BigRedX

IMO you can't beat this K&M stand.

The interview in question no longer appears to be on line, but IIRC Simon Farmer of Gus Guitars once said that he earns approximately £10/hour making guitars after all his expenses have been taken into account.

The OP is all too familiar. I used to be in a band with a singer like that. She was a very good singer and excellent front person, but seemingly very insecure if any of her friends didn't like something that we'd written or recorded. She very much wanted to be a "star" and it was the rest of the band's job (and me in particular as the main composer/programmer/producer) to make it so, as long as she didn't have to do anything other than sing, front the band write the occasional lyric. A lot of the composition was done "in the studio" once we had worked out the basic melodies and song structure, I'd spend several evenings doing the programming and production which could be often wiped out in seconds at the next practice with a "I don't like that" or "I played the demo to such-and-such (usually some second-rate DJ friend) and they think we should be doing this..." usually something completely outside of the genre of the rest of the songs. One of the latter type comments led to us having a blazing row at a rehearsal which finished the band for good. Personally I wasn't that bothered as I'd told the rest of the band I wanted to call it a day 6 month previously and had been talked out of it mostly by the singer... Since the band folded she has done next to nothing musically.

Really? The clap sound (along with the "cowbell") was the sound that made the Roland TR 808

If you need to be able to create your own monitor mixes for the purposes of recording you parts (i.e. you need some parts louder or quieter in order to be able to play your part better) and to save the hassle of having to re-render multiple takes into single stems, you could also look at AAF or OMF exports. However they will struggle with plug-ins that are native to a particular DAW and any third-party plug-ins that are not shared between the different platforms, but IME it is worth a go to see what will happen.

No it's not my thing either. For me playing in a band is a serious commitment and in the past I have made some lifestyle choices that other people would find unpalatable simply to be in a situation where I could give my band commitments the importance I thought they deserved. However it has been my experience, especially in covers bands, that this is how a lot of other musicians treat it. Which is one of the many reasons why I don't currently play in a covers band.

Which are two entirely different basses. All very confusing. It appears that if you buy one of these you aren't actually buying any of the instruments shown but placing an order for a custom made bass of your own.

Doesn't look very fretless to me.

That's crap because he's doing it wrong. Instead of correcting every drum hit to the nearest equal grid point, he should have built a new quantisation grid from where the important drum transients actually are. In Logic this is called "Groove Quantise" but there should be an equivalent function in all decent DAWs. You then quantise any errant drum hits and all the other instruments with hard transients to this grid. As it's based on where the drums actually are rather than strict 8th/16th etc. notes, all the feel of the original is maintained, the only difference is the whole arrangement becomes super-tight. Also it's a lot quicker to do that the process shown in the video, although it might be necessary to create a separate template for each important section of the song where the feel is noticeably different.

The thing you have remember is that for most musicians, unless it is their main source of income, playing in a band comes a long way down the list of priorities such as family, work, sport, sitting in front of the TV, and IME many simply view it as something that fills an otherwise empty evening once a week. You can't expect these people to have any kind of serious commitment - especially for a covers band where it simply regarded as a bit of fun and hopefully some beer money.

It's still a fixed beat. Just not one that has been set to equal 8th/16th/32nd note intervals. Here's one of mine - everything except the vocals and the legato guitar have been quantised to the beat points of the main loop

I would as well. The features appear to be decent, but I'm a little worried about how flimsy it looks especially for live use, and the fact that it uses non-standard connectors for MIDI. IMO DIN connectors are pretty terrible for gigging applications (last time I used a lot of MIDI gear live they were all replaced with XLRs) but still preferable to mini-jacks.

You must have grabbed it in the hour between me seeing it was for sale and deciding I wanted to buy it.

If your DAW is any good you can quantise to anything - it doesn't have to be simple 8th or 16th notes. In the days when I was creating music using loops, I'd take the loops into Recycle, extract the timing information from them and quantise the rest of the instruments to that. If I used different loops in different parts of the song I'd either change the quantisation to fit each loop or re-quantise the loop itself to fit the main quantisation pattern.

I think this describes my musical tastes as well. I'm always suspicious about people who claim to like almost anything or have a very broad musical taste as IME it makes them too undiscriminating. I want the musicians I work with to have definite likes and dislikes and not be afraid to express them. Someone who claims to like most things generally has no taste at all (IMO).

The argument I always see for having lots of controls on your bass is that it makes it easier to make mid-song adjustments to the sound. My opinion is that so long as the bass is actually making a noise, the band will sound worse if I stop and fiddle with the controls then if I wait until the end of the song and then make adjustments at my amp or pedals.

There are a couple of instances where active circuitry can make sense. 1. When it allows separate EQ adjustments for each pickup on the instrument like the Wal or ACG filter pre-amps. 2. When you use a long cable and like a very bright sound (unfortunately long in terms of cable length and bright in terms of sound are both subjective). In all other cases whatever the on-board electronics do, can be far better achieved with the controls on your amp or with smoother main powered device in the signal chain. The other thing to consider is that very few on-board pre-amps are designed with a specific pickup(s) in specific location(s) on the instrument so they don't offer any custom frequency advantages over a decent set of tone controls on the amp or on a pedal.

Those crazy ancient strings...

Apart from instruments using the Lightwave optical pickups and similar systems, "active" pickups are simply low impedance/output coils and magnets pickups with a level/impedance matching pre-amp fitted into the same casing. The method by which the string vibrations are sensed is exactly the same as standard "passive" pickups.

One of things that has always struck me as being weird when it comes to pedals is that the signal flow between pedals goes from right to left whereas the signal flow for the controls on the pedal themselves goes from left to right. Why is that?

Another BRX rule for boutique pedals is that the name must either be offensive or a sex joke that only a 14-year old boy would find funny.

It passes the BRX test for boutique pedals by using a badly designed typeface for the name.

Proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The matt black finish is nice, but someone has scratched an offensive word in it. Also no legends for the controls, and this pedal goes one further in the inconveniently placed control/socket stakes by having the footswitch mounted sideways and not even connected to the circuit.

If you buy second hand you can got a lot of Macintosh computer for very little money. My MacPro 2010 with 64GB RAM cost just £650 second hand. It doesn't run the newest version of Logic Pro X but with a bit of lateral thinking I was able to get 10.4.8 installed which includes everything except the very latest updates.

The white scratch plate is the better of the two, but ideally I'd want it with a Vibrola tailpiece and banjo tuners. I've been a massive fan of both the Firebird guitar and the Thunderbird bass since forever, but the Gibson models that tick all the boxes for me have always been way out of my reach price-wise. In the end I sacrificed authenticity for something that embodied some of the spirt of the originals but was far more playable than the modern "name" reproductions in the shape of an Overwater Original bass: And a Fretking Esprit guitar: