BigRedX

IIRC the bass version which came later than the guitar had the more powerful JX8P synthesiser in the floor unit.

Technically speaking, it's not a "MIDI pickup". It's a 4-channel pickup that when attached to the correct hardware via a special multiway cable will allow the bass to drive a (MIDI) synthesiser. Having said that without the required cable and foot controller this instrument is nothing more than a standard J-bass with a weird shape.

Not at all. By the time I had the money to buy any bass or guitar other than the cheapest ones in the shop, I had formed my own tastes that had/have little to do with what my musical heroes play/played. My first electric guitar was one I designed and built myself in woodwork classes at school, and while it had borrowed from existing designs (mostly Explorer and Firebird and were picked because I liked the "futuristic" shapes rather than any player association) the end result was unique in both shape and electrics. My first bass (a second hand Burns Sonic) was simply the cheapest one in the shop when I bought it - although I did try some cheap P and J bass copies at the same time and didn't like them as much.

I was almost 11 by the time I "got into" pop music. The Beatles had split at least a year prior to that, and therefore for me were completely irrelevant since they weren't on TotP and only on the radio when "oldies" were being played. I quite liked Paul McCartney's rockier songs with Wings, but the others were producing nothing musical of any interest to me. I've grown to appreciate them since then, although there are plenty of 60s bands I like far more, but the only songs of theirs I know well are the Sgt Pepper album and their singles.

I'm strictly a round-wound person on my Bass VIs, so I can't offer any advice on the LaBella Flats. However there are a couple of things you could try first. 1. Have you raised the bridge and shimmed the neck to compensate, on your Bass VI? IME as much of the "floppy" feel of the E and A strings is down to them being too compliant due to the break angle over the bridge being too shallow. If you haven't already done this, I would suggest giving it a go, as otherwise alternative strings might still feel as loose. 2. GHS do a heavier set of round wounds for the Eastwood Hooky Bass VI with a 105 E. You can get them here. 3. If you are still having problems see if Newtone will wind you some custom sets to your specifications.

For me playing in a Classic Rock covers band absolutely and utterly killed my enthusiasm for some of the songs we played, even though previously I had enjoyed listening to them. I think having to dissect the songs to work out how to play them was mostly responsible.

His lyrics are pretty good. If he chose to publish them, unaccompanied, as poetry I would have no problem with that. It's that he chooses to set them to dull repetitive music (and IMO the music would still be dull even if it wasn't so repetitive) that means they need to be judged as songs, taking both the music and the lyrics into account. And on that level it fails miserably, the music being so terrible that it completely negates the genius of the lyrical content.

What sort of 6-string bass? 34" tuned BEADGC or 30" tuned EADGBE?

Despite being more than a little interested in "Gothic" music in most of its forms, I do not like anything that Nick Cave has produced, and think that as a songwriter he is vastly over-rated.

I was only 4/5 years older, and despite the fact that Beatles were "old hat" and had split a couple of years before I get interested in pop/rock music, I was very much aware of who he was even if I wasn't that interested in his music. I think back then when there was a lot less pop/rock available to hear, so it was much easier, if you were interested in music, to find about about musicians and bands that weren't necessarily "flavour of the month".

Yes, this the third time I’ve been in two bands at once. This time It helps that both bands fit into the same genre so I’m unlikely to have to choose between gigs because if both bands have a gig on same day it’s likely to be same gig (which has happened)

Considering that I have been the main composer for nearly all the bands I’ve played in that would be a resounding “yes”. There would be something wrong otherwise.

Soft furnishings will definitely help the acoustics, so will curtains over the windows and door if you are going to fit them. However there's still a lot of what look like hard reflective surfaces.

