BigRedX

Yes. However there is no single bass that does everything I need so my perfect basses are: My two Gus G3-5s (one main and one spare for gigs) and my Eastwood copy of the Shergold Marathon 6-string bass (I may even get a second one so I have a spare for gigs). Unless I find myself playing in a band that needs some fretless bass sounds I can't (at the moment) see myself buying another bass again.

It's is also worth considering that the plug-ins that come included with the more expensive DAWs tend to be optimised for the DAW in question then therefore have a lower processor and memory footprint. 3rd party plug-ins are written with maximising compatibility for as many DAWs and operating systems first and foremost, and can work out more expensive in the long term in terms of hardware requirements as well as the upfront additional cost.

These awards tend to be for people who are singers/songwriters/producers rather than "traditional" musicians. I'd far rather someone like PinkPantheress wins this than Coldplay, whose "songwriting" is distinctly lowest common denominator stuff and everything that makes them interesting has been done by Eno.

Unfortunately it appears that DaytonaRik has turned into his dad. He'll be telling us pesky kids to get off his lawn next...

@lowdown Thanks that makes sense. However for a score that contains the instruction "literally go flipping nuts" I doubt many people would be sight reading it and the notation is there to help the players track where they are in a piece when they play it from memory, rather than to read from scratch.

I take it you spent some time in Nottingham? Were you in a band there? I was at school with Rob Birch and Nick Hallam. I saw Pinski Zoo lots of times during their weekly Friday Night residency at The Hearty Goodfellow. Anyone could get a support with them provided that they came to a gig and stayed to the end of the set. For many of us it was the only opportunity to get a "weekend" gig if you weren't playing rock covers.

I once had the misfortune to be in the rehearsal room next door to the one occupied by Six By Seven. They were so loud that it was impossible for us to practice while they were playing. I also saw them on their local gig for the tour they had been practicing for. The opening number was massively impressive, unfortunately they decided to follow this with one where one of the guitarists swapped guitars for one that didn't appear to be working. After several minutes of mucking about they finally managed to get a sound out of it, but by then all that initial momentum was lost (and the replacement guitar sounded exactly the same as the previous one). IIRC I left before the end of the gig. I'd never heard of Doggen , and after looking him up know why. Another musician who had to move away from Nottingham to be successful.

@lowdown for someone with only rudimentary knowledge of musical notation can you explain why that bar is a problem?

Nottingham: Stereo MCs (posh boys from Ruddington) Tindersticks (an amalgamation of two far more interesting bands) Both bands had to move away from Nottingham and all but deny any connection with the place before they became successful. There's also been a series of one-hit wonders, novelty acts and minor indie bands none of whom are worth a mention. Nottingham has always been a weird place when it comes to mainstream success as a musician/band. The late 70s/early 80s produced plenty of contenders who should have been massive but managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Anyone remember Medium Medium (signed to Cherry Red), 23 Jewels (had a single of the week in NME), 1,000,000 Fuzz-tone Guitars, The Howdy Boys, None So Blind (their debut single was produced by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics) or Pinski Zoo?

While Reaper is cheap (it's essentially free unless you really want to pay the £60 licence fee) you don't get a lot of bundled plug-ins for effects or instruments with it. I don't know how much the fully featured Windows DAWs are these days, but Logic Pro X on the Mac is £199, and by the time you've shelled out for a few virtual instruments to make up for what is missing in Reaper, you will have probably exceeded this without factoring in the cost of Reaper itself. A decent drum plug-in will be over £100 on its own. Regarding audio interfaces have a look at the various offerings from Focusrite. If money is no object look at RME.

Best practice is not to sent phantom power to anything that doesn't need it.

Start by looking for the minimum and ideal hardware requirements for your DAW of choice on their website. Then think about what you want to do with your DAW. Is it just going to be digital multitrack recorder and mixer or will you be using lots of virtual instruments (synths, samplers, drum machines etc.)? Then think about what else you want this computer for. More memory is better, but past 16GB you only really need more if you intend to run lots of sample-based virtual instruments, in which case you might want lots more. So start with 16GB and leave yourself with at least a couple of free slots, and the capability to be able to install at least 64GB RAM. Ideally you want a separate SSD/HD for recording your audio onto. It's always best practice not to record and playback multi-track audio from the system drive. I take it the small drive is for the OS and programs and bigger one for data? Graphics doesn't really matter for music use. All good DAWs de-prioritise screen redraw if they start to run out of steam. However you may want to run more than one display, so make sure your graphics card is capable of driving at least 2x24" screens. A good dedicated audio interface will always be better than whatever is built-in to the motherboard. It will have far better quality AD/DA convertors and ideally at least a couple of good mic pre-amps. If you want to record more than two tracks of audio at once you will almost definitely need a separate interface. HTH

AFAIK it doesn't work with colour laser prints because the toner is different. That said I have never tried it because the work Omnichrom machine was essentially replaced by a very expensive colour copier that connected directly to the computer network by an even more expensive RIP/interface at some point in about 1993/4.

