BigRedX

Are these your own songs or covers? If they are covers and you are having them professionally duplicated (CDRs) or replicated (proper glass-mastered CDs) you will need a MCPS licence whose cost is based on the number of covers and the production run of the CD and will need to be paid for up front. All the CD manufacturing brokers I've used in the past make you sign a form either stating that you own the copyright on the songs or that you have the relevant licences with details before going ahead with making the CDs. All the CDs I have produced have all been originals so I've always been able to tick the section that says I own the copyright, but a quick look at the MCPS web site reveals that 100 CDs with more than 25 minutes of non-original music will cost just over £70 with VAT for the relevant licence. One thing to watch for duplicated CDRs is that their life-span is considerably shorter than glass mastered CDs. Properly looked after about 15 years before they are unplayable if you are lucky, often a lot less. CDs are still relatively easy to make so if you want to sell them your presentation has to look professional. Single wallets are fine for "singles" but an album should really be in a gate-fold wallet or a jewel case - ideally with a 4-page booklet and a printed tray insert and with an eye-catching design. Anything less will look cheap and tacky. Also get your audio properly mastered and edited, a live performance will benefit even more from this. Whatever you decide to charge (personally for an "album" I'd suggest £10) get a Sumup (or similar) card reader. They are cheap to use and a couple of sales that you would have otherwise lost because you couldn't take card payments will more than make up for the up-front cost. I was at a gig on Friday and would have bought a CD from the headlining band but they only accepted cash which I didn't have, and it was chucking it down with rain so trying to find the nearest cash-point was out of the question. Also have someone who can "man" your merch table at all times because the time when your are most likely to be selling stuff is immediately after you have played when the band will be breaking down and packing away the gear. And finally if you just want to make some extra money for the band your are much better off producing a T-shirt where a 200% mark-up is perfectly acceptable and your punters then turn into walking advertisements for your band.

But as I said in my first post they left the protective plastic on the pick guard which makes it look messy. And which IMO looks horrible next to the plain wood of the sides and back. Yuck!

No-one in the entire history of bass guitars ever has. Every piece of wood is different.

But you can equally pick the opinions of a different luthier who says that it isn't really important. For instance Carl Thompson says that it is impossible to tell what a bass will sound like until he has finished building it. Both Jens Ritter and Bas Extravaganza have made basses out of plywood. The Ritter bass has probably had each body layer specially selected, whilst the Bas Extravaganza one was made from a couple of sheets sourced from his local DYI warehouse. Both apparently sound great. As I have said many times the problem with "tone woods" for solid electric instruments is two-fold: 1. Although it makes a difference, that difference is impossible to properly quantify because every single piece of wood is different no-one has done any serious scientific-based testing (mostly because it's near-on impossible to do. 2. Although it makes a difference, that difference is minuscule in terms of all the other factors that go to make up a solid electric instrument, and negligible once the rest of the band start playing.

I don't think the headstock is chipped - it's just badly photographed light reflections which should have been fixed by altering the studio lighting or at least Photoshopped out. It amazes me that these days photos like this are put out for public consumption, when they should have been spotted and fixed at the photo shoot. It says to me that the manufacturers don't care and makes me wonder what other things they haven't cared enough about in the actual construction.

The only thing you can say for sure is that in the case of these two bases (and only these two bases) the one with the Pau Ferro board is darker sounding (whatever that means). Nothing else. You cannot ascribe this property to just the fingerboard, as you have means of telling exactly how identical (or not) the other components of the two basses are.

I thought it was fairly expensive for what is essentially someone else's design. Also with my art-director's hat on, they should have removed the protective plastic from the scratch plate before taking the photos. With it on it makes the bass looks messy, and these photos are supposed to show it at its very best.

You could use a passive DI box in reverse. You'll need to have a special female-female XLR lead made up as you essentially connecting and output to an output. Then connect your cab sim to an instrument level socket of the DI box.

I saw them in early 1980 when they were still young and fabulous...

A synth.

"Parlance" and "Elder Statesman" both by In Isolation. These were the first two songs I learned for my audition for the band and the ones that made me hope that I would be chosen (and they are great songs irrespective of the bass lines). They have, for me, the right mix of busy and solidness.

