BigRedX

Even though the recording wasn't up to much, apparently the lyrics did make him laugh!

Which is the point I was trying to make earlier in this thread. It was fine if you were a big selling artist signed to a major record label , but for those of us without record label backing, trying to make our recordings available to the public and maybe played by John Peel or Tommy Vance, meant having to use a budget studio, and then getting our record pressed at a some cheap pressing plant using recycled vinyl as this was the only way we could afford to release it. Compare and contrast with a digital file whether it is on a CD or a download there are a lot fewer obstacles to audio fidelity. The music I've released on digital formats sounds loads better even though much of it was recorded at home rather than at a proper studio simply because the production process doesn't place limitations on the sound.

My shitty vinyl effort is a Porky Prime Cut! Back in those days I think almost every UK pressing I owned had been cut by either Porky (George Peckham) or Bilbo (Dennis Blackham).

It might have been a problem with early flip paint finishes, but I think the Gus had just had a very hard life prior to me buying it. As I said the chrome work was in a similar state and several parts including the truss rod cover and the one on the back that gives access to the intonation and action adjustment were missing. The Hiscox case it came it was so battered I've never dared use it to take any of my basses out of the house. I've now had the bass for a lot longer than the previous owner and it's been my regular gigging instrument when I've needed a 5-string for the last 18 years, but apart form a couple of dings on the headstock it's pretty much still in the condition it came to me after being refinished.

The other thing to remember is that not every record was recorded at Abbey Road or similar "professional" recording studios. My first venture into vinyl was recorded at a cheap 4-track studio situated in an outbuilding behind a musical instrument shop on the outskirts of Leicester. The equipment was basic, mostly repurposed PA gear and the only effect was reverb/delay from running a feed through a spare 2-track tape machine. Our instruments weren't much better being a mixture of very low budget and home-made. Our previous releases had been on cassettes that we had duplicated ourselves in real time and consequently we mixed the new recordings in the same way, forgetting that we didn't need to compensate for two generations of tape bounce before they reached our listeners, The end result is thin and weedy and very trebly and no amount of flash HiFi is going to make it sound better. In fact the worse the playback system is the better it sounds.

Some pops and clicks are already there the first time the record is played. That's because it's a crap pressing from the late 70s or early 80s made on recycled vinyl. Almost all the music I want to listen to that only exists on vinyl is in this format. It comes from indie bands putting out their own singles and albums where price is everything. There were plenty of bands back then for whom scraping together the £200-£300 required to record and press 500 copies of their single was the absolute limit of what they could afford and that was for hand-stamped white labels and a sleeve comprising a sheet of photocopied A4 paper folded around and stapled to the plain paper sleeve that the pressing had been shipped in. Most of these releases had defects before they'd even been played. If you were on good terms with your record shop you might be able to get them to play through all their copies trying to find one with less obvious problems. Also IME it didn't matter how well I looked after my records they would eventually pick up additional damage simply from being taken out to be played, usually on my favourite track. These days anything I buy on vinyl gets played twice only. Once to check the levels and peak signal and a second time to record it into my computer. If it is available on any digital format I would buy it on that format instead.

Really whatever you want, but you absolutely should not be using a kick drum mic as the frequency response is wrong and you'll be competing with the kick drum sound. The reality is that unless you are playing huge stages with your own sound engineer, any mic on your bass rig will be mostly for show and the main proportion of your FoH sound will come from the DI. Remember also that a single close mic on one driver in your rig is not picking up the same sound you hear from the whole rig when stood a few feet away from it. Save the mics for the recording studio and if you like the sound you are getting FoH from your DI signal path stick with that.

IME for the vast majority of musicians and composers, having a full time job is completely incompatible with making music for anything other than a bit of fun. You need to be able to be flexible with your time, often with no prior notice, in order to make the most of any opportunities that come you way, and also not be so exhausted at the end of the working day that you can then spend the rest of your waking hours working on writing, rehearsing, recording or playing gigs. From personal experience I have had the most success in my musical activities when I was able to be flexible with how I spent my time, first in the 80s when I was a student and then unemployed, and more recently since I went self-employed 15 years ago where I can set my own work/music split. I tried to do the same in the 90s when I had a "proper" job and it completely and utterly wore me down to the point that when the band split I did no new music for the next 3 years. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I guarantee you that they are rare or that they had some kind of financial safety net to fall back on or an organisation with musical contacts behind them. IME every new artist who appears out of nowhere has either already spent years being ignored or has an organisation behind them with strong music business roots.

IME the biggest improvement most HiFi enthusiasts could do would be to give their listening environment some proper acoustic treatment. You might be able to minimise surface noise with expensive playback equipment, but there is nothing you can do to eliminate pops and clicks caused by damage or defects to the actual grooves of the record or fix a pressing that is off-centre. Most of the vinyl I want to listen to is 40-50 years old and exists in runs of no more than 500 copies, so trying to find a pristine example, if one even existed in the first place is an exercise in futility. The best I can do is record it onto my computer clean up the audio the best I can by drawing out the pops and clicks in the waveform and then sell the disc on to some other sucker.

