BigRedX

In the days when I was still using amps and cabs and not all of them had standardised on Speakon connections, all my speaker cables were made using heavy duty orange mains cable, so they could be easily identified.

My second main bass was an Overwater Original 5-string with a 36" scale length. I never noticed the extra two inches, although that might have been because my previous main bass was a short scale. The first time I realised that it was longer than standard was when I tried fitting a 34" scale set of strings and found that the silks started in the first fret area. Back then (in the early 90s) finding extra long scale sets with a usable low B was very difficult. These days it's much easier. Since then I've owned basses with all sorts of scale lengths and my experience has been that scale length on it own only makes a difference for the sound and feel of the lower string when you go 36" or longer.

Late 70s more like. The damage to the finish around the neck pocket is what happens when you remove a tightly fitting neck. This body has obviously come from a previously assembled instrument.

Is there a "Wal sound"? The three players I most closely associate with the basses - Mick Karn, Leigh Gorman and Justin Chancellor all sound very different. Can you get close to all the sounds that three use with any of the current crop of Wal-alikes?

Any thread marked please ignore is guaranteed to run for at least a week here on Basschat!

How effective a drum machine will be for you and which one you decide to go for will depend very much on how you work, whether it's studio only or if you expect to use it live, and what sorts of sounds you want. How do you work? One song at a time and once it's complete and recorded you'll never come back to it? Or do you need to be able to put together a set's worth of songs with different sounds and patterns available for each one? I've been using programmed drums in one form or another since 1981 when my band bought a Boss DR55 Dr Rhythm. Despite the small number of patterns and the fact there was no way to automatically join them together to from a song; we were able to make it work for us live by creative programming using the A/B rhythm and Hi-Hat switches along with the trigger outputs for controlling the synths and the fact that we also had a live percussionist and our set never had more than 10 songs in it. However it was quite a complex set up for gigging and the home-brewed devices we used to connect everything together would often go wrong. My next band in 1983 had a Roland 808 when they were still relatively new and expensive. The only way this could be used live was to record it. While composing the individual patterns was easy there were only 32 one bar patterns available, and even if you could fit more than one song in that, there was only one song chain which had to be programmed in real-time a process which was almost impossible to edit and generally it was easier to wipe and start again if you made a mistake. Backup consisted of hundreds of photocopied sheets on which we could mark which beats fell where for each pattern and another A4 sheet showing the structure of the song on relation to these patterns. While the drum sounds were editable to a degree, we nearly always supplemented them with triggered synth sounds for more variety. Next we got a Yamaha RX11. While this boasted a 99 pattern and 99 song memory, the reality was that it was dynamically allocated and even with fairly simple rhythms you would run out of memory long before you reached pattern number 99. At least this drum machine had a tape interface for back-up. However in retrospect the photocopied sheets could be used to program any drum machine with suitable sounds whereas the tapes are only any good for loading into another RX11. After that I had an Alesis HR16. This actually got used at gigs, although only for about 5 songs in the set in conjunction with a standard drum kit and drummer. This was my last hardware drum machine for a long time because it was replaced by an Ensoniq EPS16+ sampler which had a built-in pattern-based sequencer. This was for me far more versatile than anything I had previously. I could sample any drum (or non-drum) sound and use it for my rhythms. I could also sample loops off records so the only limit was my imagination. Everything loaded off 3.5" floppy disks, and with the expanded memory I could get all the drum sounds, sequences and songs loaded in simultaneously for a complete live set. Then in the early 90s I got my first computer and DAW (although back then it was just a MIDI sequencer program) and upgraded the Ensoniq to an Akai S2000 with 32MB RAM and 16MB of Flash RAM which meant that all my samples were available as soon as it booted up. No more time spent loading samples from disk(s). Sequence programming was done on the computer and saved as MIDI files for each song which could all be loaded into the Akai. I used this system live for about 6 years until I joined a band that was live instruments only. Currently one of my bands uses programmed drums instead of a drum live. Everything is done on a Mac using Logic's drum kit designer and drum machine designer plug-ins as well as the only 3rd party instrument plug own which is an emulation of the Simmons SDSV, because I found the samples I had made when I used to own the real thing weren't versatile enough for our current requirements. Before settling on this route, I did look at several hardware drum machines. Several were dismissed almost immediately because they just didn't look robust enough for gigging use. In the end I didn't think any of them were simple enough to be able to use live when it came to selecting songs on stage. One of the things I wanted to avoid was lots of fiddling about with gear in between songs. I could get away with it in the 80s (just) but nowadays I want a slick flowing set of songs. My current system is controlled by two footswitches one for stopping and starting the songs and another which runs a macro which closes the current song, selects the next on in the list and loads it up, a process which takes less than 5 seconds and which is complete before the applause for the song we have just finished playing has stopped. Plus it means that we can change the set order simply by changing the number at the beginning of each song name, something that can be done just before we play if necessary. The computer also sends MIDI patch change information to my Helix and when I get around to adding a decent MIDI Thru box to the rack will be able to do the same for the live synths too. I've yet to see a drum machine that's a simple and versatile for me as my current set up.

