BigRedX

From analysis of my PRS statements, song length isn't important when it comes to Pubs and Clubs gigs, just the number of songs played. Because it's a live performance there is no way of knowing if the version of the song is going to be the same as the recorded one with regards length and therefore it isn't taken into consideration. PRS payments are for composers only. If you are not one of the song writers you won't get any PRS royalties.

Yes it does. The standard Pubs and Clubs royalties are based on a single payment of £6.00 per gig which is distributed between the number of songs played by all the bands playing on a particular night. Unless the on-line form has changed since I last had to complete one, they ask for a list of all the songs that you have played (both originals and covers) and also the names of any other bands that played on the same night. Of course it depends on all the bands submitting a set list, and IME if a band doesn't submit a set list then they don't get included in the payout. In the past The Terrortones have played gigs with 2-4 other bands on the bill, but when we've looked at our subsequent royalty statements it is obvious that we've received all of the £6.00 payment for some gigs even when there were other bands on the bill and we have included them in the gig details.

I would check that the mailbox hasn't filled up and is blocking the receipt of any emails. IME these types of accounts have very limited email facilities and although they can be set up to automatically forward and then delete incoming email, the process is less than straightforward. A deluge of emails from a popular thread could well have caused your mailbox to reach its maximum.

But that was from the days when an instrument amp rated at over 100W was a very rare beast indeed. Times have moved on, and now when 300W seems to be the entry level for a gig-worthy bass amp, it makes far more sense to go with an updated and up-rated connector.

Lovely!

I remain unconvinced about the tonal qualities of low-scale strings tuned higher than G. I just about works for the B and E strings on a 30" Fender Bass VI, but on longer scales the high C and above string always sound like a cheap jazz guitar and don't sit properly in the bass register/tonality.

What colour is the back of the neck? Both photographs have cleverly avoided showing it.

Useful to know. When tried one in the shop it seemed considerably louder than the competition, but obviously that still isn't loud enough in a real acoustic gig situation. However in my recommendation of the TB10 I was assuming that the OP would be using it with some sort of amplification, and was implying that IMO this was the benchmark for a decent electro-acoustic bass guitar.

If you need to be completely un-amplified you are going to need a double bass. Acoustic bass guitars simply aren't loud enough to compete with anything more than a single quiet (not strummed) acoustic guitar because the body isn't big enough to project the sound. Low notes and a decent volume requires a large body, hence the size of the double bass. There are a few very large bodied acoustic guitars like the Earthwood Bass, but they are very rare and expensive. The other issue you will come across is that decent small-bodied acoustic basses (one you will be using with an amp) tend to cost a lot more than an equivalent quality electro-acoustic guitar, partly because they aren't so popular and also because once again amplifying low notes is more complicated than a standard guitar. Unless you get very lucky with something like a bargain-priced second hand Takamine TB10, expect to pay at least £1k to get something of the equivalent quality to a £350 electro-acoustic 6-string guitar. TBH if you are going to have to reply on amplification you might as well use your favourite electric bass and a small and unobtrusive combo. It will sound better and you won't have to worry about feedback or excessive handling noise from cheap piezo pickup systems.

But he is using a Wallace Valve amp so there will be compression on his signal whether or not he has a dedicated compressor on his pedal board.

Ideally you should be using Speakon connectors for all your amp to cab wiring. It's a more robust connector capable of carrying the sorts of currents that modern high-wattage amps put out, plus it is a locking connector so you won't get any problems with cables pulling out of their sockets and potentially shorting out. If you need good quality speaker cables making up OBBM here on Basschat is the man to contact.

When this is what the majority of the punters seem to want, I can't really blame them. I've seen them play "Cries From The Midnight Circus" once and apart from that everything else has been SF Sorrow and earlier. I did speak to Phil May after one of their 40th anniversary gigs about the possibility of doing some of the 70s songs and his reply was that without a 70s biased line-up that wasn't going to happen...

Is that when you were in the band? My favourite albums are from Parachute to Savage Eye, so that's the material I'd want to have seen them play. The current line up is very good, as their latest album proves, but they rarely play anything that wasn't written in the 60s.

For gigs I wasn't able to attend at the time... 1. Greenslade at Loughborough University Students Union some time in the mid-70s. I wasn't a student and couldn't persuade anyone to sign me in, so I didn't get to see this gig. 2. The Pretty Things, any time between 1969 and 1976. 3. The Human League, any gig in 1978, 1979 or 1980. 4. Cabaret Voltaire in 1979 or 1980 when Chris Watson was still in the band and one where they didn't suffer from major technical problems. Gigs I'd like to be able to see again... 1. Young Marble Giants at The Boat Club, Nottingham 1980. (In fact just about any of the gigs I went to in 1980 at either The Boat Club or The Ad-Lib Club. They were all great gigs by bands that were still relatively unknown and so I wasn't able to appreciate at the time just how important some of them would turn out to be). 2. None So Blind any time between 1981 and 1983. Either one of the Nottingham University Buttery Bar gigs, or Chesterfield Art College in December 1983, when I would politely decline their request to do the lighting and be able watch and enjoy the performance from the audience.

