BigRedX

The only way you can find out if the arrangement of tuners is functional is to actually try them both sitting down and with the bass on a variety of different length straps. While having the tuners pointing towards the body of the bass might look more practical and ergonomic, IME it doesn't actually make any difference from a functional PoV. As a designer I think the problem stems from the fact that the current design has the post for the D-string tuner too close to the end of the headstock, and with the tuners on straight, the tuner key sticks out beyond the end of the headstock on that side which doesn't look right. When you were designing the headstock shape did you visualise it with the tuners in place? If you are going to use this headstock shape on future designs I would either make the offset less extreme or move the D-string tuner slightly closer to the nut.

Just re-enforces my belief that personal computer grade connectors have no place on stage at a gig.

As overs have said just because a unit is old doesn't affect its functionality. The software for the Helix range is being continually updated for free, so my recommendation would be for whatever out of the range best suits your needs. And to underline the point about old not necessarily meaning out of date even in the fast moving world of high-tech musical equipment, until I got the Helix, the main component of my guitar rig was a Roland GP8, one of the very first multi-effects units available, dating from the mid-80s, and still going strong. The only one of my previous effect units I've kept is a Linn Adrenalinn Mk1 which itself is almost 20 years old.

Exactly. There will be vinyl pressings of anything that actually got released out there somewhere and a good restoration engineer can work wonders with those.

But MP3 and DAB are no longer serious delivery systems, now that the bandwidth is available for uncompressed 16bit 44.1KhZ audio. They are the dictaphone tape of digital world.

Analogue tape recording is always best viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of those who have never spent much time using it (or who only used it in top flight studio where there were always good engineers to shield them from the complexities). Straight off even a standard CD quality (16 bit, 44.1kHz) digital recording will have a larger dynamic range and better frequency response than the vast majority of analogue recordings. How good your recording on analogue tape is, will be down to many factors but tape width and speed are two of the most important ones. But every improvement you make also has a trade off. Increasing the tape width per track increases the signal and noise ratio and the dynamic range available, but at the same time you also need to increase the tape speed to compensate for high frequency loss due to azimuth wander as the tape passes over the playback head. So you would think that all you need to do is to have tape with wide tracks running at high speed. Unfortunately as you increase the tape speed, while high frequency response increases, low frequency response will decrease. Everything is a compromise, and while you should get better results on a stereo master running at 15ips by going from 1/4" tape (with a 1/8" track width) to 1/2" tape (with a 1/4" track width), you have to remember that your audio is coming from a 24 track 2" tape where the track width is only 1/12", so the audio quality has been compromised before it ever reaches the tape for the final mix. And all of these systems are outperformed by the humble CD.

No, Bu if you are a 4-piece band playing sub three minute pop punk songs, then you should be able to take most songs from the initial idea to something that is close to being ready to gig within the space of an average three hour rehearsal. The trick is to come prepared. I have a load of musical ideas that are always ready to be the starting point for a new song or used in conjunction with someone else's idea to turn a simple riff or tune into a close to finished piece of music. If the rest of your band is like this writing and arranging new material should be quick and easy.

IIRC you are using a load of digital stuff as part of your signal chain which already adds a degree of latency to the signal, and the wireless is just adding enough extra for the cumulative effect to be noticeable. Unfortunately sone of the more popular digital wireless units while perfectly capable on their own are already very close to the acceptable latency figures and couple these with any other digital effect you will be into noticeable latency. Also as EBS-freak has pointed out if you are monitoring in software rather than hardware when recording again the cumulative effect might be just pushing the latency over the edge. What wireless units have you been using and what is you studio signal path?

I'll get as close as I possibly can to the right sound(s) for each song on my Helix, but it won't be until I'm in rehearsal with the rest of the band playing that I can make the appropriate fine tunings.

If the band is good and the musicians all on the same musical wavelength, it's dead easy. It also helps if your singer has a bookful of lyrical ideas, and just needs to find the right ones to fit the music. The song may well develop over the course of the next few gigs and rehearsals but the recorded version will be 90%+ the same as the one we played at the first gig.

