BigRedX

But the other parts aren't equal. For a start the neck construction of the maple board bass will different to those with rosewood boards. I'm also pretty sure that you could find 4 P-basses made all out of the identical combinations of body, neck and fingerboard woods with the same tonal variations as these 4. The only thing that struck me about the second comparison, was that the tone control on the 77P didn't seem to work in the same way as the other 3 in that it was always letting a bit of the extreme top end through all the time. And once again though, in a band mix with the appropriate EQ on the desk they would all sound so similar as to not be worth bothering with the differences.

This last one's a bit of a cheat, since I'm now their bass player, but I remembered the band from doing a gig with them back in the early days of the Terrortones, and was so impressed that when the chance to be a member of the band came up I jumped at it!

Very interesting. The first time through I listened with my eyes closed and to be honest the change in tone from one bass to another wasn't that great, and in the context of a band mix with the a bit of post-production EQ any one of them would have done the job perfectly adequately in any of the playing styles. IMO the P-Bass performed adequately on all the playing styles, but was never the best of the 6. Based on that video I'd be buying a Rickenbacker or a Thunderbird. The most disappointing was the Stingray closely followed by the Warwick. Both sounded weedy with no real body to the sound in any of the playing styles, not at all what I was expecting.

Which pretty much rules out every festival held in the UK. My experience of playing festivals, is that only one I've done in the last 5 years when it didn't rain was the one where we played indoors in a hall while the "audience" were outside enjoying the sun.

Fair enough. It wasn't obvious from your original post that was the case. I see it quite a lot on this forum that people get bogged own on specific specifications without taking the whole instrument into account. I play short scale basses myself, but I also play 34" and 36" scale length basses as well - and also guitars. I don't find any problem in changing from one scale length to another. There are certain things that are easier to play or sound better on a particular bass, but the scale length is rarely an issue for me.

Unless you are very keen on a particular bass amp sound, especially one that features a deal of valve-y distortion, I personally wouldn't bother with an amp sim for the bass. Most bass amps are simply devices with a baked in EQ profile and a means of adjusting some frequencies within certain limits. The average channel strip in your DAW will be far more flexible than any amp sim. Start by cutting the extreme bass and treble and then use the remaining frequency bands to get the bass to sit where you want it in the mix. Add some compression and you are done. If you are after some valve type distortion, there no reason not to use one of your guitar amp sims - after all until the late 70s there was virtually no difference between a guitar and a bass amp. The only reason you wouldn't put a bass through an actual guitar amp is that it wouldn't go loud enough and the frequencies are more likely to cause speaker over-excursion. Since your amp sims are just digital representations of the real thing, the worst that can happen is that you won't like the sound you get, in which case your can just try something else.

I've seen all there versions - Freur in 1985, Underworld Mk1 in 1989 and Underworld Mk 2 in 1993. I haven't been to see them since Daren Emerson left and they got massive. For the Freur gig there was a lot of the music on the backing tape and they made no secret of the fact, but given the complexity of the album (and its follow up Get Us Out Of Here) and the state of music technology at the time it was a wonder that they were able to perform any of it live. The PPG Wave synth required constant rebooting during the gig I saw, and it was very obvious when it dropped out of the mix.

It's totally subjective. Stop worrying about it. Martin makes some very nice basses but they are not to everyone's taste.

It's a nice piece of wood. However someone has seen fit to use it make a very boring bass.

My experience of Rotosounds is that they are very good at making standard gauge (40-100) 34" scale 4-string sets, but anything else is completely hit and miss. I gave up using them when they consistently failed to be able to make a 36" low B or a 30" E that would produce a proper note that rang out like the other strings on my basses rather than a dull thud.

I have a policy of hiding any signature that occupies more vertical space their typical post.

I suppose it depends what you are comparing them to. I have quite eclectic string requirements, so Newtone Bass VI and taper-wound 5 string sets compare very well on price next to what I was using before from La Bella and Warwick.

IME the thing that fails is not the PSU but the unnecessary extra connection between the PSU and the device that it is powering on the low voltage side of the assembly, because these connections and cables are simply not rugged enough to take the kind of abuse that gigging a device that by its very nature is going to be kicked about on stage, especially if you are plugging and unplugging the PSU every time you set up and break down your equipment. From experience I have found that any connector that isn't either an XLR or a 1/4" jack is going to fail eventually in a gigging environment unless it is a make once and never disconnect as well as being securely attached to either a pedal board or hidden away inside a rack case.

