BigRedX

Have they inspired you to take up the tuba though?

A few photos form last week's Hurtsfall gig at The Bodega in Nottingham supporting Midnight Danger: And a photo of the table in our dressing room - there was also a fridge full of beer and water plus cow's milk and oat milk.

All the more reason to to ditch amps and cabs IMO. Too many variables.

I've just realised that I haven't posted my setup in this thread, so here it is: I've gone wireless since this photo was taken. The computer which is our drummer and second synth player also takes care of Preset and Snapshot changes on the Helix which leaves me free to concentrate on playing and throwing some shapes on stage, also in some places on a few of the songs the Snapshot changes come every two bars which is too complicated for me to get consistently right when done "manually". The footswitch on the left controls the playback - centre for start/pause and right for close current song and load the next one in the set list. I (and the rest of the band) no longer bother with backline, although I have a powered FRFR cab that I occasionally use for rehearsals, as with the Bass VI I'm playing both "bass" and "guitar" parts and any rig provided is very unlikely to be able the handle both types of sounds. Therefore I go straight into the PA via the EMO DI box. These days we only play venues with a big enough PA to get the programmed drums up to proper drummer volume and they always have monitoring good enough for me to be able to hear what I need.

I don't. Everything I currently own is in the house and everything else is no longer my concern. At a push I could probably list all the guitars, basses and amplification I've owned over the years although I'd struggle with the synths and studio equipment as there was quite a high turnover of gear lot of it was communally owned by the band(s) I was in at the time, rather than just by me.

As I said before are there actually any performance enhancing drugs that will make you a better player form a technical PoV?

If you do a bit of promotion and get your songs onto a reasonably popular playlist, it's easy to get 1000 streams a year. Our most popular songs get around 1000 streams a month. Besides if your not getting that many streams you are unlikely to be earning enough from on-line activities to trigger your Aggregator's minimum payment threshold, so you wouldn't be getting any money anyway. As I've said before the main revenue streams for small bands are: 1. T-shirt sales at gigs 2. Physical media (Records/CDs/Cassettes) sales at gigs 3. PRS songwriting royalties from playing gigs. So get writing some songs and playing some gigs, and use Spotify as free advertising for these activities.

You are quite right. I haven't yet, but I did have this happen once at rehearsal which was somewhat embarrassing. Since then I won't do a firmware update unless I know I'm going to using the Helix at home 2 or 3 times before practice or a gig. I suppose it depends if you need to change any of them from the factory defaults. I used my Helix for about a year before I found the need to, and that's when I started noticing that Global Settings didn't seem to be saved after an update.

This problem is now sorted. There is a smaller target area for switches compared with sliders to bring up the contextual menu for Snapshots in HX Edit. I just wasn't clicking in quite the right place.

Sometime I do, sometimes I don't. I don't recall either re-instating the Global Preferences. I'll definitely do a reload next time and report back. The problem with re-importing your settings is that it adds another complete rebuild of all the presets, and sometime the Helix does it again after the next power-up following a firmware update, which is the last thing anyone wants at a rehearsal or even worse a gig. My current practice is that if there is nothing wrong with my Presets after a firmware update, I'll not bother reloading them. After I posted I did some additional reading and it seems to be related to the fact that after many firmware updates additional Global Setting options are added so the old settings can't be used.

I've been the oldest member in every band I've been in for the last 15 years and often by some considerable margin. However I've been lucky in that I still look quite a bit younger than I really am and TBH I'm probably the fittest and healthiest of all the members of the two bands I currently play with. Despite the fact that I've mostly been playing what could be considered old peoples music - psychobilly, goth and post-punk the audiences have been made up of all ages and there has been a noticeable influx of younger audience members at the goth gigs I've been playing recently.

Hasn't anyone come with a proper musical technique enhancing drug yet? Not one that just makes you think you are great.

Weak E string on a short scale bass is entirely due to having the wrong strings on it. I always thought my Burns Sonic bass had a poor E string sound and I would go to great lengths to avoid using it. Ultimately it turned out to be the fact the Rotosound (which was pretty much all that was available when I first started playing) are incapable of making decent strings that aren't 34" scale standard gauges and once I'd switched to Newtone, the E string was as good as all the others.

Some on-board pre-amps are designed specifically to work with the pickups(s) fitted notably the original MusicMan Stingray and Wal basses, and some (again the Wal and also the ACG filter designs) allow you to change the tone of each pickup separately so they won't have the same effect downstream of the bass after the pickups have been summed together. However best practice IME is to be making specific electronic EQ adjustments in a single place in your signal chain, so now I have ditched as many of the elements that impose unwanted "character" to my sound as possible and do everything from a Line6 Helix. This feeds directly into the PA with an FRFR cab for personal monitoring at gigs where the foldback isn't up to the job. TBH I'm not a big fan of controls on the bass itself apart from maybe a properly functioning volume control volume control that blends smoothly between silent and full volume. I am of the opinion that the band will sound better with bass having slightly the wrong tone than with no bass it all because I am trying to "dial in" the correct sound from my on-board controls. Besides getting the right bass sound (if required and since I've been using programmable effects I've never needed to adjust my sound on stage mid-gig) is part of the purpose of having a sound check.

