BigRedX

Doesn't "sus" imply that most people would want to hear the chord resolve to the appropriate major or minor? Certainly a sus4 chord has that feel to me. However I would be quite happy to end a song on one of my sus2 chords.

But what happens when you don't define the "3rd" but also add another note to the chord? As I said in a previous post in this thread I don't like 3rds on the guitar much, and usually replace them with a 9th. So my favoured version of A will be - A E A B E; and D is D G D E. Generally these will be replacing the A and D maj. but occasionally I'll use them instead of the minor version. IME if you don't define whether the 3rd is a major or minor 3rd, it's usually obvious from the rest of the music.

And just to throw another spanner in the works, what do you call it when you play the same note simultaneously on two different strings - i.e. D-string open, and the A string fretted at the 5th fret? In theory they should sound the same, but in practice because of tuning, inconsistencies in fretting pressure and the overall tonality of the strings in question they don't, and the result is always richer sounding than just playing a single string. Also is there a way of indicating this in notation?

Why do you need to? I don't like thirds much (especially the major 3rd) which on the guitar always sounds slightly dissonant to me so I'll either leave it out all together or replace it with a 9th which I find far more interesting and musically pleasing. And to answer the OP as soon as you play more than one note at the same time it's a chord IMO.

It is posts like the two above that add to my misery, as it seems obvious that most of the time @Ashdown Engineering are providing great customer service, I must have just got them on an off week. And it's even more galling when I discover that they were able to repair another Basschat members second-hand Superfly amp FOC when enquiries about getting a fix for mine (owned from new) with what sounds like a similar fault was met with evasion, indifference and finally silence when I was politely persistent.

I don't think so. The Hammond and Halewood claim is based on the middle 8 section of Creep, while the Lana del Rey song takes from the verses which AFAICS are original to Radiohead.

As I said in my post above... The track in question has not been officially released as a single. As a download it scraped into the lower reaches of the US top 50 last year (I don't know what that actually means in terms of actual sales). In the days before streaming and downloading on the internet, in the UK, something like this might possibly have generated a short news item on Radio One, and a couple of column inches in the weekly music press, and that would have been it. The publicity would have generated little additional airplay or record sales. However, I suspect that almost everyone taking part in this thread has had a listen to the Lana del Rey song in question on Spotify, and we're by far not the only ones who will have checked it out from curiosity. Spotify might not pay a lot for a single listen, but they all add up...

That might be OK if you are a "one-man-band", although IMO these days it's not acceptable for any business venture that wants to take itself seriously no matter how small. However Ashdown aren't a one man band. They are a reasonably big company with a global presence. Their marketing department should be regularly checking all on-line mentions of the brand especially sites like Basschat which can be very influential when it comes to making or breaking a brand/product. TBH it would probably be better for their reputation if Ashdown didn't have any presence here, as dipping into threads weeks apart and only dealing with the easy questions that superficially make them look good is probably more damaging in the long term.

A cynical ploy by the artist, her record label and publisher to generate publicity and get more people to listen to the song and therefore make up for the loss of royalties that will ultimately happen when this matter is finally settled?

Yes it is entirely subjective, but I would also suggest that you have had anything up to 45 years to get used to the sound of the vinyl version, so anything that sounds different may well sound wrong to your ears. The only true test IMO is to take a brand new piece of music of your own creation and have in properly mastered for both CD and vinyl and then compare final results from each delivery medium. Having done this myself twice - for the "Invasion Of The SpiderQueen" single and the "SnakeOil For Snakes" LP by The terrortones, I can say IMO the CD version of both is not only sonically superior to the vinyl, but is also the version that sounds the way we wanted it to when we were recording and mixing it in the studio.

I take it you've had a look at his other guitars for sale?

Normally when artists say this it means that they don't own the recordings. Most of the time record companies will retain the mechanical copyright - certainly for any band that is successful and still selling albums. They will only release the rights to the recordings when it no longer profitable for them to continue to own them. Ownership of the song/music itself and publishing is completely different and this is what is in dispute. Unless the songwriters in Radiohead signed a very poor publishing deal initially they should still own at least 50% of the rights to the song between all the named songwriters. However anyone with a financial interest in the the actual song could be the one instigating this action.

Essentially doing what I suggested in my previous post, but in a way and terminology aimed at people who haven't spent years deciphering MIDI implementation charts which is almost definitely a good thing.