While having the same type of strap locking mechanism is a great idea in theory, in practice it doesn't really work because, unless all your basses have the same body shape and you play all of them at the same height, you still need a separate strap for each bass. A bass with the strap button at the back of the heal will require the strap lock to be on the opposite side of the strap to one with the button on the upper horn. Different body shapes require a different length strap to make them hang at the same height, and if like me you play different styles with the instrument at different heights you need different strap lengths for this too.

Because IME unless the unit has a cable retainer at the PSU in socket they can quite easily come out mid performance. And even if you do use the retainer it will eventually wear out the PSU cable causing it to fail (as happened recently with a guitarist I play with). If you mount the whole lot permanently on a pedal board then you are less likely to run into problems. Needless to say the Helix has a built in PSU and uses an IEC mains lead for its power like a proper professional piece of equipment should.

Other than strings I only bought one piece of bass gear in 2018, a Burns Barracuda Bass VI, and it really was both the best and worst thing I bought. It was the best because it was (for me) so much better than the Squier Bass VI that I had been using before. And it was the worst because it has made me realise that there are no "off-the-peg" bass VIs that first my requirements for feel and sound, and therefore I am on the cusp of ordering something custom that will suit me perfectly rather than being the compromise that the Burns and the Squier are. I did discover the best Bass VI strings - Axion Custom Works Bass VI strings from Newtone which are as good as the LaBellas but nowhere near as expensive.

IMO the Helix is only expensive because much of the competition is now in real terms stupidly cheap. My first multi-effects unit, a Roland GP8 plus foot controller and volume/expression pedal (which was a separate unit) cost as much as the Helix when it came out in the 80s and in real terms would have been considerably more expensive for something that does a fraction of what the Helix is capable of now. Also unless you are going to mount your multi-effects permanently in a proper pedal case, I would be very wary of getting anything that uses an external PSU to power it.

If you want to support a British firm making strings have a look at Newtone.

That is not an Adobe Flash alert. The Adobe ones are on a black background. As a stater, I suggest that you download and re-install Flash from the Adobe Website. If the problem persists and your IT guys can't find what is wrong on your Mac you might need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything to eradicate whatever is causing this.

Pretty much anything will work given the right arrangement and suitable musicians. If you are short on inspiration have a listen to the Nouvelle Vague and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra albums. BTW the 80s covers an awful lot of musical styles. It's not all post-punk synth pop. There were a load of dull guitar bands later on off the back of The Smiths and of course Acid House at the end of the decade.

Surely New Gold Dream and Sparkle in the Rain, were the stadium rock albums - they were the band's 5th and 6th and the Waterfront single was the one that broke them properly in the UK. They had most definitely left the experimental weirdness of their Arista albums behind them by then. Same with U2 by the time of War they were playing Red Rocks. At the time that certainly counted as overblown and stadium (U2 may well have gone on to even greater live excess later)

Line 6 Helix. It might be expensive, but you'll never need another multi-effects unit again. I run mine in Snapshot mode with one patch per song and then 4 variations on the patch assigned to the lower 4 footswitches. I've not needed more than 4 different sounds per song so far. Anything that the Helix can't do can be patched in via one of the effects loops and turned on and off for each patch/snapshot. There's two instrument level inputs, plus a mic input and with a bit of lateral thinking you can use the effects returns as inputs too (so long as you aren't actually using them for external effects), so there would be no need to even swap cables on when you switch basses. Finally changing the set order is done by drag and drop using the computer editor in under a minute.

But there was a lot of nurturing and development to get from the earliest Human League recordings to Reproduction as anyone who has heard "A Golden Hour Of The Future" will attest. And it wasn't plain sailing all the way - "Dignity Of Labour" anyone? Plus their first official release on Virgin Records "I Don't Depend On You" under the pseudonym The Men wasn't a million miles away in sound and arrangement from Dare.

U2. Saw them on the "Boy" tour and they were amazing. Went out and bought the album the next day and played it to death. The next time I saw them promoting the "October" album they were as boring as the record was. Vice-Versa were a brilliant combination of early Human League and Cabaret Voltaire. The band they turned into - ABC - were blander than a bland thing. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of Underworld have yet to make an album better than Doot-Doot by Freur.

The sort of person who would want a CT bass with Wal electronics probably doesn't have a problem with the cost involved. Besides a Wal could have been picked up very cheaply 20 years ago.