BigRedX

For me the actual music comes first and the musicians who play it it a long way down the order certainly behind the songwriting/composition, production and image. I don't care how "good" a musician you are if I don't like the music that you play, you are IMO using your powers for evil and consequently of no interest to me.

I have got to agree. The one Hohner guitar I have owned also isn't on there - TE Custom XII. Although there is a TE Custom XII listed it's the black version which is simply a 12 string neck on the standard TE telecaster shape in black. Mine was a Jaguar/Jazzmaster shape with 3 lipstick pickups and in a castle green/blue colour. The only other one the same I have seen was owned by Captain Sensible.

Surely all the good Joe Walsh material was written and recorded before he joined The Eagles?

IME somewhere between 10 and 25% of people who say they will "attend" on Facebook actually show up at the gig. However it works the other way too. If you sell advance tickets on-line for a gig, 10-25% of those who buy tickets won't be there, but you'll still get paid for the sales.

As I suspected. IMO Mojave is still far too new for anything other than beta testers and early adaptors with no "mission critical" requirements for their computer. I have never understood the need to update at the first opportunity especially something like the OS. My advice is always to wait until the .4 update by which time Apple will have eliminated the worst bugs in the OS and software writers will have had time to come up with workable updates to their applications and drivers. I never update the OS on any of my Macs unless I need to run a newer version of a program that requires a newer version of the OS, and even then I'll only update to the oldest stable version of the OS that supports the newer program. HTH.

True. Unfortunately that's not a good bit of 70s rock. I'd have disliked them as much in the 70s as I do now.

Who actually watches music channels? When I first heard about MTV I thought it was a fantastic idea and couldn't wait to get it myself. When I finally did through cable in the late 90s the whole experience was completely underwhelming.

Tedious 70s influenced rock of the worst kind.

I would suggest that your update to Mojave might be the culprit, as the drivers may no longer be compatible. Has the interface worked at all since the update? Unless you absolutely require the capabilities of Mojave for something else I suggest that you go back to your previous version of Mac OS.

Did the band have any merch to sell at these gigs?

No it won't. It will filter out some of the "noise" elements in the supply and do its best to smooth out any fluctuations in voltage. However all the commonly sold power conditioners for musical equipment are designed to overcome problems in countries like the US where the overall standard of the mains supplies is rather poor compared with what we are are used to here in the UK. In fact in the UK if you are having mains supply problems they are nearly always more serious than a standard power conditioner can cope with, and in these instances only a well specified UPS will do. The UPS will completely isolate your equipment from the standard mains supply and uses batteries to compensate for fluctuations and blackouts in the supply. You specify them using the current draw of all your connected equipment and the length of time they need to provide power in the case of a complete mains supply failure. Because they contain both isolating transformers and batteries they are big and heavy. I suspect that following the electrical work at the venue the "stage" power is inadvertently sharing it's supply with something that requires a large startup current and when this comes on it is causing fluctuations in voltage and current to the rest of the devices on the same circuit. It might be possible to find another set of sockets in the venue to power your equipment off that are not on the same circuit as whatever is causing the problems.

It's not uncommon for foreign bands to come to the UK and play to minuscule audiences, I've been some of these audiences. The Terrortones were even the support band on one of those tours. We landed a support with German Rockabilly band Boppin' B. In their home country they are pretty well known - my more musically-inclined German relatives had all heard of them and were impressed that we had got the gigs. The reality was that apart form the final date of the tour at The Underworld in Camden where The Meteors were also on the bill and had consequently sold out, we spent a week travelling up and down the country playing to tiny audiences most of whom had come specifically to see us. For some reason that didn't make the front page of the Gruaniad.

Well then they're stupid and they'll die (or go out of business).

But is it actually a con if no-one has lost any money other than the band and the centre of all of this? IME venues will want enough money up front to cover their costs. Maybe they could have let the night go to a band that would have actually brought in some punters and made more money, but they shouldn't have actually made a loss putting Threatin on. Also AFAICS the support bands don't appear to have done a lot of promotion if they are playing to near empty venues as well. If it had been one of my bands we'd have promoted the flip out of this gig and got a decent sized audience even if they had all left after we'd finished playing. I don't think this affair reflects well on any of the other "players" either.

That will count as a new song. Are your band or the songwriters involved from the other band PRS/MCPS members?

I think there is more to this story than is being reported. Anyone other than Threatin who is out of pocket as a result of this, then it's down to them not doing their due diligence and they have IMO no-one but themselves to blame. I have a feeling it will come out as some sort of "stunt" to show how easily it is to manipulate things via social media, which is why the rest of the tour has been cancelled. No doubt all will be revealed at some point in the future.

IIRC, if the "original" has not been released then you can't release a cover of it. However... does your new version with lyrics have the same name as the instrumental, and are the two compositions easily recognisable as being the same piece of music? If the answer to either of these is no then there will be a case for counting your version as a new composition, and so long as you also include the people from the other band who wrote the original version as songwriters you can register the this piece as a new composition with the PRS under one of your writer members accounts and then technically no licence will be required.

