BigRedX

Did you need to update your OS? I never update my OS unless an application I absolutely require demands that I do. I've only updated and got stuck in Logic limbo because I had to update the OS to be able to use the latest versions of Adobe Creative Cloud which I require for my job. These days using my computer for recording/composing music is very much a secondary function to using it to make a living, so work requirements have to come first. Also if you are begrudging spending £199 on Logic Pro, you obviously didn't run Logic in the early days when the new price was IIRC £399 for just the MIDI sequencing application and an additional £300 for the "Audio" extension to allow you to record and manipulate audio; and upgrades were £150-£200 a go (plus an additional £150-£200 to upgrade the Audio component). And if you wanted plug-in instruments they were £50 to £200 each depending on what you bought. A "back of an envelope" calculation on what I spent from buying Logic 1.x to upgrading each version to Logic Audio 4 plus the various plugins is somewhere around £2k (that's just for software - I hate to think how much I spent on MIDI and Audio interfaces over the same period). On top of that some of the upgrades required you to exchange your copy protection dongle for a newer version leaving you without any functioning music software for about a week. In those terms the current pricing of Logic X at £199 is a complete bargain.

OK. Point me at Linux native professional standard alternatives to InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat Professional. And Logic is £199.00 To bridge the gap between what comes bundled with Logic and what you get with Reaper is going to cost you a lot more, even if you just pared it down to plugins that you need, rather than the full set that come with Logic.

DIY cassette supremos The Instant Automatons released a 19 track "compilation" album that was just them under 19 different names.

Is this base on a source you know - i.e. one of your own recordings - or on recordings that you happen to own on both vinyl and CD? In the later case unfortunately there is no real way of telling whether the various formats have actually been produced from the correct master version. Also IME "heft" is generally caused by distortion. Vinyl is very good at adding extra distortion to the signal, but it's not what the makers of the record intended you to hear.

IME Linux is fine if you have a strong technical computing background, are happy with command line interface for getting some of the more tricky things done, and your computing interests are either simple web browsing/email/office functions or server administration. For creative users, especially those of us with professional needs for graphics/audio/video the applications simply are not there.

I'm now in my 60s. I currently play in 2 post-punk/goth influenced bands, one with a reasonably long pedigree and the other fairly new although both bands have members who are "known" on the scene from their musical endeavours. I'm the oldest in both bands although my age has never been an issue. Before that I was in The Terrortones (Garage Rock/Pyschobilly) from just before my 50th birthday until I was 56. The rest of the band (we had many guitarists and drummers over those 7 years) varied in age from about 10 years younger than me to being in their late teens. Again age was never an issue. As for audiences give that all the bands mentioned have their musical roots in the 80s and earlier the ages of the audiences were extremely varied, although there are a fair number of people around the same age as me who come to the gigs, and apart from those who were on the scene "back in the day" there really is no set demographic. There are/were in all cases a healthy number of people in their 20s who come to see the bands. As others have said, it does very much depend on the type of music played and the overall age range of the rest of the band. IME for originals bands in particular there are no hard and fast rules on audience ages. EDIT: One of the bands had a large number of high-profile gigs including a European support tour booked for last year before the pandemic wiped all of that out. The UK gigs are slowly getting re-organised - we have revised dates from October this year onwards. However the tour has become a victim of Brexit regulations and although the tour will probably be going ahead we won't be the support band.

Probably yes. Also to get the best results out of vinyl the playback has to take place at the highest speed - for modern systems that will be 45rpm - and the grooves should be as close to the outside of the disc as possible; where each revolution occupies more linear space. For instance on a 12" record the first groove containing music will be approximately 145mm from the centre which gives a linear distance of approximately 910mm for the first revolution. At 33rpm that means the stylus is travelling at 500mm per second. At 45rpm it's 683mm per second (which of course is better). However each subsequent rotation of the spiral is a shorter linear distance until you get to the last groove containing music which will be roughly 65mm from the centre and is 408mm long which is less than half the distance of the first rotation. At 33rpm this last groove is only 224mm per second and even at 45rpm it is 306mm per second. As can be seen with every rotation of the record the quality of the audio on it gets slightly worse. Every time I have had vinyl cut the advice was that for the optimum audio quality the playback speed should be fast (45rpm) and the duration of the audio should be short (ideally less than 13 minutes per side for a 12" disc) so that most of it can be close to the outside of the disc where the stylus playback speed is highest. Unfortunately there is also a compromise between how close together the grooves can be and how loud (better signal to noise ratio) the record can be cut. Unfortunately with mechanical recording and playback systems everything is a compromise. You could spin the disc faster or have them larger, but the faster you go the more you have to counteract centrifugal force which in turn affects other factors. And ultimately there's no getting around the fact that with every revolution of the disc the playback speed and therefore the bandwidth is being reduced.