Hurtsfall were supporting Swedish synth wave band Midnight Danger at The Bodega in Nottingham. Once again a last minute gig with a fairly early on-stage time, but this time there was a much better turn out both for us and the headliners compared with our previous gig here. Once again we struggled to fit on the tiny stage after the headliners had set up, and ended up with even less room than previously with me stuck to a single spot between the drum kit and the foldback wedge and our synth player half behind the PA stack. However it was nice to see that there were several people in attendance who knew the songs and even surprised us when we got the biggest cheer on announcing one of our newer songs which has yet to be recorded. Played really well apart from when I forgot to un-mute the Helix at the beginning of the first song. Midnight Danger were brilliant although I only saw half their set as was catching up with an old friend, and bandmate from the 70s and early 80s. Once again no photos have appeared on line as yet, but there were several photographers in the audience including one there specifically to take phots of us so hopefully I'll be posting some later...

I buy mine 100 at a time, and have at least one placed in every pocket of every bag or case I take to gigs. On stage I have a couple on the rack that holds the computer for our drums and second synth parts. At last night's gig that wasn't in a very convenient place for me to get at quickly so I had my spares on my Helix Floor pedal board.

I saw Erasure in the relatively early days when Andy Bell's favoured stage wear was a latex leotard and DMs and Vince Clark hid behind his synths under a cloud of embarrassment. It was a great gig and IMO bands with a flamboyant front person are all the better for it.

I think you'll find that on here the Helix and Quad Cortex are more popular than the Kemper so you won't get much specific advice. I'm a Helix user which is sometimes paired with an RCF745 powered FRFR. For the sorts of gigs I do, most of the time going direct from the Helix direct into the PA and using the PA foldback is a great solution so if that's something that you might find yourself doing, maybe consider swapping your passive FRFR for a powered one, that way your nor carrying about the extra bulk and weight of the power amp in the Kemper when you don't need it. Unless you have plenty of experience with multi-effects units you may find the learning curve of whichever modelling/multi-effects you go for quite steep. If the Kemper has a good computer-based editor like the Helix then it becomes a lot easier. I do my main programming at home on the computer and only use the controls on the device to fine-tune my sounds when I'm in the rehearsal room. The other thing I have found is that IMO amp and cab models are a bit of a red herring. I rarely use them and when I do, it's normally a guitar amp or combo rather than a bass one and will probably have been selected for it's drive/distortion sound first and foremost. However for me when I was using a traditional bass rig it was there just to get my line-level signal loud enough to hear and any "character" or other colouration that amp and cab(s) introduced was unwanted. For my sounds I start with an EQ module and then add compression, drive, chorus and delay as required. HTH.

The only way to find out which pick is the right one for you and the right one for the sound that works with your band is to try a load. For me the point of using a pick or finger is that the timing feel is different and I have gone for a pick (Herco Flex 75) that is very similar to the sound I get when I use my fingers. Interestingly I find that unlike most people on here my finger style playing is louder than my pick playing. One thing to bear in mind is that just like EQ settings a pick that sounds great when you are playing on your own may not sound as good with the rest of the band. I found that hard picks in particular tend to produce a bass sound that disappears if your band includes a guitarist who favours clean single coil sounds. So go to your next rehearsal armed with picks in a variety of thickness and materials, and don't be surprised if the one that sounds great when playing with the band sounds weird when you are practicing at home.

Given the lack of volume of the bass on Oasis records either Andy Bell would be fine, and the Erasure one would definitely be more interesting to watch on stage.

When I was learning songs for the dad-rock covers band I found playing along to recordings of the songs I was learning made me over-confident. Unless you are lucky enough to be able to find versions with the bass guitar part removed, having the recorded bass there acts as a mental crutch, and there can be a tendency to fudge hard to play or difficult to work out sections because the recorded bass is there to back you up. As soon as you have to play them in a band without the original bass being there it becomes very obvious that you have skimped in places. If I wasn't playing in bands the only time I would pick up one of my basses would be if I was going to use it on a recording I was making.

The most important thing with a live rig is to have at least some of it pointed at your ears and not at the backs of your knees.

For me the whole point of being bass player is to be in a band, and I accept all the commitments that go with that. If I just wanted to play at home I'd be focusing my attention on playing the guitar or keyboards.

I hope you had a word with the singer about his one IEM in and one out?

My experience both before and after the UK left the EU, is that no matter what you order or when you place it, so long as they are in stock, the items arrive on Wednesday or Thursday of the following week.