BigRedX

What is it about your sound that you are not happy with?

But how much of an Eastwood version would be true to the original and how much would be cobbled together from standard off the shelf parts, thereby loosing a good deal of what made the instrument different and interesting in the first place?

The string break angle is still in a single plane - just not one that is perpendicular to any of the sides of the nut (you have to stop thinking in 2D and think in 3D). The witness point for the nut is not on the "bottom" of the slot as with a straight string pull. Of course that angle is still a bit too extreme even if it was rotated round to be in the standard plane for a string string pull.

I'd prefer to have a way of turning off the "picture" versions and being able to stick with the old-school punctuation style ones. A lot of the differences between the various pictures are too subtle to be seen without massively enlarging the magnification of the forum. It used to be possible but is another feature that appears to have been removed to help the hard of thinking.

The other thing to remember is that dispersion and the sound of your cabs are both fairly irrelevant if the bass also goes through the PA.

If you already have a Mac and are happy with Logic and GarageBand, I would suggest that there is little point in trying to find a musical use for your Windows machine. Whatever you pick it will feel alien after Logic and none of the ways of exchanging project data between different DAWs are for the faint-hearted, and even the best won't leave you with all the editable facilities of the project on the original DAW.

Thanks! Although a lot of the simplicity was down to cost and ease of production. Big areas of flat colour were quick and easy to screen print and when every rub-down letter costs a couple of pence to use, it certainly focuses the mind on honing the message down to its basics!

While we'd all like to think that sound our own individual instrument is the most important thing, the reality is that it takes a very distant place behind: 1. The composition 2. The arrangement 3. The production of the piece of music we are playing. Maybe it's because I approach most pieces of music as a composer/arranger/producer first and a musician a very distant second. The sounds of each individual instrument are important but only insomuch as how they fit together with the other instruments in the performance. As a musician you should never forget that.

In that case the built-in sampler of any DAW should be sufficient if all you want is to map samples and/or multi-samples onto MIDI notes, so that they can be played/triggered from an electronic kit. No need for a dedicated drummer plug-in.

I suppose it depends what you want out of a drum plug-in. I've been using the audio version of Logic for over 20 years now and have a massive library of "groove quantisation files", plus loads of drum kits in EXS24 (Logic's built-in sampler) format which I use along with the Hyper Edit Window for writing the actual drum parts. However, now that have upgraded to Logic Pro X I'll probably have a go with the built-in "Drummer" plug-in on my next composition.

My advice is the same as always. If you need to to easily swap projects with other band members or songwriting collaborators it makes most sense for you all to be using the same DAW. There are work arounds using OMF files, but nothing beats the simplicity of everyone having the same DAW. It's hard to argue with the initial VFM of Reaper when it is essentially free (or £60 if you actually fork out for a licence). However if you are used to Logic you will be mightily disappointed with the poor selection of plug-ins that are bundled with it, and unless you are able to find suitable freeware offerings, by the time you have paid for a couple of decent 3rd party plug-ins (such as a proper drum sampler/programmer) you will be approaching the full price of one of the more expensive DAWs which comes with all these things as standard. The other thing to bear in mind, especially as a Logic user is that if you have been making use of the excellent MIDI editing facilities that it has, you will find Reaper's functionality is also lacking in that department.

And some practical advice. There is no point in producing posters if no-one is going to notice them. It will be a waste of your time creating them and the band's money getting them printed. These days when nearly everyone has access to a computer, some sort of design software and a colour printer, it is much harder to make your poster stand out. The example I posted earlier in this thread was done in the 80s when the majority of our "competition" was black and white A4 photocopies with the occasional A3 photocopy on coloured paper. Therefore when our posters were A2 size 3-4 (usually bright) colour screen prints they had no problem being noticed even if the the design wasn't always as good as it should have been. Which could be difficult when I had to come up with something new on average once a month for almost 5 years and wasn't always as inspired as I was when I produced my best designs. There can be a great temptation to produce a "one size fits all" design where all that changes are the details of the date and venue. This will be fine if the posters are only going up in the venue you are playing, or all your gigs are in completely different towns/cities. However if you regularly play different venues in the same locality and hope to put up posters outside of the venue, each time you use the same basic poster it will become less effective as an advertisement. If you are going to use a single design make it one where it is easy to change the colours of the background and/or type so that it is less obvious that you are recycling your ideas. So for TL:DR 1. Make it eye-catching compared with the competition 2. Make it easy to see all the relevant information 3. Make each the poster for each gig at the same venue or in the same local area as unique as possible. This is why I said in my first post in this thread that ideas were more important than the software used.

