Leaderboard

It is all a ruse. You don't need books, CDs, hifi system, magazines, videos, DVDs or TV...all you need is your laptop and a subscription to lots of things at only £9.99 per month each. Oh, and cloud storage for all your backups at £9.99 a month for when your laptop breaks. "Why am I so poor?" the junior office worker mused, listening to Spotify though bluetooth headphones on his iPhone X while clicking away at his laptop. His £4.20 large coffee with cream from Starbucks cooled next to him.

We're vinyl lovers in this house, we invested in a decent system just as CDs were being released and have stuck with the medium throughout making further investments along the way. It was only very recently we bought our first CD player, 4-5 years ago? Now I admit our vinyl player is of a far higher quality than our CD player even though it was still quite expensive but vinyl has a big edge over listenability in my opinion as long as the vinyl is spotless (we have a record cleaning machine). There is also something more of an occasion to playing a record the set up, the album art, it's less so with a CD but not gone and let's face it the sound quality isn't bad at all with minimum fuss and it still gives that sense of ownership. Downloads, we did try but it seemed wrong somehow, download, click/play despite the excellent sound quality it feels disposable somehow. So are CDs going to become relics of the past? I hope not, there is something extra to owning a physical medium Gratuitous photo of my two Tbirds next to the hi-fi

"do you really need to put all your stuff where the other members of the band need to set up before a gig? We say yes".

On your marks!

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Have waited a few days before writing this up until I was able to use if at home and out in a gigging situation. So what is the Helix HX? It is basically all the effects you get when buying a full fat or LT Helix, plus some more added from the big 4 button and M series pedals, minus the amp and cab modeling in it’s bigger brother. In addition the HX can be used to control your pedalboard switching and routing needs. It has 2 FX loops to incorporate and switch existing pedals. There are 2 basic settings, stomp box mode and scene mode. In stomp box mode you switch individual pedals/loops on and off with the foot switches, in scene mode 1 button would switch on/off a specified group of pedals and loops. Very flexible and both settings give you real control of your pedalboard. At 43 I have one foot in the analogue era, but have been exploring DSP based effects for years. I am happy, although a little melancholy at the same time, to confirm the hype is real. Line6 have cracked component level emulation and the end result is that the HX delivers 117 or such emulated pedals that can fully compete directly with their stompbox (often analogue) brethren. There is a lot on BC and other forums on Helix, so it makes sense to not spend too much time on the technical aspects and focus on what it does for me as a frequently gigging, sometimes depping and periodically recording part-time musician. How have I set it up? Bass goes to my preferred compressor the Keeley Compressor Pro (the onboard compressors actually are very good, but I own the Keeley so might keep using it), into the HX. Loop 1 has my Future Impact and a COG Octaver (the FX loop has a blend function which is so handy), loop 2 has my long time favourite low gain Bearfoot Blueberry BOD and a DG Duality. These loops can be allocated to any position in the FX chain, so e.g. the Dirt loop can be the latest in the chain or earliest as required. My main issue with DSP effects WAS that dirt, octave and filters were generally okay but not a viable alternative to my stompboxes. I am amazed to report that I would be perfectly happy for Helix to cover my dirt. It is that good. So much so that I no longer have a B3K in loop 2 and use the emulated B7K instead. I simply cannot tell the difference in a real world situation. The Duality and BBOD are still on as I prefer them over equivalent emulated pedals, but if Line6 would emulate the Duality and BBOD I am comfortable they could be replaced. There is a really good Octaver in the HX, but I doubt the COG (or FI for that matter) will ever be replaced. But I have 2 switchable loops so who cares right? The envelope filters are very good. I use filters only in combination with octave and fuzz. Built in are more than acceptable for my application. Other may feel they still need a separate filter pedal, difficult for me to judge. All in all the HX is a compact (slightly larger than an M9) multi that doubles as a control centre for your board. Sounds great, is intuitive, is flexible and appears to be built as a tank. Some Zoom B3(n) users might think, why pay so much more for getting rid of the amp and cab emulations etc? Understandable question: I own a B3n, great fx unit in it’s own right, but totally and utterly put to shame by the HX on application, flexibility, sound quality (especially dirt and filter) and construction. DSP is here to stay and I am fully bought in.