But do your trousers flap? Not withstanding the fact that the last time wore trousers with enough surplus material to move in the wind was some time in the 70s; even when I was playing rock covers or in a psychobilly punk band with a 1kW rig I have never needed so much on-stage volume that I could feel the air move.

One of my bands uses Cram for our CDs and we have nothing but praise for their services. However I can't speak for how good vinyl organised through them will be, although I suspect that should we decide to realise something on record in the future they will be our first choice. The problem with vinyl still is that there a relatively few cutting facilities and pressing plants, so nearly everyone offering vinyl will be out-sourcing the actual production, and where that production takes place may well change depending on cost and capacity. Although all the brokers I've used for vinyl in the past 15 years have been UK based the actual production took place in The Czech Republic, France and labels for one record were actually printed separately in the far-east. The waiting times for getting your pressings back have increased significantly since I last was involved in putting a record out. And if your production schedule in any way overlaps with the run-up the Record Store day then forget it! Getting test pressings done is an absolute must. Don't skimp no matter how much it adds to the final price and production time, and check them all before signing off. One thing to look out for and bear in mind when making an order, is that vinyl is bulky and heavy to ship. Because one of my bands wanted to do something a bit out of the ordinary when it came to the packaging we ordered our records in paper sleeves only, with the packaging being produced separately and we would assemble the final product. On both occasions the shipping cartons were too flimsy to properly protect the contents and we ended up with some damage. 500 copies of a 12" album was delivered on a pallet that had been smashed to pieces by the time it arrived at my house. Luckily it looked a lot worse than it actually was and we had to get the broker to send us an additional 100 paper sleeves to replace the ones that had been damaged. All the actual records except one were OK. However had this happened to records in their sleeves I would have been demanding a complete repress of the whole job. Loosing 20% of our stock would have have serious consequences for how were would have been able to price the records, because the actual production cost is just a fraction of the over cost of making a record, all of which ideally needs to be recouped. HTH.

Afternoon and early evening gigs are weird. When I was in my covers band we used to do one that started late Sunday afternoon and was over before 8.00. The strange thing was that even though the pub was open all day it would be almost completely deserted until 5 minutes before we started our first set when the "rock crowd" would turn up en-masse, order their drinks ready to enjoy whatever band was playing that week. The kind of music I'm playing at the moment doesn't really feel right being performed during daylight hours. Having said that we have at least two afternoon gigs booked for this year. One of them is in a large windowless venue so there's no real sense of time once you are inside. The other is in a brewery where they open the large glass doors along one wall so that the people in the courtyard outside can see and hear the bands too. I've been to this one as an audience member several times and it seems to work, although in the past it's always been as a "warm up" to the main events happening elsewhere in the town in the evening. This time around the evening entertainment is significantly less than normal, so it will be interesting to see if it affects the atmosphere in the afternoon.

At least they are holding their second-hand value a bit better these days then they did back in the pre-internet age when I originally bought it second hand. This was in the early 90s when I spotted it in my local musical instrument retailer priced at £575. Spent about 30 minutes trying it out, thought it was very nice, but a it more money than I wanted to pay for a bass back then. I told them I'd think about it and left the shop. By the time I'd got home I decided that I'd been an idiot to leave it at that, and I would nip back into town during my lunch break on Monday and put a deposit down, with the view to paying the rest at the end of the month when I got paid. Unfortunately work suddenly became so busy I didn't have any time either during the day or on Saturday (this was in the days before Sunday opening was normal). When I finally had time to go back, I expected the bass to be long gone. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only was it still available, but the price had been reduced to £350! I didn't bother putting down a deposit, I paid in full there and then, and managed to persuade the shop to thrown in a suitable hard case for an extra £20. I hate to think how little they gave the original owner in cash or PX value in order for it to still be profitable at the price I paid.

The problem with playing music with the intention of earning money to be able to live off, is that unless you are very lucky you will need to take pretty much any gig that is offered. That will normally mean playing music you don't like in dodgy places with people you don't really get on with. I've said before I do something creative for my day job - graphic design - and while I would love to be able to spend all my time working for one or two clients who are keen on cutting-edge designs and think everything I do is fantastic first time around, the reality is that most of what I do is an exercise in trying to get the logo, the product shot and the USPs as big as possible without it looking too horrible, for people who wouldn't know what good design was if it slapped them around the face. Because what I do earns me enough money to live and have some fun, I put up with it. If a client wants something that I think is seriously wrong/bad, I'll politely suggest what I think would work better, but only once and if I'm over-ruled then the client gets exactly what they have asked for. However I like music too much to treat it in the same way. Having to treat playing music in the same way as I treat my design job, would mostly likely kill off any interest I have in playing or composing. No wonder the "giving up" thread is so busy!

There's only one thing there that would point to a slow down problem and that's if the system drive really is an HD rather than an SSD. What model is this Mac? It will be in Apple Menu > About This Mac And while you are their click on the System Report button, and when the system information panel appears select Storage from the left-hand column and see what it says about your system disk.

Unless you still have, and want to fit, the original bridge cover which attaches to the the bit sticking up between the A and D strings, replacing the bridge would probably be a good idea. However check the string spacing first as it tends to be narrower than normal on these old basses.

1. What version of MacOS are you running? 2. How much RAM does this Mac have? 3. Is the system drive a SSD or HD? 4. How big is the system drive? 5. How much free space is left on it?

I currently have one hardware drum machine, as the Linn Adrenalinn has a programmable drum module, although I've never actually used it. My current DAW (Logic) has more than enough programmable drum kit and drum machine sounds and options for my needs, and because I've got 30+ years using to program drum parts I find it far more versatile than any stand-alone device. However in the early 2000s I went through a phase of buying as many of the 70s pre-set drum machines that came up at affordable prices on eBay. At one point I had the following: Bentley Rhythm Ace FR-6 Casio VL1 Electro Harmonix DRM16 Hammond Auto-Vari 64 Hillwood HR2 Rhythm Ace FR-2L Roland TR-33 Rhythm Arranger Roland TR-55 Rhythm Arranger Roland TR-77 Rhythm 77 Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm SoundMaster Rhythm 1 That includes nearly all the "classic" preset drum machines that could be heard on records from the late 70s and early 80s. I also soon discovered that many of these drum machines were re-badged (and occasionally re-cased) Roland devices so there were a couple of duplicates in terms of sounds and patterns in this list. The purpose of this exercise was to record the different patterns and turn them into REX files which would allow them to be imported into a REX player plug-in in a DAW and be played back at any tempo. It would also produce individual samples of each "step" and a corresponding MIDI file of the pattern that would allow the playback of the preset rhythm in conjunction with a hardware or software sampler, but would also allow the production of new patterns by editing the MIDI file within the DAW. I was then hoping to sell the results as sample CD, as these were popular at the time, and I figured having both preset and editable versions of the patterns along with individual samples of each "drum" sound from the various devices would be a winner. However, after having spent a considerable time sampling all the patterns from two devices and slicing them up to produce REX files, I discovered that someone else had already had this idea and was selling the REX files from all the drum machines I had, and some more that I didn't, for a total that was be a lot less than the cost of a typical sample CD. Some sets they were even giving away for free. The only device they hadn't sampled was the CR-78 which was supposed to be in progress. Therefore I started work on doing this myself and soon discovered why there were no REX files for it. In order to be able to replicate what could be done from the front panel controls of the drum machine, the number of patterns, variations and sounds I would have to sample meant that it was going to be a massive undertaking, and in the end I abandoned the idea. All the drum machines were sold - mostly for quite a bit more than I originally paid for them and used some of the money to buy the REX files instead.

Depends on whether you are supposed to play in "unison" with the guitar(s). If it's not mandatory I would stick with standard tuning on a 5-string. In the past when playing with guitarists using down tuning if I'm not tuned to the same root notes as them it makes for more interesting song arrangements. However that may not what the rest of the band want.

If you have the time and patience, I would do something similar to the TB photo you posted on a removable panel that would allow you to spend some time playing the bass with all the options available. You'll probably find quite quickly that there is one that you really like and maybe another one or two that would be useful occasionally. Which of all those options you favourites will be will depend on what sounds you like, what sort of music you play, and how the other instruments in your band sound. There is no guaranteed solution, but I would say that pickup combinations that sound great on your own at home don't aways cut it in a band situation, and often the simple selections work the best. Once you have decided which combinations are actually useful, put them on a single switch and print a new panel for it.

Firstly I need to say that I'm primarily a synth player rather than a traditional keyboard player, so most of this is based on observation of other players. With boogie-woogie in particular there is a lot of left-hand movement, and generally a lot of separation between the left and right hand parts. I suspect that you find very quickly that a 61 note keyboard is too small for this and if you are able to bring the left and right hand parts an octave closer together without them overlapping it won't sound right. Also if your are playing from written notation you'll be constantly be transposing one or the other hand on the fly. IME if you want to play proper piano parts you will at minimum need a sustain pedal. Thankfully you won't need a Leslie Cab. Any decent keyboard which comes with organ sounds should include options for Leslie off, slow and fast. The important thing is to be able to change this from the performance controls as it plays a big part in the sound of 70s rock organ.