I bought my first 5-string bass back in 1989, and apart from a couple of years when I was playing fretless and hand't yet been able to find a suitably good fretless 5-string I've stuck with 5-string basses. I really can't see the point of going back to 4-string. There's nothing I could do on one that can't do just as easily on a five string. Having said that I've recently started playing Bass VI in one of my bands, but I don't really have any problem switching between the two because I'm playing completely different songs on the different types of basses. Being also a Guitar, mandolin and balalaika player helps as its the actual notes and not the string/fret position that is important.

One of my bands learned "I Believe In Father Christmas" for a live radio broadcast last year. We'll probably do it again if we we have any December gigs this year.

IME the only real no-no is trying to use guitar speakers, especially ones in open-backed cabs at band volumes. Guitar speakers generally don't have the excursion to handle low frequencies at volume, and open backed cabs add their own problems where the wavelengths generated by the bass tend to lend more readily to cancellation between what is coming out of the front of the cab and the reflected sound coming out of the back. Simply putting a back on the cab damps the sound sufficiently for those reflections to be much less of a problem. Thats not to say that guitar amps and cabs can't sound good, it's just that the with certain cabs you are going to struggle to get the frequencies you want being reproduced at band volumes before something fails. You could use guitar gear live with a sympathetic sound man who is prepared to mic up the cab and provided that you are happy with 99% of the bass sound on stage being provided by the foldback. For many years my only amp was a Carlsbro Wasp 10W amp with a single 10" speaker in an open-backed combo. Since all I was doing was practicing, writing and recording and I never had to compete with a full drum kit, it functioned perfectly well so long as I kept the volume levels sensible. The fact that I was mostly playing Peter Hook style bass lines probably helped as well. So it can be done in the right situation. The other way to go is modelling using something like the Line6 Helix. Because it's all digital there's nothing to break, and the worst that can happen is that your bass won't sound very good, in which case you move on and try a different amp or cab. Right now my favourite amp and cab model for bass is the one derived from the Roland Jazz Chorus combo. I'd never consider using the real thing in a live situation. But the model sounds great, and the FRFR speaker I run it into is perfectly happy to reproduce the sound at any volume.

Watch out with the cheaper J style bases in particular the Squier models as the control cavity might not be deep enough to take a J-Retro and it's battery without extra routing. My Squier VM Fretless Jazz certainly needed another millimetre or two of depth before everything fitted properly. Also remember that if you do route out the extra depth you'll be removing the conductive shielding paint so you'll need to re-shield the cavity.

Having contributed to the thread derailment, here's a reasonably definite answer for the OP... Pretty much any Mac made in the last 10 years will be plenty fast enough for your needs unless you are a 3D, animation or video professional. With your budget you are going to be looking at second hand, EoL or if your are lucky a refurb. A refurb from Apple is the safest option, but there is very little available to suit you budget. Currently the Apple refurb store has very little under £1k. EoL is a good fallback option - my 2012 MacBook Pro was £699 from John Lewis a few years ago. But you need to be in the right place at the right time. For me second hand is the best VFM, especially if you are prepared to collect in which case there are some serious bargains to be had. The Mac I earn my living on is a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro which cost £350 including 16GB RAM when I bought it 3 years ago. I did spend almost as much again on a replacement graphics card but that's only because I need to drive three large displays. The main problem with buying an old Mac is that there will come a point when you can no longer upgrade the OS and consequently many of the programs that you run. Even if you don't plan to upgrade the OS or your programs as you are new to Macs you may have problems buying suitable versions of your programs if the OS on your Mac is too old. Personally I wouldn't buy anything now that wasn't capable of running El Capitan and ideally Sierra. Finally there is the question of portability verse power and screen real-estate. Only the OP can answer this question, but IME the bigger the screen you have the easier it is to do anything. I use my MacBook Pro for running the backing tracks for one of my bands. However all the preparation for this is done on my desktop Mac which has nice big monitors. Trying to do anything but the most basic of tweaks to the backing on the small laptop screen is not a pleasant experience. Whatever you decide upon make sure you get as much RAM as you can afford. I'd consider 8GB to be the minimum these days. HTH.

IMO a Hackintosh completely defeats the object of having a Mac in the first place. One of the reasons why Macs tend to "just work" is that the OS only has to support a minuscule set of hardware options compared with what Windows or Linux have to contend with. The moment you try and force Mac OS to run on something other than Apple hardware you start getting all the sorts of problems and incompatibilities that other OS users have to contend with - and more because none of it is officially supported by Apple so you are very much on your own when it comes to voting out exactly why your chosen set of components won't work. The Hacktintosh is fine is a proof of concept and for people who really want to just geek about with computers, but for those of us who have chosen the Mac platform because it lets us get on with our work they are IMO a complete waste of time.

I'm sorry to say I think the bass in the OP looks minging. I'm worried about catching some incurable skin disease simply by looking at the photograph.

The cab with that 50W prototype is an open backed design which is not very good for getting a decent bass tone at anything approaching a decent volume.