BigRedX

I suppose my foot pedal use is different to the majority of musicians who if they have anything complex appear to be rooted in front of it. In the past, if the stage was big enough I'd be all over the place and often have to rush back to my pedal(s) to be able to make patch changes. All the important footswitches had to be in the "front row" and even then there was a chance that I'd hit the wrong one. Anything in the second row that required mid-song operation would have resulted in me either also pressing a switch in front of it or falling over or both. Therefore for me anything with two rows of foot switches is generally impractical, as the top row can't be used by me mid-song. As a result of this, these days all my patch changes are run from the backing track via MIDI so I don't have to worry about being in the right place at the right time to make changes to my sound. It has also allowed me to have patch changes exactly where the song requires them and not what is more convenient for me to activate manually. Some songs have changes every other bar, and a new song we are currently working has a change that comes every four bars but only lasts for 1 beat.

Spotify will carry on until one of its rivals decides to offer a free service with all the features of a free Spotify account. The problem with the other Streaming services is that you can't easily share a link or a playlist because unless the person also has an account with the relevant service they can't easily access it. As an artist I make far more money out of Spotify, through being on several popular playlists, than all the other streaming services with higher per-play rates put together.

Over the years, I've done 3 gig ones and one on-line one. IME if there are "judges" they are mostly window dressing, and the winner will always be the band that turns up with the biggest number of vocal fans. So as long as your daughter's band are reasonably competent what they really need to do to win is muster their every single one of their friends and family to come along and make a lot of noise ideally whilst wearing T-shirts for their band. Having said that only one of the four I did was absolutely pointless, and that was the one I did with the band that went on to be the most successful of all the bands I've played in, although back when we entered it was still early days, and we hadn't quite found our performance style or image. It was also the only one where the sound was uniformly pretty awful throughout the evening. The other two gig-based competitions were at decent venues with excellent PA systems. For the other three, one got me a gig on the main stage at Rock City, and the other two resulted in my band being on fairly high-profile compilation albums. The on-line competition was interesting, because it was to a much larger extent based on non-partisan voting, and as a contestant you also had to rate the other bands in order to boost the chances of your band being heard and therefore attracting votes. When the competition finished my band came 8th overall (out of over 1000 entries from all over the world) and came top in the Dance Music sub-category. As a result we were included on the best-of compilation CD which picked us up a lot of new fans and had several management companies interested in the band.

Maybe. One Fender copy is much like another...

Let's hope it's better designed and built than the Superfly.

No the OP has more in common with those posts complaining that a second-hand bass on eBay is overpriced. I just don't get why people get worked up enough about them to post them on here.

How is this different from the standard Fender BBOT?

IIRC the MiJ Metrolines were made by ESP. I'd rather have a Japanese ESP bass than a German Warwick.

But the Ad isn't aimed at the typical middle-aged, sartorially challenged Basschat member, so who are we to mock? If I was in my early 20s and looking to start a band from scratch I might be wording something very similar to weed out the old-farts and time-wasters.

To the OP. What do you want to use it for?

While I also hate soldering DIN plugs and sockets with a passion, IME commercially made MIDI leads are mostly terrible. The cheaper ones with their horrible moulded plugs, undersized pins and weedy cable are just about OK for permanent studio installations where the connections are made once and then never touched for several years, but on no account would I ever consider using them at a gig. Anything I would consider road worthy is eye-wateringly expensive compared with the cost of making my own, so whenever I need a MIDI cable out come the magnifying glass and soldering clamps.

To the OP. Are you interested in joining this band? If not why does it even matter?

Weird layout of foot switches. It's as though they don't want to make it user friendly.

The EHX was posted on another forum last week and was partially responsible for my mini rant about consumer grade computer connectors and external PSUs with no-latching connectors earlier in this thread.

That sounds like all kinds of wrong, but if that information has come from the manufacturer... The original MIDI spec uses the pins 4 and 5 to transmit the data and pin 2 is a ground/shield for the data transmission, but is generally disconnected at the input end of a MIDI link to prevent ground loops between the audio and data connections. Edit: Just had a look at the Meris device in question. It looks as though it uses a quarter-inch jack for the MIDI connection which is a slight plus, but even though there is probably room for a proper DIN socket for the MIDI in they have elected to use a jack so it can be dual function: expression pedal or MIDI. What do you do if you want to use an expression pedal and have external MIDI control?