BigRedX

Brilliant! Good on you. Who's making your strings? Newtone or Rotosound?

This. Now that the pits and mills are closed there needs to be a way to make them pay their upkeep.

As I said in the last thread on mashups the all-time classic is the American Edit album by Dean Gray which is essentially the whole Green Day American Idiot album mashed up with various suitable songs. I think this is my favourite track:

It depends whether you are using reverb as a special effect or simply to give all the instruments the sense that they are playing in the same space. In the first case use whatever will give you the sound you are after. Apply it to the instruments/track you are wanting to effect. A lot of the time in this case "character" will be more important than "realism". In the second case pretty much anything that came with your DAW will do. Stick it on a bus and route all the tracks to it in varying amounts. And stop over-thinking it. Most classic (pre mid-80s) recordings were done with whatever reverb device was available in the studio usually a spring or plate, and often it would simply be a spare stereo tape recorder giving an echo with reverb effect. These devices had very little in the way of user adjustable parameters. You could change the level of the reverb signal vs the dry one(s) and if you had a spare channel free on the desk you could apply EQ to the "wet" signal. But that would be it. Perhaps if you went to a very expensive studio they would have a room/space dedicated to producing reverb that could be be mic'd up in different ways, but that room still had a basic "character" that couldn't really be altered. If you are using plugs-ins start with something very simple and basic and only progress onto the more "complex" ones if you find the simple one doesn't offer the adjustments you really need. Don't go loading up Space Designer (or what your DAW's equivalent is) and start auditioning 3rd party IRs because that way you'll never make any decisions, or get your mixes finished. Most of the time something that offers control over reverb time and pre-delay followed by a decent channel EQ will give you all the adjustments you need.

Bluetooth always causes too much latency. The protocol simply isn't designed for real-time audio streaming.

That will be down to compression in the valve circuit.

I used sycamore for the neck of my balalaika, and elm (it was the 70s and there was a lot of it in timber stores) for the body of a guitar

Thanks! My comments weren't meant as a criticism. I was genuinely interested in how far you were going to go with sourcing locally as you had switched production to the UK. Also following on from a recent thread on here about where Basschatter's instruments were made, it highlighted just how dependant all manufacturing had become on having quick and easy access to materials and components from all over the world. IMO there is a big difference between made in the UK and assembled in the UK. Good luck to you with the move and thanks for keeping us all updated.

Actually for one of them I did. It was in the late 70s when the information on how to make guitars was pretty much limited to Stephen Delft's series in International Musician and what little hardware that was available tended to be a random selection of parts of dubious provenance kept in a box under the counter of your local musical instrument retailer. One of the instruments I made was a solid electric balalaika and for the bridge to only option was to make my own as there was nothing even remotely suitable available to buy.

As someone who has made my own guitars in the past and used locally-sourced woods to do it too, I think I'm qualified...

A good compressor, properly set up, and maybe used just when you are playing the harmonics. I'd also look at your EQ settings. What's good for your general bass sound might not be allowing the harmonics to shine as much as they could.

From what I have seen, Chowny are no longer in the £500 price bracket, At the upper end their instruments are over £1,000. Also what are the production quantise for the Chowny range? AFAICS their instruments are still in the niche category where bespoke hardware may actually make economic sense. That doesn't answer the question I asked. I know Maple isn't a local tree to the UK. What I asked was is there a wood with sufficiently similar properties to Maple that is grown in the UK and could be used as substitute. If production has moved to the UK because of shipping and supply problems, would it it also be better if as many as possible of materials and components used could also be made and sourced locally, rather than still to have to rely on shipping? And if global supplies are a real problem what happens when the hardware manufacturers decide that it is simpler and more cost effective to just service their local production markets in Asia and the US?

When you play live how does the audience hear the bass guitar? Direct from your rig or via the PA? If it's the first use whichever cab sounds best in the band mix. However make this decision based on what can be heard out in the audience and not from the stage. If it's the second use whichever cab allows your to hear yourself most clearly at the lowest volume when on stage with your band.