I used to own the fretless version of that. I once took it to a practice for my Dad-Rock covers band. The fact that it was fretless was more of a hindrance than the fact it only had one string.

I'd look for some suitable diameter pipe clamps to hold the in-line socket and screw and hot glue the whole assembly to the underside of the desk.

@BoomTing Don't worry, no offence taken, and besides I'm quite capable of scrolling past those posts I find unreadable. The reason I brought it up was because on another forum I frequent someone typed one of these (to me) incomprehensible posts asking for advice about about some instrument or software, and then someone else had tagged me as a person with the specific knowledge to be able help the OP with their problem. I had to point out that due to my dyslexia, and they way the post had been typed, I simply could not understand what had been asked, and if someone could re-phrase the question in a more legible manner I would do my best to supply the relevant information. It doesn't really apply to this thread because we were side-tracked into a discussion on the correct use of the apostrophe, and OP's original question was posed in a perfectly eloquent manner, however it is, IMO, always sensible if you have an important question to ask on a forum like this that you query is typed in the most comprehensible manner possible because that way you can engage with the largest number of people who can potentially help you.

For someone like myself who is marginally dyslexic it does matter, a lot. I have taught myself to recognise word, letter and punctuation patterns which helps me to be able to read and understand what has been written. This is fine if everything I read has been properly copy read, checked, corrected and edited. Unfortunately none of this exists on the more interesting parts of the internet (like this site and other music forums). There are several people here and on the other forums I read who probably have very interesting and important things to say but to me their posts just appear to be a collection of word-shaped letter combinations surrounded by random punctuation (if I'm lucky) and spaces. I simply don't have the time or energy to be able to decipher them (a lot of the time it would require copying their post into a text editor where I could manipulate it into something I can read and understand), and some are so bad that I have had to put the user on "ignore" because just looking at what they have typed made my brain hurt. This post has taken me about 10 minutes to compose and check and there are still likely to be mistakes in it!

It's never "vinyls" (and certainly not "vinyl's"). Just vinyl will do. And anyway the proper term is "records".

But can you play a Thunderbird and dance like the bassist from Freddie And The Dreamers?

I play in two bands and use a 5-string Gus G3 in one and an Eastwood Hooky (copy of the Shergold Marathon 6-string bass) in the other. At a push I could use the Eastwood for both bands although a few of the bass lines that use the low B would have parts that would need to be played an octave higher than I normally do. I certainly couldn't use a P-Bass as a substitute for the Eastwood as I go all the way up to octave G on the high E and I have the B string tuned to C to allow me to play some drone parts in C and Am.

Unfortunately The Clash are a particular bad example to use, as they got a reduced royalty rate in an attempt to keep the price of their albums down for their fans, particularly London Calling and Sandinista, where they were only getting a single album rate. If you really want to support bands financially you should go to their gigs and buy a T-shirt or two.

What sort of "soap-bar". On the bass other than it's a rectangular shaped lump of plastic (occasionally wood) that is wider than a standard J-type pick up, the term is meaningless. So long as there is room the pickup manufacturer can fit any coil configuration that they want in there, and unless it is specifically stated in the specification you won't even know what it is. Probably the most important consideration is the size of the pickups they are replacing because that might narrow down the options.

The Gus G3 5-string meets every single one of those requirements. Here are my two: Passive with humbuckers Active with single coils (with series/parallel switching)

I resisted the temptation to type that...

I'm not sure about the "history" - as I said I've been in Nottingham longer than Rock City has (I had tickets for one of the first gigs there which was cancelled on account of the venue not being finished in time); and its history isn't a fraction of that of the 100 Club (IMO). Maybe I'm just taking it for granted?

We're all old. Most of us grew up with physical media, and like what we know. I'd be happy to switch completely to streaming but, as I already said a lot lot of what I want to listen to isn't yet available here in the UK either due to geographical licensing constraints or because it's old and originally released on a small indie label. Also there's no guarantee that any of the streamlining services can ever be truly profitable and as a result may close at any point and then you'll have no music to listen to.