BigRedX

I like the idea of the "7th" string as a thumb rest...

And there are masters and there are masters. Back in the days when vinyl was the only serious delivery medium, a master was little more than a stereo 1/4" tape with the tracks in the correct order and at roughly the correct relative levels. All those processes that we now think of as "mastering" were actually done when the the record was cut. Sometimes at the time of cutting a "mastered" tape would be made so that when the discs were being cut for a different territory they would sound the same as the next cutting engineer could cut directly from the tape without having to apply any processing. Unfortunately this would mean that these "master" tapes already had the RIAA equalisation curve required for vinyl applied to them. When CDs started to go mainstream and record companies realised that they could make more money by selling the same albums all over again but on CD, they rushed to get CD versions made. Unfortunately sometimes these would be made from the wrong "master". Even it was spotted that a vinyl production master was being used and the CD mastering engineer EQ'd the tracks to reverse the effects of the RIAA EQ curve it was never as good as it would have been if the original stereo mix master had been use as a starting point. I would be very vary about any CD produced before the mid 90s with regards to this.

I'm sure that Hipshot bridge is a great piece of engineering, but that arrangement of string retaining slots and intonation screws sends my OCD into overdrive! 🙂

A good graphic designer will be able to produce something creative using Microsoft Paint. However that doesn't mean that the professional tools aren't easier to use and ultimately help you get the job done quicker and better. That's certainly the case when you need to produce work to exact technical standards. As I keep saying an OS is only as good as the applications that can run under it. So for all the Linux "bluster" I have yet see evidence of professional quality, native (IMO running under WINE completely defeats the point of using an alternative OS), applications for graphic design for print.

As I said mechanical recording and playback systems are full of compromises. Improve one thing and something else suffers.

Did you need to update your OS? I never update my OS unless an application I absolutely require demands that I do. I've only updated and got stuck in Logic limbo because I had to update the OS to be able to use the latest versions of Adobe Creative Cloud which I require for my job. These days using my computer for recording/composing music is very much a secondary function to using it to make a living, so work requirements have to come first. Also if you are begrudging spending £199 on Logic Pro, you obviously didn't run Logic in the early days when the new price was IIRC £399 for just the MIDI sequencing application and an additional £300 for the "Audio" extension to allow you to record and manipulate audio; and upgrades were £150-£200 a go (plus an additional £150-£200 to upgrade the Audio component). And if you wanted plug-in instruments they were £50 to £200 each depending on what you bought. A "back of an envelope" calculation on what I spent from buying Logic 1.x to upgrading each version to Logic Audio 4 plus the various plugins is somewhere around £2k (that's just for software - I hate to think how much I spent on MIDI and Audio interfaces over the same period). On top of that some of the upgrades required you to exchange your copy protection dongle for a newer version leaving you without any functioning music software for about a week. In those terms the current pricing of Logic X at £199 is a complete bargain.

OK. Point me at Linux native professional standard alternatives to InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat Professional. And Logic is £199.00 To bridge the gap between what comes bundled with Logic and what you get with Reaper is going to cost you a lot more, even if you just pared it down to plugins that you need, rather than the full set that come with Logic.

DIY cassette supremos The Instant Automatons released a 19 track "compilation" album that was just them under 19 different names.

Is this base on a source you know - i.e. one of your own recordings - or on recordings that you happen to own on both vinyl and CD? In the later case unfortunately there is no real way of telling whether the various formats have actually been produced from the correct master version. Also IME "heft" is generally caused by distortion. Vinyl is very good at adding extra distortion to the signal, but it's not what the makers of the record intended you to hear.

IME Linux is fine if you have a strong technical computing background, are happy with command line interface for getting some of the more tricky things done, and your computing interests are either simple web browsing/email/office functions or server administration. For creative users, especially those of us with professional needs for graphics/audio/video the applications simply are not there.

I'm now in my 60s. I currently play in 2 post-punk/goth influenced bands, one with a reasonably long pedigree and the other fairly new although both bands have members who are "known" on the scene from their musical endeavours. I'm the oldest in both bands although my age has never been an issue. Before that I was in The Terrortones (Garage Rock/Pyschobilly) from just before my 50th birthday until I was 56. The rest of the band (we had many guitarists and drummers over those 7 years) varied in age from about 10 years younger than me to being in their late teens. Again age was never an issue. As for audiences give that all the bands mentioned have their musical roots in the 80s and earlier the ages of the audiences were extremely varied, although there are a fair number of people around the same age as me who come to the gigs, and apart from those who were on the scene "back in the day" there really is no set demographic. There are/were in all cases a healthy number of people in their 20s who come to see the bands. As others have said, it does very much depend on the type of music played and the overall age range of the rest of the band. IME for originals bands in particular there are no hard and fast rules on audience ages. EDIT: One of the bands had a large number of high-profile gigs including a European support tour booked for last year before the pandemic wiped all of that out. The UK gigs are slowly getting re-organised - we have revised dates from October this year onwards. However the tour has become a victim of Brexit regulations and although the tour will probably be going ahead we won't be the support band.

