BigRedX

Can anyone recommend a suitable strap-mounting pouch for the transmitter when used with adaptor lead for an active bass?

I don't miss having a bass rig behind me in the slightest. 1. I have never been in a band that needed to be so loud on stage that I could actually feel the air moving, and I've been in some loud bands in the past. I suspect if I had, I'd be even more deaf than I am. 2. On any decent sized stage the moment that I stepped away from standing directly in from of my rig I could no longer hear it and it turned into a big, heavy expensive stage prop. 3. At smaller gigs I was often asked by the sound engineer to turn down so much, so as not to affect the FoH mix, that I could hear myself better from the guitarist's wedge monitor on the other side of the stage than I could from my rig directly behind me. At some gigs we would deliberately aim the cabs sideways across the stage to minimise the FoH spill. 4. Most of the gigs I have done over the pst 45 years have had PA support for the whole band. On the few occasions that I have needed my bass rig to provide sound for the audience I have ended up needing to be so loud on stage that I could barely hear the rest of the band. It was not a pleasant experience. These days I have a Helix for my sound and an FRFR for rehearsals and personal monitoring for the smaller gigs where the foldback is strictly vocals only or unknown. For the bigger gigs I just use the in-house PA foldback. If I could organise the rest of either of my bands enough to go IEMs then I would. I do most of my composing using headphones and I always mange the get the songs sounding exciting enough at those kinds of levels so I wouldn't find it limiting or isolating in any way.

1. Was mostly a recording band so when the individual members moved to different parts of the country to go to university we managed to keep it going, getting together during the holidays to write and record, and even had our music played on John Peel's Radio 1 show. However the percussionist and myself who had both moved to Nottingham started a new, more gig-orientated band there which gradually became more important to us. 2. Singer left to get a job in London. The rest of the band decided to call it a day rather than look for a replacement. 3. Band ended after I quit as I wasn't happy with the musical direction the others wanted to go in. 4. Band ended after the singer and bassist (I was playing guitar in this band) who were in a relationship, split up. 5. Having managed to keep the band going for 13 years through numerous line-up changes everything finally came to a head when I had a blazing row with the singer (who was massively insecure and a complete diva at the same time) over musical direction. This is the only time I've been directly involved in an acrimonious band split. 6. Band ended after I quit because I got an offer to join another band that was more active. 7. Band ended after the singer and guitarist had a falling out. 8. Band ended after the singer became too unwell to gig.

Even if you never pay for the licence Reaper is only good VfM if you only stick with the supplied plug-ins or 3rd party free ones. Once you've added more than a couple of paid-for plug-ins you might as well have bought Logic which comes with all the plug-ins most people could ever need. Also if you do a lot of things requiring MIDI, the manipulation of the events in Logic is vastly superior to Reaper.

What sort of guitar bridge? There are many different designs. Some might be suitable others might not. How much modification are you prepared to undertake? Also having owned a couple of Bass VIs with what are essentially guitar bridges I've found that the string spacing is far too tight for comfort with bass strings fitted.

IIRC the siren at the that start of Blockbuster was a pedal designed to do this one effect.

Because of the nature of my bands we don't need a PA because we don't play anywhere where there isn't an in-house system. However we make sure that we that apart from drum and guitar amp mics their associated leads and stands (for the band that has a drummer and guitar amps) we have everything required to connect our equipment to the PA stage box. That means DI boxes for everything that requires it and XLRs. On several occasions I have found that replacing the PA XLR lead with one of mine has mysteriously resolved a problem that was supposedly down to the our gear.

In the case of my particular "problem project" from what I was hearing a couple of the missing plug-ins were doing something specific that I couldn't replicate with anything in Logic. Even then trying to get the same effect by substituting the unavailable plug-ins for ones I had that supposedly did the same thing, was hours of work I could have done without. I had hoped to be able to open the project make a few changes to the arrangement and do a new mix. After a week or so of fiddling about and still not being able to get something that was as good as last version I gave up and paid for someone else to remix the songs from scratch using just the basic stems. I think having a massive library of 3rd party plug-ins is fine if you only ever work on your system and are prepared for the fact that at some point some of them will no longer be available because you've updated something and the developer is no longer supporting a particular plug-in they made years ago. I currently collaborate with the synth player from my band writing songs by sending Logic files to each other. We have a system whereby at the writing stage we only use this plug-ins that come as part of the Logic install so there are no compatibility issues. Besides Logic comes with so many plug-ins as standard that even after all this time (20+ years since I've been doing more than just audio and using plug-in effects and instruments) I've still barely scratched the surface of what I can do with what comes free with the program.

What's different about this compared with a production line model?

