BigRedX

No MIDI. External PSU which IME is insufficiently robust for extended gigging use.

I've done 5 festivals so far this year with one more coming at the end of November, and most were indoors. Luckily the two outdoor events we played were graced with decent weather. However everything about the organisation and logistics for them was less than optimum. There were no facilities for getting changed before we played - for the first event I travelled and set up in my stage gear which wasn't very comfortable or convenient, and so for the second one I wore something more practical that also looked reasonably decent for our on-stage image. Also they were organised in such a way that you set up, did 30 seconds of a song to check the foldback, and then played. Again there were problems at the first where our singer thought we were still sound checking when in fact we'd just done the first song in the set! Compare that to the indoor festivals where in each case there were proper changing rooms for the bands and backstage areas for safely storing the gear and relaxing if you didn't feel like watching the other bands, and even the opportunity to do a full soundcheck before the audience arrived. And while I can't deny that as a band all the events have been useful in terms of growing our audience and networking with other bands and promotors and even selling a decent amount of merchandise, I doubt I'd have attended any of them if I hadn't been playing. Eight or Nine years ago The Terrortones did a whole "summer" season of festivals. It rained at every single one often with detrimental results for both the performance and audience numbers, apart from one where we played indoors. At one event it was so cold that I was glad of my leather jacket stage wear and our guitarist played the whole set wearing gloves! At another our set up on stage was entirely dictated by having to avoid rainwater leaking through the roof. After every event I had to clean the mud off all my cabs and cases. For most of the 80s I was involved in organising a fairly large 2-day festival in Nottingham. Luckily we had city and county council funding and additional sponsorship from local firms which covered all the costs, so none of the event organisers had their personal money on the line. However it was still lots of hard and mostly thankless work. I certainly wouldn't want to get involved in something like that again unless I was guaranteed a substantial sum of money for my efforts.

IIRC the synth part of your bass uses pitch detection rather than modelling to produce sounds. Therefore in theory a string which produces less overtones should make the process easier, but it may be that the detection relies to some extent the higher harmonics which will be more prevalent in a round-wound string. The other thing you need to consider is how often you intend to use it as just a bass without the synthesiser capabilities and when you are using synth sounds how much of the bass sound you want to mix in and what bass sounds work best in conjunction with your chosen synth sounds. Ultimately I suspect you'll need to try both and see which ones give the best result or least worst compromise.

I suppose my view is clouded by the fact that I don't like outdoor festivals and these days I couldn't see myself attending any as a punter, partly because I don't trust the weather and partly because most of the bands I like are much better appreciated in a small indoors venue. As a performer I'll do them, but my preferred method would be to turn up as late as the festival schedule allows and to leave as soon as we have finished playing.

Why anyone would want to put on an outdoor festival in the UK is a complete mystery to me. We simply don't have weather that is conducive to having them. A weekend of bad weather can completely wipe you out if haven't sold enough tickets beforehand. This is what happened to a festival run by someone I know. They had a couple of excellent years and then got more ambitious for the third which unfortunately coincided with several days of heavy rain. The site was looking pretty waterlogged on the Saturday when my band played, and by Sunday it had been cancelled. IME the successful festivals in the UK are ones that are strictly indoor only. The other problem for promotors is that if you want to grow your event you'll find that costs start spiralling pretty quickly. For a couple of years I was involved with a monthly night put on by the band I was in at the time. Initially it was simple to organise. We could get a reasonably well-known up and coming band within our chosen genres for less than £200. Our band played support. Admission was free and we got a percentage of the bar takings. Even on our worst night we still made more than enough to cover the costs of putting on the gig. Unfortunately we became a victim of our own success. After a couple of months when we packed out the venue, we were told that the audience sizes were on the verge of becoming dangerous and it would be best if we looked for somewhere bigger. The cost and logistics of doing this were considerably higher, and therefore we started looking at more popular bands. It was a this point we discovered that booking a band that we could reasonably expect to draw enough people to cover the runnings costs was heading towards £1k. That wasn't the kind of money we could afford to loose and at that point we needed everything we were making as a band to pay for recording our album. Therefore we stopped being promotors. My experience of promotors recently is that none of them do it for a living. Like most of the bands they put on they are happy so long as it's not actually costing them money. They keep the events small and well-targeted, and they know their audience and which bands within the genre have the required pulling power to make a gig work.

I've bought 6 musical instruments from Japan. Four from Ishibashi which came by post and attracted the usual VAT and import duties; as Doctor J says allow 25% on top of the combined item and shipping costs and you won't have any unpleasant surprises. The other two were bought in person (in Osaka) and I simply walked through the green channel at the airport; although in retrospect I believe that this was the right thing to do as neither item was over the much higher personal import allowance for travellers returning to the UK.

Thanks. Although compared with my previous originals band who were doing 35+ paying gigs a year it's not that impressive.

There are 4 versions of the Magnum bass, two different body shapes each with two different on-board electronics. There's also the semi-acoustic Typhoon Bass from the late 60s/early 70s.

Personally I find in insipid pastel colours that Fender like to use far more objectionable.

I didn't even realise that the carry case was also able to charge the transmitter and receiver without needing to be attached to a PSU. Except when I am using them, the Transmitter and Receiver live in it permanently and at some point in the day before a rehearsal or gig, I simply plug the carry case into a suitable USB charger plug and keep it plugged in until the orange lights on both the transmitter and receiver go out. I've owned my NUX system for about 6 months now and it's been used about 30 times. At the moment it takes about 15-20 minutes to charge everything ready for its next use. This is after a typical 3 hour practice and the device sat in my bag for the rest of the week.