Probably yes. Also to get the best results out of vinyl the playback has to take place at the highest speed - for modern systems that will be 45rpm - and the grooves should be as close to the outside of the disc as possible; where each revolution occupies more linear space. For instance on a 12" record the first groove containing music will be approximately 145mm from the centre which gives a linear distance of approximately 910mm for the first revolution. At 33rpm that means the stylus is travelling at 500mm per second. At 45rpm it's 683mm per second (which of course is better). However each subsequent rotation of the spiral is a shorter linear distance until you get to the last groove containing music which will be roughly 65mm from the centre and is 408mm long which is less than half the distance of the first rotation. At 33rpm this last groove is only 224mm per second and even at 45rpm it is 306mm per second. As can be seen with every rotation of the record the quality of the audio on it gets slightly worse. Every time I have had vinyl cut the advice was that for the optimum audio quality the playback speed should be fast (45rpm) and the duration of the audio should be short (ideally less than 13 minutes per side for a 12" disc) so that most of it can be close to the outside of the disc where the stylus playback speed is highest. Unfortunately there is also a compromise between how close together the grooves can be and how loud (better signal to noise ratio) the record can be cut. Unfortunately with mechanical recording and playback systems everything is a compromise. You could spin the disc faster or have them larger, but the faster you go the more you have to counteract centrifugal force which in turn affects other factors. And ultimately there's no getting around the fact that with every revolution of the disc the playback speed and therefore the bandwidth is being reduced.

I don't know what all the fuss is about. When I was a teenager back in the 70s, one of the sales assistants in my local musical instrument store in Loughborough was a bass player and when the shop was quiet, he would regularly break out a bit of slap bass on whatever bass guitars were on display. This was basically a "home organ" store rather than somewhere selling to "rock" musicians, and his musical tastes were some of the most mainstream I knew of. So he had definitely mastered slap enough to impress 17 year old me back in 1978 and someone must have taught him, because it's not a technique that you can work out from just listening to records without some pointers for how it's being done.

Are you talking about actual tension or "stiffness" which is a combination of tension plus compliance of the string? All standard sets of string are very uneven in tension which can be seen in the figures for this manufacturers who publish them. Generally the D string will be the highest tension, and then the as you go both higher an lower the strings reduce in tension. However due to compliance, and a little bit of being used it, they do tend to "feel" relatively even to most people, especially if you play a bass with a standard Fender style headstock and bridge, as the way the strings are attached changes the compliance and goes some way to evening out the "stiffness". Of course if you play a bass with an angled headstock or anything else that gives an equal break angle for all the strings over the nut, or something with through-body stringing that increases the break angle over the bridge, this balance of actual tension and compliance will be completely wrong. Looking at the gauges that you chosen, that has probably taken a lot of trial and error to arrive at those, and of course they will only work on one particular bass. Balanced tension does not equal same tension, and IME is a bit of a red herring as it still relies on compliance to even out the differences in stiffness between the strings. Unfortunately for string manufacturers compliance is not only dependant on the string construction but also on the design of the bass and how the strings are fitted to it - break angles over the bridge and nut and how long the non-speaking portions of the string are, and string manufacturers have zero control over this. The only way that balanced tension can be made to work for all bassists and basses is if the manufacturers sell different balanced tension sets depending on the headstock layout and whether or not the bass is strung through body, and all of a sudden it becomes too complicated for the average bassist. Again it looks though you have found a combination that works for you, how much trial and error did you have to go through to arrive at those values? Also as above those values won't necessarily work on a different design bass.

OK i'll narrow it down as far as possible. When I play both the CD and vinyl versions of recordings that I have been involved with, on my HiFi at home (so the final listening environment is the same) the CD version sounds, to me, much closer to what I was hearing during the final mix playback in the studio. In a good studio control room the acoustics have been adjusted so that the sound is as even as possible throughout the room. There will be a "sweet spot" in front of the desk where the mix engineer sits, but it is in their interests for sound to be a similar as possible for all the listeners in the room otherwise their comments on the mix become irrelevant.

If there was only one master, then it will have either been done specifically for vinyl, or compromised with a vinyl pressing in mind. There are plenty of mastering practices that work nicely for digital formats but which can result in unplayable/uncutable vinyl.

Mixes should always be mastered specifically for the delivery medium as they are have different strengths and weakness. If the vinyl versions sounds better than the CD it's probably because the CD version wasn't mastered properly (or it's purely subjective). I can categorically state that all the recordings I've been involved in that have both the CD and vinyl versions the CD versions sound the most like what we were hearing in the studio when we were doing the mixing.

It might be worth it if you have spent several thousand pounds on your turntable, tonearm, cartridge and stylus and have then perfectly set up and balanced, and your hearing is still good enough for you to be able to tell the difference. It still won't sound as good as as a decent digital file. It might even be unplayable on more budget systems.

Sting was also in "Radio On" which came out just before Quadrophenia. At the time if you were into "alternative" music Sting and Toyah (who had also been in "Jubilee" were equally well known.

But I was looking forward to being able to post 10,000 Maniacs and 1,000,000 Fuzztone Guitars

808 State or just 808 (J-pop electronic band pronounced Ya-o-ya)

AFAIK the only white version is the BJ5B which is the 5-string version and is essentially a TRB5 with the SBV body and headstock shape. It's also massively heavy. I'd say good luck trying to get one because there were only 50 made, but I managed it:

IME Rotosound are very good at making round-wound 4-string sets in 34" scale length and 40/45 to 100/105 gauges and very poor at all other strings. Also IME for 5-string basses getting a decent sounding a feeling low B string depends on both the player and the bass. What works for one person on a particular bass won't necessarily work for another player and might not even work for the same player on a different bass. Case in point, when I owned lots of 5-strings basses I had different strings on nearly all of them because those were the strings that worked best for me for each bass. Having said that I would try Warwick Red Labels as a first choice and if they aren't doing it for you then have a look at Warwick Black Label or LaBella Steels. If none of those are what you are after then try some DRs.

M is for Medium Medium

That's a lot of money, considering that you can normally get a bike box for free from your local bicycle shop (IME they are more than happy to get rid of them) and the cardboard they are made out of is considerably thicker and stronger than the typical guitar packing box.