BigRedX

With The Terrortones we always rehearsed the songs we were going to record with and without a click. It was usually obvious straight away which ones would benefit from having a constant tempo and which needed a bit (or occasionally quite a lot) of push and pull in order to sound natural.

The only place I've played that had noticeable mains problems, nothing short of a full UPS would have protected the susceptible gear from it. What the OP needs to ask themselves is have they suffered from noticeable mains problems at a gig?

There's no ugly instruments. Just boring looking ones - which IMO is a greater crime against aesthetics.

The way to get the best sounding recording is to make it in a way that is most comfortable for the band. For a band with a live drummer that does not play to a backing track I'd go for a live take of all the instruments and only overdub any mistakes or if there are any extra parts you want to add. I'd also go into a proper studio to do this. Unless one of the band is an excellent sound engineer and already has all the mics you need for recording drums (and decent acoustic space to record them in), you'll get far better results and in a much shorter time from a good engineer in a good studio. And this is coming from someone who spent 10's of thousands of pound on their home studio in the 90s. Ask around other bands in a similar genre for recommendations. Good studios are ridiculously cheap these days. The last time I paid for studio time (a couple of years ago) it was only slightly more expensive per hour than my fist studio session in 1980, and the standard of the space, equipment and engineer was a massive improvement. However for the purposes of getting gigs if you're not doing it through supports with similar bands and you haven't yet built up a reputation as a live act, then you will need a video of you playing live.

Although the synth engine is the same as that in the original Alpha Juno. I don't recall if the sounds it came with were different though.

SAW were notorious for getting hold of new synths just before they became widely available and plundering all the decent pre-sets for their next hit before everyone else had a chance to use them, so the synth in question may well have been something that was brand new just before either the Dead Or Alive, or Bananarama songs were released.

The arrangement on Bananarama's version of Venus was entirely inspired by SAW's production work on Dead Or Alive's "You Spin Me Round", which was their main reason for picking SAW to work with on that song. And in turn the Dead Or Alive arrangement was inspired by any number of HiNRG disco songs of the time. Edit. It almost definitely won't be a Roland TB303, as no one used them when they first came out because they simply didn't sound any good (for what was considered "good" at the time) compared with even the cheapest monosynth. Also their main selling point when released was the sequencer which was designed to compliment the matching TR606 drum machine. Unfortunately the programming was less then straight-forward, and the memory limited. My synth band at the time had one on trial from our local musical instrument store where one of the band members worked, and we not impressed. Weedy sound (in comparison to the synths we already had) and limited sequencer memory - IIRC we could only get one song at a time programmed in and there was no simple way of saving the sequences. We decided to wait another 6 months for the newly announced MC202which had a better on-board synth, was 2-track and could control a second separate synth and you could save what you had written as data to a cassette tape. The TB303 only became popular with the rise of House Music in the late 80s when they could originally be picked up fro a fraction of their original price.

The "systems" merely distribute the songwriting royalties according to the wishes of the songwriters and their publishing contract(s). Any "injustice" has nothing to do with them. Since both other members of the Police have song writing credits and co-credits for song songs on all the albums (mostly on the less good songs - so it is obvious what a talented songwriter Sting was at the time), we can only assume that at the time of writing the guitar riff wasn't considered important enough to the overall sound of the song to warrant Andy Summers getting credit. Also it's not as though he was a young naive musician at the time, and didn't realise the importance of getting a writing credit. What did surprise me was how few credits Stuart Copeland gets; I would have thought that with his brother managing the band he would have been able to negotiate better split for himself at least. This is why anyone who thinks they are contributing a major part to the writing of a song should insist that their contribution is recognised. And also why for the last 30 years every originals band I have been in, has split all the writing credits equally between the members of the band at the time the song was written. That was there are no disagreements, especially over the choice of which songs to record and release, since whatever we choose everyone benefits equally.

I always thought that part of Fender's USP was that they were less expensive than their main US-based competition - Gibson (and to a certain extent Rickenbacker). That was certainly my perception of them in the early to mid 70s.

Written by a man who never learned to drive.

Has he never changed his bass strings before?

For those who don't subscribe to the Torygraph, could you give us the gist of the article?

And probably at the time was a nice little earner from his "day job". I suspect that he would have been in and out of the studio in under an hour, for which £15 isn't a bad deal today let alone in 1970 when the recording took place.

