BigRedX

To the OP what sort of band exactly do you want to be in? I'd assume from your YouTube channel you'd like to be in a classic rock covers band, but I might be wrong and if there something other than that you'd like to do your videos aren't selling it. IME experience musicians often try and sell themselves as versatile but unfortunately it comes off as directionless which can put a lot of bands off. If there are lots of styles of music that you would be happy playing I would consider doing a separate ad for each style maybe even with a separate profile for each ad. As others have said you also need to do some real life networking. Go and see some bands, talk to other musicians and get your name out there. I got into the two bands I currently play with through networking and a JMB ad. One band I was a fan of their music and therefore following them on Facebook so I saw that they were looking for a new bass player. For the other I put a very specific JMB ad up saying exactly what sort of music I wanted to play and what level of commitment I was prepared to put in and what I expected of any band I joined. It took almost a year before anyone answered my ad but that were exactly the sort of band I was looking for in terms of both music and the amount of gigs, rehearsals and recording sessions they wanted to do. It also helped that both bands knew who I was from my previous musical activities before I went for the audition which I believe gave me an advantage over the other applicants.

My tactic with anyone complaining hoping for a discount is to offer a full refund for the return of the item, only this, and absolutely no shift from my position. I've a few buyers try to get money off for supposed "problems" with items I have sold, but only one return. Most disappear silently when they realise that they won't be able to scam me out of a discount.

To the OP. Some important questions the answers to which may influence the advice we have give: 1. Where are you? Are you in a big town or city, or out in the sticks? 2. Do you want to play covers or your own compositions? 3. What genre(s) of music would you like to play?

That doesn't sound right at all. For me there's no difference in sound between the NUX and the 5m OBBM cable I was using before. However I do run through a lot of effects to the point where it makes little difference from a sound PoV which of the 3 Bass VIs (Squire Bass Vi, Burns Barracuda, Eastwood Hooky) I use. However there is definitely no noticeable latency or high pitched hum coming from mine. I always use my transmitter folded back on itself. If it wasn't designed to be used like that it wouldn't bend that way. TBH until you mentioned it in your post it had never occurred to me that the small disc on one side might be there to protect the finish of your instrument. Besides there's one on the receiver too, which is unlikely to be plugged into anything that needs protecting from a small piece of plastic. To me it sounds like your unit is defective, and I would suggest that you send it back for replacement or refund.

The dirt is being produced by high output pickups overloading/overdriving something further down the signal chain. IME most overwound pickups tend to sacrifice other more important tonal elements in their efforts to be as "loud" as possible. Personally I'd rather turn the gain up a bit more else where in my signal path.

A bit late, but here are some photos from our gig supporting Byronic Sex & Exile 2 weeks ago: BTW our next gig supporting Aurelio Voltaire on November 5th is now sold out, so if you haven't bought a ticket you won't get in.

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.