And respectfully you are wrong. 1. Analogue recording for the most part is terrible. You are constantly fighting distortion against signal to noise ratio, and the dynamic range is poor compared to even 16bit digital. Every extra track you use at the multi-track stage and every time you do a mix down or bounce you are adding more tape noise to the signal. Add in the fact that many bands of tape for both multi-track and mixed masters is now starting to deteriorate badly - if you are lucky anything recorded on Ampex tape might make it through the single pass required to make a digital copy. A good digital transfer will be as good as the original analogue master allows it to be. 2. No, you can't know how good unreleased tracks are going to be without hearing them. But... listening to what does get released, IMO most bands struggle to write and record 50 minutes of quality music for each album. The best songs get released as singles, then the rest of the album is filled with the next best songs and what is left over is used for the B-sides of the singles. Therefore if there is anything left over, it will be less good than the least interesting B-side or album track. The same with alternative takes of the tracks that do make it onto the releases. The best version gets released to others don't. Certainly as a punter I have yet to hear a previously unreleased track or alternative take that I thought was better than the ones the band and/or record company chose to release at the time. 3. An original master is an important document, but I'm not keen on artists who go back and fiddle with the past to try and improve upon it. By all means have another go at recording the songs if you think you can do something better with them, but leave the original recordings alone. As a songwriter I have more fun revisiting old ideas with new bands/musicians and seeing what new elements they can bring to them, than going back and tarting up old recordings. A recording is a document of it's time, the technical limitations of the recording process are part of the sound, and you made the recording you had to based on the techniques and facilities available at the time. Don't for a moment think that if musicians who made their recordings direct live, direct to mono because that is all that was available would have made the same records if they had access to a modern multitrack studio. 4. Maybe not, but most of the music lost has sat un-listened to in a vault for 20+ years. If the record label though they were worth releasing, I'm sure they would have done so by now, after back catalogue is where the money is the days. As for the artists involved, none of them were making a very vocal fuss about the recordings until it looked as though they had been destroyed in the fire. That to me says they had all moved on the new things musically. And the most important fact of all is that AFAIK the vast majority of the recordings lost were the property of Universal Music, and while losing the originals of your back catalogue is poor business, that's all it is.

A productive rehearsal is one where you turn someone's idea for a new song into a finished fully arranged number and can play it well enough to be able to gig it that weekend.

By which I meant one of your T-Bird shaped basses. On the other hand just buy a Lull JT4. You know you want to. 😉

I that case, if it was me I'd buy the cheapest Fender Precision Bass that I could get on with and, if the project took off, look at getting something that still looks the part but is more comfortable to play (how about a Mike Lull JT4?). Although TBH from the description of the band surely one of your Thunderbirds should fit right in?

If someone asked me to use a Fender Bass I'd turn up with a Coronado or a Bass VI. Or perhaps buy that Alien Ant Farm custom shop model that turns up on eBay every so often.

Somewhat like the Klein Bass

It's very difficult to recommend a DAW as they all have their individual strengths and weaknesses, and what suits one person won't always suit another. I would make two points: 1. Reaper is nice and cheap but AFAICS it doesn't come with as many bundled effect and instrument plug-ins as most of the commercial offerings, so depending on what you need one of the more expensive DAWs might end up being better value. 2. If you are going to collaborate with anyone else, get whatever they are using. While OMF and AAF can do a great job transferring sessions between different DAWs my experience is that the conversion will let you down in a spectacularly bad way just when you need it most, so the easiest way to avoid disappointment is for all the people working on a particular project to be using the same DAW.

AFAIK there weren't actually any "lawsuits". It was more of a "cease on desist" that was already out of date, as by the time it was issued the Japanese manufacturers had either: 1. Moved on to producing their own original designs. 2. Changed the design of their copies enough to avoid copyright/trademark infringement. 3. Stopped exporting their instruments.