Our second Sunday afternoon at the Old Abbey Taphouse in south/central Mcr. We're on a stage at one end of a big beer garden - landlady loves us acoustic, but we brought very small amps for singer and my acoustic bass, but were told atm their license doesn't allow any sort of amplification outside, so no chance anyone more than 6 feet away from the stage could hear us. Which didn't matter, because there was literally nobody there apart from the staff and a few friends and a sausage dog. It's a funky community center as well as a very good pub, and for a while a couple of attractive scantily clad young people (one male one female) were practicing circus skills with hoops and scarves in front of the stage - an interesting contrast to the usual "punters getting up to dance"! We just enjoyed playing together without pressure, and it was perfect for our excellent lead singer who's trying hard to build up confidence. And we were given good food and beer and told we can come back any Sunday we want to. Happy landlady, happy band, happy bass player :-)

...it’s all about the TONE.

There’s a few videos on YouTube about it but it’s really simple: 1. You print off your logo on normal paper using a laser printer (won’t work on inkjet) 2 Cover your printed logo with sellotape then using the handle of the scissors rub the sellotape for about 1 min making sure all the sellotape is firmly stuck down and there are no air bubbles 3. Cut out the logo leaving a few mm’s round the edge 4. Put the logo in cold water for about 5 mins if it curls straighten it out again 5.Carefully rub the paper off the back of the sellotape and you will leave just the logo on the sellotape (if it feels slightly gritty then put it back in the water and carefully rub it again till you don’t feel any grit) 6. Wet the sellotape again 7. Place on your headstock or wherever you want the logo to go and blot with some kitchen towel remove any air bubbles and excess water then leave to dry 8. Once dry you can then apply your finish and flatten the same way you would a water slide decal See it’s simple and a very cheap way to do it In the style of blue peter here’s one I did earlier......

Wow, that's awesome... Now where are my f'ing pickups?!

We played a Skinhead pub in Brockworth in '94 looking like below. The lowest point was when a bar stool was thrown at the band onstage.... so we did an encore! They offered what could only be described as a "carry to the car" service once we finished. Apparently the pub closed down in the late 90s.

Sounds like a message to Skelf could be on the cards next month (I'm moving house first). @CameronJ, I'm up in Perth (not Oz, thankfully), but soon to move down to Falkirk, so ACG would be a little over an hour's drive away (about 70 miles). Though I'm not against the idea of a wee drive down to Warwick & London. If I wait until July/August, I'll hopefully have a lekky car, so no congestion charge. Guitar Guitar stock Sandberg, so a trip to Glasgow/Edinburgh is imminent too.

Mine went well until I got a music stand out...

My hard rock covers band was booked to play at a pub not too far away. It turned out when we arrived that it was essentially a harvester style restaurant/ pub. We played our usual sets and towards the end of the second set, I had a punter come to the front and ask very politely - "excuse me, I don't want to be rude, but how many songs do you have left?" Alwaysbmake us chuckle

I'm doing this remembering repairing kit back in the very early 70's, well 1970 actually. My memory may be a bit iffy at that distance. Compression is something valve amps do naturally partly down to the valves themselves but also due to the saturation of the output transformer. Basically they just peter out as the output rises giving a nice soft sounding distortion as they over loaded. Guitarists used this to create all the sounds of early rock music. Combined with the feedback you get at ridiculously high levels it also gave them a lot of sustain to play with. Everyone forgets that most of these amps were pretty unreliable and a band running four valve amps on stage plus often valve PA amps was experiencing a lot of technical failures. Plus back problems from carrying the amps. Having 20 KT88's on stage was a nightmare to be honest. Transistor amps were coming in by then WEM (not much more reliable) and later HH for PA followed by early guitar and bass versions. They were certainly cheaper and quickly became more reliable but transistor amps really distort unpleasantly when overloaded so we looked for a way of getting that gentle overload that the old amps gave. Compression was what was needed so compression on instrument amps started as an effect to give 'valve sound' The first compressors I encountered used ordinary car bulbs to compress the sound. At high power they get hot and their resistance goes up, put the signal through a bulb pick it up with a photocell and bingo, compression. The next stage was a voltage controlled amplifier. Take the output and use it to control the volume or gain of the amp and you get compression. These were often adapted from tape recorder automatic volume circuits and used FET's as the controlling element. By about 1974 integrated circuits took over thousands of components in a single package. You could get undistorted compression at will but you wouldn't do that complexity with valves. So you wouldn't simulate valve sound with valves for obvious reasons. They still make optical compressors as an effect but with VCA's you can get completely controllable compression which is largely done digitally nowadays anyway. Valve based computer anyone? If anyone is interested https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-what-optical-compression

Always liked the vibe of this one, about 30 years ago at the Crypt in Hastings.

