BigRedX

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

AFAICS the design of the P-Bass split pickup requires an even number of strings to make it work effectively (and look right). In order for it to act as a humbucker but without the loss of extreme top end characterised by guitar humbuckers which have both coils under all the strings, it has one coil detecting the E and A and the other the D and G strings. The off-set split nature also allows a "fatter" wind of the coils similar to the guitar P90 pickup. Unfortunately as soon as you try to design a version of the split P pickup for an odd number of strings you run into all sorts of problems both technical and aesthetic. The best aesthetic solution I can see would be to use a "soap bar" cover and have whatever coil arrangement you want hidden underneath. Unless you need to be able to adjust the pole-pieces there is absolutely no reason have them visible. However if having the split off-set pickup shape is an important part of the over all look of the instrument this might not be acceptable. In that case it's just a question of finding the least offensive looking (to you) solution of all of those already mentioned above. However none of these solutions address what is happening electronically and magnetically with a split pickup working with an odd number of strings. In order for the pickup to be perfectly humbucking both coils must be equal but opposite in polarity, but what do you do when one coil covers an extra string compared with the other. The strength of the pickup depends on the strength of the magnets, the number of coils of wire and the overall resistance. And here's the problem. IIRC the resistance of both halves being equal is the important factor in making the whole pickup hum-cancelling, but the number of coils in each half dictates the tonal characteristics and output level of the pickup. When both halves work for the same number of strings everything balances out, but as soon as one half has to deal with one extra string either the whole pickup will no longer be completely hum-cancelling or the tonal and output level of the halves will not be identical. Putting both halves underneath the centre (A) string means that the tonal and output characteristics of that string will be different to the others. The only solution I can see would be for both halves to be the same (3 string) size, but instead of having them overlap in the middle, would be to have the half only detecting two strings to stick up or down beyond the lowest or highest string. But then you're back to poor aesthetics again...

That's because the right hand "side bar" is also expanding even if there is nothing in it (as in your example). For me this side bar is a complete waste of space except on the home page where it some of it contains useful information. IIRC previous versions of the forum software allowed you to turn it off the bits you didn't need/want and if you removed it completely the posts then expanded to fill the whole width of the browser window.

I can't believe that this wasn't a massive (indie) hit. Catchy tune with clever lyrics. John Peel played it constantly for several moths. It was Single Of The Week in NME, and Any Trouble even covered it on their debut album: 23 Jewels released 2 more singles to almost complete indifference. Singer, songwriter Nick Simpson is now a well respected classical composer...

This latest update still hasn't fixed the inconsistency with whether or not you get a warning message when marking a forum as read depending on which browser you use and whether you click the button at the top within the forum or icon next to the forum name.

I've found it easier and cheaper to learn a bit of rudimentary keyboard technique, rather than spend ages messing about with pedals and having to modify your bass (or guitar) playing style. Then you can buy a cheap modern synth with user programable memories and have the right sound available every time at the touch of a button, no worries about tracking/ghost notes etc.

Based on those two statements Basschat should probably dump the ability to have signatures completely. After all if you can't do anything creative with them and over half the audience can't even see them, then what is the point?

I suppose that's down to differing expectations. I would never click an image expecting a larger version I would always expect that if it was clickable link that it was going to take me to a new page. I'd also use the ability to view the url of the link in the information bar at the bottom of the browser window before clicking anything. To me this is a dumbing-down of the forums to protect the hard of thinking who aren't viewing them on a device capable of displaying all the information properly.

Thanks. However using BBcode it used to be possible to combine an image with link to another web page - i.e. I could make a banner for my signature that was hosted on an image hosting website, which when clicked would take you to my band's website. Without BBcode I can't see how this is possible anymore.