@akabane the bands that I like are still releasing music on physical formats and their fans are still buying them, so for the music that I would be interested in supporting there is a good chance that I would see a return on my investment. However these bands are selling their product off the back of gigging, and it has been my experience that unless your band is very well established (to the point where you shouldn't need crowd funding) the only way to continue generating sales for physical formats is to gig and sell copies to people who come to the gigs. Maybe as an alternative strategy in this age of streaming would not be to record albums at all, but to release a single song/piece of music every 3-4 months as a promotional item, and the only way people are able to hear the rest of your material they have to come and see you play live. Also, if as an artist you are serious business venture (as I suspect Rocco Prestia is), rather than just doing it for your own enjoyment then your business model needs to be one where income from each previous release funds the production of the next release. You might need to put in some of your own money in the first instance, but from then on it should be self-funding. That was certainly the way one of my previous bands operated. I put up the money to record and release our first EP, but the recording and production of subsequent releases were funded from sales of the back catalogue and other merchandise. If you can't do this then either your "product" isn't appealing enough or your business model is wrong. Start small and work your way up to an album that is going cost $50k to produce when your income from your back catalogue and royalties support it.

Also a lot of the time even if the session was recorded on multitrack tape, these tapes would be eventually re-used if the record company or artist didn't buy them. Back in the days of multi-track tape recording a reel of 2" tape was a lot of money, and often could be a significant proportion of the overall recording cost. Certainly I've never paid to keep any of the multi-track tapes of anything I've recorded in a commercial studio. The usual deal was that the tapes would be kept for a month or so just in case we wanted to go back, book some more studio time, and make changes to the mix, but after that they would be erased and re-used for another session. In my situation it was always the case that by the time we had finished mixing the last track, we had run out of money, and besides AFAIWC the stereo mix was the important tape, not the multitrack. The only multi-track sessions I actually own are the ones I recorded in my home studio, and these days none of them are accessible to me as the I no longer have the tape machines for those on tape, and the digital ones are the wrong format to load into the current version of my DAW.

And the fact that it says "Dean" rather than "Gibson" on the headstock.

Of course. It will be in the contracts.

Charging who? AFAICS most of the tapes stored and audio recorded onto them were the property of Universal Music and unless their contracts with the individual artists state otherwise, UM can do what they want with them. There might be a case for UM share holders to sue the company on the grounds of failing to adequately protect company assets, but IMO that's as far as it goes.

As an artist I think it is somewhat presumptuous and disrespectful to your (potential) audience to expect them to crowd fund your recording. It is my experience as a artist that if your music is worth releasing you will find a way to do it without resorting to begging. It is also my experience as a fan of bands who have used crowd funding to release their music that the incentives being offered aren't really that special. What I am primarily interested in is the music. I'll be able to buy that for £10 when the album comes out. Nearly all of the other stuff is irrelevant to me. And in this particular case $50,000 just seems to be far to much money to ask for with no explanation of exactly how it will be spent. Is it just for recording costs? Getting your music on-line with all the major download and streaming sites only costs $50 for an album, so unless he's going for a large volume physical release that seems like an awful lot of money. For that kind of money just for recording plus mixing and mastering I'd be looking at a couple of weeks lock in with a name producer and mixing engineer with the aim of producing a fantastic sounding album and turning at least one of my band's songs into a potential hit single. Getting your music recorded and released has never been cheaper. My last studio recording (made earlier this year) was charged at the same hourly rate (£6/h) as my first back in 1980 and while both were made in similar locations (converted garages) the quality and range of the equipment (as well as the acoustic treatment in the studio and control room) used for this year's session was vastly superior to 1980's semi-professional 4-track tape machine fed from a modified 12 channel PA desk and the sole effect available being reverb and echo from a spare 2-track tape machine. Maybe the way forward for crowd funding recordings would be instead of offering useless "special" incentives would be to give everyone funding the album a cut of the sales? I might be tempted to throw a couple of hundred pounds at my favourite bands in return for 1% of the sales of their next album.

Very much this. If the tapes stored were still the property of Universal Music, as they would have been in vast majority of their artist's contracts, they can do what they want with them. While not adequately protecting what has now become a valuable business asset is pretty stupid, I don't see what comeback any of the artists have since the items lost in the fire are not their property. And any artist that does own their master tapes and allowed Universal Music to store them without making adequate back-ups only has themselves to blame.