I’ve scanned through the article which reads like someone who listened to a couple of Satriani YouTube videos before spouting some uninformed bile.. and then backtracked just a little..

Spot on, and the really tiny one was a Little Giant. (we were only 16, after all) And they weren’t called gigs in those days, they were 'bookings'.

Somewhere in North Notts, late 1963, band name 'Vince Pinkerton and the Lawmen'. Me on drums in those days. Look at those huge amps.... How things have changed!!

Had two gigs yesterday - Left home at about 08:45 with my battery powered gear to get to Wythenshawe to set up bass gear and PA for a 10:00 start. Busked until 16:00 with two half hour breaks. Packed up and got home at 17:10. Loaded in the battery rig and loaded out the mains rig. Left home at about 18:00 heading for a village fair in a field in Weaverham. Set up by 19:30 - pie and chips while the other act was on, then were were on for just over an hour. Packed up while the crowd watched the fireworks - got home about 22:15. Today we started about 10:30, busking in the entrance of a local Tesco Extra. We had two bass players, so we shared the load. Musically, it was mixed - we don't have set lists, so you know most of the songs being covered, until the lead busker decides to try out a new one. For paid gigs like the evening one, we have a smaller pot of songs that we know well, but we still follow whatever the lead busker decides to do next. All the donations and payments go directly to Cancer Research UK. David http://www.loosechangebuskers.org.uk/

There's nothing odd going on here at all. In the good old days you probably would have just destroyed your speaker(s) with way too much deep bass at volume. You may also have had a knackered head too but modern heads have clever stuff in them nowadays to compensate for our incompetence and turn the power amp output off when it senses a dangerous load both for itself and any connected cabs. Octavers are good but be aware of the extra stress you are placing on the speakers and the extra power output from your amp at low frequencies you might not even hear.

current layout, will be changing tomorrow as ive got a few new pedals i wanna try out.

We turned up to a gig and found the drummer pacing up and down outside. Apparently, when he arrived, someone had said, "I hope you're better than the band last week. The drummer got stabbed!" It was a dodgy pub full of oiks, retards and throwbacks, but we still did the gig. Thankfully they liked us.

Ah. Presumably 'real men' like basses with crappy strings...

If you were looking at the Warwick Alien, check out the Godin A5 Ultra. I have the A4 and love it, Bass Direct have a used A5 for sale too: http://bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Godin_A5.html Well worth getting the Ultra version for the extra magnetic pickup, it sounds middy and growly like a fretless 'Ray. Older ones are piezo only. Demo of the A4:

Time then that the curriculum was changed to educate them that they should do things the way they were in the olden days. They were so much better then.

I say leave this one as-is - looks good! Save the new neck for a new project! Ever onwards!

That looks well tasty. I am not a fan of matching headstocks.

This^^^^^ the artwork and pics are all part of the music experience to me. I can picture the covers of all of my favourite albums, probably 99% of all the ones I,own in fact. I also like the fact it can’t be deleted or lost in an ‘upgrade’.

Played an Oxford Uni graduation ball with an old Steel Panther tribute band I was with called Iron P##sy. Everyone was in ball gowns and tuxedos and had paid £140 a ticket. We rocked up and opened with "17 Girls In A Row". There was a fairly strong feminist vibe in the room and with the exception of the rugby team, who loved us, we got plenty of verbal abuse and a few drinks thrown at us. At the end a rather militant looking group of short haired girls got up in our faces and we're expressing their feelings. Didn't help that our singer genuinely thought they were messing around and was hitting on a couple of them.

Here’s how it looks.......... I don’t know whether to keep the matching headstock I kinda like it and it doesn’t really look out of place??, but..... would it look better maple??..........

Oh, thank you so much!

Shuker. My 5 string fretless is all the way up at the traditional end of the spectrum, but Jon makes great basses in many shapes and sizes. Quality is fantastic and he is a great guy to deal with.

