BigRedX

All the time. If you don't it says to me that you aren't really connecting with the music that you play.

Which is why I NEVER practice sitting down. It's not how I play on stage so I simply can't see the point.

Five or six years ago I had almost 50 guitars and basses plus a load of synthesisers. I sold most of them and I am now down to: 2 x 5 sting basses which I use with one band, a main and a spare for gigs 2 x Bass VI which I use with the other band, again a main and a spare for gigs 2 x guitars for writing and if I ever get the urge to play guitar live again. The plug-in synths that come free with Logic. Some of it wan't easy, but I decided to be ruthless and anything that hadn't been played for at least 2 years went straight away. The rest was done by a process of elimination using them for rehearsals and deciding which I liked the best, and selling the others.

Bluetooth on an amp (or any other supposedly "professional" piece of musical equipment) is a really bad idea mainly because so far the security on these products has been pretty much zero. Imagine somebody in the audience Bluejacking your set up and then messing about with the settings or streaming some music from their phone through the amp because they didn't like your band?

First potential gig of this year (Infest) has been cancelled and rescheduled for 2022.

This. I can't see ever getting rid of mine.

Unless it's a CITES protected wood and you are planning on taking the instrument out of the country, does it matter?

But at the same time with every decent song you write, you sent the bar just that little bit higher. Or at least that is certainly the way that I work. Therefore something that might have been perfectly acceptable 5 years ago won't make it past the initial ideas stage because I simply don't think it's good enough in the context of the other songs I have written. Therefore writing a good song as you get older simultaneously becomes easier (because of experience and practice) and harder (because it has to match up to the other songs that you think are good).

And some my most favourite songs that I've written were in my twenties too. But by then I'd had six or seven years of writing stuff that wasn't as memorable.

IME most people aren't actually any good at anything. And songwriting is just like any other skill, you have to stick with it from poor beginnings to start producing stuff that other people really want to listen to. After all I can guarantee that no-one on here was a instrumental virtuoso the first time they picked up a guitar or bass. You have to practice regularly. Songwriting is exactly the same. Of course our ancestors in 1000 years time will still need a clue how to turn those zeros and ones back into an audio signal that we will recognise. Just because it is digital don't mean that it will be easy to decode once the current concepts of word-length, sampling rate and bit depth have been lost, and if musical ideas have significantly moved in during the intervening years how do you know when it "sounds right".

More modern post-punk:

I saw them much later than that in 1982 and then 1983 on tour for the Crackdown album.

As I suspected. Thanks anyway. As I've said before I rarely use my mobile for anything other than seeing who's sent me an email when I'm out and about. Things that are trivial to on this forum on a proper computer are either far to time consuming or just about impossible for me on a mobile (or tablet) so I rarely bother looking at Basschat on mobile devices. But I was gratified to see that all the spacing problems were just as bad on the mobile. Unfortunately I can't block the elements as they are all important to the functionality of the site. It's just the way they've been arranged with a whole load of elements on the left and then another load of elements on the right but underneath rather than alongside.

There's probably not a lot you can do about it, but I'd like to add my voice to those complaining about the excess vertical padding and general wasted space vertically. I did think it was down to the fact that forums are tending towards being optimised for mobile devices despite the fact that overall they over a very 2nd rate user experience. However I just had the misfortune to view Basschat on my mobile and the top of the page uses up so much vertical space that, before I started scrolling, I could only see the first topic in any forum (which is normally one of the pinned topics) and when I look at a new thread only the first line of the first post is visible, the rest in both cases being taken up with a lot of useless crap and poor design/layout - blocks with elements all ranged left followed by another block with all the elements ranged right when the two could easily be combined. Even on a big 24" monitor only the first 5 topics in any forum are initially visible and most of them are pinned ones. Is there anything that can be done about this?

@Lfalex v1.1 That's the one. Tasty lava swirl finish (there's only 9 of those).

Cabaret Voltaire were one of my favourite bands of the time. Nag Nag Nag was always how I though Suicide should have sounded (I was majorly disappointed when I heard Suicide for the first time after reading the reviews and then hearing what I thought was weedy organ and drum machine instead of an onslaught of electronic noise). I was lucky enough to see the Cabs twice although I never saw the while Chris Watson was still in the band. BTW anyone here read the Sheffield fanzine NMX?

Thanks. Must be a new model, as the Brad Houser model I was interested in was basically a 5-string Rumblefish with two humbuckers.

Mine wan't quite that bad. The person(s) who owned it before me had made some fairly extensive modifications including striping the original finish, removing all the logos, and modifying the scratch plate and control cavity to allow for extra electronics and controls. When I bought it had to replace the bridge and machine heads to keep it playable as well as replace all the electric components apart from the pickups, plus laminate a new top onto the scratch plate in order to hide the extra holes that had been drilled in it. If I was still using it and hadn't sold it a couple of years ago I would be looking at a refret now.

I was going to ask if the normal P is in the correct P-Bass position, but IIRC the bass is only 30" scale, so I suspect that the overall sound is going to be different to a traditional P-Bass anyway

Good luck with that. There were only 79 Brad Houser models made. I've never seen one for sale in the UK (because if I had, I'd have bought it) and none of the people selling them in the US have been prepared to ship abroad.

As an audience member I would expect a tribute act make at the minimum a decent effort to look like the band they are copying. After all if it was just the music I was interested in I could stay at home and listen to the recordings.

No more ugly than the average Fender P

To improve the basic internal acoustics even though the building itself is perfectly rectangular, you could angle one or more of the internal walls, maybe the ones that don't have either a window or a door in them?

Does anyone actually use the tags? I know lots of people put them in, but does anyone actually click on them to find "related content"? I used to a be a big tag user for some things until I discovered that adding tags to thread was one of the causes of the appearance of the right hand margin and the narrowing of the actual thread content width. Since then I have stopped including them in any threads I start.

No, the text and the ads (or whatever is in the right hand side bar) are expanding at the same rate. However the design of the site is such that the overall width of the site is always 100% of the browser window width, and with the width of the right hand side bar being a set size for a given magnification and the left hand side being fluid, then the left hand section expands or contracts to fill the rest of the available width. So changing the overall magnification of the browser window content makes the text size bigger and the ads bigger. As the ads get bigger the line-length of the text gets shorter