BigRedX

More 70s electronica...

The synrh band I was in during the 80s used to cover this.

Do you play with a pick? Does your new guitarist have a predominantly clean sound? If the answer to both of those is yes you may have to have a bit of a rethink of your bass sound. I found that mine all but disappeared in this situation and I had to switch to mostly finger-style (or a softer nylon pick) and completely different EQ to separate the two instruments out again. Otherwise you'll probably get away with a small EQ adjustment if anything is required (I've also played with Strat players who from a tonal PoV might as well have been wielding an LP).

Thanks. Performer is from Mark of the Unicorn who used to be Mac only, but I believe these days they support Windows too. As a Mac user for over 30 years now I don't really know if there are any Windows-only DAWs with the same pedigree as Logic, Cubase etc. which might also be worth a look. If the MIDI side is important any DAW that can trace its lineage back to the pre-audio days ought to be suitable.

There is zero reason for any MIDI controller keyboard to stop working simply because the host computer changes its OS, unless it has been poorly designed. These days any MIDI interface whether it be external unit with traditional DIN sockets or built into the keyboard using USB should be class-compliant and work whatever OS it is presented with. I'd steer clear of anything that requires a "driver" as at some point it will top being supported by the manufacturer, at which time it will just turn into an expensive paperweight.

If you want to do lots of MIDI manipulation or editing your are much better off using a DAW that has it's roots in MIDI sequencing such as Logic, Cubase, Performer or Reason. Unfortunately in most other DAWs MIDI is very much an afterthought.

It really depends on the style of music and the other instrumentation. I play in two bands. One with two guitarists and synths and most of the time the bass is there to provide the bottom end although every once in while the bass line takes centre stage in the arrangement. The other is just vocals, synths and myself on Bass VI and drum machine. Pretty much all the instruments are equally important for both frequency range and melody/harmony and the mix changes all the time depending on who is doing what in any song at any particular time. Having both synths and Bass VI means that either of us can be providing the bass line or the melody part and often we'll swap over in the middle of the song.

I saw Bauhaus for the first time in 1980 (around the time when Terror Couple Kill Colonel came out) when they played the Ad-Lib Club in Nottingham (later to be The Garage). A properly mad gig. The "stage" was only about 1 foot higher than the rest of the venue and to get to it from the "dressing room" the band had to get through the audience first. Peter Murphy spent most of the performance inflicting violence upon anyone in the front row of the audience. They opened with a fantastic version of Bela Lugosi's Dead (the only time I saw them perform it live) and closed with Dark Entries, then band literally leaping into the audience at the end and were gone before anyone realised it was over. No encore. I saw them on every other occasion that they played in Nottingham or Derby over the next 3 years, but none of the other gigs matched that level of intensity.

From 1980, a time when you could buy pretty much any record by a band from Sheffield and get something good. Vice-Versa eventually morphed into the less interesting ABC...

Is this in "Off-Topic" because the OP doesn't consider Iron Maiden's output to be music? ;-)

The number of members at the time anyone joined is the number in the URL of your profile page that comes before your user name. Regarding the first member even Kiwi is only number 2 so I would assume that number 1 would be whoever did the technical bits for setting up Basschat .

So was my Yamaha KX5. CZ5000 (just one) out of shot.

Doesn't actually make any sounds of it's own. It's just a controller keyboard. Besides at the time the Yamaha version looked much cooler:

Before I bought my first bass, my band which was a writing and recording only project would borrow one of the two bass guitars owned by people we knew at school. One of these was a home-made thing put together by someone who'd seen a photo of a P-Bass once and then had tried to make their own from memory using only what was available from the parts box at our local musical instrument store. The other was Mosrite-influenced "Woolies Special". Neither were really worthy of the description "musical instrument". We'd got by with these for about 4 years until I actually went out and bought one myself in 1981 - a very battered and heavily modified Burns Sonic Bass which had appeared in the afore-mentioned musical instrument store. It cost me £60 including the OHC and the shop chucked me in a Fender-branded strap. For a while I wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't also home-made as there were no logos on it other than on the Tri-Sonic pickups. However I was able to get hold of "The Burns Book" by Paul Day which confirmed it was actually a proper Burns Bass guitar made in either 1961 or 1962. And that's what I used in my first two bands and on the demos my second band recorded that got CBS records interested in signing us (they decided to go with Wham! in the end), and them for writing bass lines in my synth band, until I bought my Overwater Original 5-string in the early 90s. I still had the Burns Sonic bass until 2 years ago when I had a ruthless pruning of my musical instrument "collection" and got rid of everything I wasn't using. Here's photo of me playing it live in 1982...

