BigRedX

Occurred twice today using Safari on a Mac. On both occasions the ad failed to render on screen properly, but at the same time it prevented clicking any of the links on the page requiring me to use to back button on the browser to escape.

Strange how people still think that the size of the individual speakers is the most important factor in how a cab will sound. While the combined driver areas in all your cabs plus the x-max of those drivers will be important in the maximum loudness achievable, the "sound" of a cab is more influenced by its design - overall size/volume, port size and design, rigidity etc.

The big advantage of the Virtual Drummer in Logic is that it is supposed to be able to produce new patterns based on the rhythmic elements of other tracks that have already been recorded/programmed. However as I said in practice the styles are quite limited to very mainstream genres.

Jamstix seems to get a lot of decent reviews. Make sure it will generate the sorts of drum patterns you want. In theory Logic's virtual drummer is a great idea; in practice it has yet to produce a pattern I would want to use for my music. I find the basic patterns are boring and the fills too clever. Also there doesn't seem to be any way of adding additional drummer styles. I still find it easier to find an existing song that has a basic drum pattern close to what I want and then convert that to a MIDI file (I used to use Recycle! but I'm now looking for a modern alternative) to use with my own drum sounds and build the rest of the drum part from that.

There's nothing big or clever about having cheap gear, and equally there's nothing big or clever about having expensive gear either. Use what you can afford and/or need and just get on with the important job of playing the actual music. I always put it into perspective by considering that when I was playing in a synth band in the 80s it would have been possible to buy a small mid-terrace house in need of modernisation for the same amount as we had spent on the musical equipment we took to gigs. In that respect taking £10k worth of instruments, effects and amplification on stage, when compared with property or even car prices these days, is peanuts.

Someone here 3D printing fixtures that replaced the feet and allowed the Helix the be screwed to the wooden base of a pedal board case.

Thanks. The video shoot was done in a single day in Melton Mowbray, December 2022.

Saturday was the last ever gig for In Isolation. Singer Ryan is calling it a day after 20 years, and with my other band being much more active I have been struggling to find the time to be in more than one. We were able to persuade the organisers of the Spellbound Goth Night at The Salutation in Nottingham to let us perform before the main event, so we had an early start of 7.15 in order to play an extra long set and be packed up before the normal club night opening time of 9.00pm. Probably the longest single set I have ever played in 45 years of gigging with 17 songs. I was more than a little relieved to find that all the songs were ones we've been playing for the last 18 months and that they had decided against dusting off some from before my time, I've been with the band almost 8 years but I am to a certain extent still the FNG. Based on the ticket sales and door takings there must have been close to 100 people in to see us, which was very nice, but it would have been nicer if they had all been regulars at all our previous local gigs (we played this time last year to just over a third of that number). There were several down the front who I had never seen at one of our gigs before but who seemed to know most of the songs! Played all three songs from the new EP which seemed to go down well and all 5 of the covers that we occasional add to the set including our version if "I Believe In Father Christmas". I'll miss playing our version of the Bauhaus classic "She's In Parties" because we really made that our own. I heard the original the other day and was pleasantly surprised by how different our version is! Here's a couple of gig photos and a short video of the closing moments of the set... I Isolation.mp4

IMO £30 is a complete bargain for what we got. It's described as a "Lyric Video" but the animation makes it interesting enough to use as our primary video version. On the other hand we could spend a lot more money and make a "proper" music video. I won't clog up this thread with them, but go onto YouTube and have a look at the In Isolation videos for "Trappist-1", "Not Noticing" or "The Man Who Hides From Love".

Thanks! We started playing it after being asked to perform a Christmas song as a condition of playing a live session for a local radio show 7 years ago. We did consider doing "Wombling Merry Christmas" but "I Believe In Father Christmas" was thought to be more in keeping with our image. We've been playing it at any gigs in December ever since, and it was recorded during the summer heatwave of 2022. We'll be performing it for the last time this Saturday when do our farewell gig, as singer Ryan is calling it a day, and I will also be leaving as my other band is occupying too much time for me to be in both. And thanks again! IIRC the video cost us £30 through the Fiverr website. Our singer sorted it all out. They also did the video for "Tilting".