While those other luthiers will be able to make you a very nice instrument, none of them (with the possible exception of an ACG with the appropriate pickups and filter pre-amp) will get you close to the sounds of a Wal. Once you step outside of the Precision and Jazz bass market, one luthier/manufacture's basses are not a substitute for another's, and if you think they are you would probably be best off with a Squier.

If you are planning on playing piano parts especially boogie-woogie, you will want more than 61 keys. At least 76 or ideally 88. You'll want velocity sensitivity for piano emulations - the harder you hit the keys the louder the notes sound, like a real piano. For organ parts you'll need to be able turn it off. I'm assuming touch sensitivity means "after-touch" this allows extra expression in synth sounds by pressing down harder on keys you are already holding down. Not needed for Piano or Organ emulations. Weighted and semi-weighted keys will react more like traditional piano keys. Organs tend to have unweighted keys. What suits you best is something you'll only discover after you have been playing a while. Unweighted keys with velocity sensitive sounds (like piano) will make you work harder at your piano technique as they tend to do everything at full velocity. If you watch piano players and (rock) organists you'll notice that the playing styles for each is totally different due to the nature of the sounds each instrument produces. If you want to emulate a real piano you will need a sustain pedal. You might also want something that supports the soft pedal function and a pedal to go with it. Finally remember that a big part of the traditional rock organ sound is that of the Leslie Cabinet and the speed controls for it. You won't get a convincing emulation without being able to change the speed on the fly. You will also want a volume pedal.

Do you have a DAW? MIDI files will load onto a suitable track in your DAW and then transmit the system exclusive patch data to your synth. You may need to adjust the playback speed to get a reliable transfer. If you don't have a DAW there are detailed instructions in the "How To Load Instruction" link on the page you linked to. Be aware as it doesn't seem to be mentioned on the page, but loading these sounds will over-write what you already have on your synth so if you want to keep any of them you'll need to make a backup first. Ultimately you might be better off with a MIDI librarian application. What OS are you using?

It is really the vendor's duty to sort you out with a proper UK legal PSU. Since it appears to be Harley Benton that's Thomann and they should really know better. While it might be quicker to just go out and buy a replacement PSU, it means that you are out of pocket buying something that should have been supplied in the first place, and it also means that Thomann are less likely to start supplying the correct electrical items for sale to the UK.

The thing about second prices for Wals is that you can have the bass the moment that you had over the money. Right now, due to the backlog, you can't order a new Wal, and even if you could you'd be looking at a wait time of 4 years for yours to be completed. However, since the basses at The Gallery are currently unsold, it would suggest that they have been priced too high. A true indication of what a Wal bass is worth would be to look at what second hand example have actually sold for over the last year.

Here are the gigs we have booked so far for the first half of 2024: Tuesday 13th February at The Chapel above The Angel Microbrewery in Nottingham Supporting Murdah Srvc, with Laura Dickinson and NMG We're on at around 9.00pm Friday 16th February, HRH Goth 2 at the O2 Academy, Leicester with Fleisch, The Danse Society, Exilia, PLAY/DEAD and Nox Pulso We're on at 7.00pm Saturday 27th April at The Whitby Brewery, Whitby with In Isolation and Chaos Bleak This is part of the April WGW events and is on in the afternoon Hurtsfall are on first at 2.00pm Saturday 8th July BlaqkhOlesun Alternative Music Festival at The Alhambra, Morecambe Line up and running order still to be finalised Saturday 13th July Leodis Requiem at Wharf Chambers, Leeds Line up and running order still to be finalised

Hurtsfall have two gigs coming up next week. First we are supporting Murdah Srvc at the Chapel (above the Angel Microbrewery) in Nottingham on Tuesday 13th February. Were on at around 9.00. Then on the Friday 16th February HRH Goth 2 is finally going ahead with a change of venue from Sheffield to O2 Academy Leicester on account of O2 Sheffield still being closed due to RAAC concrete problems. This has resulted in a changed but expanded line-up on both days, which for us has both advantages and disadvantages. The overall line up on the day that we will playing is now a lot stronger, so hopefully that will result in a bigger audience; however, we will be playing further down the bill and much earlier (7.00pm) than we would have been had the event gone ahead last year. The full line-up for Friday 16th February hen we are playing is: Fleisch 11.00pm The Danse Society 9.30pm Exilia 8.10pm Hurtsfall 7.00pm PLAY/DEAD 5.55pm Nox Pulso 5.00pm