It's a difficult one. Streaming pays pretty well if you haven't signed contracts giving the lion's share of your royalties to record labels and publishers. You read reports of major artists who have several million Spotify streams a year and earn just a couple of hundred pounds. A couple of million Spotify streams would probably be enough pay for my band to record our next album in a good studio with a name producer. That's because we haven't signed most of our rights away to record label or publisher. However the price we pay for getting 100% of our streaming royalties is the fact that almost no-one has heard of us, so we only get a few thousand streams a year. As always, what an artist is paying for (from their earnings) when they sign a record or publishing deal is the ability of the label and publisher to get their music heard by a far larger audience then they will ever be able to achieve by themselves. And therefore why shouldn't the labels and publishers take their cut? Anyone who has signed a deal in the last 5 years giving them a pittance in streaming royalties only has themselves and their legal advice to blame. And anyone signing a deal right now needs to take a long hard look at any clauses about unknown future distribution methods. It's not the 60s and 70s any more. Artists these days should be clued up about what they are signing and if their not get legal advice that is, and can explain it clearly to them. However all the things that make it so easy to get your music out to your potential audience compared with the pre-internet age also make it even harder to stand out from the background "noise". In the past your label could insert a couple of well-placed ads in the "inkys" along with an interview, and a plugger to get your single on Radio One. Then it was down the chart return shops to buy back enough copies to get you onto next week's Top Of The Pops. These days it is so much harder as there is no single route to potential success. And the days when the people who "help" you along will do so for a one-off payment are long gone. Now everyone wants a percentage and they want to keep on earning - just look at the sheer number of people of have a "writing credit" on any successful song... Added to this the fact that unless the situation has changed in the last 12 months none of the streaming services make any money by themselves. All are propped up by the more profitable parts of their parent companies or artificial income from their IPO. To date the only profitable streaming service has been Soundcloud, and they achieved this by not paying any performance royalties. Since they have had to do this they have veered from one financial crisis to the next. Spotify might be able to turn a profit if all the users signed up for the subscription service, or they had enough paying advertisers (most of the ads I get as a non-premium member are ones trying to persuade me to upgrade to the premium service, or poorly targeted low-budget ones from bands who have nothing musically in common with what I am actually listening to), but until that happens they will have to continue relying on external investment. Once we move beyond the streaming royalties headlines, there are some interesting recommendations in the report especially one regarding allowing works/recordings to revert back to the writers and musicians after a set period of time. But there are also some that show that the committee involved only appear to have a minimal understanding of how the music business works. In particular one regrading finding "ways to ensure songwriters, who receive minimal streaming royalties, can have sustainable careers". What does that actually mean? Who decides if a songwriter should be able to make a "career" out of it. For instance over the last 40 years I have built up a catalogue of several hundred songs all registered with the PRS and most at one time or another have earned some performance royalties if not from radio play, then from being performed live. Does that mean I can put myself forward as a songwriter and demand that my royalties are adjusted so that I can make a living out of it? After all, if I don't have to worry about my day job to keep me solvent then I'll have more time write more songs? Who knows?

Your Mac doesn't need to be expensive. I'm running not quite the latest version of Logic Pro X on a 2010 MacPro that cost £650 second hand and that's only because it had 64GB RAM and a high-end graphics card capable of supporting 4 large monitors (I run 3). I've seen the same Mac with less RAM and a more sensible graphics card sell for about half that.

In that case it's going to be much easier and what you will need to do is work on the chord voicings to give the best compromise between overall clarity and the notes you want to play. And a lot of the time it works best if you keep it simple. You don't need to play every note of the chord. Lot of the time just the root and an upper register note or two that define the melody will be fine. If you must use lots of notes try and keep the intervals between them as big as possible - i.e. more than a third.

In the day when I owned A LOT of basses, I found that even though the ones I liked playing the most all had quite different string spacings at the nut and bridge, when I looked at the string spacing at the point where I plucked the strings they were all almost identical. The only time I've made a conscious effort to find a bass with the string spacing I liked was when I started playing Bass VIs. This is probably because most of them appear to be designed for guitarists and I'm approaching it as a bass player, and for me the necks are narrow even by guitar standards. However I'm sure that had I started playing these 40 years ago I would have adjusted to manage whatever I could find and (more importantly) afford. It's only now that I no longer have to put up with instruments that aren't exactly what I want through a combination of far wider choice, availability and disposable income.

