BigRedX

For me friends are people I will see socially for things that don't involve music.

What do you mean by colleagues? People you work with outside of the band?

Mr Venom signed The Terrortones up to PledgeMusic when we first considered making an album, and I had a good look at the system to see what the pros and cons would be. I couldn't see any PledgeMusic "community" that would result in our campaign getting noticed or cross-promoted on the site itself. In the end we decided not to use the service, because we wanted to make the album in our own time when we had the right songs to record and an when we were happy that we had the right versions recorded. Also IMO there is nothing sadder than a band with a PledgeMusic campaign who don't manage to hit even their most basic targets. From experience having punters say they would buy your album after a gig doesn't in any way guarantee a sale when said album becomes available. The Terrortones album cost about £5k for 7 days recording, overdubbing and mixing, mastering all the tracks including a few extra that didn't make it onto the final release, packaging design and artwork, pressing 500 copies on vinyl, printing the packaging, and also making a promo video for one of the tracks and the first wave of promotion costs. We could have done it for a lot less (probably half the price at the most) if we had gone for CDs instead of vinyl and simplified the packaging, but we decided that the cost wasn't extravagant for a band that was out gigging every week and selling plenty of merch off the back of our gigging, plus divided between the band members it was by no means an unobtainable amount. As for sales and distribution, IME "independent" bands (who would normally be PledgeMusic's main customers) sell far more product at gigs then they ever do on line. For The Terrortones our total income from on-line sales of physical product, downloads and streaming was less than 10% of our sales of CDs and vinyl at gigs, and nearly all of those came through BandCamp who only take 10% of your sale price (as opposed to the 15% PM take). And for "independent" bands even in the days where record shops and distribution deals counted for something, the chances of actually seeing your money or getting your unsold stock back in the condition you originally supplied it was negligible. You might as well have given your stock away for free. In the past, I've known bands who lost all their records or CDs when distributors and record shops went bust. These days I wouldn't consider selling any of my band's physical product through a distributor or record shop unless I got the money up front, when it is far more cost effective and just as easy for the audience to buy the product directly from the band.

Having played a Dingwall bass which has more extreme fan-fretting, it took me about 30 seconds if that to adjust.

And I would agree, but in that case having a speaker pointing at your ears as opposed to your knees is still more important than the overall dispersion pattern.

Having now seen all three programmes, I have to say of the three I enjoyed the drum one the most, probably because its the instrument I know the least about, and I wasn't worrying about the simplifications and inaccuracies I kept finding in the bass and guitar/effects programmes (although I'm sure there were just as many and they were just as bad to those who do know their drum history). However what was the point of the sections with Taylor Hawkins? He didn't have anything interesting to say and to paraphrase John Lennon, he's not even the best drummer in The Foo Fighters!

But unfortunately there are only a handful of guitarists that would actually use these guitars who can afford to buy any of them.

IME any stage large enough to move about on tends to have decent monitoring and I can always hear myself better (and have a better balanced sound of the whole band) in the monitors, unless I am stood right in front of my rig.

Surely dispersion is only important if the bass isn't also going into the PA?

I'd agree with this. In real terms it is cheaper than ever to record and release your music. And you still need to already have a sizeable following to make schemes like PledgeMusic work for you, so I really can't see the point. Maybe it's time for someone to do another Desperate Bicycles and see just how cheaply it is possible to record and release 500 copies of an album.

Which Pretty Things album was this?

Get a Theremin and let your singer play the part.

Weird isn't it. Without the famous name owner that instrument would be significantly devalued because it is no longer in completely original condition.

No. What a ridiculous thing to do.

Not easily, but there are a couple of techniques you could try. You could see if the drum hits are in a differently place when the run repeats and cobble something together by cutting and pasting sections with no drums over sections with drums. Alternatively you could run the whole sample through a high pass filter to remove as much of the drum thuds as you can without affecting the keyboard sound. Then if the drums are still noticeable cut the sections where they are audible out completely, cross-fade the join and stretch the whole sample back out to the original length without shifting the pitch. I doubt any of these methods will be able to completely remove the drums without leaving other noticeable artefacts, but you might get something that will do the job well enough.