To the OP: what percentage of your gigs is your rig completely responsible for what the the audience hears, and what percentage is it mostly the PA?

Guitars only need to have curvy shapes if they are intended to be played sitting down. And even then it only needs to be on the lower half of the body like the Ovation Breadwinner or any of the Klein-inspired ergonomic designs. All my important playing (in front of an audience) is done standing up so the shape of the instrument really doesn't matter so long as it does not adversely affect the balance on the strap or access to the areas of the fretboard that I need. It certainly doesn't need to be "curvy".

I've not come across any aluminium-necked instruments where the frets were integral to the neck. Not even on on the Born To Rock F4B or the Andreas "Shark" instruments which have aluminium fingerboards. The Born To Rock used inlayed round "wire" and the Andreas had standard frets. As has already been said the Kramer has standard frets fitted to an Ebanol fingerboard (it's the stuff that bowling balls are made out of), so it shouldn't be any more difficult to refret than any other instrument with a traditional close-grain hard wood fingerboard.

There's been a "professional" version of that method available for ages (search for "Omnichrom machine" - although it's become less easy to find due to a pesky similarly-named virus variant). Before the arrival of affordable high quality colour printers graphic designers would use it to add colour (mainly to type) to their mock-ups, to show clients what they were going to get before the design went to print.

From an electrical PoV it should be fine. What is unknown is just how much of your on-stage sound is reliant on the sound of the cabs you have been using.

"Down in the Sewer" came on in the car once and I spent a good 3-4 minutes waiting for Jon Anderson to start singing so I could work out which Yes song it was.

Over the past 40 years I have used cabs with every standard size of speaker from 8" to 18". These days I I have given up using a conventional bass rig completely because on the whole IT DOES NOT MATTER to me. If I was in the market for a traditional bass cab again, my criteria for choosing a cab would be as follows: 1. Do I like the sound? (can only really be considered when playing with the rest of my band) 2. Does it go loud enough without distorting/dying? (see above) 3. Do I like how it looks (and more importantly how it looks with the rest of my rig)? 4. If I'm not playing in a band with a van and/or roadies, can I lift it (easily) on my own, and does it fit in my car/on the bus/down the escalators on the tube? AFAIAC none of the other facts, figurers and fictions that speaker cab manufacturers would like to bamboozle us with are important.

While it is a slightly modified DMZ5000, the bridge is the least consistent thing about Kramers from that era. It could just as likely have sported a Badass or a Schaller 3D from new.

For vinyl, you will need to cross-check the barcode (if there is one) the catalogue number, the country of manufacture and possibly the run-off groove markings as well as the small print on the actual sleeve and labels, to try and narrow down which version you have. I suspect that some of the Sex Pistols records are bootlegs, which is why they are not allowed for sale. It's a dodgy area. I've sold a couple of "unofficial" CDs, but they were "proper" glass-mastered versions rather than CDRs. The advent of bands doing short-run releases on CDR is problem area too, as many of them would be relatively trivial for an unscrupulous seller to duplicate if they were valuable enough to justify it.

If you are going to try and sell them on Discogs, make 100% sure that you are listing the correct version. The sorts of people who buy on there (especially rare versions) will demand that sort of accuracy and won't be happy if you sell them the wrong version, even if it is a genuine mistake on your part. I speak from experience.

I didn't start listening to music until 1971, but retrospectively I've come to regard "Parachute" by The Pretty Things as the by far and away the best album released in 1970.

Personally I wouldn't bother with ProTools unless you are collaborating with an existing ProTools user and expecting to make serious money out of your recordings. The iLok copy protection system is beyond flakey, and ProTools' parent company Avid appear to stumble from one poor CEO and financial crisis to another. The only thing keeping it going is the inertia of the established user base built up from the days when it was the only serious proposition when it came to recording and manipulating digital audio. Plus these days when new users have never used a traditional multitrack tape recorder and mixer, the familiarity of the user interface that mimics this system is far less important.