BigRedX

That's crap because he's doing it wrong. Instead of correcting every drum hit to the nearest equal grid point, he should have built a new quantisation grid from where the important drum transients actually are. In Logic this is called "Groove Quantise" but there should be an equivalent function in all decent DAWs. You then quantise any errant drum hits and all the other instruments with hard transients to this grid. As it's based on where the drums actually are rather than strict 8th/16th etc. notes, all the feel of the original is maintained, the only difference is the whole arrangement becomes super-tight. Also it's a lot quicker to do that the process shown in the video, although it might be necessary to create a separate template for each important section of the song where the feel is noticeably different.

The thing you have remember is that for most musicians, unless it is their main source of income, playing in a band comes a long way down the list of priorities such as family, work, sport, sitting in front of the TV, and IME many simply view it as something that fills an otherwise empty evening once a week. You can't expect these people to have any kind of serious commitment - especially for a covers band where it simply regarded as a bit of fun and hopefully some beer money.

It's still a fixed beat. Just not one that has been set to equal 8th/16th/32nd note intervals. Here's one of mine - everything except the vocals and the legato guitar have been quantised to the beat points of the main loop

I would as well. The features appear to be decent, but I'm a little worried about how flimsy it looks especially for live use, and the fact that it uses non-standard connectors for MIDI. IMO DIN connectors are pretty terrible for gigging applications (last time I used a lot of MIDI gear live they were all replaced with XLRs) but still preferable to mini-jacks.

You must have grabbed it in the hour between me seeing it was for sale and deciding I wanted to buy it.

If your DAW is any good you can quantise to anything - it doesn't have to be simple 8th or 16th notes. In the days when I was creating music using loops, I'd take the loops into Recycle, extract the timing information from them and quantise the rest of the instruments to that. If I used different loops in different parts of the song I'd either change the quantisation to fit each loop or re-quantise the loop itself to fit the main quantisation pattern.

I think this describes my musical tastes as well. I'm always suspicious about people who claim to like almost anything or have a very broad musical taste as IME it makes them too undiscriminating. I want the musicians I work with to have definite likes and dislikes and not be afraid to express them. Someone who claims to like most things generally has no taste at all (IMO).

The argument I always see for having lots of controls on your bass is that it makes it easier to make mid-song adjustments to the sound. My opinion is that so long as the bass is actually making a noise, the band will sound worse if I stop and fiddle with the controls then if I wait until the end of the song and then make adjustments at my amp or pedals.

There are a couple of instances where active circuitry can make sense. 1. When it allows separate EQ adjustments for each pickup on the instrument like the Wal or ACG filter pre-amps. 2. When you use a long cable and like a very bright sound (unfortunately long in terms of cable length and bright in terms of sound are both subjective). In all other cases whatever the on-board electronics do, can be far better achieved with the controls on your amp or with smoother main powered device in the signal chain. The other thing to consider is that very few on-board pre-amps are designed with a specific pickup(s) in specific location(s) on the instrument so they don't offer any custom frequency advantages over a decent set of tone controls on the amp or on a pedal.

Those crazy ancient strings...

Apart from instruments using the Lightwave optical pickups and similar systems, "active" pickups are simply low impedance/output coils and magnets pickups with a level/impedance matching pre-amp fitted into the same casing. The method by which the string vibrations are sensed is exactly the same as standard "passive" pickups.

One of things that has always struck me as being weird when it comes to pedals is that the signal flow between pedals goes from right to left whereas the signal flow for the controls on the pedal themselves goes from left to right. Why is that?

Another BRX rule for boutique pedals is that the name must either be offensive or a sex joke that only a 14-year old boy would find funny.

It passes the BRX test for boutique pedals by using a badly designed typeface for the name.

Proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The matt black finish is nice, but someone has scratched an offensive word in it. Also no legends for the controls, and this pedal goes one further in the inconveniently placed control/socket stakes by having the footswitch mounted sideways and not even connected to the circuit.

If you buy second hand you can got a lot of Macintosh computer for very little money. My MacPro 2010 with 64GB RAM cost just £650 second hand. It doesn't run the newest version of Logic Pro X but with a bit of lateral thinking I was able to get 10.4.8 installed which includes everything except the very latest updates.