But I have learnt my scales as theory. I just haven't learnt how to PLAY scales. I also know that any of the notes in the key will fit over a series of chords and which notes make up any given chord, but playing those notes while technically correct won't automatically give you the best melody you could come up with. In fact IME they never give you best bass line or melody. If someone sings a melody to you can you immediately play that melody back note perfect on your chosen instrument? I know some people who can but most of us will struggle with some of the notes until we find the ones that are the exact right ones. That's how I compose. I know whether I need to go up or down in pitch and I will know which notes are most likely to be right because of the key, but I won't always find the exact notes I want on my first attempt, but I can hear how the ones that could be better (they are not "wrong" notes but just not the ones I could hear in my head) are out and then I'll have a much better idea one what the best notes to use are more likely to be.

I compose by hearing what I want to play in my head and figuring out where the notes are on the fretboard or keyboard. Once I've got a couple I'll have a reasonably good idea of what the key is going to be and therefore where I'm likely to find the other notes that I want. However I don't need to be able to play a scale in that key in order to be able to find the notes. This whole digression started off because several people earlier in the thread mentioned that they incorporate playing scales in their practice routine, I wondered why they did this because they are almost never used in playing actual musical pieces.

Except that the following runs are different at the end and you will need them all for the intro.

There are two different problems at work here. Firstly almost all cheap 5-string basses are not very good, and secondly this apparent need to swap between 5-string and 4-string basses. I suppose I was lucky, my first 5-string bass was a vastly superior instrument to my 4-string so I never saw any need to go back, and my subsequent 5-string basses have all been even better. I did have a spell when I was getting into fretless bass where I played fretless 4-strings and fretted 5-strings, but this was because I hadn't yet found a fretless 5-string as good as my fretted ones and because I was playing very different things depend on whether I was using the fretless or fretted bass. As soon as I found a properly good fretless 5-string bass I sold all the fretless 4s. Also I've always played lots of different stringed instruments with different numbers of strings, string spacing, tunings and scale lengths, so now don't really have that much problem swapping between instruments. I currently play in two bands, one using a 5-string bass tuned B-G and the other using a Bass VI tuned E A D G C E.

I think it very much depends on what music you liked back then. When I look at my music collection, there is a noticeable dip in the numbers of albums I was buying between 1974 when glam rock stopped being interesting and 1977 when punk bands started releasing records. The reason for this being there was very little new music released that I wanted to buy.

Our milages obviously do vary. TBH my comment was actually aimed @Deanol who posted at the same time as you.

Thanks. I have found myself able to this through years of simply playing and writing actual music, as opposed to practicing scales and "musical exercises".

Speaking from personal experience, it absolutely gave musicians who weren't playing "conventional" blues-based rock or using conventional instruments the realisation that you didn't need to fit into the norm in order to be able to play live or release music for public consumption. I formed my first band in 1975. Our instrumentation was 2 acoustic guitars fitted with pickups, a homemade solid electric balalaika all going into a 10 watt practice amp via a couple of practical electronics fuzz boxes, a bon tempi-style wind powered chord organ, and a home-made "drum kit" composed of tambourines and cans and anything that sounded good when hit, all held together with clamps acquired from the school chemistry lab. There was no way that we could have preformed in public with these instruments, so we contented ourselves with recording at home, almost entirely for our own enjoyment. When punk came along, we realised that there might actually be other people who would enjoy the recordings that we were making, so we started putting out albums free on anyone who sent us a C60 cassette and an SAE, which we would return recorded complete with a photocopied A4 sheet as the cover. We put out 5 "albums" this way and were asked to contribute to an actual vinyl compilation EP which was played on John Peel's Radio 1 programme, and ultimately led to the band putting out a retrospective CD compilation on Chicago's Hyped To Death label in the early 2000s. The band even played some gigs in the early 80s, admittedly to mostly baffled audiences; but at least they didn't bottle us off stage as would have undoubtedly have happened in the pre-punk days.

Everyone is still confusing learning scales (I already know scales and the notes that make them up and where they are on the fretboard and keyboard) which I agree is an invaluable skill, and learning how to play scales which I find of no musical use at all.

IMO Off Topic is for stuff that isn't music related, and General discussion is probably the best place for this question as almost everyone will actually see it. Back when the single was originally released, The Osmonds were on a UK TV program demonstrating how the Crazy Horses effect was done, so if you can track down that you should be able to extract the sound without anything on top of it, as the record itself has drums over the intro which you would need to mask out. IIRC the device used was a keyboard with a Ribbon Controller (could well have been a Yamaha, they were keen on ribbon controllers) mounted along the top which was used to modulate the pitch of the sound and created the over the top vibrato at the end of each "note". You could probably do it in a DAW that allows you to draw in the controller data to manipulate the plug-in synth of your choice. Good luck.