Leonard Smalls

Here's a mobile phone one of my old band playing at an excellent venue in Whitchurch - Percy's. Unfortunately, it's effectively outside and this was March...

Certainly in the topsy turvy world of rock and roll, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is quite often useful.

Just popped into my local guitar shop and they had a Mooer ge200... It looks solid, it's got lots of stuff on it, but just wondered if anyone's tried one with bass? Unfortunately I didn't have time so I'm wondering if it's at all worthwhile.

Anybody's work with Hiromi is usually pretty darned excellent... Tony Grey is brilliant on the Sonicbloom stuff with The Fuze!

Bootsy!

Always liked Jonas' Wal slap sound on this: And Gary Willis gets the max from a fretless - especially in his solo (3'30ish)

I see your puny 4, and raise you 11...

I remember playing the Marquee many years ago. 3-400 had come to see us - it was Christmas and the crowd were quite lively. We did a few songs, then our singer announced that we'd hired a stripper, who was going to perform while we played pne of our crazier numbers, "Curtains". The crowd whooped and hollered in excitement, the band launched into the song, and out came the stripper. Funnily enough, the rest of the band hadn't known about the extra performer, and were just as surprised as the audience when a very overweight Santa staggered out. None of us knew where to look as he disrobed rapidly and cavorted very nakedly... The singer realised quite how far his joke had backfired when his girlfriend started flirting outrageously with Fat Santa.

I dig too, Daddy-o! 😀 I was pleased to guess who the winner would be...

Took me a while to get used to them as well - bass did seem quieter than it was with my Etymotic plugs. But that was because the Etymotics filtered much more at higher frequencies. I turned up my amp a bit - and funnily enough the rest of the band have said things like "I didn't know what you were playing before", the drummer is actually drumming to my bass line and the singer is writing lyrics that follow the bass... So everybody's happy!

I've been attempting to work myself towards this sort of bass sound. Perfect in a funkin' No Wave band! Might need a 2nd bass player plus keys to pull it off...

I've only been playing bass for 35 years, but I wouldn't go for any... Firstly, I don't want to do covers, unless it's in a Spinal Tap tribute band... Secondly, I don't want to play in a gothpunkgrunge band - I've done 2 of the 3 before and want to be funky and crazed now, as opposed to just crazed. And thirdly, I don't sing.

Funnily enough I've had absolutely no problem running Ableton and many different VSTs together with Novation keyboard controller, Scarlett interface and separate touch screen monitor from my Windows 10 laptop... But I once had trouble working out how to use ProTools on a Mac Pro, so obviously I have sufficient experience in it to say all Macs are rubbish. Or perhaps I don't, which would maybe make my wildly sweeping statement a bit daft.

Bear in mind it's brand new, with octacore i7 9700K processor, over-specced 450W power supply, 500Gb solid state drive, coolermaster cooler and a 23" monitor and wireless keyboard/mouse... You won't get much new for anything like that price; for example, this similar, but only quadcore i7, HP machine is £1500+ https://www.ebuyer.com/738034-hp-z240-tower-workstation-j9c07ea-abu A similar spec new Mac would be at least 2.5x the price of that!

As I said in my first post on the subject, best value in Macs, and PC for that matter, is to buy a 10 year old one with Xeon octacore (or more!) and 96Gb RAM - the Mac towers for editing/graphic use are very similar machines to, say, an HP Windows high end server of the same era... You are, however, buying a 10 year old machine, with all the potential problems (or not!) that may entail. I've just specced a decent PC, including monitor, mouse and key board from PC Specialist - this is what you get for £1153 all in: Case PCS 6003B BLACK CASE Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™ i7 Eight Core Processor i7-9700K (3.6GHz) 12MB Cache Motherboard ASUS® PRIME Z370-P II: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs Memory (RAM) 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB) Graphics Card INTEGRATED GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR (GPU) 1st Hard Disk 500GB WD Blue™ 3D NAND 2.5" SSD, (upto 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW) DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 16x BLU-RAY WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW & SOFTWARE Power Supply CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY Processor Cooling CoolerMaster Hyper 212X (120mm) Fan CPU Cooler Thermal Paste COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD) Wireless/Wired Networking 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED) USB/Thunderbolt Options 2 PORT (1 x TYPE A, 1 x TYPE C) USB 3.1 PCI-E CARD + STANDARD USB PORTS Operating System Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KUK-00001] Monitor AOC 23.6" E2470SWH LED - 1920 x 1080,1MS, D-Sub, DVI-D, HDMI Keyboard & Mouse LOGITECH® MK270 WIRELESS KEYBOARD & MOUSE COMBO

It's a bit unhelpful! You have to click on the date, which gives you a link to the .zip file. And you're right, there's nowhere near as much as for mac and Windows - which is why I use Windows... But if I was just starting up, and being a bit techy anyway, I'd go for a Linux OS with Ardour - there's options for just about every type of effect and virtual instrument, just not the ones you or I may be using already.

If you're starting from scratch there's quite a few that'll work on Linux... Many Windows ones will also work if you use WINE (windows emulator), though this can be glitchy and/or crashey for certain plug-ins. But this is a good source of quality paid-for and free open source VSTs, all of which were developed for Ardour/Tracktion/QTractor etc for use without WINE: http://www.airwindows.com/ And here's a list of suppliers: http://linux-sound.org/linux-vst-plugins.html

Indeed. RIP!

I'm afraid I was having a senior moment - instead of typing "Ardour" my ancient fingers wrote "Logic"... However, Ardour is a decent DAW , and it's open source.

And they don't get viruses... And they make you more attractive to the opposite sex... 😁

Somebody's got to bite! Windows based computers are just as fast and easy to use as Apple are, just a lot cheaper for the same spec. After all they often use the same processors! But it appears that getting used to one OS or the other makes you rabidly defensive of it. But at the end of the day, both can be equally annoying... So if you're of a techy mindset and would be happy with Logic, get an old HP server with octacore Xeon chipset and 96Gb RAM and run Linux on it. Ableton won't work... Or you could just run Windows and Ableton. If you're keen on Apple get a refurb old editing/graphics machine, same chipset and RAM and run whatever latest Mac OS it'll support plus Ableton. Both these options would be £5-800. And 96Gb RAm!!! Alternatively, you could do what i did and buy a made-to-spec laptop from PC Specialist. I got i7 with 16Gb RAM, 256Gb ssd and 1 Tb HD 17" one for £700. I run Ableton... Admittedly the motherboard failed after 4 years - £160 - but that was unusual! But add all that to a large touchscreen monitor for mixing, plus controller midi keys, Scarlett interface and a pair of Adam f5 monitors and you've got an instant studio for less than a similar spec Macbook...

It's to do with what's in the emissions... Diesels produce more NOx and particulates which are more associated with health problems.

Aye... When I was in London (18 years!) I would only ever use the car to leave town; if I was going to the centre I'd cycle or get the tube. Going to work was either cycle or motorbike. But I knew some folks who couldn't cope with the idea of public transport, never mind pushbike; those people would drive everywhere - it was amazing how full the carpark at work was with cars that had driven 1 or 2 miles. They'd take 30-odd minutes doing that, then whinge about the traffic, or the congestion charge but would never think about who caused that traffic (them!) or why their backsides were increasing in size daily.

Some modern Dutch prog, as seen in my local boozer a couple of weeks ago! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC7KgOuuV1Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLk5Y8JBb7E