BigRedX

Did your copy come with the booklet as well?

As I said in the live album thread when you only had enough money for an album a month at the most, the design of the cover and any extras (double album/gatefold sleeve/printed inner sleeve etc.) went a long way to deciding what to buy when spending Saturday afternoon browsing at castle Records in Loughborough. However this was bought entirely because I thought the cover was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Luckily the music didn't disappoint.

It will be harder. The current vaccination card is the work of an hour by someone with a page layout program and a decent printer.

And thinking some more on the subject the other massively loud gig I have been to, was one a band I was in played. In the late 90s we'd been booked as support to a minor indie band (whose name escapes me) at the Coventry Student's Union Christmas Party in the newly finished Union Building. We'd arrived late to find the headliners already set up and sound checking. The wave of sound hit me in the chest as I can through the doors into the room where they were playing and I had to retreat back outside until they had finished it was so loud. Because of the design of the venue, on stage the sound was completely disconnected from the FoH, so if you couldn't hear something in the foldback, your couldn't hear it all on the stage. I have no idea if my band were as painfully loud as the headliners were during the soundcheck, but AFAICS the most of the audience had left to check out the entertainment in the other rooms in the venue, and those that were left were stood a long way back from the stage.

My most listened to live albums by a long way are: "Pictures At An Exhibition" by ELP and "In Flight" by Alvin Lee Both bought in the days when I didn't have a lot of money to spend on records so factors such as being cheap or a double album in a gatefold sleeve played a big part in my choice of what to buy that month, and because when I first got them I didn't have very many albums they got played A LOT. Since everything got put on my computer, according to my iTunes stats my most listened to live album is "Show And Tell" by The Birthday Massacre.

Polysics at the Islington O2 Bar - not the main venue, the BAR! It was their UK debut gig and having no idea if they would ever come a play this country again I was desperate to see them. Didn't realise quite how loud it was at the time until I discovered I could barely hear anything once they had stopped playing. Also no idea why it was so loud. I've been to other gigs at the same venue and seen Polysics on numerous occasions since then and not once have I had the same feeling of complete disorientation and inability to hear as I did after that gig.

Unless you've seen them before with the same line up, you have no idea if a band is going to be any good until you go and see them. I try to avoid disappointment by mostly going to see bands that I like the music of. Have it still is no guarantee. I had enjoyed the albums by both Fleet Foxes and propaganda, but both bands were terrible live (although for different reasons).

In the days when I was still using a traditional bass rig I had my Thumpinator in the effects look of my amp after everything else, the idea being that if any of the other devices were boost unwanted frequencies that was the best place to have it. Also IMO all effects loops should be serial, or switchable. Parallel is only for effects the require a clean portion of the signal to be present, and plenty of effects need to process the whole signal.

That bit of paper makes all the difference to the sound don't you know?

Reading through this, you are hoping to achieve pitch-to-MIDI for you bass somehow? IME pitch to MIDI for bass is all but useless. The laws of physics are against you. The very best pitch to MIDI converters require a minimum of 1 1/2 cycles of the waveform in order to be able to identify the pitch you are playing and most of the time they will require more for warble-free note generation. On top of that you will almost certainly have to modify your technique to produce clean and accurate notes, as well as work extra hard on silent damping to prevent ghost notes and glitches. I gave up on pitch to MIDI a long time ago and taught myself some rudimentary keyboard technique. The great thing is that for most synth bass lines you don't need to be brilliant keyboard player. For me it was a much quicker route to getting the sounds I wanted, and I didn't have to worry about whether it was the technology or my playing technique that was letting me down. If you are absolutely set on using a bass guitar as a controller there's always the Industrial Radio MIDI bass, which uses fret sensing to get around the latency involved with pitch to MIDI.

Is the top "Foto Flame"?

IME plectrums and drumsticks given out to the audience during gigs are promotional tools that usually bear little resemblance to the ones actually used by the musicians in question.

My own. By which I mean a rapidly diminishing box of Herco Flex 75s.

