BigRedX

So wouldn't you be better off buying a Lakland Skyline Bass instead?

If there is latency in some things but not in others then it would follow that the computer is prioritising some Bluetooth events over others. How far up the list a set of Bluetooth pedals comes then, is anyones guess.

I think eventually one of your gigs will be visited by someone from the PRS...

Yes, and no. The £6.00 is split between all the songs you play, approximately based on their duration. When you submit your set list you should also include all the covers that you play as well. The band leader's share of the royalties will be £6.00 minus the proportion that goes to the writers of the other songs you play. For example if your band plays 10 songs of which two are originals and the rest covers and all the songs (or at least the registered versions) are roughly the same length then he'll get approximately £1.20, so long as there are no other bands on the bill (or if there are they haven't also submitted set lists).

This is wrong. The performance royalties from being played on even local radio are quite substantial. My one quarter split of a song played on BBC Radio Nottingham was a couple of pounds for each play. On 6 Music it was considerably more. Also don't forget if your band is regularly playing live you can get performance royalties from this too. Last time I looked the PRS pubs and clubs rate was £6.00 split between all the songs performed live at a gig. That might not sound like much, but bear in mind that most small bands don't bother to report live performances, so there is a good chance that that whole £6 will go to the songwriters in your band each time you play. Also for bigger gigs and festivals the rate is higher. If you are out gigging regularly it soon adds up. My last band funded all our studio time (3 EPs and a full-length album - approximately 15 days in total) from our PRS royalties, that's roughly one gig a week over 5 years, plus radio play. From 40 years of recording and releasing independent music I now earn a couple of hundred pounds a year from the PRS. It may only be a few pence here and there for each song, but I'm still getting royalties from recordings made and released in the 80s and 90s as well as those I'm making with my current band.

Join the PRS. You'll also be able to collect performance royalties on your songs when you play them live as well as when they get played on the radio or television. A lot of the copyright information supplied by Bandcamp and other on-line music services such as aggregators is aimed at musicians and bands in the US where the mechanism for collecting performance royalties is somewhat different to that in the UK and Europe. Don't sign up for any service on-line that purports to collect your performance royalties for you. If you are a PRS member you won't need it. In the UK you don't need a publisher. All performance royalties go to yourself (and you co-writers) unless you have specifically assigned a proportion to a publisher. In the US it is somewhat different as a lot of collection agencies will assume that you have a publisher and hold back the publisher's share. You can get around this by setting up your own publishing company and assigning them a proportion of the performance royalties. However it is only cost effective if one of your songs is picked up to be used on a US film or TV show.

Is Bluetooth fast enough for timing-critical operations like patch changing? In the days when I used to automate all my band's patch changes with our MIDI sequencer, one of the things that we spend a lot of time on was getting the program change commands in exactly the right place for a glitch free performance. Often we'd be moving things forwards a back by the smallest MIDI timing increments to find to optimal position for each one. My understanding of Bluetooth is that there is too much latency for timing-critical operations, and that the latency is not consistent depending on what other operations the two Bluetooth devices are also doing at the same time. I'd get a proper set of MIDI pedals and MIDI interface to connect to the computer to do this. Does the audio interface you are using on the computer not already have MIDI?

That's pretty much how my Hondo Alien sounded, particularly once I'd replaced the horrible bridge with a proper Schaller one. Plenty of clarity and a piano-y sound with round-wound strings - very suitable for post-punk bass lines.

I would suspect two reasons: 1. Not everyone liked them or understood how they worked properly. I bought a 5-string Overwater Original fretless from a prolific session bassist where the pre-amp had been replaced with a Ken Smith one. 2. They eat through batteries compared with modern designs. I much preferred the sound of my fretted Overwater with the filter pre-amp to the one with the Smith, but I can see/hear how they wouldn't be for everyone.

Even that is no guarantee. I had 500 copies of my band's LP on vinyl delivered on a pallet from the pressing plant in France. By the time they reached me the pallet had been smashed to bits and every single box had damaged records in it.

I've not owned a Kramer Duke, but I have owned other Kramer basses - 450B long scale and XKB-10 short scale - and a Hondo Alien, and IMO apart form the completely rubbish hardware (bridge and machine heads) on the Alien it compared very well. Once I'd swapped them for proper Schaller components it was a very usable compact bass with a perfectly good sound.

Who? Seriously though, they're not a massive company with a presence on the wall of almost every musical instrument retailer in the UK, Besides their Fender clones only appear to be part of what they offer, and my perception of them has been as more a custom maker than off-the-peg. Could they stay in business if all they offered were the Fender Clones with no customisation options?