The white scratch plate is the better of the two, but ideally I'd want it with a Vibrola tailpiece and banjo tuners. I've been a massive fan of both the Firebird guitar and the Thunderbird bass since forever, but the Gibson models that tick all the boxes for me have always been way out of my reach price-wise. In the end I sacrificed authenticity for something that embodied some of the spirt of the originals but was far more playable than the modern "name" reproductions in the shape of an Overwater Original bass: And a Fretking Esprit guitar:

I tried the 5 string version of the Gibson Thunderbird Studio at a point in the 90s when it was the only way of getting a 5-string bass in a Thunderbird shape without going for a custom build. Very underwhelming IMO, because it was simply a very ordinary 5-string bass with a Thunderbird-shaped body. Had almost nothing in common with a classic (76 re-issue or earlier) Thunderbird other than the shape. Proof (if any more was needed) that even Gibson can't get their legacy basses right.

I'm using ImgBB. It's not the slickest of sites or interfaces, and it occasionally has problems detecting that I'm logged in, but it does the job and doesn't look as though it's going to be charging for its services any time soon.

I use a system whereby anything important that warrants long term availability is hosted on an external image site, and the Basschat storage is for stuff that doesn't matter if I'm going to need to delete it in 6 months time.

It's not so complicated. Eight identical channels so once you've figured out how one works you know how to work the other 7 as well. Also the bottom half of each channel doesn't do anything unless you need side-chain processing (where the signal being processed is controlled by a different signal - i.e. compression/gating of the bass guitar being triggered by the kick drum).

Really? Didn't sound like it from some of the comments on here.

Some harsh truths: The vast majority of commercial recordings made in the past 20 years will have had some degree of pitch correction applied to at least one of the parts. Some will be completely unnoticeable, some will be done as a definite effect and others somewhere in between. Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean it's not there. I wouldn't be so sure that that there's no post-processing applied to "live" broadcast performances. They're all recorded to multitrack and unless the concert was aired in real time who knows what has been done to the audio between the performance and its broadcast. Remember all those "live" albums of the 70s that were tickled up in the studio before being released to the public. Why is a drop in acceptable and timing or pitch correction of a previously played part not? I can can play pretty much anything one bar at a time, but I might not be able to string all those bars together no matter how much I practice. But for some people comp'ing it together from a multitude of takes is somehow OK while correcting the pitch and timing of errant notes from a single take is not? For me there's no difference. Use whichever gives the best audible end result. I think one of the reasons why there's a lot more processing of live vocals is because these days you can actually hear them at gigs. Certainly most of the gigs I went to in the 70s and 80s often the best you could hope for regarding the vocals is that you could hear there were some. Being able to tell if they were in tune or if the singer had remembered the words was anyone guess. IMO for a long time so long as they could cobble together a decent performance in the studio, it didn't matter live because most people couldn't tell in the gig mix. That however doesn't cut it with todays much better PA systems, so is it not surprising that musicians are opting for various effects now that they can be properly heard?

Agreed. In the past Id have done this myself even if I hadn't had exactly the right tools for the job. These days, and especially for a brand new instrument I'd want it to be perfect out of the box. Therefore I'd be sending this one back to be exchanged for one that had all the correct parts as standard. The alternative would be if there were no more in stock and no more likely to be in stock any time soon and I REALLY wanted this bass, in which case I'd be looking for a discount equivalent to the cost of getting a decent luthier to do the job for me.

I've been looking at the "Sphere" option. IIRC you get about 30 months usage plus a load of extras for the same price as buying Studio One outright. Within that time frame I'd expect to have think about at least one paid upgrade if I went for buying outright, and if I find I'm not using it enough to justify the subscription I can always take a break until I do need it again. OoI how often does the software "phone home" to check that you are still paid up? If I was to go this route it would be mostly for the live use facilities and a lot of the places where my band plays have limited opportunities to connect to the internet. Worst of all our underground rehearsal space doesn't even have any mobile phone reception!