I don't know what all the fuss is about. When I was a teenager back in the 70s, one of the sales assistants in my local musical instrument store in Loughborough was a bass player and when the shop was quiet, he would regularly break out a bit of slap bass on whatever bass guitars were on display. This was basically a "home organ" store rather than somewhere selling to "rock" musicians, and his musical tastes were some of the most mainstream I knew of. So he had definitely mastered slap enough to impress 17 year old me back in 1978 and someone must have taught him, because it's not a technique that you can work out from just listening to records without some pointers for how it's being done.

Are you talking about actual tension or "stiffness" which is a combination of tension plus compliance of the string? All standard sets of string are very uneven in tension which can be seen in the figures for this manufacturers who publish them. Generally the D string will be the highest tension, and then the as you go both higher an lower the strings reduce in tension. However due to compliance, and a little bit of being used it, they do tend to "feel" relatively even to most people, especially if you play a bass with a standard Fender style headstock and bridge, as the way the strings are attached changes the compliance and goes some way to evening out the "stiffness". Of course if you play a bass with an angled headstock or anything else that gives an equal break angle for all the strings over the nut, or something with through-body stringing that increases the break angle over the bridge, this balance of actual tension and compliance will be completely wrong. Looking at the gauges that you chosen, that has probably taken a lot of trial and error to arrive at those, and of course they will only work on one particular bass. Balanced tension does not equal same tension, and IME is a bit of a red herring as it still relies on compliance to even out the differences in stiffness between the strings. Unfortunately for string manufacturers compliance is not only dependant on the string construction but also on the design of the bass and how the strings are fitted to it - break angles over the bridge and nut and how long the non-speaking portions of the string are, and string manufacturers have zero control over this. The only way that balanced tension can be made to work for all bassists and basses is if the manufacturers sell different balanced tension sets depending on the headstock layout and whether or not the bass is strung through body, and all of a sudden it becomes too complicated for the average bassist. Again it looks though you have found a combination that works for you, how much trial and error did you have to go through to arrive at those values? Also as above those values won't necessarily work on a different design bass.

OK i'll narrow it down as far as possible. When I play both the CD and vinyl versions of recordings that I have been involved with, on my HiFi at home (so the final listening environment is the same) the CD version sounds, to me, much closer to what I was hearing during the final mix playback in the studio. In a good studio control room the acoustics have been adjusted so that the sound is as even as possible throughout the room. There will be a "sweet spot" in front of the desk where the mix engineer sits, but it is in their interests for sound to be a similar as possible for all the listeners in the room otherwise their comments on the mix become irrelevant.

If there was only one master, then it will have either been done specifically for vinyl, or compromised with a vinyl pressing in mind. There are plenty of mastering practices that work nicely for digital formats but which can result in unplayable/uncutable vinyl.

Mixes should always be mastered specifically for the delivery medium as they are have different strengths and weakness. If the vinyl versions sounds better than the CD it's probably because the CD version wasn't mastered properly (or it's purely subjective). I can categorically state that all the recordings I've been involved in that have both the CD and vinyl versions the CD versions sound the most like what we were hearing in the studio when we were doing the mixing.

It might be worth it if you have spent several thousand pounds on your turntable, tonearm, cartridge and stylus and have then perfectly set up and balanced, and your hearing is still good enough for you to be able to tell the difference. It still won't sound as good as as a decent digital file. It might even be unplayable on more budget systems.

Sting was also in "Radio On" which came out just before Quadrophenia. At the time if you were into "alternative" music Sting and Toyah (who had also been in "Jubilee" were equally well known.

But I was looking forward to being able to post 10,000 Maniacs and 1,000,000 Fuzztone Guitars

808 State or just 808 (J-pop electronic band pronounced Ya-o-ya)

AFAIK the only white version is the BJ5B which is the 5-string version and is essentially a TRB5 with the SBV body and headstock shape. It's also massively heavy. I'd say good luck trying to get one because there were only 50 made, but I managed it:

IME Rotosound are very good at making round-wound 4-string sets in 34" scale length and 40/45 to 100/105 gauges and very poor at all other strings. Also IME for 5-string basses getting a decent sounding a feeling low B string depends on both the player and the bass. What works for one person on a particular bass won't necessarily work for another player and might not even work for the same player on a different bass. Case in point, when I owned lots of 5-strings basses I had different strings on nearly all of them because those were the strings that worked best for me for each bass. Having said that I would try Warwick Red Labels as a first choice and if they aren't doing it for you then have a look at Warwick Black Label or LaBella Steels. If none of those are what you are after then try some DRs.