For some of us those pops, clicks, general surface noise and low frequency rumble just get in the way of the music. I suspect that those who still champion vinyl have never spent countless occasions arguing with record store employees about whether the scratches on your newly bought album and single were already on when you bought it (they were) or put there by your mis-handling. And you've never spent an afternoon going round all the local record shops looking to see if any of them had a copy of a particular album with the hole close enough to the centre for you not to feel seasick when you listened to it (there weren't any).

I have a ticket to go and see Cabaret Voltaire at Rock City in October. Normally I wouldn't buy anything so far in advance because I don't know if there might be something better coming along like a really good gig for my band. I also looked at going to see Kraftwerk at The Royal Concert Hall but I'm not paying £172 to see them at a seated venue where being seated is rigorously enforced.

My Dansette played one side of the stereo image much louder than the other. Because I rarely listened to my records on other peoples systems, the only time I could tell it was making an obvious difference to the sound was on 60s recordings that had stereo mixes with the vocals panned to the quiet side of the stereo image. For everything else I was perfectly happy with what I could hear (or not) because I didn't know any different. When I finally get a system that played both sides of the stereo image at the correct volume I found that lots of my records had additional instruments quite prominently in the mix that I had not been aware of previously, and IMO the addition of these instruments did not always improve the recordings.

But there is no denying that it imposes a number of artistic limitations on what can be reproduced with regards to low frequencies, phase and panning as well as impacting on the running order of albums. It's a matter of fact that should we decide to release a version of the album my band are currently recording on vinyl, it will most likely have a different running order to the digital version because the track that we want to close the album will not sound as good at the end of a side on vinyl. Also one of the tracks where we have done something interesting with the panning of the notes on the Bass VI will need to be at least partially collapsed down to mono. I've already checked what the effect will be and it has negatively affected the stereo movement and spread of the track and is particularly noticeable on earbuds/headphones.

This and only this.

And there's one of the advantages of sticking with just what you get with Logic. If it's doing what you need now, it will still do what you need in the future. Up until a year ago I was managing perfectly well with an early version of Logic X. When you do finally upgrade all your Logic plug-ins will still sound exactly as they did before. Even if they have been updated or depreciated as in the case of ESX24 the new version still loads all the sample sets I made 25 years ago and they still sound the same as they did back then. Unlike my Simmons SDSV plug-in which suddenly made all my carefully edited drum sounds completely different because the developer had changed how a few parameters worked and although there was a single preference setting that needed to be toggled to get them back to how they were under the previous version, it was hidden away and not at all obvious. There is a case for starting with GarageBand rather than going straight to Logic. The OP will already have it without needing to spend any money and has been said previously in this thread the multitude of features available in Logic can lead to option paralysis. I'd been making recordings for over 20 years starting with live to stereo tape and progressing through 4 and 8 tracks adding analogue and MIDI sequencing along the way until I went full in the box DAW, by which time I had built up enough recording knowledge for it not to be information overload.

@Dood I did wonder after I posted my reply if it was a brand new finish rather than trying to fix an existing one. I own the bass that used to look like this: I don't know how it got in this state, but it was pock-marked all over on both the flip finish and the chrome work when I bought it, which is why it was (relatively) cheap and I didn't have any serious competition when bidding on eBay. This how I discovered that successfully retouching the damage to the finish would be impossible, and as a result since I wasn't totally in love with the colour I had it redone in CAR. However it does mean that Simon at Gus Guitars should be able to refinish your instruments with flip paint depending on his availability.