TBH there are only 2 types of Fender style basses that are worth making if you are not actually Fender. 1. Standard P and J style basses of a reasonable quality that can be sold cheaper than the equivalent Squier branded model. 2. Specialised models that look on the face of it look like a typical P or J but have been customised to exactly match the requirements of the player ordering it and come with a correspondingly high price tag. Pretty much everything else is going to be doomed to failure.

No. Please no more pointless electronics being shoe-horned into the control cavities of our instruments. Especially when it almost always going to be duplicated somewhere else in the signal chain. IMO all I want on my bass is a master volume control that works smoothly, and for basses with more than one pickup that don't have an individual output for each pickup individual volume controls/balance controls for the pickups. If you are going to have on-board EQ then it needs to be individual EQ for each pickup, and not a master one which is going to be duplicated elsewhere in the signal path.

The Kramer Duke is generally a better bass, especially where the hardware and electrics are concerned. However if you can find a Hondo Alien cheap enough to be worth upgrading then it can come very close it in quality. There are two things to watch. 1. There are quite a few Hondo Aliens that are being passed off as Kramer Dukes. The earliest way to tell them apart is the neck joint. The Duke has the standard Kramer 2-bolt attachment with a lozenge-shaped plate which includes the serial number. The Alien has a 4-bolt neck plate attachment. Also the Duke has a single bolt string retainer whereas the Alien has two bolts. 2. Not all Hondo Aliens have an aluminium neck. All Kramer Dukes do. If you prefer the feel of the all-wooden neck the Alien might be a better choice if you can find a wooden-necked one.

How much string you need around the machine head winding post depends on what sort of headstock your bass has. For basses with angled headstocks you need somewhere between one and a half and two turns. This is enough the hold the string in place while not being so much that string tuning stability takes too long to achieve. (as you tune up the string would around the post takes longer to stretch to an equilibrium than the normal speaking length, therefore the more you have wrapped around the post the longer it will take the tuning to settle after restringing). Usually 7-8 cm of excess string is right depending on the diameter of the winding post. On basses with non-angled headstocks, for the strings that do not pass under string retainers, you need as much string as it takes to wind to the bottom of the post. This will depend in the thickness of the string, the diameter of the winding post and height of the post from the bottom of the string slot to the bottom of the post. If you are good with maths you could work it out, but it is generally easier to do it by trial and error making a note of how much excess string you have each time and adjusting it as appropriate the next time you restring. Strings that pass under string retainers can be treated the same as strings on angled headstocks.

The Hondo Alien/Kramer Duke is already short scale so no sawing needed.

Anything that is basically a knob joke.

Unless you have a particular amp/cab sound that you like and the Helix nails it convincingly, you don’t really need any of the amp and cab sims. In real life an amp and cab are just devices designed to make you bass loud, and any “sound” they have is generally unintentional. The vast majority of my bass patches don’t use and amp or cab sims - just a suitable EQ module - and those that do the amp was selected primarily for its drive sound and is used simply as an effect. However for guitar and Bass VI use the amp models are somewhat more important, although if I had to I am sure I could get away with careful EQ and overdrive/distortion module selection.

I've had a bass with a similar design bridge. This had an allen key screw on the side of the bridge that when loosened allowed the saddles to be moved by hand.

RCF745

Surely the Loadstone basses were also Fender copies but with an even more ugly headstock?

If you are set on 34" scale, then be aware not all the Rockbass versions of the Warwick Starbass are long scale.

Is probably for a DI out (and if it is like the one on Overwater basses still needs a plug in the jack socket to power it on). Normally when these are disconnected it is because a previous owner has swapped out the pre-amp, and obviously the replacement has no DI circuitry. As has been suggested a nice big in focus photo of the control cavity would be useful.

Pub in Leeds in one of the arcades. Nowhere to park the van, so we just pulled up onto the pavement outside the arcade entrance and unloaded. Then all the gear had to be carried through the arcade to the pub, and up a flight of stairs to the room where the gig was. Repeat in reverse for the load out at the end of the evening. In the 90s there used to be a gig venue in Nottingham in a nightclub down an alleyway off a pedestrianised area where the bands played on the 3rd floor (and there was no lift). The Chameleon in Nottingham is pretty bad. There's only one space to (illegally) park while you unload and if it's occupied by a bus or taxi, you have the choice of either circling round the one way system to see if it's free when you come back or parking a long way away and carrying everything. The entrance to the venue is down a dark narrow alley way and the gig room is up two flights of stairs, one narrow with a door top and bottom and the other not so narrow with a door at the bottom only.