BigRedX

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.

I'd just like to say that the only strap locking mechanisms I've ever had fail on me were set of the Dunlop style ones fitted to a Warwick Starbass, and that happened within the first 6 months of me getting the bass (which was new). On the other hand I have Schaller Straplocks from the mid 80s that are still going strong. The ones on the Warwick were not the recessed versions so they were easily were changed for Schallers.

IMO you are over-thinking this. Each additional thickness of card will change the neck angle by approximately one quarter of a degree. That is not going to be enough to worry about the screws needing to cut new threads in the wood. I would add a second piece of card underneath the existing one but twice as "wide" - so it almost reaches the first set of neck sure holes and then re-assemble it.

Were the venues shabbily treated? IME venues will charge what it costs to cover their expenses to open for a gig, so none of them should have been out of pocket just because the audience was virtually none existent. Perhaps they could have booked a band that was more popular, but having been part of many tiny audiences for both local and touring bands there are very few bands playing the kind of venues that Threatin were playing that could 100% guarantee a decent crowd every time they play.

How do you know that you need a short scale bass? Have you actually tried any? As someone who also plays the guitar I've found that even a standard 30" short scale bass is a big jump up from a 25" scale guitar, so IME you might as well go for a full 34" scale bass. You'll certainly find it easier to find something decent in your price range then, as short scale basses tend to be specialist/niche instruments and the prices tend to be higher for the same level of quality to reflect this. What you need to do is to get down to your local musical instrument retailer and try as many basses as you can to see what suits you best. As others have said, scale length is only part of the picture, and the only way you'll get the right bass for you is to actually play it.

The "woodiest" sounding bass I've owned was a Born To Rock F4B, made mostly out of aluminium tubing.

Looks fake to me. His finger/fret positioning in a couple places should be resulting in choked notes, but they sound perfectly fine on the audio. Besides it's a video there's no guarantee that it is actually real.

But how many differences are there between these two basses other than their weight? This is why the question IMO is mostly meaningless. The heaviest bass I have owned (Yamaha) sounded good, but I own lighter basses that I think sound better. The lightest bass I have owned (Lightwave) sounded great but I suspect that was down almost entirely to the pickup and electronics than anything to do with the weight. Also there is very little point in comparing the two as about the only things they had in common was that they were mostly made out of wood.

Full of cracks and no strings fitted (probably because it will disintegrate under string tension). Will need a lot of work doing if you actually want to play it.

NAMM isn't open to the public.

As others have said the laws of physics are against pitch to MIDI conversion for bass guitars, because you need a MINIMUM of one and half cycles of a CLEANLY played note in order to accurately detect the pitch of the note being played which will already introduce too much latency for the typical bass line before you figure in additional delays for MIDI conversion etc. Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik who has been doing this for decades uses a guitar controller which halves the latency (being an octave higher) and still has had to learn to play slightly in front of the beat for his bass lines to be in time. There are alternatives such as the Industrial Radio MIDI Bass that uses fret sensing to deprive pitch information and guitar-like controllers from Starr Labs etc. but they all remove much of the immediacy of playing a stringed instrument. One of the things I quickly discovered when trying various guitar and bass synth controllers over the years is how much almost every player relies on things like ghost notes, full and partial muting, harmonics and tonal nuances from altering the plucking position, all of which cause havoc with pitch sensing and are completely meaningless on other controllers. In the end I founded it simpler, quicker, cheaper and far more reliable to develop some rudimentary keyboard "chops" and buy a decent keyboard synth than to try and force my guitars and basses to produce synth sounds with any degree or reliability and repeatability.

I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating. I paid just over £2k for my Helix and RCF745. My previous big bass rig which was mostly bought second hand over 10 years ago cost me more, and while it looks impressive on stage the Helix RCF combination is far more versatile. One thing did occur to me recently; a lot of the gigs I play are supports to well-established goth/post punk bands where the headliner will have brought an Ampeg stack or similar. I set up my RCF in wedge mode just in front, and still looks as though I'm using a big impressive bass rig while sounding infinitely better!

Sleepify is still their best IMO 😉

IMO it's far better that they are in London, as there's a ton of other things you can there do if the show turns out to be boring. You can't say the same if it's out at the NEC or somewhere similar. In the 90s I used to go to the annual MacUser Show at Earls Court which kept me occupied for a morning while I checked out the exhibitors, signed up for beta testing programs and perhaps got a show deal on some hardware or software I was after. Then in the afternoon, I could go shopping and/or visit one of the museums in London. I also used to go the IPEX - the big printing exhibition at the NEC, where there was nothing to do once I had checked out all the various exhibitors I was interested in except go back home (or if was really unlucky and in the company of my office manger, go back to work).

For most situations a business card about 1/4 the length of the neck pocket is sufficient to give a big enough change of angle of the neck to sort out most problems. The average business card is between 0.333mm and 0.5mm thick (and will compress slightly when the neck screws are tightened up). The only bass I have with a bolt-on neck has a pocket 90mm long. My back of an envelope calculations give an angle of between 0.2° and 0.3°. IME there is far more play in the holes going through the body than that so I wouldn't worry about changing the neck angle with a shim.

You would need to buy a double bass. There's a reason why the DB body is so big.

That opening note of the solo is just fantastic. As is the little reprise at the end.

Bass Direct in Warwick are the only listed Spector USA Series Dealers in the UK. However distribution for Spector is by Barnes & Mullins so they should be able to let you know which London shops carry stock.