BigRedX

There's no harm in looking and while there are plenty of things I might like to own I don't actually need any of them. Having said that, it has taken just over 50 years of buying and selling along with several advancements in technology that have rendered many of the instruments I wanted when I was younger irrelevant, to get to this point.

I would never choose another pick that wasn't easily replaceable. I probably loose/misplace/wear down a couple every month and as a consequence buy mine in batches of 100 at a time.

Pretty much every amplified instrument benefits from some degree of signal processing. Your choice of amp and cab(s) is the same as any other effect. Otherwise there would be no point in having some many different brands of amplification. Stick your bass through a rig that did absolutely nothing but increase the amplitude of the input signal and everyone would complain that it made their bass sound bland and lifeless.

My first bass was a second-hand Burns Sonic. At the time it was the only bass I could afford and for over 10 years the only bass I owned. I used it on the demos that had CBS records interested in signing my band. It went through numerous modifications in order to keep it playable. However when I could finally afford something good it was replaced with a 5-string Overwater Original. After that it spent most of its time unplayed in its case. When my current band did their first set of recordings I used it on one song. We re-recorded that song recently and I used one of my Gus 5-strings instead, which sounded better. When I had my big clear out of instruments I thought long and hard about keeping it for sentimental reasons, but I ended up selling it. It didn't really fit with any of the music I've played over the past 30 years, and if I had kept it, it would have gone back in its case and into storage.

Looking at the prices of my usual supplier 250 cards matt laminated is under £20 so if your contact details change it's not a big deal to get new ones printed.

Whoever you pick make sure that their standard rate business cards are the normal size of 85 x 55 mm. IIRC one of the major budget printers of business cards has/had a different standard size which doesn't fit in the typical business card pocket in a wallet rendering them less useful. These days unless you want something fancy in terms of material or finishing, all the budget suppliers will be much of a muchness since all the cards will be digitally printed on similar digital presses and it's very difficult to get this wrong. I'd pick someone local and arrange a discount for collecting them in person. Otherwise if you don't want the hassle of picking them up yourself have a look at Flexpress who are usually very competitive for printing.

I'd post this on the Sound On Sound forum and see what response you get there.

When I'm not going wireless I use one of two leads OBBM made for me back in 2010. Before that I was using a couple of leads I made myself in 1979. I'm still using XLR cables I made up in the mid 90s. Get something made with decent quality components and don't abuse it and it will last you forever.

I'm the process of selling off the last of the guitars and basses that I no longer use regularly. At one point I had over 40. When I'm finished I'll have 5 or 6. I did the same with all my keyboards and MIDI sound modules. Now I have a single controller keyboard for programming my DAW. While it was nice to have a large musical instrument collection, IMO there's little point in owning things that I don't use and are unlikely to use any time soon. They are better off in the hands of people who will actually play them.

Here's mine showing the song that I am currently working on: This workspace is shared with my day job where I do graphic design for packaging hence the rather tidy nature of everything. Most of my programming is done with the mouse and QWERTY keyboard and the guitars, basses and controller keyboards normally only come out when I am actually doing recording for the purposes of making something for release to the public.

As I've said before how do you establish the monetary value of a piece of music? There are songs on my current band's forthcoming album that I have been working on over the last 40 years, and others that were written from start to finish in a single 3 hour practice session.

I have been delaying posting this because I was hoping to include photos but none have surfaced so far... Weird gig at the weekend. We played the Newark Festival, which I was disappointed to find was not the big "rock" event on Newark Showground happening on the same day, but a series of gigs spread around several pubs in the town. We were down to play early evening at The Castle & Falcon and due to our synth player being somewhat under the weather we arrived just as the band before us were finishing. Surprised to find that the actual stage was outdoors in the pub courtyard, which hadn't been mentioned at any point when we were being booked. I'm never quite sure of the effectiveness of these events for us since we're not a "conventional" band, and in the past some of the similar gigs we have played have been more than a bit "meh". However this was one of those exceptions. The audience seemed to be really up for our set of "melancholy bangers" and even more surprisingly we sold several T-shirts and CDs including a couple that we had the sign. Compare that to our previous gig where we were playing to our core audience and we sold just one T-shirt. Bit of a break now until the end of September which will give us a chance to work on some new material and recording for the album.

If you want more tonal variation buy a programable multi-effects pedal with a decent EQ section.

It's costing approximately £30 plus postage for a rewind. I don't have to worry about doing any soldering more fiddly than connecting the flying leads back to the selector switch and it will be re-wound with the correct gauge of wire and to the correct DC resistance as the original pickup. From what I recall when I was using this bass the middle pickup either on it's own or with one of the others was the setting I favoured for most of the bass sounds, so trying to sell the bass without the most important pickup working is likely to knock off more value than the cost of the rewind.

