BigRedX

Thanks.

IME there are a number of things that go together to make good live band photos:

A good photographer - which should go without saying.

An interesting and appropriately lit stage space. Ideally the rest of the venue should be relatively dark compared with the area occupied by the performers

Interesting looking band/artists. IMO there is no point getting up on stage to perform if you are not also going to give the audience something entertaining to watch. Otherwise you may as well stick to the recording studio. For me, live performance is as much about the visuals as it is about the music.

When all those things come together the results are usually rewarding. Of course I only post the photos I think look good. There are probably an equal number of terrible phone shots of the band looking uninteresting also posted on Social Media. I just choose not to share those.

Better photos from Friday's gig:

29 minutes ago, MartinB said:

Essentially just an EQ curve that matches the sound of putting a specific microphone in a specific position in front of a specific speaker cabinet.

 

The green wiggly line is a Helix Cab > Single block for an Ampeg 4x10 cabinet, which uses a built-in IR.

The blue smooth line is a Helix EQ > Parametric block with an approximation of the same overall frequency response.

Goes some way to explain why I think a lot of the bass cab models make my sound worse. There's a fairly hefty dip in the mid-range just where I like to boost the EQ without a cab model being present.

In 40 years of using programmable multi-effects and synths I think I've only ever used a few factory presets which still needed adjusting to work in the context of what I wanted to do and I have never paid for any. Line6 recently shared Peter Hooks "Salford Rules" Helix Preset, and while it wasn't bad, I think I preferred the version of his sound that I had programmed myself.

The Helix and HX series of devices are simple to program. Simply start with a blank Preset or if your device doesn't come with any pick one that you'll never use and wipe it. I spent half a day going through all the Presets that came with my Helix when I bought it and decided that none of them were remotely what I wanted to sound like. Then start adding modules as if you were populating a pedal board with pedals. Work on each one separately until it's producing a sound you like and then tweak them to produce the combined sound you want. You'll stillness a technical rehearsal or two with your band to fine tune everything, but other than that it's easy.

52 minutes ago, urbanx said:

Bedford Esquires on Saturday with For The Hornets:

Played the venue part several years ago supporting Balaam and the Angel who had a rather Spinal Tap moment when after setting up their drum riser and drums the road crew realised that it was now too close to the venue's ceiling for there to be enough room for the cymbals!

24 minutes ago, cetera said:

but I do prefer the chorus in the B3...

Have you tried all the chorus models on the HX Stomp? I don't know which models are included in this version, but the Full Helix has 4 different chorus models plus 4 flangers which will all do a chorus effect at the right settings, some other modulation models such as the Poly Detune which will do chorus-type sounds and finally a couple of the delay models include chorus options in their parameters. Are you sure that none of those are a suitable substitute for the B3 chorus sounds?

Instrumental tracks for the forthcoming Hurtsfall album. Just one more song to go and I'll have recorded all my Bass VI parts.

On 21/02/2025 at 15:29, NickA said:

Still setup isn't everything and a pine body and poplar board are never going to feel or sound like mahogany and ebony.

You can't say that, because every piece of wood if different and to try and make sweeping generalisations about a particular species is at best nonsense.

Remember also that descriptors like "pine" "poplar" "mahogany" etc. are very broad. There are over 40 species of tree that can produce wood called ash. Swamp ash is simply one of those species grown in swampy contains which goes to show that the climate/environment in which a particular species is gown might be more important than the species itself.

Also there's nothing wrong with plywood. Even Jens Ritter uses it to make bases.

When you can find it! I've played their twice with other bands and both times it took us ages to work out exactly where it was -even with the benefits of sat-nav. However the last time was less than 12 months ago so I think I may remember now!

Just to give you an idea of how small the stage is...

First gig of the year for Hurtsfall supporting The DSM IV at a new venue in Nottingham - The Grove in Sneinton Market. This may now have the record for being the smallest venue in the city as it appears to be even tinier than The Jam Café. There's an upstairs with a balcony but that's reserved for the bands and last night also for the person running the psychedelic light show projectors. Small stage meant that the headliners had to completely remove all their gear after sound-checking in order for us to have any chance of fitting on. Luckily there was an acoustic duo and a solo guitarist on before us so we were able to keep most of our stuff set up. Small but excellent sounding PA and a great sound engineer meant we were set up and sound checked in well under 30 minutes.

By the time we went on the venue was completely packed (which was very gratifying as Heartworms were also playing Nottingham that night, a gig I would have been attending had we not be playing), and although it looked like quite a different audience to our usual local Goth crowd there were people dancing from the start and the end of each song received plenty of cheering and applause. Managed to catch my finger on a protruding bridge screw during the second song and was dripping blood all over my bass and stage for the rest of the set. I've done this before so I realised what was going on and the fact that there was little point in worrying about it until the end of the set. It does mean I'll be cleaning the strings before Tuesday's practice it not actually change them.

Really enjoyed all the other bands, especially The DSM IV who were much more aggressive live that their recording suggested, and which made for a great evening.

The promoter was also impressed with our performance and has offered us a potentially great gig later in the year which I can't share until it's confirmed. From what was being said when we were arranging the gig, I got the feeling that they thought we were a relatively new project that had been formed after the dissolution of my other band, and we were quite happy to let them carry on believing this until we played. There were several photographers with serious cameras in attendance, but nothing has surfaced on Social Media yet. No doubt I'll be posting something later this weekend.