Just in case anyone was planning to attend our gig supporting Aurelio Voltaire at The Chapel on 5th November, if you haven't already purchased a ticket, you won't be able to get in. The gig is now completely sold out and based on what has happened at previous sold out gigs there there will be no admission without a ticket.

Just in case anyone was planning to attend the Hurtsfall gig supporting Aurelio Voltaire at The Chapel on 5th November, if you haven't already purchased a ticket, you won't be able to get in. The gig is now completely sold out and based on what has happened at previous sold out gigs there there will be no admission without a ticket.

If you need to watch a video to get a sound out of an ARP2600 then it's probably not the synth for you. Firstly it's not like a fully modular synth where you can't do anything without patch leads. There are default signal and modulation paths that will get you started simply by turning up a couple of level controls and opening the filter cut off. Secondly the default routings are clearly marked on the from panel. Anyone with a reasonably logical approach can see this and understand how things work. Finally it's a bit limited really. I'd expect to need at least another pair of envelope generators and a dedicated LFO to make the most out of any patch that required the use of leads to defeat the default modulation routings.

You really can't make any meaningful decisions about colour when viewing a digital photograph on a screen. Maybe if both the viewer's screen is hardware colour calibrated, the photographer had correctly set the white point on their camera and the forum software has correctly adjusted for any embedded colour profile, the resulting image will be reasonably close to what you would see if your were looking at it in real life. However 99% of the time at least one of those variables will be wrong or neglected.

In the late 80s the band transport was an ex-coal board minibus with benches down each side in the back. All the gear went in the space between them and those unlucky enough not to be able to sit in the front (usually myself and the drummer) spent most of the journey sliding up and down the benches as we went round each corner. Also since everything in the back was on display someone always had to be in the van whenever we stopped for food and toilet breaks.

As someone who was a massive fan of The Human League in the early 80s (I even sported the Phil Oakey asymmetric hairstyle in 1981) but I was never in a position to see them live back in the day. I finally got to see them play 10 years ago and while it was enjoyable, in hindsight it re-enforced the feeling that I'd missed out by not having seen them in 1980. These days the line up is Phil, the two girls and a 3 session players. The set list is mostly taken from Dare and the 2 subsequent albums (that's what the majority of their audience want). They played one pre-Dare song (Circus Of Death). From what I've read since seeing them I doubt if the set list will have changed much, main variable being which early song they do as a part of the encore. I think the only way I be tempted to see them play again would be if it was the original line up with Adrian Wright doing the slide show playing Travelogue and earlier material.

Having seen the guitar in question up close, for anyone other than Rory Gallagher to play, it would require a serious deep clean. Luckily for me it was safely secured in a sealed display case. Maybe the National Museum of Ireland are hoping to be able to use it to clone him when the technology is there?

Went to see IST IST at the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham last night. Probably the best gig I have attended as a punter since The Last Cry just over a year ago. I discovered the band fairly recently so I was unfamiliar with about half the songs they played, but it really didn't matter. Everything was engaging and the fact that I didn't know a lot of the songs was in no way an impediment to enjoying the gig. Unfortunately the same could not be said for the support band. Not to my taste at all and apparently they have been support for the whole tour which is strange because musically they had little in common with the headliners.

The GLDX16 looks fine if you already have a traditional pedal board with spare capacity on the PSU, but that certainly doesn't make sense for me. I don't need a tuner - there's already a really good one in the Helix. I would need a PSU for the receiver and AFAICS it's not on a locking socket which means I'd need to have a pedal board which suddenly means everything takes up more floor space on stage. I'll stick with my cheap and compact NUX until I have a major problem, hopefully by which time I'll be playing bigger stages and have bigger band transport for all the extra equipment.

For me one of the big advantages of the NUX system is that both the transmitter and receive are completely self-contained on the jack plug. My Helix is essentially my pedal board, I really didn't want a completely separate device taking up more floor space, as this can be at a premium for some of the gigs I play.

I don't get this. I'm always pleasantly surprised if there is a preset or two on a programmable effects unit or synth that gets close to a sound that I want, but I always assume that first thing I'm going to have to do is to make a basic default patch that I can use as a starting point for all my other sounds. Without this the device is essentially unusable.

That can't be right. I use mine continuously at rehearsals which are about 3 hours long, and when I next plug them in the recharge the LED meter is only showing one segment down from full charge.

That's the one. I got mine from Amazon.

I've got a NUX 5.8GHz system as well. It has been used for 6 gigs, including two outdoors and one on a large stage, and about 10 rehearsals without any problems so far

As someone whose done a lot of recording, I won't deny that using a click track, especially when a recording to a DAW, has lots of benefits when it comes to post-tracking edits and changes of arrangement, because they make life a lot easier for the recording engineer. However it is also undeniable that a fixed constant tempo can suck all the life out of a song. With my previous band before any recording session we would practice all the songs with and without a click to see which version worked best. In the end the recordings were split 50/50 between those that were played to a click with constant tempo and those that needed a more flexible approach to timing. Without sticking the tracks in a DAW and beat matching them, I doubt whether anyone could tell which was which. In my current band that uses computer-generated drums quite a few of the songs have programmed tempo changes to get the right feel.