BigRedX

The wobbly rig was my small one which used light-weight cabs and was under 1.5m high. I never tried it with my big rig, because I was afraid it would have squashed the foam flat!

I only use my wireless system for gigs and full band rehearsals, and only at the rehearsals because, for me, part of the reason for rehearsing is to check that all the gear I'm going to be using at a gig is working properly. The rest of the time I use cables.

I've been using the NUX for almost 2 years now with no problems. That includes some large stages and a couple of outdoor gigs.

Over the past 30 years, I've had two guitars and two basses custom built for me. The fact that I still own three of them after a massive clear out of musical equipment and instruments some years ago should tell you everything. The bass that I did let go was a wonderful musical instrument, but it was built specifically to suit the music of a band I was playing in at the time. Since the band folded 15 years ago it had come out of its case a handful of times and, although I've used it twice on recordings, I couldn't justify holding on to an instrument that mostly got played for fun at home about once a year. My advice to anyone contemplating a custom build: 1. Pick a luthier who is already building something very close to the instrument you want. That's what they do best. 2. If the wood is going to be visible pick something that you like the look of. Otherwise it really doesn't matter and leave the selection up to your chosen luthier. On three of my builds I picked ebony because I like the look of black fretboards. No other reason. For one bass I went to the luthier with a photo of an instrument whose colour scheme I really liked (orange and grey) and woods were chosen to achieve this through a combination of natural wood colour and staining. What those actual woods were didn't not interest me beyond achieving the correct look. For any tonal characteristics they may have given the bass I trusted the luthier to make the right choice. 3. If you are going for high C rather than low B make sure that the pickup(s) and electronics are suited to this. IME most bass pickups and pre-amps tend to make high C sound like a bad jazz guitar and not very pleasant to listen to. Go and play lots of basses strung with a high C string and see what works in your opinion for getting the sound you want. Good luck with the build.

It's news like this that has made me glad that I have decided to stick mostly with the plug-ins that are part of the standard installation for my DAW. I have made a couple of exceptions, which make life easier for me when recording but none are essential to my workflow should they stop working tomorrow.

I have made a useful isolation platform for decoupling the acoustic noise produced by playing an electronic drum kit from the fabric of the building so my band could rehearse at my house without annoying the neighbours too much, but it was a significantly more substantial construction than a piece of plywood supported on two bits of "acoustic" foam,

I stopped using mine because on the one stage where it should have made a vast improvement to the sound, it was negligible but it did make my bass rig wobble about alarmingly in time with the kick drum pedal. @Bill Fitzmaurice should be along with the science as to why they aren't really worth it.

Right now for creative purposes. AI is at the same stage I was in my teens when my songwriting "influences" were very obvious, and the greatest current threat to it is that it will get sued for plagiarism. As others have said there are lots of uses of AI in music that take the donkey work out of some technical aspects such as noise removal. and frequency balancing. I use AI fairly frequently in my day job in graphic design. One use is when creatinge photo-realistic mock-ups of some of the food products and packaging that my clients are considering producing. I could spend time in Photoshop compositing inclusions onto a slab of chocolate to show through a window in the packaging, or I could ask an image generator to create one for me. One will take an hour or so the other with the right prompts less than 5 minutes. It has also been used to generate one of the "covers" for my band's releases. At the time I was completely snowed under with paying work, so we fed a series of prompts into an AI image generator and refined the output until we had something everyone was happy with. I could have done a better job manually, but it would have taken a lot longer and at the expense of paying work.

Poisoning the well. IIRC someone has created a method of encoding music so that AI thinks it is a different genre to its actual one, or "hears" the music it is being trained on as just noise.

I find with a slot loading bridge it's more difficult keeping the strings in the slots while getting up to a suitable tension that they will stay there by themselves. This is never more obvious when trying to replace a string under pressure like at a gig.

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.