Was this for your car?

I would have liked to pick something a little less obvious (for me), but for me the album of 2017 has to be "Under Your Spell" by The Birthday Massacre. I've been a fan since I first heard them in 2005, and each album has pretty much been my favourite album of the year when it was released. This year's runners up were: "Darkness Falls Upon The Light" by Luxury Stranger, and "Fake Sugar" by Beth Ditto.

The two halves should be identical, otherwise the pickup won't be humbucking.

@Ashdown Engineering Unfortunately the emails like the amp itself were consigned to the bin long ago. If you do want to have a look at your end it would most likely have been some time in either 2009 or 2010 (it's such a long time ago now I really can't remember). The amp in question was a Superfly which had developed the standard high-pitched whine on the output plus an unreliability when it came to powering up. Both faults had been well-documented on the internet, and considering that the high-pitched whine was generally accepted to be a design fault of the power-amp part, I had expected a more sympathetic response from Ashdown when I reported the faults and enquired what I should do to get them remedied. I notice that you recently repaired another Basschat member's faulty Superfly FoC. It would have been nice to have received to same excellent level of customer service myself...

Yes but you don't need a compressor pedal if you've already got one or more devices in your signal chain compressing the sound as side effect of whatever else they do.

A well-contracted neck and neck joint is far more important than the scale length on a 5-string bass unless you are looking at 36" scale or longer basses. The next most important thing is to find the right strings for your 5-string bass. What works well on one bass doesn't necessarily work as well on another, plus IMO the low-B strings in most sets are too light and low in tension compared with the other strings. For example, in a standard 40-100 set the low B should be at least 128 if not 130. As others have said go and play as many 5-strings as you can and see what suits you. Also your money will go a lot further if you buy second hand, and you'll loose less should you decide that 5-strings really isn't for you and you end up selling it on. IME most people trying 5-strings for the first time make the mistake of buying something cheap that isn't sufficiently well enough made to do the low B string justice. After all there is much more to making a decent 5-string bass than taking a standard 4-string design and putting a wider neck on it. Finally, again as others have said, once you get your 5-string put your 4-string bass(es) away and don't get them out again until you are either ready to sell them or you find you really can't get on with your 5-string.

Most bassists who claim not to need compression probably have something in their signal chain that is actually doing the job of a compressor. Where it is valves in the amp or something in the sound coming out of the PA. The only way you guarantee not to have any compression in your bass sound is if you: 1. Don't go through the PA 2. Use a transistor amp (not class D) with the input gain well below the level at which the clip light comes on and still plenty of clean extra volume available on the master volume control. 3. Don't have any overdrive/distortion/fuzz effects. 4. Don't use any digital effects. 5. Don't use a wireless system.

For someone like me who is mildly dyslexic, breaking posts up into digestible chunks by automatically adding space after a return makes it easier to read. If I can read what other members have written without having to work too hard to understand their massive blocks of streams of consciousness posts I'm more likely to take the time to offer an answer or advice.

I doubt it. I have shimmed the neck on my Squier Bass VI. Pretty much everyone does, as it's the only way to get the break angles over the bridge right. I put a cut-down business card in the back quarter of the neck pocket. Uncompressed this is about 0.5mm thick. Once all the neck screws have been tightened up it will less. Looking at the pocket from the side there is just enough room to slide in a piece of 80 gsm paper (roughly 0.01mm thick) 25mm wide into the gap. The same piece of paper folded in half to make it 0.02mm thick won't fit in the gap. The rest of the joint is a completely snug and gapless fit. So from what I can see the is a hairline gap of less than 0.02mm in the middle third of the neck pocket . Either end where the neck is attached to the body by the screws it is a completely snug fit. In fact I would venture that since the card is likely to compress more than the wood of the body or the neck, there will be fuller contact between the two surfaces at the point where I have added the shim that there was before. Most of the contact anyway will be from the end of the neck against the end of the pocket cause by the pull on the strings. In fact one of the tricks to get the best possible neck joint on a bolt-on neck is to slacken off the screws very slightly before re-stringing and then re-tighten them once the instrument has been strung and tuned to the correct pitch. This allows the tension in the strings to pull the neck as tightly as possible into the pocket.

Should we even have a radiused fingerboard on a bass? On a bowed instrument you need the radius to allow each string to be individually accessible to the bow, and on the electric guitar the slight radius is supposed to make playing chords easier and more comfortable. However on the electric bass we don't really play full chords like a guitar, and if you think about it the fretted stringed instrument the bass has the most in common with as regards playing style is the "classical" guitar which nearly always has a flat fingerboard.

If you listen to any national radio broadcast (as opposed to internet) radio for any length of time it is still very obviously playlisted, so someone somewhere is still having a big say in what you get to hear. The big difference now is that for anyone with a real interest in finding different types of music radio and printed media no longer have a monopoly on popular taste.