These are all the musical instruments I have owned over the past 50 years. The ones with an * are those I still have. Basses Atlansia Solitaire Fretless Born To Rock F4B British Custom Guitars 4-string bass (unfinished project) Burns Sonic Bass Burns Barracuda* Carlo Robelli UBD510 8-string bass Eastwood Hooky Bass 6 PRO * Fernandes Pie-zo Hello Kitty Edition Gus G3 4-string fretless Gus G3 5-string passive* Gus G3 5-string active* Hagstrom Futurama Bass Hartke XL-4 Bass Hondo Alien Kramer 450B Kramer XKB-10 Lace Helix 5-string fretless bass Lightwave Sabre Bass with fretted and fretless necks Manne Mandobass Overwater Original Overwater Original Fretless Pedulla Buzz Reverend Rumblefish 5L Roberts 4-string fretless bass prototype Sei Flamboyant Offset 5-string fretless bass Squier Bass VI * Squier VMJ Fretless Stagg EUB Switch Innovo Bass Tokai Talbo Bass Traben Phoenix 5-string Warwick StarBass II Washburn B20-8 8-string bass Washburn Force ABT B105 Wesley Acrylic 4-string bass defretted Yamaha BJ-5B Guitars Andreas Black Shark Baldwin 12-string FretKing Esprit V Custom* Gus G1 * Hallmark Wing-bat Harley Benton Stratocaster Copy Harley Benton V7 Series Barione Guitar Home-made solid electric guitar Honer TE Custom XII 12-string Ibanez Firebird Copy* Kimbara Acoustic Guitar* Shaftesbury Resonator Guitar Tokai Talbo Jr Guitar Yamaha EZ-EG Yamaha RGZ612 super-strat Synthesisers etc. Akai AX73 Akai S2000 Casio CZ5000 Casio CZ1 Casio SK1 Casio VL-Tone Cheetah MS6 Control Synthesis Deep Bass Nine EDP Wasp Ensoniq ESQ1 Ensoniq ESQM Ensoniq EPS16+ Etherwave Theremin Korg Monotron Korg MS20 Korg MS50 Korg VC10 Nord Rack Novation LaunchKey 37 * Roland Jupiter 6 Roland PC-2 Roland SH09 Simmons SDSV Simmons MTX9 Tenori-On* Waldorf Microwave XT Yamaha KX5 Drum Machines Alesis HR16 Bentley Rhythm Ace FR-6 Electro Harmonix DRM16 Hammond Auto-Vari 64 Hillwood HR2 Linn Adrenalinn Rhythm Ace FR-2L Roland TR-33 Rhythm Arranger Roland TR-55 Rhythm Arranger Roland TR-77 Rhythm 77 Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm SoundMaster Rhythm 1 Yamaha RX11 Other Instruments Home-made Electric Balalaika

Careful, You might find that the venue want to pay you less as a result. For originals bands I suppose the merch stand is the equivalent. When my band plays we expect the takings there to exceed what we are being paid to play the gig.

Thank you.

I've had a similar experience with a previous band. As my day job is graphic design it normally falls to me to produce posters, record/CD/cassette covers, email newsletters etc. I can't remember what I was actually supposed to be producing, but I was struggling to find time to fit it in around all my demanding (and paying) clients. The singer suggested paying someone else to do it, to which I replied "If you want to pay me then it will be at the top of the list of jobs I have". The subject of how long I sometimes took with band graphics was never raised again.

The closest I've come it was when I was in The Terrortones, where we had our own label and management company (Jailhouse Morgue) which was run by our singer as part of his day job. Very few people who dealt with us when booking the band, actually realised that our manager and Mr Venom were one and the same person as they seemed so different on-line and on the phone compared with how we were on stage. I can recall being asked on numerous occasions if "Will" was at the gig...

