle and vibrate, and therefore slightly more energy available to be detected by the pickup.

How successful it is will depend on: 1. What the bass is and how it is constructed 2. How you play and what sort of bass tones your favour 3. What strings you currently use 4. How much time and effort you are willing to put in to changing/experimenting with your bass/technique/strings, if your first attempt doesn't yield the results you are after.

I've only made 6 gear-orientated purchases this year and only one of them (4 sets of Warwick Black Label Strings) were directly for the bass. The two sets I have used so far are performing exactly as expected. The best bit of non-bass musical equipment I have bought in 2021 is this plug-in version of the classic Simmons Drum kits. Having owned the original SDSV hardware I've been mightily impressed with the sounds and adjustments available and it is a distinct improvement over the handful of samples I made before I sold mine. Everything else I have bought has been cases, stands and software updates/upgrades which have all done exactly the job I required of them and therefore I have no contenders for worst bass gear purchase this year.

A while back there were complaints about massive pics in signatures, so limits were placed on the size (in both pixels and file size) of images that could be uploaded to the Basschat servers. Hopefully @ped will be along with the exact current specifications, and then you will know how much you need to reduce your images by. Alternatively you could use an image hosting site and link your pics without having to worry about file size.

That would be almost completely signal cancelling. A humbucker works because both the winding of the coil and the magnetic polarity is swapped around between the coils. This means that any "background noise" and some very high frequencies (determined by the distance between the two coils) get cancelled out and the rest of the sound of the strings gets through. If both coils are around the same polarity pole-pieces then everything will be cancelled out. That's why there is no information on them. They don't work.

MacBook Pro, Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 2nd Gen, ART DTI – Dual Transformer/Isolator, PSUs, 1U patch panel to put all the connections to external gear on XLR connectors on the front of the rack. This system fits in a 3U rack box and runs the backing tracks for both my bands.

There's still almost 2 months to go before the end of the year so it could all change, but right now my album of the year is "Love Made Me Do It" by Kat Von D which is completely 80s-tastic! I also liked "Flux" by Poppy, but it's a bit ordinary compared with her previous album "I Disagree" so not a contender IMO. PS why is this in "Off Topic"? It's a perfectly acceptable subject for "General Discussion". Or does the OP not consider their choice to be "music"?