So it's still more cost effective and easy to ship hardware from abroad (especially the US) then it is to make it in the UK? I know that no-one serious makes their own machine heads, but several UK guitar makers (Gus, Overwater, and Wal) have other bespoke hardware (bridges in particular) that I would have thought were made somewhere in the UK (I know for a fact that Gus make all their own hardware except for the machine heads and Straplocks). Also is there no locally grown alternative to Maple? Surely Fender only picked it originally because it was cheap and easily available in the US, and not because of any unique properties that weren't available from other species of wood?

How will moving production of the instruments to the UK be affected by the availability of woods and hardware? Will you be moving to UK sourced wood?

For me the real skill in music is in composition.

Does Mark King's choice of amps matter? Unless he's playing small <200 capacity venues, 99% of what the audience hears of the bass guitar will come from the PA and he's wearing IEMs.

You are only able to take a daily look at this bass because it hasn't yet been sold, which suggests to me that it is over-priced.

This used to be rationale for fitting the Schaller versions to all my instruments that required a strap. However I have come to realise that every instrument requires a different length of strap due to either its design or the way that I play it, and therefore having interchangeable straps is (for me) a last ditch backup measure. The only two instrument I have where I could use the same strap for both are the two Gus G3 5-string basses since they are identical in design and they are always used as my main and backup bass for the same band.

You only have to do this if you haven't fitted them properly in the first place.

Except when you buy a guitar with this type of strap lock fitted there is no mention of this required maintenance, and it isn't until the lock fails permanently that you tend to find out.

Just about to go out and see The Last Cry and the Peter Hook And The Light.

Unlike Schiller Straplocks which I have been using for almost 40 years with one failure on a 20 year old item. My one encounter with the Dunlop version lasted less than 3 months before one of the locks failed. They were replaced with Schallers the following week.

Brilliant That would probably do it! Our input needs are: 1. Computer via USB 1 to 3 channels depending on whether we run in mono or stereo plus click when needed. 2. Two keyboards both in mono 3. Bass guitar via Helix 4. One Vocal So assuming we don't need the click for this band (we will when we go IEM) we could get the output channels down to: 1. One for drums and sound effects from computer (if there were enough I'd consider splitting the drums for everything else on the backing and use two channels) 2. One for both keyboards (relative levels set by the mixer) 3. One for bass guitar 4. One for vocals 5. One spare for the click if we need it later. I think the X18 Rack will do that. It also appears to have the advantage for me that all the connectors are on the "front" of the unit so I don't have to give up yet another U on the rack for a patch panel (our current system has all the outputs on the front of the rack and set up is considerably speedier because of that). One final question (for now) how robust are the outputs to being presented with phantom power or will I need to invest in isolator boxes to be on the safe side?

I had my very first Schaller StrapLock failure in almost 40 years of using them the other week. Luckily it was the part that attaches to the strap that had failed (AFAICS the spring that pushes the "lock" into the button on the guitar had finally lost all of its spingyness which meant that the two parts no longer locked together securely). This was on a part that was at least 20 years old and has regular use over this time, so not bad as regards robustness. Luckily the cup nature of the StrapLock held the bass on the strap so long as I didn't thrown too many aggressive poses on stage. I suspect many more "sedate" players would never have noticed that there was a problem with it. The upshot of this is that I ordered a new set of StrapLocks to replace the one that had failed and also the replace the one at the other end of the strap just in case, and like the OP noticed that the part that attaches to the bass had changed. And it was a good thing that this wasn't the part that I need to replace because on two of my basses the button as attached to the bass using bolts into a threaded insert rather than wood screws, so the new button would have been incompatible. I have been in touch with Schaller who have said that this is the way that all Straplock buttons are being made and there are no plans to make any where the wood screw can be replaced. So anyone with a bass made using unconventional materials and uses bolts rather than wood screws to hold the strap buttons on, be aware.