I saw Furniture at Nottingham Trent in the late 80s (promoting Food, Sex & Paranoia album) knowing nothing but "Brilliant Mind" and was utterly blown away by both the music and the performance.

Fantastic work as always!

Apart for some events where there was a band (generally covers) on amongst all the stuff that I had actually gone to see, and few multi-band events/festivals where I wondered off to do something more interesting while the bands that I didn't like were playing I don't think I have ever left a gig early. I've been disappointed by performances in several occasions - most notably Propaganda at Rock City in the mid-80s, and Fleet Foxes at Trent University more recently - but I've always stayed to the bitter end in the vain hope that they would improve at least for the encore.

I find it stranger when people 20/30/40 years younger than me like the same sort of music that I do. Having said that, IMO "popular music" has changed less in each decade since the 50s then it did before that. The music my parents listened to was completely and utterly incomprehensible to me, as was the music I liked was to them.

Are you 100% sure? Have you tried it? No of course you haven't. Hardly any of us have apart from a few people on YouTube and since their sample sizes are one of each and their scientific methodology is essentially non-existent, their results are irrelevant. Trying to pin-point a tonal quality onto one aspect of a bass is close to pointless. So is trying to make generalisations about the sound of a particular "tone wood" as every piece is different. The best thing to do is to take each instrument as a whole. Does it look, play and sound how you would like it? Yes? The buy it. No? Then look elsewhere. Job done.

You've always had to pay VAT on imported second hand items from the rest of the world. All that has changed is that items from the EU are now included. So it's VAT on everything from everywhere.

Your location is only important if you are buying and selling on Basschat, where AFAICS adding a location to a sale post is mandatory. For those of us who don't buy and sell on here location is of no consequence.

But that's only 1/3 cedar maximum. The rest is resin and whatever the "lead" part of the pencil are made of. Are they "tone woods" too?

The VAT and import duty situation shouldn't be a problem, so long as all UK forum members is aware that buying from EVERYWHERE outside of the UK is now the same. Add 25% onto the cost of the instrument plus the shipping price and you should be covered. I've bought musical instruments from all over the world and VAT and import duty alone have never put me off. I factor it in when deciding if what I want is good value or not and then make my decision. I just have to add this equation to anything from the EU as well now. The problem is now that if you can find a suitable service that is currently shipping between the UK and EU the prices have been significantly increased, and add to the fact that your bass may spend up to a month traversing EU and UK customs. Those are the things that are going to put me off.

The sorts of things I'm looking for is making slight changes to the body shape and/or thickness to improve the sound that the finished instrument will produce, rather than simply sticking to the templates. Of course this would mean checking the body at every stage of the construction, and for instance, if it was discovered that the process of removing wood for the forearm counter or the belly cut was making it sound worse, would they stop? Also would they bin a body if the finished item sounded less good that the original uncut blank?

Which ones? And do they check all the way through the process of turning the wood into solid bodies? I've seen videos of Sadowsky checking body blanks, but not the finished bodies. Do they alter the shape of the body if it would appear that doing so would make a better sounding instrument? I have seen no evidence of this?

You could make an argument for "tone wood" in a solid electric instrument if the bodies were made of a single piece of wood, specially selected for it's resonant properties and shaved and sculpted to bring out the best of those tonal features, in the way that a good luthier will work on the soundboard of an acoustic instrument. However with few high end exceptions they are not. The bodies od solid electric guitars and basses are randomly cobbled together from two or more pieces of wood that have most likely been selected with an eye for getting the largest number of instruments out of a single plank rather than their tonal properties. They are joined at random with lashings of glue (compared with an acoustic instrument where to top is joined to rest of the body with smallest amount of glue that will still achieve a stable and strong join) and then cut and shaped to a template designed in the most part for player comfort rather than tuning the body for optimum sound. Once manufacturers start applying the care that the luthier of acoustic instruments does in choosing and shaping the wood, and is able to produce consistent tonal results from the same species of wood then I might start believing in "tone wood" for solid instruments.