@Dood I was more being practical rather than trying to be the "fun police". Back in the early days of plug-ins (around 2000) I was gifted the complete set of Waves effects along with their authorisation dongle from a friend who worked in studio equipment sales and had an install that was surplus to their requirements. This was back when none of the main DAWs came without any plug-ins included. I had bought ES2 and ESX24 for Logic and a complete suite of effects plug-ins for free was indeed a bargain. I used a selection of those plug-ins on just about everything I was working on for the next 3 or 4 years and they were great. Then I needed to upgrade my Mac (it's used first and foremost for my day job and the music use is a nice bonus) and unsurprisingly the plug-ins no longer worked. I had a look at the cost of upgrading to the latest versions of the few I thought I absolutely couldn't live without but they were scattered throughout the various bundles and IIRC the cost was more than the full version of Logic and that was just for upgrades. I ended up with a load of projects that I no longer sounded the same as they did on the old Mac. I also encountered a similar problem a few years later when I wanted to do a quick remix of a later band's studio session that had been recorded using Logic. The files used a multitude of 3rd party plug-ins and unfortunately many of them had been discontinued by their developer and those that were still available were prohibitively expensive. All I had wanted to do with open the existing project make a few level and EQ changes and bounce down the new mixes. In the end it was quicker and cheaper to pay someone to remix the tracks from scratch using the original stems and the current mixes as a reference point. Since then I have mostly stuck with the plug-ins that come with Logic. I have a Simmons SDS V emulator that replaces the woefully inadequate set of samples I made when I used to own the real thing, but I'm sure I could recreate all the sounds I wanted using Retro Synth or ES2 if I really had to, and Helix Native which give me a bit more flexibility when recording my Bass VI parts, but again it's not an essential item. Whether the 3rd party plug-ins are actually better is entirely subjective. IME what many people are buying when they purchase 3rd party plus-ins is not a "superior" sound manipulation algorithm but access to a few hundred new presets. Free or cheap 3rd party plug-ins might sound great but, they basically work in the same way as your neighbourhood drug dealer. Give you something for free or cheap and get you hooked so that when you need to upgrade you are hit with the full price. After my Waves experience I'm not so sure I want to go down this route again. If I was making a living from my musical activities it would probably be worth it, but I don't, and can't justify the cost when there are plug-ins that I already have that will never go out of date or be discontinued that will do the same job, and if I take the time, I can learn how to get the best out of them and not need to spend any money chasing something elusive. The free Spitfire Strings might be better than those in Logic, but 15 years ago I was able to orchestrate the backing for a selection of Carols to use on an interactive Christmas website for a very well-known insurance company using just the plug-ins that came with Logic which were more than adequate for the job, and TBH I could have probably done that job in GarageBand. And, because of the sort of music I compose for my band, I'm not interested in realism but textures and atmospheres. This is why I also don't care about how realistic sounding amp models are, because what I'm really interested in is being able to make sounds that will work in the context of the music I am creating. For this I already have everything I need within the Logic install. In the end it's up to each individual user. I'm just offering a potentially more cost effective long-term route.

Unfortunately you will need to have all the old flip paint removed and then find someone who can spray the whole instrument in a single pass, because that is what is needed to make the flip paint work. It can't be retouched because there's no guarantee that the retouched parts will flip in the same direction.

Because most vinyl lovers are in denial. There are all sorts of technical issues that affect what can be cut to a master disc in the first place and then what will actually be playable on a typical system once the results have been stamped out of a pice of hot plastic. As much as vinyl lovers would like to tell themselves otherwise, the final stage of the manufacturing process is hardly one of precision and finesse. My current band are contemplating a vinyl version of our album (CDs still sell exceptionally well in our genre) and if we do it is likely to have a different running order to accommodate the limitations of the medium as well as having some the the more extreme stereo effects collapsed to mono in order for it to be capable of being cut. For me, any records I bought as a teenager simply don't sound right unless they are played on my old dansette that cost £8 from a junk shop in 1973 and played one side of the stereo mix much louder than the other. These are versions/mixes of those records I am used to and everything else sounds wrong no matter how superior the reproduction might be.

This. When I went to collect my finished Sei Bass Martin was still making some final set up tweaks when I arrived so he gave me another Sei to play while I waited. Also a fretless 5-string but a different body shape and electronics. It was nice, nut for me nowhere near as nice as mine when it was ready, because the other Sei hadn't been made for me, it didn't have the fine tuning to the design and neck profile that I had asked for. I've owned a few other custom basses that weren't made for me, because they were basically off-the-shelf designs that fact that they hadn't been personalised exactly to me didn't matter as much as it did for the Sei. I still own one of these basses. In fact I liked it so much that when I did have one made for me, mine was almost identical apart from the colour and pickup layout.

When AI creates a form of music that is genuinely new, that's when we need to start worrying.

Isn't the advantage of the Technics direct drive decks that they have a near instantaneous full-speed start which you need for mixing? I remember from my student radio days that we would have to wind the record back about 1/3 of a turn from the cue point so that it would be up to the required speed by the time the music started and you wouldn't get an audible pitch change at the start of the track.

This. A bike box cut down to size is way more sturdy than your typical guitar/bass box. And you can use all the surplus cardboard as strengthening and padding.

No, not at all. However, if the presets are any good you'll find that lots of other people are already using them and you will start to recognise them in other records. And my point was that rather spending money on buying another plug-in it would be better value to learn how to really use the ones you already have. Some of the greatest ever recordings were made with technical facilities that were inferior to what is included with GarageBand and Logic. I'm sure a good mix engineer would have no problem producing a great sounding recording without needing to resort to 3rd party plug-ins.

This is exactly what I was going to say. For simple recording and learning how the process works GarageBand will most likely do everything you want and you already have it with your Mac. Move onto Logic only when you find there are things you absolutely need to do that are beyond the capabilities of GarageBand