cheddatom

Well I'm very tempted to start ranting about the bassists I have to put up with, but I won't in terms of mistakes live though, I don't think I've ever actually dropped/missed a beat. Sure I've missed hitting an actual drum or something, but that doesn't effect the timing of the song at all. Sometimes if I'm distracted, I might hit something out of time, but it's easily ignored, it doesn't upset the groove we're all playing to. I play with 3 different bassists, they all occasionally make mistakes, but they always get back on track with me.

One of the bands I'm in has 6 members. We're supposed to rehearse/write once a week. I think on average it's once every 2 weeks due to cancellations. We have all 6 members there for maybe 1/4 of those. Absolute nightmare!!!! Great music though

I've never had the problem when playing drums at a gig, but at rehearsals when I'm trying out fills I might mess up. For example we're playing in 7/4 (my theory's not great, but it must be 7/4 or 7/8) and I'm trying to come up with new fills, I play one that's 8 beats instead of 7 by accident. If the band just carried n regardless I might be able to get back on track, but it just seems natural for them to fall in line with me. If this happened at a gig it'd be way better than me stopping for a second while I figure out how to get back in line with the band I play with a singer who struggles with timing, and I often drop a beat or two just to follow the singer. The other guys in the band know we're always going to follow the singer, and it generally works really well

I listened and voted this morning. Very enjoyable once again, so thanks all!

Thanks! I don't plug my studio PC into the internet. I've managed to download and install on my office PC. I've grabbed the installation files and will try to transfer it to my studio PC later. I'm not hopeful though!

Well I found it up-lifting, on many levels

I've never been to jam nights, so I wouldn't know if it's a dying art in general, but I do spend time with a lot of young bands, and I've jammed with lots of them who can improvise.

pretty good, I agree with Dad on everything he's said!

put it on the recording forum here? I'll give it a listen Or did you want labels or radio stations to listen to it? In which case your local BBC Introducing show might be a good start?

I broke a stick at a gig recently. I kept going with it the wrong way round until a section with just kick drum thumping, at which point I kept my foot going, and grabbed my spare stick. I knew I'd gone slightly quieter for a couple of beats while I got the stick, but it was definitely in time. I've even watched video footage, it was no big deal When it happened the bassist started twatting his muted strings slightly ahead of the beat, and glaring at me, as though he thought I'd slowed down. At the end of the song he said "what the f*** happened there?" and at the end of the set he said "That was alright apart from that massive f***-up. You need to get some stick holders" If you could handle it in a slightly more sensitive way, you might be evening out some collective bassist karma.

[quote name='Davo-London' timestamp='1477324052' post='3161422'] LOL, good responses. I too play with loud drummers. I hate it. That's why I play drums very quietly. Seriously, I've been asked, on occasions, to play louder. Imagine that! Davo [/quote] same here, but I think I can trump you.... I play with a guitarist who is regularly asked to turn up!!!

If you're going to help, try not to drop everything. One of my band mates dropped my cymbal bag trying to be helpful (although no-one has admitted it yet) and now I have a sharp dent in all of my gigging cymbals. One member did helpfully suggest I get a hard case. I'm not sure he realised just how much it would cost to replace them all.

I'm also a drummer/bassist. I have a bag with a back-strap for my cymbals. All of my hardware goes in one bag, then I have a snare, two toms and a bass drum. I can generally do it in 2-3 trips and set up in 5 minutes. I'm ALWAYS set up before the guitarist(s)... I play 6 string basses and to buy new strings is generally £30-40. I can get 3 pairs of sticks for that The one thing that I hate, and no other members of the band would have to deal with, is lack of space. Especially if it's a multi-band gig, the first drummer will have set up the kit about 2 feet from the back wall. I don't know if there's some sort of rule where promoters find the shortest drummer possible to put on first but it certainly seems that way. I have to shift the whole kit forward, into the back of the frontman, who then complains that he doesn't have enough room. Also shared kits. They're always sh*te. I always bring my own but I'm not allowed to use it. I guess people don't believe I can set up in 5 minutes?!

I don't have anything against it but it wouldn't work for most of my bands. There's only one band where we could stick rigidly to a pre-recorded track with a click for the drummer (me). The rest of my bands feed off the singer/front people, and also off the atmosphere of the gig

ace! Thanks!

I have 3 6 string basses, they all sound very different, but I can get a usable sound from any of them for any style (in conjunction with my pedalboard) so I generally take the one with the freshest strings (or oldest strings if I want that sound)

that's ace, great band!

It's important that the performer is as comfortable as possible. Sometimes that means acquiescing to some difficult requests, particularly when they're spending money. Furthermore for a lot of people, reverb helps pitching. This is true for most non-fixed-pitch instruments (IE fretless bass) as well as vocals

Cheers, already got plenty of ideas, it's the value for money I need to research!

yeh, that's what I'll do in the meantime I've never bothered much with outboard. I do have a couple of multi-effects racks I use for reverb occasionally, but because the reverbs on the PC are so much better I always go back to them. Right, time to research some reverb units!

I doubt anyone makes it. What overdrive pedal is it? I bet SFX could make one for you

We found a reverb for the vocal, which we both liked, but it was pretty CPU intensive. This coupled with reverbs on other tracks, plus drum triggers, some VSTs, and a lot of audio, meant the CPU load was quite high. This was fine with a large buffer size, but unusable with a small buffer The artist wanted to re-do his vocal, and listen to his mic monitored through the actual channel in the project with all the effect on it. I think I'll save up for some nice outboard reverb, that'll solve it

lots of ways to make it sound great on bass. I do it a lot with delay and other effects

I use my tuner to mute, and my volume knob(s) to control the output from my bass. I use a lot of dirt and compression so varying the input on my signal chain can have significant effects on tone, without necessarily changing the volume that the audience perceives

I'm using Cubase 6, I don't think it has an easy "render effect" option, but obviously I could just export the tracks I want and bring them into the project. Probably the quickest way to achieve what I want is to export the entire song without the lead vocal, then use that as the backing track to record to, then import the new vocal into the original project. A bit of a PITA but it sonds like there's no easy workaround I'm regularly running projects with more than 50 tracks of audio