In that particular case only. Most of the time if you are hired as a session musician, you are there simply to play. And get paid a one-off fee simply for playing.

Which AFAICS is entirely Andy Summer's fault for not asking for a share of the songwriting on that particular song in the first place. There are other songs on the album (and other Police albums) that he is credited or co-credited as writing. At the time of writing it probably wasn't immediately noticeable what an important part of the song the guitar was going to be. After all traditionally songwriting credits go to the lyricist and whoever come up with the vocal melody. Not that this arrangement is applicable these days. Every band works in a different way when it comes to songwriting credits. Some split everything equally between all the members of the band regardless of who wrote what, others only credit those who come up with the lyrics and main musical idea; and any possible combination in-between.

Artists make little money from Spotify because they have signed contracts that gives their record label the lion's share of the royalties. I've just checked my Spotify payments and I'm generally making about 0.5p per stream, but then as a member of a band without a record deal I'm only getting a fraction of the plays.

One of my bands has made the decision that each song we record will be released individually as a single. Maybe once we have released enough for an album we'll do a one as a physical release (either on vinyl or CD). We have found that this approach has worked much better in terms of growing our fan base, and also it turns out that our most popular song to date was one that had it been an album track would most likely have been tucked away half-way through "side two" where it would have been mostly ignored.

And from the PoV of a business owner every customer is equally important, and you simply never know when an initial enquiry one day will lead to them being you biggest and most important customer a year down the line. That's certainly been the case for me on more than one occasion, and why I ensure that every email gets a reply with in 24 hours and ideally within the hour, even if it's just to say I'm looking into it.

S036 - brilliant! Who's actually in Crass these days? Apart from Steve Ignorant they were all getting on a bit when I saw them in 1980!

Conveniently doesn't show any of the details (like the neck plate and back of the machine heads) that would help track down exactly what it is.

I believe he wrote the actual notes (and came up with the idea of doubling up the Upright bass and bass guitar), but what he did would have been created to fit the song Lou Reed had already written, and there may not have been any indication at the tracking stage how prominent that bass part was ultimately going to be. This was often the case when playing sessions and should have been reflected in his session fee. If you want a cut of the song writing royalties then it need to be negotiated before you even play a note, and hope that you don't get dropped for another player. Edit: and IIRC he doubled up the the bass parts specifically so he could charge double the session fee for playing two instruments, which meant that he was completely aware that his contribution was simply a session payment only.

Was the possibility of a percentage ever on the table? Most of these cases the musician(s) in question were paid their session fee which they happily accepted. Job done on to the next session. I've always said that if you want to earn money after the fact then you need to be a songwriter.

The problem with a telephone conversation is that there is no record of it having taken place unless both parties record it (which has its own separate set of privacy problems). That's the last thing you want when trying to resolve a problem. Form personal experience with BD I would want a full record of everything that has been done for any order over £25.00. I certainly wouldn't want to buy a bass (or have a problem with one resolved) from just a phone call. As someone who runs their own business my position has always been (and most of you on here will probably be sick of me saying this) that if you are not prepared to deal with your customers by a particular means of communication, then DON'T PUBLICISE IT! All my customer's emails get answered within 24 hours of them sending it, and usually a lot sooner; even if all I am able to say to a particularly complicated request, is that I am currently working on it and will be back in touch as soon as I have the required information to answer them in full. I have no sympathy, no time, and no business to give to companies who cannot respond in a timely manner using a method of communication that they have published.

There you go. agedhorse has answered your question perfectly.

As I said in another thread, unless you are strictly a solo player, what makes the bass guitar (or any instrument for that matter) sound good, is how well it works in the overall mix with the other instruments. That sound when solo'd is rarely the sort of sound you would want to spend listening to on its own, but put back all the other instruments and everything sounds fantastic. Science, if you understand it fully can get you to roughly the right sonic space, but ultimately getting the perfect sound for a band/song will require someone with great ears at the controls. Many of my favourite bands feature a musician with an unconventional sound or style and the other instruments often have to be completely re-balanced to make the overall band sound work. And finally from a personal PoV, I play in two bands with different instrumental line-ups. The sounds I use on my Helix for each band are very different, and not at all interchangeable.