M is for Medium Medium

That's a lot of money, considering that you can normally get a bike box for free from your local bicycle shop (IME they are more than happy to get rid of them) and the cardboard they are made out of is considerably thicker and stronger than the typical guitar packing box.

Well I was going to take my own advice and finally upgrade Logic, but it turns out that I can't do it. About a year ago I bought a second hand MacPro 5,1 to replace my previous (also second hand) MacPro3,1 because I needed to update OSX from El Capitan to High Sierra in order to run the latest versions of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps for my work. At the time I spotted that my copy of Logic 9 no longer worked after the OS update, but as I wasn't doing any music due to lockdown, I wasn't that bothered. Last month the keyboard player from Hurtsfall got in touch saying that we had been invited to contribute a new track to a compilation album and here was his initial idea for the music. Would I be able to add some Bass VI to it? He'd just bought himself a copy of Logic since he knew that's what I was using. No problem, I thought I'll work something out to the MP3 I've been sent and then when I'm ready to record, I'll take the plunge and buy a copy of Logic Pro X. By the beginning of last week, we'd got the structure of the song sorted and I was ready to record. It turns out that sometime in the past 12 months Logic Pro X has been updated and the current version now requires Catalina as the minimum OS. The App store won't let me buy a previous version, even though there is an older one that works under High Sierra. A telephone conversation with Apple support reveals that it might be possible for me to get hold of a version that will work with my Mac, but I will need access to a Mac with Catalina on it in order to be able to purchase the latest version of Logic. I should then be able to go to the App Store on my MacPro and it will allow me to download the most recent version that is supported under High Sierra. However Apple can't guarantee that method will be 100% effective. I have half a mind to buy a the cheapest new Mac I can find from Apple, get my copy of Logic (if the method works) and then send it back for a refund under distance selling regs. In the meantime I was able to do my recording in GarageBand (although even that complained bitterly about being out of date) and I have been investigating the cross-grade options for PreSonus Studio One which does run on my Mac.

I'm not on Twitter - I've never seen the point, and therefore I don't think a Tweet from someone who has obviously just joined to have a moan at FedEx is going to carry much weight.

Does anyone have the contact details for the head of FedEx in the UK? Tried of being lied to on the phone and then cut off whilst on hold.

And add FedEx to the crap list. Printed proofs coming from China sent by FedEx. Unfortunately the printers forgot to send me the tracking info so the first I knew about it was when I returned from a 10 minute trip to the shops yesterday morning and found the "We Missed You" card. Not a problem, I didn't know it was coming so it's not really their fault. I'll organise a redelivery. Go onto the FedEx web site and sort out a delivery for today. While I'm on there I notice that there is also an option to to nominate a neighbour for the delivery, so I thought I would do that as a back up. However once a redelivery has been arranged it is impossible to add another option via the web site (and the phone number on the page you to call because there is a problem, just tells you to use the web site). Spend 5 minutes scouring the web site for a customer service number and trying to persuade the "virtual assistant" to let me speak to a human being before I get one. Fifteen minutes on hold finally gets me through to a real human being who is very helpful and says that she is able to also add my neighbour's address to the delivery details. Sorted, I think... This morning some time between 8.00 and 9.00 FedEx try to deliver again. The first I know about it is when I spot they have put another card through my letterbox. Again not a problem I'll just go and collect from my neighbour. She's not got my parcel, no-one has knocked on her door all morning. Phone customer services yet again (it's a good thing I wrote down the number yesterday when I found it) This time it get escalated and I have been told that they will contact the driver and tell them to make another delivery later today. If this is true that will be great, but it really shouldn't have happened in the first place. Compare and contrast with my "damaged" DHL parcel which was sent again this time by Parcel Force. On my return from the shops yesterday morning, I spotted a PF van in the street, the driver waved me over and said he had a parcel for me, which he handed over and told me to ignore the card through the door. He's spotted me coming down the street, and had waited for me in order to deliver the parcel. Now that's excellent service.

Looks like a Burns Sonic neck. Pity he didn't use the rest of that bass.