No. I've moved on. Most bands are very much of their time, and usually there is a good reason why they ended in the first place. For originals bands if you were serious about what you did you'll have a recorded back catalogue that might be worth trying to get out to a wider audience, but that's it. Back in 2002, on a whim I googled the name of the very first band I was in and came across an extremely favourable review by Johan Kugelberg (a reasonably well-known champion of DIY music) of our one vinyl release from 1980, and off the back of that I ended up being asked to produce a retrospective CD compilation of our music by Chicago indie label "Hyped To Death". It was an interesting project and about as close as I'd like to come to reforming an old band. I'd have provided a link but the label and its website appears to have vanished. Edit: The label has a holding page back on line since I last looked. However it appears that they had a couple of fires and most of their stock (including our CD) was lost...

No this year, but in 2022 one of my bands released the cover of I Believe I Father Christmas that we had been playing live for some time: It was recently listed on the Emerson Lake and Palmer YouTube channel as one of their favourite covers. My other band put out this original song last year:

Plenty of guitar designs go to show that technical ability with tools does not necessarily go hand in hand with aesthetic awareness.

Wishbass copy?

That's a lot of money for something that is essentially a copy of Fender's more budget offerings.

I'm happiest playing something that enhances the song. It can be simple or (relatively) complicated.

In Japan, where Karaoke originated, you're not even supposed to do it in public in front of random strangers. And it's certainly not for their entertainment.

Of course in the days of recording to analogue tape, the final mixes would often be sped up (or very occasionally slowed down) to achieve a better feel when the record was cut without any regard for what it would do to the pitch.

If I was ever to find myself in a band that was popular enough for people to want to cover my songs, I would be seriously contemplating making an album where every song used a different non-A=440 tuning reference. In my first band we had two reed organs neither of which were at A=440, as a result our recording were tuned to three different references - whichever reed organ we were using or a set of pitch pipes if we weren't using either. Since I got my first electronic tuner in 1983, everything I have done has been to A=440, although one of the cassette recorders that we used to make copies of our demos in the 80s ran slightly slow so anyone listening to them on a machine that ran at the correct speed would be hearing the recordings at the wrong pitch.

The Mu:zines project is a worthwhile endeavour, and if you have issues of International Musician that are missing from their archive and digitisation schedule it would be worth lending them your copies in order for them to be added to the archive. My understanding is that they have already negotiated all the copyright issues, so if all they require is a link and an attribution that would be a small price to pay in order to be legally covered for usage in you blog. There is also a massive difference between quoting a few sentences from a source with an acknowledgement and reproducing an article wholesale, so decide what you want to use and act accordingly. I do page layout and graphic design for a number of small publications and there is an amazingly cavalier attitude to photo usage in particular, in that some of the contributors to these publications think that because they have seen something on a web site it can be used without any compensation (either literal or financial) in their articles. After one of these publications came unstuck spectacularly for using photographs without permission (luckily in an issue from before I started working for them, so I'm not involved) I now include a clause in my artwork sign-off that states that the publishers/editors of the publication in question certify that they own the copyright, have permission, or a licence from the copyright holder to use all the text and images being reproduced. Photographs are a particular problem because the copyright often remains with the photographer, so even if you have permission to reproduce the text from the author you may need a separate permission/licence for the accompanying photographs. Remember that anything on-line is much easier to find that an obscure printed book/magazine and some photo copyright services have automated procedures for scanning through web pages and even hosted PDFs to track down photographs being used without the correct permission. I'm just coming to the end of a vast project producing a 400+ book detailing various exploits during WWII that has reproduced numerous written sources and photographs. In most cases getting permission to quote text from other books was easy, the author of this book contacted the author of the book(s) he wanted to quote, and they were happy for either a written acknowledgement in the book and the possibility of using any new information that had been uncovered in a subsequent edition of their book with a reciprocal acknowledgement. For the photographs it was a lot harder and much more expensive. Apart form photographs taken by people in the book and which have been supplied by their relatives, everything else has had to be licensed from the various copyright holders who all need to know various details such as proposed printing quantities, image reproduction size, and distribution reach. I've just finished negotiating with the IWM for the last batch of photos we want to use which, even with a hefty discount, have cost several thousand pounds in licence and scanning fees. Tread with care and make sure you have exhausted all possibilities for getting permission first.