BigRedX

However you are not comparing like for like. A Squier bass is pretty much the same as a MIA Fender except made with cheaper labour, slightly cheaper materials and supposedly not quite as rigorous quality control. Most Epiphone basses share very little in common with their Gibson counterparts apart from the name and the basic body shape.

Back in the 70s and early 80s amps and bass cabs were very expensive compared to todays prices in real terms. Also while guitarists could easily make to with a small(-ish) combo, bassists needed a lot more gear to compete volume wise (especially if you weren't going through the PA). My first proper bass rig in 1982 consisted of a no-brand 100W transistor amp which I got as a straight swap for a Shaftesbury resonator guitar a 1x18" cab and 2 x12" cab both home made (although not by me) which I acquired for minimal outlay from their previous owners who were moving away from Nottingham and couldn't be bothered with the hassle of taking the cabs with them. I can't remember exactly how much the total cost was (including what I originally paid of the guitar I swapped) but I have a feeling it was about what I paid for my first bass (£60). Back then there wasn't a lot of science to building a cab unless you were going for a folding horn design. You simply went to your local musical instrument retailer and surreptitiously measured up a similar cab and cobbled one together at home out of whatever wood you could get for free.

Actually most of the better Japanese manufacturers had already abandoned the copies in favour of their own designs about a year before the Gibson "lawsuit" and the others simply stopped selling outside of japan.

IMO its even more important for a (unknown) pub band to put on a show then it is for someone with a back catalogue the audience is already familiar with. If you can't engage a 100 or so punters from the corner of a pub, what hope have you got of being able to entertain an audience of several thousand from a big stage? If all a band is going to do is play their songs the audience might as well stay at home where the drinks will be cheaper and toilets less offensive and stream them from Spotify or Apple Music. That goes for any band no mater how well-known (or not) they are.

@markdavid So you appear to be justifying IP theft just because you can't afford the real item. However in real terms guitars and basses from the big name manufacturers have never been cheaper. Looking at historical prices lists a Fender Precision in the mid 70s (when I started playing) would have cost between $350 and $400 depending on the specification. A Gibson EB3 was $499. To get the UK prices at this time you could simply replace the $ sign with a £. In today's money that works out at £2000 for a standard spec Precision and around £3000 for a Gibson EB3. TBH even though I think Gibsons actions are likely to be doomed to failure because of the number of years that they haven't properly defended their IP or trademarks, anything that forces other manufacturers to come up with their own designs for guitars and basses rather than boringly copying others has got to be good thing.

I wonder what Industrial Radio have to say about this system?

Did you get any more information about how the system works and what is involved in retro-fitting it to you guitar or bass?

The website is very low on information about how the system actually works. However a close read does reveal that it only works with fretted notes, so playing open strings AFAICS won't trigger a synth note.

I think the reason why there are more basses with dark colours fingerboards than light coloured ones is because there is a larger variety of dark coloured woods that make suitable fingerboard material. I have basses with Ebony, Cocobolo, Wenge, Indian Rosewood and Brazilian Rosewood boards - and those are just the basses where I know for sure what the fingerboard material is. Light coloured fingerboards tend to be limited to maple. Also a light coloured board will need some form of protective coating to prevent it from getting dirty and nasty looking which adds more processes and time to the construction of the instrument. All in all there are more wood choices available and less build time involved in producing a bass or guitar with a dark coloured fingerboard.

And I am Whitby 200°

Yes but once again we had a sample size of one of each which is scientifically meaningless. Also he didn't test (or at least we didn't hear the results) to see what tonal changes are achieved simply by removing and re-attaching the same neck, which is an essential control experiment. And finally the results for these two examples were the opposite way around to what "tone wood" believers tell us to expect. My problem with "tone wood" is not that it doesn't make a difference, but that it doesn't make a predictable difference, or from what I have heard, make a massively perceptible difference. When someone takes the time and effort to do proper scientific testing with proper controls with a decent sample size (at least 100 of each type of wood) and gets results that are consistently similar and significantly noticeable for each species of wood that are are also consistently different between different species then I'll admit that the type of wood used in the construction of a solid electric instruments is important for aspects other than looks.

Yes but the difference was tiny and in a band mix would be completely lost. Also the construction of a neck with a rosewood fingerboard is different to an all-maple one, so is the slight tonal difference due to the woods or the construction or a bit of both? Or was the difference down to the fact that he had taken the neck off the guitar and put it back on in a slightly different way?

What make of strings ave you got fitted at the moment? I had the same problem with the E on my Burns short scale bass until I switched to Newtone which made a massive difference to both the playability and the sound.

Except that Helix is derived from Greek rather than Latin...

Not for me either. Although TBH the kinds of bands I like are better appreciated down in front of the "stage" in a small sweaty club late at night, rather than from the back of a windswept field in the middle of a dull and overcast afternoon. I used to enjoy the Nottingham Rock & Reggae festival in the 80s but at the time I was living 5 minutes walk from the site and could go home any time the music or the weather were being unsuitable.

Are you thinking of selling it or thinking of using it at a gig?

Is their sound or what they play? If it was just their sound you'd able to tell from a single note, but I bet no-one here could identify any bassist from a single note, so the note choice and phrasing must be equally if not more important than the sound itself.

Always amazes me that people are quite happy to pay £10+ for a T-Shirt that's probably taken an hour to design and has a unit cost of less than £3 to produce, but won't pay the same for 40 minutes worth of music on a CD that has cost more to produce in terms of recording, mastering, printing etc. then the band will ever get back even if they sell every single copy they have made.

Fernandes sustainer. Or a small (<50watt) amp in the right position on stage.

Thanks for the comments about the poster. TBH it was just a question of being in the right place at the right time. It was part of an exhibition at the Greenwich Mural Workshop in the 80s, that must have taken the V&A's fancy. I had several other posters in the exhibition but none of them were taken. And now something even weirder. One of the bands I play with wrote a song about the Trappist-1 system and made a video to go with it that got sent to various scientific bodies involved with the discovery. As a result our singer is currently in Liege presenting the video and talking about writing the song, and has just posted footage of the video playing to the other serious academics at the conference, including a couple of seconds of me throwing some serious bass poses...

But it pales into insignificance beside the sheer number of Marshall guitar cabs next to it.

Then where was the smilie?

AFAICS none of the those AC/DC bass cabs are mic'd up so their contribution to the FoH sound (and that's the important bit of the band sound) is zero.

And completely pointless from a sound PoV. IME as soon as you are playing on stages/venues big enough to have the room for this kind of rig the foldback system will be far more effective for hearing yourself than your rig, unless your default stage position is to be stood a couple of feet in front of it and you never ever move from this spot.

And your/his point is? A good musician plays for the music. Sometimes all you need is your instrument. Sometimes you need a load of sound shaping devices. Knowing when and where to use them is one of the things that sets a good musician above an average one.