BigRedX

I've not come across any aluminium-necked instruments where the frets were integral to the neck. Not even on on the Born To Rock F4B or the Andreas "Shark" instruments which have aluminium fingerboards. The Born To Rock used inlayed round "wire" and the Andreas had standard frets. As has already been said the Kramer has standard frets fitted to an Ebanol fingerboard (it's the stuff that bowling balls are made out of), so it shouldn't be any more difficult to refret than any other instrument with a traditional close-grain hard wood fingerboard.

There's been a "professional" version of that method available for ages (search for "Omnichrom machine" - although it's become less easy to find due to a pesky similarly-named virus variant). Before the arrival of affordable high quality colour printers graphic designers would use it to add colour (mainly to type) to their mock-ups, to show clients what they were going to get before the design went to print.

From an electrical PoV it should be fine. What is unknown is just how much of your on-stage sound is reliant on the sound of the cabs you have been using.

"Down in the Sewer" came on in the car once and I spent a good 3-4 minutes waiting for Jon Anderson to start singing so I could work out which Yes song it was.

Over the past 40 years I have used cabs with every standard size of speaker from 8" to 18". These days I I have given up using a conventional bass rig completely because on the whole IT DOES NOT MATTER to me. If I was in the market for a traditional bass cab again, my criteria for choosing a cab would be as follows: 1. Do I like the sound? (can only really be considered when playing with the rest of my band) 2. Does it go loud enough without distorting/dying? (see above) 3. Do I like how it looks (and more importantly how it looks with the rest of my rig)? 4. If I'm not playing in a band with a van and/or roadies, can I lift it (easily) on my own, and does it fit in my car/on the bus/down the escalators on the tube? AFAIAC none of the other facts, figurers and fictions that speaker cab manufacturers would like to bamboozle us with are important.

While it is a slightly modified DMZ5000, the bridge is the least consistent thing about Kramers from that era. It could just as likely have sported a Badass or a Schaller 3D from new.

For vinyl, you will need to cross-check the barcode (if there is one) the catalogue number, the country of manufacture and possibly the run-off groove markings as well as the small print on the actual sleeve and labels, to try and narrow down which version you have. I suspect that some of the Sex Pistols records are bootlegs, which is why they are not allowed for sale. It's a dodgy area. I've sold a couple of "unofficial" CDs, but they were "proper" glass-mastered versions rather than CDRs. The advent of bands doing short-run releases on CDR is problem area too, as many of them would be relatively trivial for an unscrupulous seller to duplicate if they were valuable enough to justify it.

If you are going to try and sell them on Discogs, make 100% sure that you are listing the correct version. The sorts of people who buy on there (especially rare versions) will demand that sort of accuracy and won't be happy if you sell them the wrong version, even if it is a genuine mistake on your part. I speak from experience.

I didn't start listening to music until 1971, but retrospectively I've come to regard "Parachute" by The Pretty Things as the by far and away the best album released in 1970.

Personally I wouldn't bother with ProTools unless you are collaborating with an existing ProTools user and expecting to make serious money out of your recordings. The iLok copy protection system is beyond flakey, and ProTools' parent company Avid appear to stumble from one poor CEO and financial crisis to another. The only thing keeping it going is the inertia of the established user base built up from the days when it was the only serious proposition when it came to recording and manipulating digital audio. Plus these days when new users have never used a traditional multitrack tape recorder and mixer, the familiarity of the user interface that mimics this system is far less important.

I've had a quick preview of a handful of the songs, and the bass sounds (IMO) about right in the mix for the genre of the band. It isn't right up front, but if you are listening out for it, all the notes can be heard. If I was in a band doing a cover of one of the songs I'd be able to work out the bass part from these recordings. On the other hand if you think the bass needs to be louder and more prominent, the only way you are really going to be able to do that is to form a new band doing music in a genre where it is accepted for the bass to more heavily featured in the mix and then write and produce all the songs yourself.

Unfortunately there's no real alternative to experimentation, and seeing what suits you and bass(es) you are using. A lot of it will depend on how sensitive you are to the changes in tension and compliance which the different tunings will bring. If this was me I'd be looking at using two separate basses - one for the songs in standard E-G tuning and another for the D-F songs - and strung with the appropriate gauge strings. However I'm the person who has a separate guitar with a heavier "E" string that is permanently tuned to drop D because a single gauge string is too much of a compromise in feel for one of the tunings and even a "half-way" gauge is no good because it's "wrong" for both tunings. You may feel differently but you won't know until you try. I wouldn't even consider trying to retune a single bass between songs. The rest of your band and the audience are unlikely to tolerate it. And as has been mentioned already you need to pick your string gauges carefully. Consider that when going from A to E the gauges of a "standard" set go up from 80 or 85 to 100 or 105. That's for a 5 semitone drop. For a drop of a tone you are going to want to increase by around "7". Also bear in mind that lower strings could generally do with being a bit heavier to compensate for the fact that they are lower tension. If your preferred E-G set is 100-40, then for DGCF tuning I'd start by trying 110, 90, 65, 45 and go from there.

