Doctor J

Yeah, I know, but I'm asking about toneacrylic and tonegraphite now 😉

13 minutes ago, thodrik said:

My band are in the same boat. We released an album last month and it has been received fairly well in the stoner/doom circles which is great. This means that numerous different sites/blogs and fans have already posted the whole album to Youtube, which means that we get absolutely zilch for those plays. At least a couple of the larger blogs had the decency to ask if they could post the album and made sure to include a direct link to our bandcamp when posting the video. The process of sharing of the album has helped the band in terms of  'exposure' and our bandcamp physical and digital sales are more than they would have otherwise been if the sharing had not occurred in the first place. 

Essentially, the band have almost written off streaming revenue since we don't operate in a genre where that will ever be a significant revenue driver unless Lady Gaga changes style entirely and does an EP with Sleep. We are still relying on people who find the Youtube links to check out the bandcamp, maybe buy the physical album to listen to it in better quality, possibly buy a t shirt and maybe catch us at a gig sometime when it becomes possible. 

The revenue the band generates helps keep the band going but there is little to no individual income for any of the band members. Even if the band 'made it' within this genre it would not be particularly financially lucrative. 

That was exactly the situation we were in and felt pushed into publishing it on the streaming sites. This one, which we gave permission for as the guy is good about publishing links back, was getting almost 1000 plays per day, initially, which was the trigger behind taking ownership of the music in the streaming world. It had gotten to around 14,000 plays before the licencing kicked in, which you can now see in the description.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9mCQ9JXYYA

Youtube can recognise the music published to it and will automatically apply a licence like that into a previously existing video. A lot of the people sharing music are monetising it themselves. They're getting paid for someone listening to your music. If they're "sharing" loads of band's music every day, however, it can start to add up. If you want to... not control it, you can't, but at least establish your ownership, setting up publishing with the likes of CDbaby is the way to do it. We didn't get paid for the first 14,000 or so plays of this and, granted, it's not like I'll be buying a speedboat, but I think the people who wrote and played the music should get something out of it instead of someone just putting up music they didn't have anything to do with. I am not a Spotify customer, they are the very worst thing to happen original music, but you're in a corner as an original artist. If you don't take ownership of your music, someone else will do it for you, sadly.

14 minutes ago, bassist_lewis said:

How have you been paid so little from iTunes (aside from, you know, capitalism)? A song costs 60-99p, do they take a huge cut?

This is streaming only. Itunes Music or IMusic or whatever their streaming service is called. They're trying to get out of the music purchase game.

20 minutes ago, Woodwind said:

Is this complete plays/streams?

It's everything. The reason I was specific about the kind of music we play is because our three-track EP takes 27 minutes to listen to. That 27 minutes still only counts as three plays, however. I could get precious about our art and all that but basically it takes a long time to play four bars at 55bpm 😁

The whole thing is weighted in favour of having as many short tracks as possible above 30 seconds. Vulfpeck nailed it with Sleepify.

Here are some real world numbers just to show the bare bones of the actual situation. I don't know why people are so protective of this information, everybody should see how things really are. This is for some original music I wrote and released in 2019 and used CDbaby to publish to the streaming services which cost around $90 to do, if I recall correctly. This is all streaming activity since it was released right up to today. I hope to recoup by 2030.

Ok, 2040 😂

Granted, the style of music we play - slow stoner/doom type stuff where our shortest song is 7 minutes long - is exactly the opposite of how to play the streaming game. Ideally, songs should be as little over 30 seconds as possible to register a play, hence why so many albums now feature short songs, short skits and other filler. We're in it for the doom, not the money, though. I have had to go to 4 decimal places to make sure everything gets covered. Pay is counted in US$. To clarify, we're getting 1.05 cents per stream on SoundExchange, for example, and 1/3 of 1 cent on Spotify.

Why would you bother, I hear you ask? Well, something is better than nothing, I suppose, but only just. People are going to post your music to youtube and the likes, "share" it on your behalf, whether you like it or not, so you might as well get paid (yes, I know) for it rather than them. That was my logic, anyway, based on it being uploaded to Youtube by several different people unassociated with us. I felt forced into it rather than waste my time finding it and having it pulled down (we did that too, a few times).

By contrast, we have around 100 digital sales on Bandcamp, priced at €3.00 and get roughly €2.33 for each sale there. If I ever come across as a Bandcamp fanboy, it's because they are, without question, the only decent digital music provider who aren't ripping artists off. Bandcamp also give you free streaming and downloads for every purchase of music you make. If anyone wants to check out the music behind the numbers, http://witheredfist.bandcamp.com is my shameless plug 😉 If you actually want to support an artist, Bandcamp or direct from the artist is the only way to do it, in my opinion.

