BigRedX

The easiest way is to get as close as you can at home and then fine-tune your patches during a technical rehearsal with your band. That means you need to know the user interfaces of your multi-effects back to front so you can make the right changes quickly and effectively (pun intended) in the practice room.

More details of the Leodis Requiem Festival at Wharf Chambers in Leeds Saturday line-up have been released: Doors at 14.00 Bands from first on to last: General Ambi3nc3 (14.30) Astrofaun (15.30) Debdepan (16.30) The Scarlet Hour (17.30) Helle (18.30) Hurtsfall (19.30) Arch Femmesis (20.45) Witch of the Vale (22.00) Sacrilege DJs until late Edit for updated playing times

Are you still going to veneer the whole board?

7 years ago I took a long hard look at my collection of almost 50 guitars and basses and ruthlessly sold all the ones that I wasn't using. I'm now down to 9: Two guitars (Gus G1 and Fretking Esprit) that were custom made for me and which get occasional use when I am writing songs. Two Gus G3 5-strings - a main and a backup for one band I play in An Eastwood Hooky 6-string bass which I use in the other band I play in and a Burns Barracuda which is its backup. A Squier Bass VI, Ibanez Firebird copy and an ancient Kimbara acoustic which will all get sold when I get my act together and list them. There were some real gems amongst the instruments I sold: Two 5-string Overwater Originals, one of which may have been the first 5-string Overwater ever made from 1983. A Pedulla Buzz A Sei Flamboyant 5-string Fretless A Born To Rock F4B A Warwick MiK 5-string StarBass II And a load of other weird and/or rare instruments However I wasn't using them, and wasn't likely to be using them in the near future for anything other than noodling at home, so I sold them all.

Maybe it didn't come across very well, but I was trying to question the assumption that you had to have a device with amp and cab models in it to get the best out of an FRFR cab. I think a lot of my particular bias comes from the fact that most of the time (almost 45 years now) I haven't had anything remotely resembling a traditional bass rig, and even for the relatively brief period when I did, any colouration the amp and cabs added was completely overshadowed by the Bass Pod that was also in the signal chain, something that was brought home by the fact that when I was had a large and small rig the difference in sound between the two could be eliminated by slight EQ tweaks on the Bass Pod.

Why do you need amp and cab models? In real life their primary function is to make your line or instrument level signal loud enough to hear over the drummer. All a modelled amp does is give you a pre-set EQ curve with some adjustments, and is out-performed by any number of dedicated EQ modules. A bass cab is essentially just a low pass filter. IME adding amp and cab models to my Helix signal chain makes the overall sound much worse. I do use a couple of guitar amp models mostly because I either like the EQ frequencies or the drive sound. The rest of my patches don't have any amp or cab models and sound all the better for it. Remember that a lot of classic recorded bass sounds are the bass guitar straight into the desk or studio EQ unit, and haven't been anywhere near a traditional bass rig.

What pile-driver banging? The kick drum on that mix was pretty restrained compared with a lot of dance music.

There's a really irritating squelchy click on the attack of all the "synth" bits that sounds like something in the signal chain overloading.

I still found side dots in the wrong place too distracting, even when I knew they were in the wrong place.

IME there is little point doing merch for a one-off gig unless you are a very well known band. Merch is a long term-investment. Even if you are only playing once a month 4 T-shirts sold at each gig should cover your costs in less than a year. Anything after that is profit.

At the two O2 Arena gigs I have done they had a single PoS location for festival and band merchandise with someone employed by the festival to sell all the merch, so IMO it was worth the 10 or 15% that they took.

I've only come across this twice in the last 15 years (both times at O2 Arenas).

Another thing to consider if you veneer the whole fingerboard, is that the side position markers will then be in the wrong place for an unlined fretless. In my fretless playing days I could only get on with them being in the fretted positions if the fingerboard was very obviously lined. Otherwise I found myself continually playing slightly flat which isn't very good.

Loads of experience with band T-shirts for many different bands. This is what I have discovered. 1. Unless you have a strong visual image that always features a particular 2-3 colour palette stick to black T-Shirts with a white or light coloured print. Everyone likes a black T-Shirt. When I've done white or coloured T-shirts (I was once in a band that had a very strong visual identity based around yellow with red and black, so we had yellow shirts with red and black print) they have never sold as well as black ones. 2. No matter how many young skinny hipsters there are in your audience, IME the people who buy band T-Shirts are mostly L and bigger. The number of unsold Terrortones T-Shirts in S, M and ladies fit sizes will attest to that. By all means have a range of sizes but make at least 2/3 of them L and XL or bigger. 3. If you want to make money out of selling T-shirts, screen printing is the way to go. 100 T-shirts with a single colour print on one side should still work out at under £5 per shirt which means you should be able to make at least 100% profit on every shirt you sell for £10. IMO 100 T-shirts is a minimum order to make it worth while. The more you can get printed in an order the cheaper the unit price becomes. 4. It might sound boring, but T-shirts that obviously feature the band logo always sell well, and have the advantage of turning your audience into walking advertisements for your band. If you want to do something clever, think about printing back and front with the band logo on one side and the clever bit on the other. IME clever T-shirts look great but don't sell as well as ones that are obviously for the band. 5. Store them neatly with the size (and the design if you have multiple designs) clearly labeled. No-one will buy a T-shirt that looks like it's been used to clean the floor of the band van. 6. As others have said have someone working your merch table who isn't involved in having to pack the gear away. Your peak sales will be immediately after you have played and again just before kicking out time, so don't pack your merch away until the last punter has left the venue. 7. Get a card reader. Very few people carry cash to gigs these days. One of my bands has a Sumup machine and the other is still cash only and consequently doesn't sell much merch anymore. If you are taking cash make sure you have plenty of the right kind of change, because you can guarantee that first round of sales of a £10 T-Shirt will all be made with £20 notes.