Are you a Window's expert? Are you happy setting up complex system configurations, or are you simply a switch it on a use it kind of person? While running a DAW under Windows is a lot easier these days, it's still not as straight-forward for most people running one on a Mac. You may be swapping one set of relatively trivial problems (a general unfamiliarity of the "Mac way" of doing things - although it's not that different to Windows these days) to a brand new set of potentially greater ones using Windows. Mac OS is designed to give audio the priority it requires especially when running a DAW. Windows, although better than it used to be, still does not without specific configuration and often 3rd party drivers. There is a reason why there is still a viable business providing music optimised Windows machines, while the same is almost unheard of outside of serious high-end Mac systems. If you determined to press ahead with the Windows route, than as Dad3353 has said, download some trial versions and see which one suits your way of working the best. Reaper is nice and cheap, but IMO you get what you pay for, and if you are after lots of options for processing and instrument plug-ins, you may find that cost advantage quickly disappears if what you want isn't available for free. As an example the cost of a Reaper licence plus a decent drum plug-in is pretty close to the cost of the whole of Logic Pro X which comes with nearly all the plug-ins that most people could ever want. If you are using your DAW simply as digital multi-track recorder and for processing recorded audio, then any DAW should have the facilities you need. Just find one that suits your way of working. If you intend to use a lot of plus-in instruments and be editing the MIDI performances for those, then you should be looking at a DAW that has it's roots in MIDI sequencing - Cubase, Logic, MotU Performer. HTH.

I think it's probably more likely to be the player rather than any particular feature of a bass that makes chords on this instrument sound good. Chords play a big part of my playing style and I can't say I've ever noticed that they sound better on any particular type of bass. These days I play long scale 5 string basses in one band and short scale Bass VIs in another and both do the job equally well. From a playing PoV these are things I keep in mind when using chords: The more complex the chord the higher the register you are going to need. For simple two note chords I can go all the way down to the open low B string on a 5-string. As the chords get more complex I find myself needing either a higher register for all the notes or at least those that are the "less obvious" notes in the chord. Failure to do this results in a poorly defined mush no matter what the bass. Don't try and do everything on the bass. Use the arrangement of the music and the other instruments to add in the extra notes required. Then it's much easier to adjust the volume and timbre of each note to give the effect you are after. Think of the arrangement as a whole and not just what one instrument is doing in it. And of course that leads to the well-known fact that works when solo'd is not necessarily best when part of a bigger music picture. This more true than ever when playing chords on the bass. Work on the bass sound in the context of the whole arrangement not on its own.

What exactly is the problem with the Mac that you think will be fixed by moving to a computer with a different OS?

That's neither reliable nor low-maintenance.

All my basses have been far more reliable and low-maintenance than any car I've come across.

Are you a leader or a follower? So many players here seem to have picked their first instrument based on what their "hero(s)" played. I've never really felt like that. maybe it's because I see myself first and foremost as a composer/songwriter, secondly as a producer, and only thirdly as a musician. Also I've never really concentrated on just one instrument. I started on guitar and have also had spells playing synthesisers as well as bass guitar in bands. I'm interested in any musical instrument capable of producing sounds that I find relevant for the music I write. Also I'm not really interested in following the mainstream. That's not to say I won't be influenced by it (both positively and negatively), but I'm not intent or following it slavishly. I'll take on board ideas that I like and make a conscious decision not to be like bands I don't like, but all those influences get mixed up an hopefully something a little bit unique comes out of it. I'm very much the same when it comes to my choice of musical instruments. In many ways my tastes have been shaped by the "cards I have been dealt". My first guitar was an acoustic - my parents very much disapproved of "pop music" and this was as far as they were prepared to support my musical endeavours - that I modified over the years to incorporate pickups and various other things that would allow me to get closer to realising the music that I wanted to make. My first proper electric guitar was one I built myself during my last year of school when I really should have been working on my A Level studies. It was a mixture of originality and what I could afford. If I was influenced in my choice of instrument by the musicians whose bands I liked it was that the ones I found interesting (and noticed) all used non-mainstream designs. The guitar I built had obvious influences (Explorer, 345, Iceman) but the combination of influences made it a unique instrument. It was the same when I came to buy my first bass. It was a combination of what I could afford and a conscious desire not to have the same bass as everyone else. Ultimately it was completely by chance that I ended up with the bass that I did. I just happened to drop by a music store before I went back to university and hanging on the wall was one of the most unusual basses I had ever. Later research showed that it was actually a Burns Sonic from the early 60s, but in the state it was when I bought it I wasn't entirely sure that it wan't home-made. Probably the most important thing about was that I could afford it (if I spent a bit less on food for next couple of months), but it also looked interesting - particularly next to the Grant and Columbus copies. IIRC it cost £55 including the original had case and I persuaded the salesman to chuck in a strap as well. As an instrument it served me well throughout the 80s, and both it's strengths and limitations very much shaped my playing style and the bass sounds I would come to favour. When I finally decided that it time to "upgrade" in the early nineties having spent the previous years mostly playing synthesiser and guitar in bands I bought a second-hand Overwater Original 5-string. Again the choice was based almost entirely on cost (it was a complete bargain because apparently no-one else wanted it and the store was getting desperate to sell it) and the fact that it didn't look like any of the other instruments in the shop. Ultimately I have come to realise that I don't like "ordinary" looking instruments.

For detail/delicate work you can't really beat a Dremel.