Vulfpeck's most musically interesting album is "Sleepify"

Ideally you should have everything. A web site, a presence on ALL the social media networks, and everything as far as possible linked to everything else, so that you audience can chose which way to get their informations and if necessary interact with you. None of them have to be complicated, but they should look good and be kept up to date, which generally means something to post every week on social media even if you don't have any gigs in the pipeline. Also keep on top of changes to the design and layout of your social media pages. There's nothing worse than a page that looks broken on Facebook etc. because the layout and graphic specifications have changed but the band/business haven't bothered to update the user elements on the page to take advantage of this.

Carpet will go some way to taming the room. Is this just going to be a rehearsal space or will you be recording here too? If you hope to do anything better than basic demos, it may be an idea to have some of the carpet removable, so you can create a "hard surface" area in one part of the room for recording instruments that will benefit from it. You might also need to look at any spaces between the floor metalwork and the ground. Unwanted resonances can build up in any untreated space.

A sample size of one for each type of body renders this "study" scientifically meaningless. All it proves is that these two different bits of wood sound different. For it to be worthwhile not only do they need to show consistent differences between multiple bodies made out of the same two species of wood, but the bodies made out of the same species of wood should sound the same. As I have said before it very easy to make two solid wooden bodied electric instruments sound different.

Sometimes you don't know what options are actually going to turn out to be the useful ones until you have tried them all out (and also tried them when playing with your band). When I built my first guitar back in the late 70s I fitted as many passive tonal shaping options as I could to make the most of a single (coil-tapped) humbucker as I couldn't afford a second pickup. In the end I only found three of them useful, but there was no way of knowing this in advance. If I was doing the same again, I'd try and find some way of making all the options easy to try out, but also being able to just have the controls I actually needed once that trial period was over without the front of the instrument being full of unwanted knobs/switches/holes.

He's wrong. In the early 80s it seemed as though every third gig I went to had A Flock Of Seagulls as the main support band. It was obviously a strategy that ended up working well for them, but in my case I wasn't particularly impressed the first time I saw them (before, what was even by the standards of the day, the adoption of the ridiculous haircut) and I was no better disposed towards them or their music by the 6th time, by which time they were also on heavy rotation on the radio.

That's interesting. When I used to run The Terrortones website we sold fair amount of merch and CDs right up to the time that we also started selling on Bandcamp, at which point sales from our own site dropped to zero despite the fact that it was cheaper than buying the same things from Bandcamp.

I can most definitely relate to this. When I got my first really good bass - an Overwater - the step up in playability was massive. I then realised that any short-comings in what I was able to play and how I sounded would be entirely down to me and not the instrument.

Each machine head is geared differently so that turning the tuning peg 360° will turn the post the required number of times to produce a 1 tone change in pitch of the string. However, to accomplish this on the bass version they require a scale length of 34" medium gauge strings and standard tuning intervals between the strings. Changing the scale length or string gauge while losing the 1 turn per tone ratio, should mean that same amount of turning produces the same pitch change per string, but those of us who use non-standard tuning intervals (such as always having the lowest string dropped an extra tone) will lose some of the benefit. Guitarists who regularly use all sorts of different tunings won't really see any benefit at all.

If that's the case, use your audio app of choice to record the audio. Then use QuickTime Player to record the screen while the audio plays back. You may be able to add the audio directly to the QuickTime recording at this point depending on what audio sources QuickTime can see while doing this. If QuickTime can't directly pickup the audio playback you might want to look at Loopback from Rogue Amoeba to facilitate this. If that's not possible you can combine the two in any video editing app.

Actually you are mistaken. All the early Roland guitar synths - the original GR500 and the subsequent GR100 and GR300 (one of which is being used in the video) used a mixture of pitch detection to drive the synthesiser sections (or out put CVs and Gates) and basic audio processing - mostly polyphonic distortion, EQ and auto filter - and very little like the complex signal processing/modelling that goes in on in the current V and SY devices.

He gets around the latency problem by using sounds with a very slow attack, ones that are doubled up with the processed guitar sound, and by playing in the upper register where pitch detection is much faster.