BigRedX

The heaviest piece of kit my band take to gigs is the 3U rack case that holds the computer and associated devices that supply our backing. Since this case essentially replaces a drummer plus their drum kit and another keyboard player, synthesiser and stand, and means that we can get the whole band with our instruments and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car I can put up with the 17kg weight.

Track 11 on this page is the only publicly released recording of my second band The Perfect Party. Contrary to what it says on the page the compilation was released in early 1982. The song was written a year earlier by my previous band and a very embryonic version of it appears on our third cassette album "Do Modern Atoms Wear Fashionable Clothes?" This time I'm actually playing bass although most of the bass part is played on G-string and it never goes lower than bottom E on the guitar. Believe it or not this recording had CBS records interested in signing the band until they heard our second more polished and less quirky demo and decided that Wham! would be a better choice.

Lost In Music by Giles Smith

Musically? Probably very subliminally. Much of our early music (including these two songs which were composed several years before we committed them to vinyl) stemmed from both our inability to play well enough to be considered prog rock as well as the fact that we had very few conventional rock band instruments. I didn't have the album in my record collection, but it was definitely to sort of thing that at least one us would have been listening to in the 70s; we tended to favour the less well known bands. The band name comes from The Pretty Things song "Cries From The Midnight Circus".

Here's my first band The Midnight Circus with our only appearance on vinyl as part of the "Angst In My Pants" various artists double EP. This was recorded in 1980 at a 4-track studio behind one of the musical instrument shops in Leicester. Multiple warnings: Weedy sound, no bass guitar on the first track, dodgy lyrical subject matter (we justified it at the time by claiming to be sarcastic). However John Peel liked it enough to play on his Radio One show... And Johan Kugelberg rated the EP 34 in his Top 100 DIY Singles in Ugly Things magazine saying: "...and extremely do it yourself DIY frenzy from the Midnight Circus. Who in "Silicone Baby" and "Hedonist Jive" have out-poignanted a tow-truck full of Aimee Mann's and Michelle Shocked's edgy humanity and funny as shit to boot..." There are older recordings out there in the public domain. We were asked to contribute to Angst In My Pants as a result of our first album "The Bland Craze" which was released on free cassette (you sent us a C-60 cassette and a SAE and we returned the cassette with our album recorded on to it alone with a cover made from a folded A4 photocopy. We distributed about 150 of these so I am sure some still survive.

If I had a bit lotto win I wouldn't buy any musical gear. What I would do is buy a comfortable band transport and employ someone to drive it for us. I'd also book us a couple of months in a top-class studio with Trevor Horn producing.

TBH there was so little to choose between the 4 versions that for a stand-alone single release any of them would have done the job admirably and picking one in that case would have been almost entirely subjective. It was only because we wanted our original mix of the song to stand up along side the dance remix that we eventually chose the one that had a slightly higher average loudness. We'd all heard the master that our synth player had done before this competition but neither myself or our singer correctly identified it when listening to all 4 versions. I was expecting our master to sound slightly weedy compared with the ones that we had paid for but this was not the case at all. It was one of those situations when you can't help but wonder if a professional could be doing a better job, and in this case the answer turned out to be that what we were doing was equally as good. The single will be available to download and stream on Friday 25th April and on CD at our gigs.

But one of the advantages of email is that there is a written record of everything. Can you record a Teams meeting? And then that has it's own privacy issues in that all the participants would have to consent to being recorded, and one person declining would scupper the whole meeting. Can you even take part in a Teams meeting if you don't have a microphone or webcam attached to your computer?

Depends... My interest in "funk" begins and ends with the post-punk/industrial crossover bands of the early 80s, so artists like early ACR, The Contortions, Medium Medium and 23 Skidoo. However I could see the technique being used in slap bass lines for the thumbed part.

It will turn up fairly frequently in any riff-based music. I've used the technique in songs I have written in the post-punk, goth, pschobilly, and dance-rock/pop genres.

Lots of riffs are essentially played on one string with alternating fretted and open notes with many of the fretted notes at the 12th fret and higher. I'm sure they could be played without using any open strings but you'll need to work twice as hard at plucking over multiple strings and muting the pedal note string and it will be much harder to maintain the rhythmic feel especially if the riff uses hammer-ons and pull-offs.

Here you go!

I think that the rigidity of construction that normally goes hand in hand with a high-mass design is more likely to have an effect on tone than the actual increase in weight over the BBOT.

I've got an RCF745 and TBH it's been complete overkill for what I need most of the time. In the 7 years that I have owned it, I've needed it twice to supply bass to the audience when the PA has been vocals only and in this respect it has preformed far better than my previous traditional bass rigs. However, the rest of the time, for rehearsals and smaller gigs with PA support, I could have definitely got away with something smaller, lighter and cheaper. I personally wouldn't go for the Headrest as IMO it's overpriced for what it is. Have a look at the FRFR thread in the amps section for other options. I think you get better VfM when looking at PA type cabs. It will depend what you want from a personal monitor. For me all I need is to be able to hear that I am in time and in tune with the rest of the band. I don't need "heft" or a perfect representation of my bass tone on stage in order to play well, I'm happy to assume that that is being taken care of FoH by the PA for the audience who are far more important.

It would depend on what I needed to play and how many of the songs were challenging to play in E or Eb without being able to use open strings.

After all the recommendations I thought that you might be interested in the final outcome. Based on feedback here and from another forum we chose two different people to do masters for us one of whom supplied us with two versions with differing amounts of compression. So along with our original master, we had 4 different versions to consider. Our synth player per got one of his kids to randomly rename the tracks so that only they knew which was which and then sent them out as versions A to D. Listening to each in turn I thought they were all, good which little to choose between the four. Version C had a bit more "air" and separation of the instruments but the other three sounded very similar. I then stuck all four masters in Logic and used the solo function to switch between them on the fly. At this point it was noticeable that Version A sounded a bit "louder" than the others, although none sounded excessively compressed. It's always tempting to just pick the loudest and most impressive sounding one, but in this case our mix has to also stand up next to a dance-floor friendly remix that we have had done, and the "louder" version did this better than the others. So that will be the one that goes on the single. It was also the one that we all picked as our first or second choice. And the winner is... The version done by our synth player which I believe was created using Ozone. The single will be out on April 25th to coincide with our gig at WGW.

Until I discovered music forums on the internet I'd never met a musician, or anyone else creative for that matter, who wasn't left of centre.

I got the impression that Simms were moving away from instrument production when Enfield finished. Also unless I am mistaken, all the graphite parts for Enfield basses were made by Gus Guitars who use a completely different construction method to Status.

Apart from the Boss Waza-Air system all of the consumer wireless (Bluetooth) headphones will have too much latency to be of any use for practicing.

The reason it makes so little difference is that the overall weight of the bridge and body combined, and because they are attached to each other we need to consider the combined weight, hardly changes. I did the maths last time this was brought up and even though a typical high-mass bridge is almost 3 times heavier than the BBOT, the combined weight of the bridge and body is less than a 5% difference.

IMO anything with the "Original" shape. The various Jazz copies not so much.

Too many different models for them to become collectable just by brand. The signature models and the all-graphite ones will probably start to appreciate in value. The rest of them not so much and confusion over models and construction methods may well keep the price of the more desirable ones down. (All IMO)

You were robbed. Worth about the same as what it would have cost new from Woolies back in the day - about £19.95

But you'd have to stack them on top of each other for best dispersion.

Out of interest did it come with a case or gig bag?