BigRedX

TBH if I had that kind of money I'd be looking at booking my band into a decent studio with a proper producer to make a really good recording that will last for ever, rather than buying another piece of musical equipment that I might be selling a few years down the line.

Having previously used The Line 6 Bass Pod with their Shortboard controller I remain to be convinced of the robustness of a CAT5 cable to connect the rack Helix and it's foot controller in a gigging environment. I'd go for mounting the wireless system along with the Helix in a pedal board flight case (which is what I am about to do).

IME the most important thing to do with the Helix is to ignore what the various modules are supposed to be copies of and just use your ears to decide whether a particular module sounds any good for your needs. Of my 30 or so patches I have only 2 with a bass amp (and no cab) and those are used entirely for the overdrive sound of the amp so in effect I am using it as a distortion module. The rest of my patches use either guitar amps (with and without cab sims), or no amp or cab sims at all and simply one of the EQ modules and a distortion module if required.

IME you don't actually need any bass-dedicated models or effects. On my Helix only 2 of my 30 or so patches use a bass amp model (and those are used for the drive/distortion effect). The rest either use "guitar" amps or no amp model at all and just EQ and distortion modules. And as I've said before I'm not keen on multi-effects that don't have a built-in PSU. They are not professional pieces of equipment IMO.

What do you like in a bass? What don't you like about the bass(es) you currently have?

The Epiphone 5-string Thunderbird, was a Thunderbird in approximate body shape only. Nothing else - construction, woods, electronics had anything in common with the original 60s Gibson Thunderbird. Gibson themselves made a 5-string Thunderbird in the 90s. It wasn't very good (although it was more of a traditional Thunderbird than the Epiphone). What Gibson need to do is to make a 5-string Thunderbird that looks and sounds like an original 60s version but with a usable low B string. They have yet to do that.

Typo

The thing is, there are covers bands and there are bands that play covers. I've played in bands where everyone has gone away and learnt note for note what is on the record, and it still sounds wrong because the band can't reproduce every overdubbed part from the studio recording when they only have one or two guitarists plus bass and drums. A lot of the time (mostly on songs from the 60s and 70s) I find that what is perceived as the "bass part" is actually the keyboard players left hand and on the original, the bass guitar tends to be noodling away in the rhythm guitar range rather than holding down the bottom end. I found on these songs learning the bass guitar part was a waste of time and they would sound much better if I played the left hand of the keyboard part with any prominent bass guitar runs (usually those where there was no singing) thrown in. Even on those songs where the original bands instrumentation was the same as ours you still can't reproduce every overdub from the record, and playing every single complex fill and run on the bass, would detract from the main job of the rhythm section - getting the song to drive along. In the end I found it far more effective to learn and simplified version of the bass part and then add the more complex stuff back in if it was noticeably missing when we rehearsed the song with the whole band. I aslo discovered that the previous bass player from the covers band that was most particular about getting the arrangement right from the recording, had produced bass parts that had only a passing resemblance to what was on the original. A fact that I had never spotted, until I started learning the songs myself, despite seeing the band with him play on many occasions before I joined. I've also played in bands whose covers only used the lyrics and vocal melody from the original and the rest of the arrangement was new. Quite a lot of the time I have only had a passing knowledge of the original song and sometimes I completely unfamiliar with it, so in these situations I have tended to approach the song as though it was any other new original song and play what I felt was right for the arrangement as it developed. If I knew the song well enough to know that there was something missing at the bottom end, I would add it in but otherwise I did my own thing. TBH I enjoyed this approach far more, and IME the audiences were no less enthusiastic in their reception than if we had learnt the song note for note from the best known recording.

If you are a functions band then essentially you are staff.

Well after nearly 40 years of gigging and never having been subjected to any requests let alone ridiculous ones from the audience I finally get my first this weekend. First thing to bear in mind is that the band are playing post-punk influenced originals with an unconventional line-up (Drums, Bass VI, Synthesiser and Vocals). So having just played our one and only cover song of the set (a disco'd up bass heavy version of "A Forest" by The Cure), a young lady strides up into the "stage" area and leans over to ask me if we can do something by Placebo! I have to smile nicely and say that our previous song is our only cover and besides the next one is our last before giving the synth player the nod to start the opening bass drone for the song... We appear to get away with it as the lay in question and her friend seem very keen on coming to see our next gig.

From my personal experience, I’d very much agree with this.