Next gig is Friday 7th March at The Arches in Coventry.

3 minutes ago, Reggaebass said:

I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any difference in sound from a higher action to a lower action unless it’s low and someone is playing hard in which case it’s noisy where the strings are buzzing, I play with a super low action and a soft touch, I don’t like buzz 

Because something else in your playing style or signal chain is over-riding the possible effects of changing the action.

But so long as the nut and bridge have been adjusted to allow the best possible tuning across all the strings and frets, and bearing in mind that tuning on all fretted instruments is a compromise, everything else about a "set-up" is subjective.

Everything from how you play and what you choose to play right up to the space in which you play it will have an effect on your tone. Some things will be very important other will be completely overshadowed those very important things. What is important and what is not, will be different for every player.

37 minutes ago, Jerry_B said:

I think in the late 80s I was using Labella Hard Rockin' Steel strings but I think they were rebadged some time ago(?).

They are just called LaBella Steels now. Because LaBella round wounds aren't as popular as their flat wound strings they tend to be quite difficult to get hold of in the UK and, when can find them, they are eye-waveringly expensive. IME most people who like LaBella Steels would be just as well off with Warwick Red Label stings which are about a quarter of the price.

EQ is only a partial solution to room acoustics as the sound of a room is both frequency and time domain based and EQ is a frequency domain only solution. What normally happens with EQ is that you can correct for one area of the room but you are just shifting the problem to somewhere else. 

You have to move cabs quite a way from walls, floors and ceilings before you break the proximity effect they cause. However moving your cabs will cause the position of the room nodes to shift which may help with the sound of the room (changing the time domain parameters). Decoupling solutions rarely work at gig volumes. I stopped using my Gramma Pad because it did little to improve the sound but did make my rig wobble alarmingly on some stages

9 minutes ago, prowla said:

It doesn't see strings - it sees lines, so the binding might confuse it.

Most AI can't even see lines properly as my building brickwork example proved.

10 minutes ago, ratman said:

Ah, my bad, I missed that crucial bit.

No problem.

Perusing Thomann's selection of cases did point me in the direction of what could have been a suitable alternative. Unfortunately on checking the measurements it's much too big.

23 minutes ago, Happy Jack said:

I do find it puzzling that the AI is capable of doing so much in these images, but then hits a brick wall when it comes to things like the number of strings / tuners / pegs etc.

AI appears to very stupid when it comes to many things that human beings can see and easily understand.

I was recently asked to use several tiny photographs of buildings in a publication that needed to appear at full page width which involved enlarging them by over 400%. I have several AI-based tools for image enlargement that were initially bought to use with headshots for contributors (for another publication) that had been taken from their organisation's website or their LinkedIn profile. For this task it is very good indeed. Unfortunately in the case of the photographs of the buildings it rendered all the regular brickwork as something between avant-garde architecture and dry stone walling. As a human being I can instantly look at the photographs and recognise that those buildings are made of bricks that need to be arranged in straight rows. AI has yet to be able make that deduction.

11 hours ago, ratman said:

I just bought a couple of these and I'm very happy with them.

 

https://www.thomann.co.uk/thomann_rack_case_4u.htm

Thanks. Unfortunately the top doesn't come off as well as the ends, which is requirement for me.

For clarity here's a shot which shows how I have the current rack case configured.

1 hour ago, NickA said:

I guess the p bass is pretty easy to replicate. 

 

Any manufacturer who still can't make a good P or J copy shouldn't be in the business of producing bass guitars.

On 15/02/2025 at 22:06, Beedster said:

Deep down everyone loves Rush 👍

Unfortunately not.

My interest in Rush lasted a little over 72 hours, from when as an impressionable 15 year old I saw the gear porn cover of "All the World's a Stage" on Saturday afternoon  in my local record shop, until the Tuesday when I got back from school, roughly 5 minutes after I had dropped the needle on side one my borrowed copy of 2112. No matter how much I liked the music I couldn't get past the vocals. I listened all the way through both sides just in case there were songs with more "conventional" singing on them. It wasn't a pleasant experience. 

From time to time I go back and listen to the occasional track, but my opinion hasn't changed and I still can't get past the vocals. I don't get on with Muse for much the same reasons.

Bear in mind that a "good" tone is partially subjective and partially to do with how the other instruments sound and the arrangement of the music you are playing.

In 50 years of guitar and bass ownership, at all sorts of price points, I have only once had an instrument where the machine heads were actually problematic and that was a 1960s bass where 20 years of abuse meant the gears had worn to the point that they slipped when approaching proper tuning tension. The shop I bought it from had disguised this by tuning it down a tone to a point where they didn't slip and therefore I didn't notice it when trying it out. Everything else has had machine heads that functioned perfect well and so long as I cut my strings so that I wasn't winding unnecessary coils around the tuning posts they held their tuning perfectly well. IMO these days the only reason to change your machine heads is because you don't like the look of the existing ones.

42 minutes ago, chris_b said:

If this were the case people wouldn't be trying to sound like Cliff Burton and Steve Harris etc.

But that only works if the rest of your band sound like Metallica or Iron Maiden. The sound of a band is the sound of all the instruments fitting together like a sonic jigsaw.