BigRedX

While the Fearless might not be as supper-efficient as something from Barefaced, it's a modern cab design housing a modern driver so it should be plenty efficient enough. IME with just a Puma 300 amp the only times I've stubbled to hear myself on stage is when I've done equipment sharing gigs and have had to use another bassist's very old and inefficient cabs.

Is there any reason why you can't to go back to the studio where you did the recordings and redo the bass parts there? After all you are going to need someone to mix the songs again after the new bass has been tracked. IME while transferring a project from one studio to another should be fairly straight forward so long as they both use the same DAW in practice it is usually much more complicated than that. I've had a go (in Logic as it happens) trying to transfer a project recorded in a commercial studio to my home setup so we could continue working on the tracks for free. Unfortunately it wasn't quite so simple. The studio had used a lot of 3rd party plug-ins which I didn't own. and after spending the best part of a day trying to identify and track down all the missing plug-ins I had to admit defeat. For starters I was looking at having to spend at least £500 on plug-ins which were essential to getting the project sounding like the last rough mix we had, but more importantly there were a few plug-ins that were not available at all because the company(s) producing them had stopped trading and hadn't made them available for free before going out of business. I the end we went back into the studio with a budget cap of 50% of the cost of buying all the missing plug-ins and got the job done properly long before we had spent all the money.

I should also add that having had first hand experience of Shure Super 55 as it was Mr Venom's microphone of choice for the Terrortones, I can say that underneath that supposedly rugged exterior, they are quite flimsy. In particular, the wires that run from the XLR socket in the base to the capsule in the body of the mic are very thin and weedy and if your singer makes a lot of use of the pivot between the two, the wires will eventually break and need replacing. I had to do this 3 times over 6 years with Mr Venom's mic and they continued to wear out with use, even after I replaced the wires with something a bit more heavy duty. Admittedly Mr Venom, gave his mic some serious abuse, but after 6 years I had replaced almost every part, so they are not as robust as their looks would have you believe.

IME having a decent cab with a high efficiency is far more important than your choice of amp. After that from a power output PoV all the small lightweight amps are pretty much the same since they nearly all use the same power amp module, so it's finding one with a pre-amp voicing that you like which can only be done by you auditioning the amp in question.

There are two versions of the Shure 55. One is essentially an SM58 in a vintage style casing, and the other has a more “vintage” voice. You should really try both, but IMO the SM58 model generally sounds better.

There are several rockabilly/psychobilly upright bass players who play left handed, most notably the bass player with Vince Ray & The Boneshakers. Whether any of them play with the strings swapped around for left handed I don't know. However you are very unlikely find any playing left handed in orchestras, as their bowing will clash with the double bass players seated next to them.

Unfortunately that's bollocks. The reason you tune down and then back up is because the windings on the string catch at various points along their travel - at the nut, over the bridge saddles, as they pass under string retainers... Tuning down lets the windings drop past any "obstructions" and then you tune back up to pitch. It's got nothing to to do with how good the machine head mechanism is. Hipshot machine heads might be better made than the competition, but they still won't help when your string is caught on the nut or string retainer.

All instrument amps are voiced to some degree, otherwise there would be nothing to choose between them. Before I ditched my Puma in favour of a Line6 Helix and RCF745, I was using it in two different bands, and kept all the tone controls at 12 o'clock, using just the "Taste" control on either slightly "Dry" for one band and slightly "Rich" for the other.

That is minging. And it only appears to be on the front of the body and so looks completely fake.

I'd say the same for Pink Floyd. Back in the 70s when my friends were all raving about Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall, I completely failed to see what all the fuss was about. To me it was just some simple chord sequences, endless guitar solos and some oh so clever studio trickery. However when someone else covers the same songs and throw away all the proggy, pretentious muso nonsense, the actual songs suddenly shine through. Consequently I have a lot of time for Scissor Sisters version of Comfortably Numb and Rasputina's take on Wish You Were Here. However the originals still leave me cold.

If you really are going to go the DIY route there are a number of things to consider. 1. Make sure that your band are behaving in a photogenic way when you do the shoot. Get them all to dress appropriately and actually put on a performance. It is a video after all. If you can't look entertaining then your video is going to do more harm than good. Make sure there's nothing distracting happening off-stage, in the audience, or in the background. It's about your band not anything else. 2. You'll need several camera angles that you can cut between in order to make the video interesting. That means either more than one camera person filming the gig; playing the song more than once to capture a few different angles; or knowing that you can cut in bits from other songs with a different angle. On the actual song concentrate on the singer, and get the rest of the shots from other songs. Trust me no-one will notice that the musicians aren't actually playing what is on the soundtrack. Good hand-held moving shots always add interest. 3. You'll need good quality audio to go with your visuals. That means something better than what the camera mic is capturing. Personally I'd go into a recording studio and get a good live take of your band so that it sounds like it would a gig but a proper mix and no mistakes, and then cut the video to match this. If you are going add some audience reaction make sure that it is all very enthusiastic but in relation to size of the gig. 4. Keep it short and snappy. No-one is going to spend ages watching your video. Unless it is brilliantly put together and entertaining most bookers will give it a minute, tops. Either pick your best short snappy song, or if you are going for a compilation to show your range, then a great intro followed by the just the choruses of 4 or so exceptionally catchy songs. As you can see, a single static camera in the corner isn't really going to cut it. And unless you have a friend with a good eye for visual composition who will act as your camera person, you are probably going to have to hire someone to film your band you might as well get them to edit it too. But if you really want to edit it yourself, then you'll need some decent software. If you have a Mac then you already have iMovie. If you are a Creative Cloud subscriber access to Premier and After Effects is included in your plan. DaVinci Resolve is cross platform, there's a free version, and it's pretty good, but you may find that you'll need to upgrade to the paid for version in order to get some of the more interesting features.