Even on a live recording you are unlikely to be hearing anything of the amp and cabs you can see on stage, but the processing that is being applied either by the PA or the recording process.

There is no right answer regarding types of string. Choose the ones that produce the sound and playing experience that you like. Don't make a big deal about it. Unless you aren't able to produce the correct bass tone for the type of music the band is playing no one will care apart from you.

But no humans other than Tech Bros were disadvantaged in the process, and they don't really count.

But how can anyone tell? There's only so many note combinations. Songwriters and composers come up with very similar tunes all the time. If I sign up to an AI music generator via VPN using a one-off email address, and then by the same method use an on-line stem separator. Convert the results into MIDI. Redo the bits I don't like, and keep the rest but using my very similar sounds, or me playing guitar or bass parts, there is no trail back to me and no way it can be proved that I didn't come up with the idea all by myself.

I did set up some patches for it on the BassPod I owned at the time that had additional gain to compensate, but the weedy sound was just one of the many reasons that this bass was completely unsuitable for me and ultimately it was simpler to sell it and buy something I could get on with.

IMO the vast "data set" that AI uses to make something is part of its downfall. A bit like the musician who says they are open to everything but because they have no focus doesn't really get most of it and as a result what they come up with never really fits properly. And if you were to get AI generation to restrict it's data set to a particular genre then it doesn't know when or how to borrow from outside of that genre, to make something just a little bit different and maybe more interesting. But where do you draw the line? If I type some prompts into one of the AI music generators, it might come up with some interesting ideas, none of them will be perfect but there might be something that can be developed, in the same way that when my band writes a song the original idea that one of us come up will go through many changes and mutations as each of us adds their take to end up with something that has moved on quite a bit from the first musical themes. If you start with an AI generated piece of music and develop it, how can anyone tell that the original was AI generated?

I found the same. I could never get on with Squier Jazz, no matter what I did it sounded thin and weedy compared with all my other basses including my 60s Burns Sonic. Also whenever I let a Jazz Bass user play through my rig I would have to turn it up massively compared with my usual settings in order to get anything like a usable sound.

But surely we all learn to create art whether it be visual or audio starting off by copying what we see and hear and like? Certainly no-one in the 21st century is emerging fully formed doing completely brand new work without having gone through this learning process first. The way I see it AI is just like me at 14-15 where my "influences" were clearly on show in both the music and art I was making, and I was only a whisker away from plagiarism. And even today I'll freely admit that if I see or hear something I like it will at some stage probably get incorporated into something I create. What experience has given me is the knowledge not to make it too obvious. AI hasn't learnt that yet and IMO will require a lot me resources and effort putting into it to reach that stage.

It requires Kontakt? I didn't spot that before. I've had problems in the past with NI so I won't use anything the requires their products.

Considering that I've been playing in bands for almost 50 years now, I have only been in one acrimonious split. It brought about the end of a band that I had been involved with for 13 years through numerous line-up changes that had seen every member except me replaced at least twice and had left me as the "de facto" band leader, although I had always been one of the main motivating forces behind the band. The falling out occurred between myself and singer, who was a complete diva and simultaneously very insecure musically, unlike me who knew exactly what I wanted musically and if anyone didn't agree with me, then they could f- right off. (I'm a lot more relaxed these days.) I had actually tried to leave the band a few months earlier as I had become completely fed up with having to organise the other band members musical lives, but they had talked me out of it and things were actually looking quite promising as we were on the point of securing a development deal with a studio owner who was also a member of a reasonable successful 90s band. I don't recall what set the agreement off, and therefore it was probably something completely trivial but it ended up with the two of us screaming at each other. This happened at my house where we also rehearsed and recorded and I'm surprised that none of my neighbours called the police thinking there was a domestic going on. Eventually the singer stormed out and the rest of the band made their excuses and left looking very sheepish. Considering how desperate the singer had been to "make it" at the time, as far as I can tell, she's done almost nothing musical since. I've run into her twice in the last 20 years when we have said "hello" to each other and that's been it. Interestingly the demise of the band led to a very interesting musical development which involved being asked to put together a retrospective CD compilation by the very first band I was in for a US indie label and took up the best part of the next two years of my life. When I was ready to join another band I found one where I could just turn up and play bass and not have any involvement beyond that. That kept me occupied for another 4 years until I joined The Terrortones.

This does look interesting, and I might just break my nothing outside Logic rule. However given that the developer is calling it a day and the Mac specs says it works on Intel Macs, does it also come with an installer for an Apple Silicon version?