You've obviously got your own agenda which your are going to pursue despite people posting evidence to the contrary. I'm out and you are on ignore.

If your bass isn't doing what you want, then sell it and use that £150 to go towards a bass that does.

From my recollection of the late 70s (from 77 onwards) if you were playing bass in any sort of covers band that was doing Top 30 hits rather than "rock" you needed to have your slap bass chops up to scratch.

I don't know about Reaper, but in Logic you sort this out by making each track mono and then assigning the appropriate audio interface input to each channel.

I'd go for a K&M floor stand fitted with their 21231 Boom Arm which has both an adjustable counterweight and an extra-long telescopic boom.

"Alles ist gut" By DAF

IME it’s more about the programming than the sound themselves. Spend some time listening to what drummers play and then go about replicating it in your drum plug-in of choice. As far as signal processing goes a bit of common reverb and compression on all the drums helps to hold all the sounds together.

But he could sort it out in one fell swoop by simply registering “Gerald Bostock” as a pseudonym with the PRS, so I suspect that either the story is worth more than some missing royalties or the is more to it than we are aware.

Personally I think once you've invested more than a few months (or at least done a serious project) in a particular DAW you are pretty much tied in for as long as you are going to be be making music using your computer. I ended up with Logic (in the early 90s) because that was what my songwriter partner of the time was using and it made total sense for us both the be using the same program. Left to my own devices I would have most likely gone for Opcode Vision and a couple of years down the line found myself having to start from scratch with another DAW after Gibson bought up Opcode and subsequently killed off all their software. And from that PoV Logic is probably one of the safest DAWs to be using since is is extremely unlikely to be discontinued or sold by Apple; and because it is tied to the Macintosh platform tends to far more stable than the competition. If you want an indication of just how badly software can fare once a closed system is "opened up" just look at the decline of the once mighty ProTools... Also Macs tend to last a long time. My "studio" MacPro is from 2010 and cost me £600 second hand a couple of years ago (it replaced another second hand MacPro that cost £350 and which I sold on for only slightly less than that!). The MacBook Pro that runs the backing for both of my bands when they gig is almost 10 years old and was £700 new as an EoL model. Also if you don't need to, there's no real need to upgrade software. I'm only running the latest version of Logic, because upgrades to my Macs for my day job (where I earn the money to be able to make music) meant that the previous version no longer worked. If my Macs were just for music, I'd probably still be running Logic 9 (or maybe even 8). And finally the "upgrade" cost of Logic has never been cheaper. I recall the days when I paid close to £300 just to upgrade the MIDI sequencing part of Logic and the "Logic Audio" extension upgrade was an additional £200. Compared with that current price is a bargain. Finally how cost effective the various DAWs are depends on what you require them to do. If all I wanted from a DAW was a glorified multitrack audio recording device and mixer, then Reaper would do the job admirably for free. However to replace the various plugins that I use regularly which come for free with Logic with 3rd party versions for Reaper would be in excess of the £199 that Logic currently costs. Edit: I have been looking at swapping to Presonus Studio One since the "Show" version of the DAW suits the way I use software for gigs far better than Logic or MainStage (which ought to be the obvious choice for me). Unfortunately the change-over is providing far more complicated than I envisioned, at I may well continue to use Logic even though isn't as flexible for running a live set simply because the new learning curve is too steep.

In the days when I was still recording at home, my method when DI'ing instruments was always to record clean/dry and if a particular effect was an essential part of the sound the slap it on the track in playback before doing anything else. Alternatively if I had the appropriate hardware (and tracks available) I'd record the instruments with the effects as well as a separate DI feed direct so I could always change my mind later if I found the the mix was suggesting alternative sounds. For demos to show the band how the song goes, I've stopped worrying about how they sound and simply concentrate on making something to showcases the song. For social media I wouldn't entertain posting anything that wasn't a properly finished and produced piece of music, and for the bands I've been in over the past 15 years that has meant going into a proper studio. Finally as I and others have said, recording is like any other skill. For nearly everyone it takes hours and hours of practice and trial and error. No-one expects to be even a competent bass player after a couple of weeks of playing so why should recording be any different?

I really don't see what the problem is. I've always been of the opinion that you pick your computer based on the software that you want to run on it. When I bought my first Mac it was because I needed to run Quark XPress which back then was the premier page layout programme (nothing else came even remotely close) and was Macintosh only. Yes there are alternatives to Logic out there, but unless all you are ever going to use your DAW for is a digital multitrack tape recorder, none of the alternatives IMO are anywhere as near as cost-effective. And besides the OP already has a Mac.

No the amp itself should have it's own fuse - either accessible from the back panel or somewhere on the circuit board and will probably be a "slo-blo" to compensate for in-rush on the power up. The fuse in the mains plug is just for the lead between the mains socket and the amp.

The fuse in a mains plug is there to protect the lead not the equipment it is powering (which should be fused separately) so if the cable is rated at 13A then it should be fitted with a 13A fuse.