I'd be interested to hear what people think of those numbers, is anyone surprised by them?

Do acrylic or carbon graphite basses show more tonal consistency across multiple instruments? Anyone got two fully carbon Statii out there? 🙂

Instruments made of the same woods, sorry, tonewoods, sounding very different to each other? What trickery is afoot?

We all know that if you take 10 of the most basic and mundane bass out there, the Precision, with ash bodies, maple necks and fretboards, they will not all sound the same. Wood is organic. No two pieces of the same species are the same. To apply blanket characteristics to something which, by its very nature, is inconsistent in cellular structure - before you get into age, how it is dried, how it is cut, etc, etc, etc, is just prone to error.

Still no-one can present a list of wood species which are structurally suitable but tonally unsuitable for solid body electric instruments?

It also makes it spoonwood, chairwood, batwood, gatewood and any other application you may use it for?

Save those fingers and just call it wood?

50 minutes ago, deepbass5 said:

what would you call all the woods that bass makers reject? and have learnt to not use because they sound bad,  (non tone woods) ?

logic says hundreds of years of musical instrument making, using wood has led to some favorite woods now known as tone woods

What woods do they reject, out of curisity? What woods constitute non-tone woods? I'm guessing ones not rigid enough to support the stress of strings under tension but if anyone knows of a wood which is hard enough, stable enough but doesn't have tone, I'd love to know.

The only one which readily springs to mind is Fender being attracted to pine but finding it too soft and easy to damage, even though the instruments sounded fine and it was cheap and plentiful, their primary criteria for electric solidbody wood back in the 50's. Harder finishes have allowed pine to cross the treshold into Tonewood University, though. Even some Ekos were made of pine 40 years ago. No balsa basses I'm aware of. What wood would be good if only it sounded like it should?

That kind of thing reminds me of the Metal Sludge interview with Jason Ward, bassist from Flotsam & Jetsam who were on MCA for a few albums, as well as a few independent label releases. They sold a decent amount of albums in their day and toured regularly. This bit was an eye opener to me, twenty years ago.

What do you do to pay the bills?
"We all do many things, I am a computer tech by trade and have done tech support for the last few years. The rest of the guys work day jobs as well as other musical ventures. I used to worry about people knowing, now its more like “who the flip are you kidding.”

http://metalsludge.tv/classic/?p=28283

Jim Sheppard and Warrell Dane worked as chefs even when Nevermore were doing well. The myth of the full-time professional in original music was, and still is, greatly exaggerated.

39 minutes ago, deepbass5 said:

how about Yamaha exposing their basses to hours of musical vibration in their factory to simulate years of playing, the aim to line up all the woods molecular structure to be in line and vibrate in harmony to those notes to be played on it. Just as an old violin or 60's P bass. Good wood selection helps with this, hence the term tone wood. electronics and string choice can ruin this but not enhance it. High mass bridge can help bring out what is there, along with expert set up.

Those 60's P basses were built with plentiful and/or cheap wood, not carefully selected wood. Fender were and are in the mass-production game. Besides, all the old Fenders seem to be good ones these days, even the ones which barely had a note played on them. How has their molecular structure changed?

Rosewood fretboard, though. It should have a nice, warm tone.

I was forever having to repair stupidity

😂

Congratulations! 👏🏻

Sorry to annoy you, I was just trying to understand why you have that opinion in a spirit of open discussion. I'll go back in my box and just post pictures.

So the name matters more than the bass? Sorry, I just don't understand where the negativity is coming from. Surely the quality of the instrument is all that matters?

1 minute ago, Cuzzie said:

HPW is a bit of a tool with a record of ruining stuff

Really? I have never heard of this. What stuff?

Vote or perish!

48 minutes ago, FDC484950 said:

It’s about dilution of the brand. It doesn’t really matter what the quality may or may not be when the name on the headstock is meaningless. At least other manufacturers that have cheaper ranges elsewhere generally handle the sourcing, quality control, distribution and warranty. A Sadowsky bass used to mean something. A Sadowsky sold by Warwick is, to me, meaningless.

The first Metros weren't a dilution of the brand?

Have basses no-one here appears to have actually played yet ever been so unpopular?

I don't understand the ire towards this project. Sadowsky knows his stuff. Warwick know their stuff. Despite the shaky embryonic stage we appear to have passed, I can't understand why anyone would think these are going to be anything less than superb.

14 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

And I bet at the end they still don’t know who the fifth Beatle is.

Your mother should know

I go with what looks nice 🙂

If the truss rod snapped you'd expect all the strings would go flat and the action to increase by about 1cm. Are you sure it's really a truss rod issue?

Martin Ain's "mad monk on meths" was more to my tastes