Song: 12 Long Years (this has been the closing song in the set since the band started in 2018) Band: Hurtsfall Venue: The Bodega, Nottingham Bass: Eastwood Hooky Pro 6 > Line6 Helix > PA

That will make it a bit harder to fit veneers in the slots as you have to cut the width accurately first.

Actually now I know where to look I think the output jack is visible in the first photo (the one of it hanging on the wall).

Definitely not my experience with the FRFR (RCF 745) that I have. Because of the nature of a lot of the gigs I do where there is a great PA and excellent monitoring it only gets used for rehearsals and about half the gigs that one of my bands does. However for those it is perfect. I've needed to use it twice in venues where the PA was strictly vocals only, and due to the better dispersal characteristics of the FRFR it was far better than the traditional bass rig it replaced in that I only had to be slightly louder on stage than I would normally choose, as opposed to so loud I could barely hear the rest of the band. Plus it's about a quarter the size of my previous rig, and will fit in a lot of places on stage where there wouldn't be room for traditional bass cabs. I can't see myself ever going back to a conventional bass amp and cabs.

Next gig for Hurtsfall will be in Leeds at Wharf Chambers on 13th July as part of the Leodis Requiem Festival: Edit: we don't have the full running order for our day yet, but unless something changes in the next couple of weeks Hurtsfall are on at 7.30.

As I said back in May on the other AI thread:

How easy it is will very much depend on what sort of noise you are trying to remove. Constant uniform noise is generally the easiest. There is a noise reducer in Logic already, so have a go with that first. Otherwise if there is a section of the recording with just noise you could try copying that onto a new track and then setting it to be out of phase with the original audio and mixing it back in which should remove most constant uniform background noise. Otherwise if you are happy to pay there are plenty of noise removal plugins at various price points. Watch some YouTube tutorials on them before parting with any cash so you can see and hear how they work so you know which one(s) are going to be the most useful for the type of noise you want to remove. After this is is worth thinking about how you are making the original recordings and take steps to ensure that any new ones are as noise-free as possible. If you aren't recording as much unwanted background noise in the first place removing it will be a lot easier. Also if the you are able to make the phase cancellation method work for you, if in future you find yourself having to record in a very noisy environment, you should spend a few extra minutes recording just the background noise so you have plenty of samples to use for removing it from the speech recordings later on.

What sorts of bands are you talking about? Could be anything from genre, there are plenty of genres where the bass is deliberately placed in a different sonic space in the mix compared with where it would normally be, to the fact that the bass player simply wants to be able to hear what notes they are playing and having too much bottom end in the sound gets in the way of this.

Am I missing something, but I can't see any pickups or mention of them in the description

I'm obviously approaching it from a completely different direction to the typical user. Firstly I have no idea if any of the models on any of these devices are accurate to the originals, and TBH I don't really care. For me amps and speakers were always seen as devices that would get my instrument/line-level signal from whatever instrument I was playing, and effects I was using, to a level where it could be heard by the audience, and any colouration they added to the sound were unintentional and unwanted. In the days when I did own individual pedals or rack processors, none of them were conventional and most were chosen first and foremost for practicality - for instance when I bought my first delay device (some time in the mid-80s) the most important thing to me was the fact that it had a display showing the delay time in Ms so I could get my echoes in time with the music; MIDI sync and tap-tempo weren't even a thing back then, or I would have probably picked one of those as the must-have feature. So as long as I have access to all the typical effects I need - compression, distortion, EQ, chorus/flanger and delay - which perform in a way that I am expecting and produce sounds that work in the context of the overall band mix, I am happy. For me programmable memories, MIDI control, a nice big display, a built-in PSU connected by a standard IEC mains lead and the fact that I only need a single device are absolutely essential. At a gig I can plonk the device down on stage, connect the leads and I'm ready to go. When we sometimes have 10 minutes max to get set up and line checked at a multi-band gig where there is often barely enough room to stand let alone move about on stage, I want something that I can get connected and working in the shortest time possible.

For me the point of the large format multi-effects is that they are self-contained units that are essentially their own pedalboard. In this respect the Helix Floor trumps all the other devices I have seen because it has a built-in PSU which for me is an absolute must in a gigging situation. I worked with musicians in the past that have similar devices with external PSUs and in every case at some point the low voltage side lead has failed rendering it useless. I accept that some of the effects in a multi-effects unit may not deliver quite the sounds that are wanted, but my philosophy is that live I'll take the convenience of having everything in a single device which is MIDI controllable over having a slightly "better" sound that may be not be noticeable to my audience. I don't use filter or synth sounds for guitar or bass because IMO a keyboard/MIDI synth will always do them better and we already have two synth players in the band - one human and one computer. In the studio I'll use whatever I need to get the sound that is right for the final mix.