In the early days when I was gigging I used to get very wound up about things not sounding right on stage and FoH and TBH a lot of the time because of this I could be rather unpleasant to be around at gigs. In the end I realised that it was not good for me, the band and the other band members or for anyone who had come to see us play. These days so long as I can hear enough to know that I am in time and in tune with the rest of the band and can hear any important musical cues to know where I am in the song, I am perfectly happy. As a result I'm much nicer to be with at gigs and an I put on a much better performance, both musically and visually.

I do this for a living and while owning all the industry standard software (and a decent computer to run it on) can speed up the process it doesn't actually help with coming up with decent ideas in the first place. In the same way owning a bass guitar without being able to play it doesn't make you a bassist. My most successful poster from a creative PoV, and one that has been considered worthy of a place in the Victoria & Albert Museum permanent collection, was created using a couple of sheets of cheap WH Smith rub-down letters and a drawing pen.

I've found that how well received the music I write and play is entirely down to how much effort I put in to the writing, recording, performing and promoting, and absolutely nothing to do with how old I was at the time. The most "successful" band I've been in was one that was formed a few months before my 50th birthday.

If you've got a decent idea Word or even Paint will be fine. If you don't, even owning the whole Adobe Creative Suite won't help you.

I think that too often we over-obsess about minutiae. It's not necessarily a bad thing, in a great studio with unlimited time and budget, but we also need to acknowledge that there are times when no-one cares or will even notice in the slightest except us and it really doesn't matter.

Any "DAW" that can't handle MIDI is not a DAW but a digital audio recorder. As has been said the cut down versions of DAWs that come with audio interfaces etc. are there simply to get you hooked before you shell out for the full version. It's all very well saying that Reaper is cheap but by the time you've shelled out for some Waves or Sound Toys plug-ins you might as well have bought a DAW that comes with all the plug-ins you should ever need as free. Personally whatever you go for I wouldn't buy any 3rd party plug-ins (or even download some free ones) until you have absolutely exhausted the possibilities of the ones that come bundled with you DAW. Also be aware that if recording and editing MIDI is important to you, that MIDI manipulation in Reaper is still very much an after-thought and no-where near as comprehensive as what you will find in the DAWs that have their roots in MIDI sequencing.

I didn't mean using EQ to change one version to the other. I mean that once the bass has been dropped into the mix at an appropriate level the differences between the two will be negligible without using EQ to further boost the frequencies that each pickup position accentuates.

The "pedal" that ended my search was the Roland GP8 multi-effects with it's FC100 foot controller. Up to that point I'd built up an impressive collection of pedals and rack-mounted individual effects that filled 10U of a rack flight case. The GP replaced nearly all of them and I decided that the ones it didn't I could live without. As well as being a tenth the size it was programmable so getting the next sound was simply hitting the relevant switch on the FC100 rather than having the mess about with numerous settings on my old devices. Since than I've stuck with programmable multi-effects going from the GP8 to a Peavey BassFex, BassPod and most recently Helix Floor. I can't see ever going back to individual units of any kind.

But the majority of those minutiae are lost the moment you drop the bass sound into any kind of band mix, unless you EQ the flip out of it.

No mention is made of how the change the pickup position affects the playing style - for instance if you used the bridge pickup as your thumb anchor then moving the position of the pickup also changes the plucking position. Similarly playing with a pick, do you consciously or unconsciously avoid playing over the pickup so having it in a different place with again affect the plucking position. Interestingly the one technique that shouldn't be affected by the pickup position (slap) showed to least change in sound between the two examples. Also to make the two versions of the bass as similar as possible the examples should have been recorded with the new route for the pickup in place but without the old cavity filled and simply move the pickup from one hole to the other. Also since it was likely that the bass would have been disassembled to create the new route and fill the old one, we don't know what the change in tone would be from simply the disassembly and reassembly process was.

The SBVs from the 2000s don't have that much in common with the 60s models that influenced them other than the shape.

With the price of decent MIDI footswitches with expression pedals you might be better off selling the HX Stomp and looking for a second-hand Helix Floor.

The only time I've weighed any of my basses is when I've sold them, in order to put that information in the listing. I've only owned one bass that was noticeably on the weighty side a Yamaha BJ5B although in that case the sheer physical size of the instrument was more a problem than the weight. Any movement on stage had to be carefully considered so as not it injure bandmates or audience members.