Don't mean to derail this, but the best bass I ever played that I didn't own ... I immediately bought it!

I think the Holy Grail for most musicians is to be able to play what you hear in your head. If you have a fertile imagination so much the better. Joe Satriani can probably do that and Blackmore probably can't. Also to put it into context, I've always thought of Ritchie Blackmore as an obnoxious knob.

I had a rattle on one of Hartke's big Pro4200 cabs - 4x10 with a horn-like tweeter in the middle. I discovered, in the studio unfortunately, that when a loud note was played there was an audible rattle; we stripped the cab, tightened everything up but the rattle persisted. I ended up having to drive into London (from Kingston) to hire an Ampeg to record with. I later found out that the issue was a great big upholstery staple was on the tweeter magnet, so when I played a loud note it shook off, but was then immediately pulled back onto the magnet. Unfortunately, it was just the angle the tweeter was hanging that we missed it when trying to get rid of the noise in the studio, as it was a better cab than the Ampeg.

I had an old Hartke VX215 cab which started to rattle and buzz. Get someone to play a bass through it and try pushing different sides of the cab to see if if goes away when you put pressure on them, then when you find where the problem is you can secure it. I ended up doing a crude but functional repair on mine - cut a flap of carpet (like a square U shape), stuck a screw in and glued the carpet back. Repeat this x20 and I had a fully functional cab for years, the guy I sold it too recently resold it on eBay here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hartke-VX215-bass-cab-cabinet-/183158935358?hash=item2aa51f8f3e%3Ag%3AOtgAAOSwxfdauOsd&nma=true&si=gkQkrxvTDcndV%2BnbZ8ltGoj%2Fe7c%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557 You can still see where I repaired it, still going strong though!

Thought I'd add to this what i can from my experience 1st class D i got was Markbass LMK ordered at a show about 12 years ago, had to wait for the new kid on the block. It was great never let me down or left me wanting in over ten years with various cabs 2nd was an GK MB500 fusion as back up to the LMK . great amp used mainly for rehearsal and jazz. Great warm amp. EQ presets didn't really suit my cabs ? or basses? to be 1st call. change of cabs to two Acme 4 ohm, left me looking for a stereo amp with 2 ohm capability. bought an SWR SM-500 on here to cover the gigs where two cabs were req. Then got a Mesa Subway D800 to take the strain. Bomb proof design and great depth of tone, Just got the Mesa D800+ for the added footswitch mute and tuner out, also greater EQ flex, Gas again + grass greener etc. So verdict is I would be happy gigging any of these. Gas is the only reason apart from Ohms loading that pushed me to change. Some amps EQ centers suit certain basses and cabs better. and may be able to respond better to room E.Q ing. some shops let you try at home / gig well worth doing if you can. It is the only way to be sure. N.B. An old mosfet amp with a 4x10 cab will always feel good but your back will prefer the class D

just work systematically and you'll find it. You'll need to remove the grille anyway to look at anything else so do that and see if the rattle goes away. then have a good look at the outside of the speaker cone. Look for any tears but also have a look at the dustcap in the middle and where the cone joins the corrugated surround. Check that all the fixings on the speaker are tight and it is pulled firmly against the baffle (front board). If the rattle is still there you'll need to remove the speaker and look inside, First check the wires inside aren't touching the cone, this is a common fault and you can usually fix it to something with cable ties to stop this happening, then look for anything loose onside the cab, check the speaker magnet which will pick up any loose screws etc. Then work your way round all the woodwork and fittings to check for anything amiss. Tapping things gently will often tell you if something is loose. It's unlikely to be anything serious or difficult to repair. Good Luck

Me too and I rather enjoy a root note and a plectrum

Just try A/B ing each gig, till you decide if there is an overall preference. A pain perhaps, though you may be surprised at the results. I generally prefer the sound of my cab directly on the floor, but as mentioned above this can occasionally lead to boominess on hollow wooden staging. When this happens I just put the cab back in the base section of it's flight case (on castors) - simple.

Thank you, that's one I made

From Friday night's open air event in Salisbury's market square.

Just remembered this belter!

Sent. The local post office asked me what was in the package 'for security reasons' and had a bit of a panic when I told them it was a couple of strongish magnets, but in the end they slapped a 'danger! magnets!' sticker or somesuch on the parcel and off it went.