The problem with this approach is that you're at the whim of a number of different people/companies when it comes to support and continued development to keep with changes in the host DAW and OS. I've fallen foul of this in the past when I needed to do extra work on recordings one of my bands had done. The studio were using Logic (like me) and so I thought it would be easy, but on opening the project I found that about half the plug-ins that had been used were discontinued and unsupported for my version of Logic/Mac OS. These days I will only use the plug-ins that come bundled with Logic. I've broken that rule twice, but neither 3rd party plug-in is essential to my workflow and if they stopped working after an update I could happily carry on without them. This is why I consider any DAW that doesn't come with a full arsenal of plug-ins poor VfM.

I haven't done completely silent stage with IEMs yet, but I've been in two bands with no backline and electronically generated drums. The problem I see with most bands in this situation is that they haven't beefed up the FoH sufficiently to compensate for the lack of acoustic drums and the rhythm section can often lack "oomph". When my current no backline band plays a new venue I make a point of telling the sound engineer that we want the drums on the backing to be the volume of a mic'd acoustic kit in that venue, and to only turn them down from this if they are having trouble getting a decent vocal mix. As a result the band always has a punchy sound FoH. It helps that the venues we play have a properly defined stage area, so the audience can't get in the "dead space" behind the main PA speakers. It will be interesting to see if the FoH changes much when we do finally stop relying on traditional foldback and go for IEMs.

Surely everything about the cab design will contribute to the overall sound of that cab and not just the position or even the presence of the port?

There have been two site updates that rendered a lot of the old posts close to unreadable. The end of BBCode as seen above was one, and the other was when using "return" added a paragraph spacing for after one update and then reverted back to just a line space with the subsequent one meaning that many posts from that time are now solid impenetrable blocks of text.

Almost always caused by your microphone picking up the sound from your speakers. Replacing the speakers with headphones is generally the simplest way of sorting it out.

To the OP. What is your writing/composing for. Simply personal enjoyment or for your band or musicians to play? If I don't have something I actually need to compose for I can find the motivation to write quite low. Luckily right now I'm in a very active band and I actually have the opposite problem where I don't have enough time to work on all the song ideas I have going on. For me the biggest motivator for composition is playing with other musicians (see above). IME there's nothing that gets a song finished quicker than having other people to bounce ideas off and collaborate with. If that's not possible then here are a couple of other things to try: Revisit one of your old songs. I'm sure that there are things that could be updated or improved. Right now for me about half of my "new" song ideas come from things I originally wrote when I was in my 20s (I'm now in my 60s). In every case I've been able to make massive improvements, or even produce something so far removed from the original inspiration that it sounds like a brand new song. Even just trying an old song in a different key may open up new compositional possibilities. Alternatively try playing along with other people's songs, and then removing to original inspiration and seeing where it takes you. One of my most successful songs in the past was composed like this. Because I pushed the harmonic structure of my "new part" quite hard, once the original song had been removed it was impossible to hear where my "inspiration" had come from. HTH.

What's wrong with the original bridge?

That's weird. Could you post some photos of how you have the lead arranged with the strap when you are playing. I had a Yamaha guitar with this output socket arrangement and never had any problems with it.

The last gig I went to where I wasn't also playing was Auger/Westenra/Dhampyres at The Met in Whitby as part of WGW. The bands were all great but struggled with appalling sound from an under-powered PA and seemingly incompetent sound engineers. The strange thing was that at various points throughout the evening the mix would suddenly improve for about 10 seconds and then mysteriously go back to being terrible again. Auger actually stopped their set after the first song and essentially did a second sound check and didn't continue the set until it sounded half-way decent. Overall a less than brilliant start to the weekend. I would have also gone the gig there the following night to see Deviant UK, but the appalling sound put me off. From what I hear the sound was better, but still not very good. I played at the Met two years previously and it looked like the same people doing the PA, and while they weren't brilliant they weren't as terrible as on this occasion. They also brought a much larger PA that was far more suitable for the size of the venue.

But a lot of that back catalogue sold in significant numbers when it was released so there are plenty of copies still around for anyone who wants to hear or buy them.

And what's the betting that one of the listeners manages to sneak in a recording device and the tracks are all over the internet before the end of June?

It is indeed. I played Corrosion Festival there a couple of years ago with In Isolation. Looking forward to getting on that stage again.

Next Hurtsfall gig is opening day 2 of BLAQKHOLESUN 2024 at The Alhambra in Morecambe. We'll be on at 16.20 on Saturday 8th June but the whole weekend looks brilliant:

Next Hurtsfall gig is opening day 2 of BLAQKHOLESUN 2024 at The Alhambra in Morecambe. We'll be on at 16.20 on Saturday 8th June but the whole weekend looks brilliant:

I play my Eastwood Hooky as both a guitar and a bass which confuses quite a few people - mostly PA sound engineers. Despite mentioning this when we set up, I have discovered that it's still necessary to soundcheck one of the songs with a "guitar" part so they don't EQ out all the top end.