In that case, you'll need to make sure that both units are set to the same MIDI channel, and then you should get program switching at the most basic level - i.e. selecting patch 1 on the Helix will select patch 1 on the Big Sky. I would suspect that at least the Helix will have MIDI program mapping (I haven't delved that far into mine yet) so that you can assign the program number that the Helix sends via MIDI on selecting a patch independently of the actual patch number selected on the Helix. If in doubt consult the MIDI implementation chart for each device.

Does the Big Sky have a MIDI In socket?

Maybe it really is just me these days, but when I was first getting into music in the early 70s, one of the my main memories was that when my musical heroes made one of their infrequent appearances on TotP they would be wielding ever stranger custom guitars often from the work bench of a certain John Birch in Birmingham. Later on with the advent of punk and post-punk, sometimes the choice of instruments would be dictated as much by what was affordable as it was by what looked cool and interesting, but it also introduced me to the instruments of Microfrets, Burns, Hayman, Mosrite to name but a few. I always felt that if you chose to use an instrument that wasn't in the mainstream then maybe your music might be a little more interesting too and perhaps worth that extra effort to check out. Of course it wasn't always the case - no matter how cool Jerry Garcia's Travis Bean guitars looked it couldn't make me like the music of the Grateful Dead! And sometimes those imperfections can kill the music stone dead. I've lost count of the number of times a record has been completely ruined for me by the acquisition of a scratch or piece of grit stuck in the grooves of a vinyl LP, usually on my favourite track, and more often than not at some point after the record in question has been deleted and therefore difficult to replace with a pristine copy. CDs and lossless digital files are the answer to this, I no longer have to worry that the act of playing the music I love might destroy it for ever.

IME unless all the bases you play are fundamentally the same, you need to find the right string to match not only your preferences but also what suits the individual bass as well.

Generally the record company only owns the mechanical rights - i.e. they own the copyright on the recording but not the actual songs that go to make up the recording. However in the days when bands still signed recording contracts the publishing company which owned the copyright on the songs would usually be a subsidiary of the record company that signed the band.

Yes it is good, but they tend to dip in and out of basschat without having a regular presence and only seem to pursue the problems that suit them.

There seems to be a lot of confusion is this thread about how the different methods work and what they actually do. First off there is no pitch detection system that has zero latency. You cannot change the laws of physics which say that you need a minimum one full wave cycle to detect the pitch of a note. In practice, with guitars and basses because of the rich harmonic content of the notes produced by a plucked string, you actually need more than a single wave cycle to guarantee pitch stability, and the very best systems will need a minimum of one and a half cycles plus some clever programming along with it being set up the suit each player's individual style. This would normally rule out using any bass instrument as the latency for all but the highest notes is going to be easily audible. What generally happens with musicians who persevere with these systems is that they learn to play very slightly ahead of the beat to counteract this built-in latency. So what has happened is that a couple of alternative systems have been developed to try a get around the pitch detection latency. Industrial Radio use fret sensing to derive the pitch combined with trigger detection from plucking the string. The Roland V System and the Line6 guitar and bass use signal processing of the individual strings to produce their sounds, so there is no pitch detection needed. The Roland V System in particular works very well until you try and use the MIDI output to drive an external synth, at which point you end up with all the pitch detection problems outlined above. On top of that in practice all the different systems will require you to modify your playing technique to some extent in order to get the best out of them. Some more than others. The further you go from plucked string type sounds the more you will need to modify how you play the instrument, to get anything usable out of it. IME having been seriously interested in using guitars to produce synth type sounds since the first serious commercial models appeared in the late 70s, I've still to be even 75% convinced by any of them. The guitar is for me a very tactile and immediate instrument and many of those qualities fail to translate adequately to synth-type sounds. If I want to produce synth sounds I still find it easier to use a keyboard-base synthesiser. Even with my very rudimentary keyboard technique I can still get results faster and more consistently than try to use a guitar (or bass) to achieve the same thing.

Is it actually Radiohead, or Radiohead's publishers? There's an important difference.

A 12" LP in a nicely designed and printed sleeve as an artefact is a thing of beauty. As a delivery medium for music it's a piece of crap. Give me a CD or a lossless download any day. Maybe the way forward for selling music is to package your CD in a 12" vinyl type sleeve which gives you the best of both worlds? Wood id still used for solid musical istruments because it is still comparatively cheap as a material and it is easy to shape and finish compared with the alternatives. Plus most musicians are far too conservative these days.

And why would you want to sell it? If you’ve made the right choice of instrument, then you won’t need to.

Actually the low B should be the least of your worries as, it will be the lowest tension string on your bass.

If you liked the 130 B then get another. IMO unless you have the lightest of light touches when playing you'll find anything less far too floppy in feel and sound.