Two completely different instruments IMO. I use a Bass VI (tuned E-E) with one of my bands and the top two (and sometimes 3) strings definitely need treating like a guitar rather than a bass for the best effect. I've also experimented with E-C 5-sting on a standard 34" scale bass and I couldn't get on with the sound or feel of the C string. At best it sounded like crap jazz guitar when playing it.

IMO the way to Improve a Sadowsky's tone is to turn the pre-amp off and role back the passive tone control just a touch. You do have to be playing it through a nice valve amp for it to be completely effective though. BTW this isn't a dig, but the result of spending a pleasurable couple of hours in Sadowsky's NY showroom (when they were still located in Brooklyn) trying out all their available basses.

IME manufacturers of "lower cost" items such as strings do seem to be more approachable about endorsement deals. Their main criteria is generally that your band is active gigging and recording (and releasing those recordings) and that you are prepared to "big up" the product as much as possible.

It's crying out for a Gibson 3-point bridge. 😉

The sorts of stresses that your cab (not amp?) has been subjected to in order to cause the magnet to become detached mean that even if you could successfully re-attach it you'd most likely find that there was more damage to address in order to get the speaker to work properly again.

There is no "neutral" on a bass amp (or cab) by their very nature they are designed to produce colouration.

I started just as it became possible to do decent layout and typography on a Mac in 1989. I can remember spending ages creating custom kerning tables in Quark Xpress for some of the less "professional" typefaces we had to use. Regarding the ad, all the corners of the type look just a little too rounded to me suggesting that it has been re-photogrpahed on the process camera a couple of time too often. But then again that was the norm back in those days. You had to be a very important (and well paying) client to have your type re-set every time you made a copy change.

I may have misunderstood what you wrote, but in my book ethernet should be far superior to USB in terms of just about everything.

You would have probably paid quite a lot for the design and artwork of something even as simple as this, as it required access to specialist skills and expensive equipment that were strictly for graphic arts professionals.

It doesn't look wonky enough to be Letraset, so I'm guessing this would have been done on typesetting machine. This was a rudimentary computer that controlled a photographic imaging process to produce the type. Changing the typeface (including getting bold and italic variants) normally meant fitting a different photographic negative with the required character shapes, and everything else was done by inserting various codes into the text that controlled the type size, line length and alignment. Since you couldn't be 100% certain what you were going to get until the program had run and the results had been developed in the dark room, a lot of the time it was simplest to run everything at a single size ranged left and then cut up the results and use a process camera to resize them to fit. The finished design would be assembled on a piece of board, cutting and pasting the various elements into position. If you wanted colour you would specify it on a tracing paper overlay, and the repo-house would work their magic to turn black and white artwork into a full colour print. The process was long-winded and time consuming and often the client would have revised the text before you'd even got the first version out of the developer, let alone stuck down onto the artwork board!

Ableton is very much perceived as a specialist tool for musicians working in live electronica. What most people want from a DAW is a multi-track "tape recorder" running on there computer. Let us not forget that even the most expensive a DAWs are now incredibly good value for money compared with what you could have spent 25 years ago. Today a copy of Logic Pro X is £199.99. When I bought my first copy of Logic (version 2. something) is cost at least £399 and all it did was manipulate MIDI data. There were no VST instruments back then, so on top of the program and a computer to run it (in those days you most likely bought a computer specially to run Logic), you would need a MIDI interface, and hardware synthesisers and samplers to actually make the sounds. You would also need something tape-based to record your compositions on to (and a mixer and outboard signal processors). You could get an add on to Logic on for recording audio (provided your computer was up to the task) which was another £399. ProTools back then was essentially a hardware-based solution that used the computer merely as a visual interface - the ProTools hardware did all the heavy lifting in terms of recording a manipulating the audio data. My first Logic system cost me about £2500 for the program, a computer to run it on, and a MIDI interface. I already had several thousand pounds worth of synthesisers, samplers, outboard signal processors and an 8-track analogue tape machine and mixer to record it all on to. By the time I'd worked my way up to what could be considered a "proper" DAW, I'd spent another £6k on a better computer, audio interface and a digital mixer. It still had less capability than the cheapest system you could put together today.

We had one of those in 1983 before we upgraded to the KX5s (and patch memories). I hated the SH101 on a strap it was heavy and awkward, and the modulation grip wasn't that good (IIRC the pitch bend only went up if you use the grip control). Still it got some of the band out from behind our keyboards.

It wasn't supporting Clint Bestwood and the Mescal Marauders was it?

We did this just over a year ago. My answer hasn't changed since then.