BigRedX

One band is mostly concentrating on writing and recording our next album, but we still have a number of decent gigs lined up including WGW and Infest. The other band has already done some pretty good gigs this year including HRH Goth 2 at the Leicester O2 Academy, and last night's gig opening for Empathy Test. Coming up we have WGW (as well), and places on several other festivals later in the year booked already. We have our London debut this weekend. It helps that both bands fit into the post-punk/goth genre which has a good number of decent promotors and venues especially up north. One of the best gigs is Carpe Noctum in Leeds which is so popular that unless a band drops out, neither of my bands are likely to be playing there before 2025!

I've dep'd once. About a year after I had left the dad-rock covers band I used play with I got a phone call from one of the guitarists asking if I could help them out for a gig in two weeks time as their replacement bassist had injured himself and was unable to do it. Since the evening in question was one of the rare weekends when I didn't already have a Terrortones gig, I said yes on the understanding that the set would only be made up of songs that I had played before with them, and that they send it through as soon as possible so I had plenty of time to familiarise myself with them again. Less than a week before the gig after further prompting the set list finally materialised and while it was all songs I had done with them before, rather than being numbers from the last time we gigged, it was years since I had played a lot of them and some I'd only done once or twice before they were dropped from the set. On questioning this, it turned out that their current singer couldn't do the gig either, and a previous vocalist had been enlisted. The resulting set was made up of all the songs I had ever played with them that he could also sing. It took me several evenings of hard work to get everything to an acceptable standard. I hadn't played some of the songs for such a long time that I was essentially learning them afresh. The gig went OK, but ultimately it wasn't a very pleasant experience for me. Too much hard work for too little fun. I won't be doing it again any time soon.

I looked at getting mine converted to a 5-string but it wasn't really cost-effective, so I sold it (to someone in Japan IIRC). If money was no object then maybe I's reconsider, but I'd probably just have some more Gus basses instead!

Last week, I went completely by chance past the Gibson Garage on the way to somewhere more interesting. Back in the 20th century I would have probably been sidetracked and spent an hour or two drilling over the instruments. This time I simply glanced at what was visible in the widows and went on my way. Until they make a 5-string Thunderbird that is essentially a 64 model with an extra string, I'm unlikely to be interested in anything they produce.

The Tokai Talbo Bass which has a similar construction with a hollow aluminium body weighs the same as a typical wooden bodied bass. Mine was full of the sort of foam you find in cushions in an attempt to prevent the hollow body inducing feedback, although @Bassassin has reported it's not very effective when using high-gain sounds.

There's a back one level and forward to the next unread topic links at the end of every thread, are they not sufficient? IMO the phone browsing experience is very poor, but there are more important missing bits of interface than the ones you mention.

How big is your pedalboard?

It might be worth mentioning that many multi-effects units have a built-in audio interface so you don't need a separate device for recording. I do all my recording using the Line6 Helix which has options for outputting the processed and direct sound via separate channels. This allows me to monitor (and record if I want) the processed sound while also recording the direct sound which I can then process later using either the Helix Native plug-in or any other effects in my DAW. Then I can tweak the sound to fit better into the track without being stuck with the original sound or needing to re-record if I want a different sound.

I use either my Gus G3 or the Eastwood Hooky into my Helix with headphones. The choice of bass is down to which band I'm practicing for. I see no point in having a different bass and effects set-up for home use as the one I'll be using at gigs or in the rehearsal room. The use of headphones over my FRFR cab is simply down to noise considerations. I know the sound of the headphones well enough to know that what I program on the Helix will be very close to perfect when I get into the rehearsal room, and it's just a question of some final EQ and level tweaks. I also practice standing up as that's how I'll be playing at the gig.

When I was in The Terrortones, once a month we would put on a "Dick Venom Presents..." gig at a local venue. Mr Venom would pick a better known band in a compatible genre to us and we would play support. Very useful for building up our gig "CV" that let us claim we had shared the bill with numerous well-respected bands which would open doors for gigs elsewhere. It also gave us a low-pressure local gig where we could try out our newly written songs. This ran very successfully for a couple years, but eventually its success contributed to its downfall. It had got to the point where we were often attracting a bigger audience than the headliners. It was rather embarrassing to see a significant number of people leave after we had played and not stay to see the supposedly better-know main act who had often cost quite a bit of money to get to play. This in turn was the secondary problem where the venue was now too small for the event, but booking better-known bands and hiring a bigger venue was a massive step up in terms of the amount of money we would need to front to make it happen, and the financial side just got too risky.

Only for us old farts. Anyone born after 1979 has the possibility of buying something both usable and interesting for not a lot of money.

While there are one or two YOB (1960) basses that would be interesting to own, nothing exists that I would actually want to use, so it's all a bit pointless for me.

Probably because no-one on a mobile device wants to waste time and bandwidth downloading huge images that their screen is too small to display in full resolution anyway. If you really want to post enormous photos use an external image host.

Unfortunately @diskwave has previous form for joining topics mid-way through a reasonable discussion for what seems like the sole intention of posting something contentious and then flouncing off when challenged.

The next Hurtsfall gig is on Wednesday 10th April at the Chapel in the Angel Microbrewery in Nottingham, opening for Empathy Test and Black Nail Cabaret.

Everyone on the recording needs to be in tune with the same thing. What it is doesn't matter in the slightest.

It's already been on here several times in the past 5 years.

In the days before electronic tuners the practice would be for the rest of the musicians to tune to whatever instrument was the hardest to retune. Normally the the studio piano. However many recordings would have their speed (and pitch) altered in order to get a better feel, usually being sped up, so it is very common for the final released version to somewhere between a quarter and a semitone off standard pitch.

There are a couple of reasons why these synths are so cheap. One will be that with parameter access they will be difficult to program without a computer editor. The other is due to their age things will be starting to go wrong with them. The Roland keyboards from this era are notorious for glue failures on the key weights causing them to become detached, rendering the keyboard useless, and although fixable it takes a lot of time and effort. There are also likely to be problems with the battery backup of the user memories. Unless you are happy with the factory presets or there is a readily available selection of free decent 3rd party sounds that are easily loaded in, I personally would steer clear of all the synths that you have suggested. Also from what I recall of these synths, the sounds will now be quite dated. Unfortunately any decent synth with MIDI with close to one control per parameter will be more than your £200 budget, If you are determined to go with one of the synths you have suggested approach with caution and make sure everything is working as it should be before parting with your cash.

The iLok problem only affects M2 and M3 Macs running Sonoma version 14.4, previous versions were fine. And now the 14.4.1 update has fixed it.

Your problem is your budget of under £200. What have you seen that fits into this? Otherwise I'd be recommending the Behringer Deepmind 12.

What do you want the synth to do? Produce it's own sounds or just act as a controller for the Doepfer system? If you need it to produce sounds, what sort? What sort of music do you play?

I'd dob them in to the relevant authority.

I suppose in my case the Helix already does the vast majority of things that I want and it does them very well. All the "improvements" I am after should be possible with the existing hardware and all I need to do is to persuade Line6 to implement them in a future firmware update.

And what exactly could a newer chipset improve?