It looks like the first fret line is a quarter tone up from the nut but all the others are spaced at the regular semitone intervals from that.

What's going on with the fret lines on that bass?

Travis Bean as a company stopped making guitars in 1979 (although there was a limited edition of 24 instruments made in the late 90s), and the man himself died in 2011, so I would suspect that any patents, copyrights etc have long expired. Kevin Burkett the man behind the Electrical Guitar Company once said that he wouldn't make any Travis Bean copies as he didn't want them passed off as the real thing at later date. That situation has obviously changed, although with the Electrical Guitars having a different headstock, it would be very difficult to pass them off as Travis Beans.

It's not so much the number of fixings on the front panel but how rigid it is since it is also the point at which the amp bolts into the rack case. Just looking at some photos of this amp and the front panel does appear to quite thin compared with how heavy you describe the amp as being. Does this amp have any rack mounting attachments at the rear (I could find any photos of the back of the amp). The important thing from the PoV of preventing damage to the amp is to stop the back of the amp moving up and down. Good quality heavy rack mounting gear will also have fixings that attach to the back of the rack case to prevent this.

I have Ultralites on my Black Gus bass and they are also unbranded and look exactly like the ones in your photograph (other than they are black).

Personally I'd be more worried about the stress on the front panel of the amp rather than the bolts attaching it to the rack case. Heavy rack gear should provide fixing both front and rear, to hold it properly in place. Failing that could you bolt a heavy duty rack shelf into the back of the rack and support the amp that way?

How do I stop the latest version of the forum software from converting my text smilies to those nasty picture ones? There used to be a setting in the text entry box to disable automatic smilies but I can't find it anymore.

Says the person with a boring sunburst J bass as their avatar. 😉

No more so than any wooden necked bass IME. I've owned 2 Kramers, a Hondo Alien, Hartke XL-4 and a Born To Rock F4B all with aluminium necks, I've never had any problems with them staying in tune on stage. IMO Mick Karn always sounded better with the Travis Bean.

No it's an Ibanez Black Eagle

Production fashions go in cycles. That much is obvious from the few comments here already. In the 80s I couldn't stand listening to most of the albums I'd grown up with in the 70s due to (at the time) sterile sounding production with their weedy cardboard box drums. Now it all, sounds fine again to my ears. I can remember someone on one of the recording forums in the late 90s berating the gated reverb drum sounds and wondering how we ever tolerated them. It didn't go down too well when I suggested that in another 10 years time they'd be saying the same about the currently fashionable ping-y snare drum sounds. And to answer the OPs question, it is for me not so much about the production as about songwriting quality control. There's plenty of albums on CD from the mid 90s onwards that are simply TOO LONG. Just because the CD format allows you to put 80 minutes worth of music on a single album doesn't mean that you should. Like most albums there are a couple of killer tracks, some other songs that are OK and then an additional 40 minutes of self-indulgent rubbish. I find that the higher proportion of poor songs makes me less likely to listen to the album as a whole, whereas if it had been a normal 35-40 minute release I'd have probably played it more often and spent time getting to like the less obvious songs. Instead I just stick with the 2 or 3 tracks I know I like and never listen to the rest.

I think latency probably depends on the Bluetooth device that you transmitting to. I've had to ditch a pair of Bluetooth headphone for watching video on my Mac because there was a noticeable delay between the images on screen and the sound from the headphones. Also with a Bluetooth mini-hifi you are dependant on the quality of the D/A conversion in the hifi. Personally I'm not convinced by unnecessary wireless connections. In my house at any one time I can see 15-20 different wifi networks not including my own and any that have their SSIDs hidden. All those routers and the devices connected to them are fighting for bandwidth and dominance, and invariably there are problems with dropouts and some devices losing their wireless connection. And depending on the Mac the OP may have more options than just the headphones out socket. Most Macs also have a digital audio output as well as the analogue one.

Bluetooth is fine if all you want to do is get the audio out of computer to better speakers than the built-in ones, but if you require synchronisation to video displaying on the monitor or you are going to be playing an instrument also routed through the computer along with a track then the latency is simply too high.

I'd have to agree with this. After immensely enjoying the first two Clash albums, I found London Calling distinctly underwhelming. Other than the tilted track and "Lost In The Supermarket" the only other track I like from those recordings - Armagideon Time - isn't even on the album.