mike257

Another Reaper user here. Main attraction for me is that it's very resource-light (will happy chug away on a fairly basic spec computer) and very stable. My main use for it is capturing live recordings, where it needs to just work, and that's exactly what it does. As far as editing video - you won't find much in the way of software that does both well, because they're different tasks with different demands and workflow. Video editing is much more demanding of your computer than most audio tasks. If you're trying to do both at once, especially if you're doing a lot of processing/plugin useage on your audio, you'll be taxing your system. I'd be inclined to use the right tool for the job - finish your audio and do a final mix in a DAW, and throw that mix in to a video editor where you aren't asking the system to do anything extra other than playing a single file with no live processing.

Noooooooooooo! Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness is one of the few double albums that make me want to turn down the lights, clamp a pair of decent headphones round my ears and just disappear in to it. How an album with X.Y.U., Thru The Eyes Of Ruby and Stumbeleine on it (back to back!) can be samey is beyond me. Yes, the singles on their own would have been a great record, but it would have been the worse for what it would have lost.

It's definitely a weird phenomenon with rock music fans that they're surprised to find top flight musicians from "less worthy" genres are actually extremely talented.

Friends who do solo acoustic covers gigs are back out in the pubs and bars and keeping fairly busy. Touring is a write off for the foreseeable though. UK shows aren't going to go ahead any time soon, and with the constantly shifting lockdowns and quarantine requirements I don't see international work springing back soon either. The single biggest issue for promoters is the uncertainty that an event will actually be allowed to go ahead. There's been some VERY last minute cancellations imposed by local authorities, and the constant spectre of local lockdowns over everything. No sensible promoter will want to engage suppliers, spend on marketing, sign contracts for guaranteed fees etc while these sorts of shenanigans are happening.

Nobody musical in my family and my parents thought pursuing music was a terrible idea. I started playing guitar at 13, and after a few months on a borrowed acoustic, asked for an Epi Les Paul Special II for Christmas, on offer from Soho Soundhouse for £99. "Can't you find a cheaper one. It's not like you can really play it anyway" was my Dad's response. When I wanted to take music for my GCSE options at 14, the blocks were put on by my parents in collusion with the head of year "You can't read music now, there's no point carrying on studying it". Didn't stop me playing, and a few years later my shitty unsigned band ended up being one of the first shitty unsigned bands to be offered a headline tour of O2 (or Carling as they were back then) Academy venues. With my parents still nonplussed, I was pressed to stop chasing my dreams and ended up at 21 working with my dad at the same company he'd worked for since he was 15 years old, and the band folded shortly afterwards. Seven years of increasingly dull corporate misery later, engaged, with an infant son and a second one on the way, I took a chance, to my parent's sheer horror, and left the sensible job to make a living from music. Until COVID struck, I'd managed to sustain a career for eight years, although I do very little bass playing now and primarily work as a sound engineer and tour manager. I don't see my parents any more, but when I landed the biggest gig of my career last summer, touring as a monitor engineer for an artist who's music was always played in our house growing up, I finally got some acknowledgement, with a one word comment from my dad on a post on my company's Facebook page after mixing the main stage headline slot at Boomtown Festival - "Congratulations". That was it. I didn't feel compelled to reply!

Had a set for years that's migrated across various basses and always sounded great

If you enjoyed learning Sir Duke, you could stay with Stevie and add I Wish and Master Blaster to the list. Both fun lines to play. There was an isolated bass part of the original Sir Duke line posted on here a little while ago, worth looking that up for a little listen!

Yep. The reality for small to medium sized venues is that you need a pretty well packed house to break even. When you slash capacity to 20% but you also need more staff in to enforce distancing measures, you don't have to be a genius to realise the numbers won't work.

Sorry to hear that. There's an awful lot of people in a similar position. The government have played a blinder in coming out with great, headline grabbing schemes that they can shout about come the next election, whilst simultaneously making the small print full of enough challenges that an absolute ton of businesses and individuals have been left without any real support.

Cheers mate - frustrates the hell out of me when people act like we've somehow got it easy being outside the world of "normal" employment. I'm receiving a small grant from HelpMusicians UK which, whilst I'm immensely grateful to receive it, is a monthly amount equivalent to what I'd normally earn in one day on tour. I put in for the Crew Nation scheme that Live Nation are running but they were just overwhelmed with applicants. Was in line to be working on their summer of drive-in concerts before all that got pulled too! I was doing some delivery driving for a local brewery but they've laid off all the home delivery drivers now they're back supplying pubs. There's little bits happening - I'm involved with a live streamed festival happening at the end of August, and possibly doing some installation work for a couple of new bars/venues, but everything has the shadow of a return to lockdown hanging over it, especially in light of this week's local restrictions in some areas. It's very hard to plan ahead with any confidence.

This stinks of the tired assumption that the self employed are all on the blag. I work in the touring production industry. I trade as a limited company, even though it's just me. This means I'm not "self employed" so I wasn't eligible for that support. I can't furlough myself, because I still have to undertake what tiny little business activities I can, otherwise I'll have no business to come back to. I don't have premises that are eligible for business rates, so none of the grant schemes apply to me (I did have a small unit but it was within a self storage facility and not counted as eligible premises. I've had to give this space up for financial reasons). I've got precisely zero government support. The government support that does exist will cease in a couple of months, long before our industry is able to return to normal. There will be no concert touring, festivals, theatre productions etc in 2020. There is no guarantee they'll be back in their normal form in 2021. Will the government continue to support artists, musicians, technicians, production companies, venues, event trucking and bussing suppliers, tour caterers, stewards, security, all the huge supply chain that supports live events? Like hell they will. Redundancies and dead companies will be all over the place. @dudewheresmybass, like me, will not see his income return to normal levels from live music for quite some time. Our mortgages and bills won't go away. Our kids still need to be fed and clothed. I won't be working for free.

Thanks! Touring techie here. The year's diary completely wiped out for myself, and all the freelancers and companies that I work with. Lot of people and businesses at real risk of going under, it's certainly a strange time to be in this industry. I'm sure it'll come back eventually, but the high profile pulling of the country-wide drive in concerts hasn't exactly boosted consumer or industry confidence. Attempts at getting shows up and running are going to be hamstrung by the debate of who takes on the risk (and the costs) if a second wave/local lockdown/plague of locusts causes cancellations.

That's a truly wonderful bit of bass playing, that song.

Only came here to excitably yell "Oceansize!!!” Huge amounts of Biffy Clyro stuff is in things that aren't 4/4, and they're very good at squeezing it in but making it sound perfectly natural. This shifts effortlessly from 3 to 5 and back again... And this goes to a whole bunch of different places musically and dynamically in less than five minutes....

There's definitely a history on here of everyone mobbing round whatever budget bass is found to be slightly less bad than you expect a cheap bass to be. Remember the SX craze? I think this forum must have bought most of their stock over the course of a few months. There'll be another one along soon, there always is!