BigRedX

You can always cut it up and use the pieces for cleaning/polishing your own bass.

I liked The Tourists as well. But the Eurhythmics - especially the second album - is all about the sonic minimalism.

As have Hughes & Kettner with their Red Box system. As I said in a previous post, in the studio on my Tube 50 combo, the Red Box output was virtually indistinguishable from a SM57 on the 12" speaker, and for live use I always preferred to use the DI rather than muck about with another mic on stage. This was in the late 90s and use to perplex many PA engineers. Often at multi-band gigs I'd find after the change-over my amp DI from the soundcheck had been replaced with a mic on the speaker.

Get one of those pull-up banners with a SVT and 8x10 printed on it.

If I was going have dummy cabs on stage I'd have made out of light-weight materials and constructed so that they folded flat for transport.

The OP has got the cabs in wheeled flight cases. I don't think taking the speakers out of one of them is going to do much for weight or portability.

Yes. Actually both bands were using some automated backing in their performance already. For me the additional live instruments added unnecessary clutter to the arrangements, especially The Eurhythmics who lost the stripped down elegance of the songs from the Sweet Dreams album.

Some uncomfortable truths... If your bass is going into the PA and DI'd from the amp, then at anything other than very small (<100) venues and for people directly at the front of the stage at larger ones, the contribution your cabs are going to make to what the audience hears is zero, nada, zilch. If the visuals of having lots of cabs on stage is important to the look of the band by all means take both of them, but just plug in one.

Interesting thoughts. In the 80s when I was very much into synths I went to see The Eurythmics and Propaganda and was disappointed to find that they had considerably "rocked-up" the arrangements of their songs to suit a more conventional band line-up. Even though the Eurythmics band was pretty much an all-star line-up featuring amongst others Clem Burke (Blondie) on drums and Micky Gallagher (Blockheads) on keyboards, I was underwhelmed by the arrangements and missed the clinical precision of the album versions of the songs. The Propaganda gig was even worse. The songs were barely recognisable from the recorded versions and the inclusion of live guitar and bass (but not drums) in no way made up for the missing synths power that was present in Trevor Horn's production work.

The actual Jackson Pollock technique was to have the canvas on the floor and suspend a bucket with a hole in it above it on a rope. The resulting "finish" is very "3D" though. Whatever you decide to do I would clear-coat over the top.

What size venues are you playing? Does the bass go through the PA or do you rely on your rig for the audience to hear the bass? If the bass goes into the PA where is the feed taken from? DI from the bass? DI from the amp? Mic on the cab?

He's probably given up, as that was the last thread he contributed to and he hasn't been back since the end of 2014...

Absolutely! I'm in the middle of selling the two bass rigs and guitar rig that it is replacing. Also in one band it has allowed me to use my Bass VI without needing a complex dual amp rig for the "guitar" and "bass" sounds that I produce with it. In the other band the FRFR goes under the stand for the backing computer for a completely minimal stage footprint. I cannot ever see myself going back to a "conventional" bass rig unless I joined a band that required one for show (and it would only be for show) and they had a road crew to move it for me.

When I was last playing guitar live I was DI'ing my guitar amp. But then I was running a Hughes & Kuttner Tube 50 with a built-in Red Box DI system. We did an A/B test in the studio and the DI feed was virtually indistinguishable from that of an SM57 off-axis to the 12" speaker.

Lat year I switched to a Line6 Helix and an RCF745 FRFR speaker - total cost just over £2k new. The bass rig that they replaced cost me about the same at (mostly) second hand prices ten years previously.

It's a holiday. Enjoy the time away. On the few occasions when I have gone on holiday and taken my bass it has always been when I have gone in the company of other musicians. Invariably over the course of 7 days away we end up playing for a few hours in total at the very most. The rest of the time we are too busy doing fun holiday-type things.

IME unless you only run one program at a time you should go for 8GB RAM as a minimum. Always choose an SSD over a HD drive as that is probably the biggest speed improvement you can get. Other than that, so long as the Mac you choose will run the OS version you need they are all plenty fast and powerful enough for everyone expect high-res video and 3D graphics professionals. I'm still running a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2008 Mac Pro which are fine for all my needs. I am going to be upgrading my Mac Pro, but only because some of the programs I haver to run for my work, require a newer version of Mac OS than El Capitan. If it wasn't for this, the Mac would be more than adequate.

As others have said, cutting through is as much about not fighting with the other instruments for sonic space.

@Happy Jack

Even with a bi-amped rig and the bright box connected to the high frequency output, it made no discernible difference to my sound.

I'm very much into things looking good when gigging, but... In the past I've been in bands that had so much equipment on stage (not just amp stacks, but racks full of synths and samplers) that there was hardly any room left for the musicians, and when you are hemmed in on stage it is hardly conducive to putting on a good (visual) performance. These days when one of my bands does a "big" gig, the stage is normally already full of impressive looking rigs for the headlining band. We just set up next to these. The FRFR I'm using for the bass is practically invisible on these stages from the audience PoV so it just looks as though I' using whatever impressive looking bass rig the headliner has bought with them.

I owned one for a couple of hours (the time it took to get it home, try it out for 10 minutes and take it back to the shop for a refund) in the late 80s. Does absolutely nothing unless you already have a treble-heavy bass sound.

Not quite at that level... But this poster I created for a gig I played in 1984 is now part of the Victoria & Albert Museum's permanent collection. Also in Sound On Sound Magazine in the early 2000s there was an interview with Steve Levine in including photos of his home studio where the CD from the band I was in at the time was visible amongst a pile of stuff on his desk.

The quick and dirty calculation for working out VAT and import duty used to be to take the declared value of the instrument (for insurance purposes) plus the shipping costs and add on 25% plus an extra £20 for customs clearance and you won't have any nasty surprises. Unfortunately CITES has added a new level of complexity. Instruments with CITES listed woods need both an export licence (to be arranged by the sender) and an import licence (to be arranged by the recipient) and both must be in place before the instrument is sent. I've looked before for the cost of a CITES export licence from the US and can't find any actual prices. However the UK import licence is £76 IIRC so I would imagine that the US export licence will cost about the same. TBH for me CITES just makes the whole process too time-consuming, complicated and expensive.

For bass you probably would need to use a 300 Watt amp if you were going also use an impedance matcher, as any setting that isn't a 1:1 match is going dissipate at leat 1/3 of the amp's power as heat through the resistors rather than sound through the speakers.