BigRedX

And my personal experience is that most people prefer to buy their music from a recognised website such as Bandcamp/Amazon/iTunes rather than from a small band's site.

And having owned various high-tech devices from both Roland and Akai, I tend to prefer Roland's way of doing things.

From my PoV it's the fact that the Roland has both synthesised and sampled sounds. IMO there is a place for both. And with a bit of lateral thinking I might be able to use it for some of the simple sequenced synthesiser sounds the band will also need.

And we go back to the "grey import" situation of the late 70s. You could get your big name guitars and basses and be able to sell them about 15% cheaper than an official dealer, but they don't come with a guarantee, and if the example back then were any indication, you got the stuff that wasn't shifting in whatever country they were from originally (usually the US).

Might be a while yet. Personally ATM I'm leaning towards the Roland. Back in the 80s and 90s I had close friends in the high-tech musical instrument business and it would normally be possible for me to borrow anything I was interested in for a week or so (depending on stock availability) to see if it really was what I wanted. I spent a lot of money this way, but I also avoided some costly mistakes where for instance the features available didn't make up for the unfriendliness of the user interface.

This.

I suspect it's in the contract for the supply of instruments.

A lot of on-line reseller are not permitted to sell outside of their country (or economic area) by the terms of their agreement with the manufacturers/distributer.

The Terrortones used to sell CDs and records directly through our website and the later on via Bandcamp. Despite the fact that everything was slightly cheaper on our website, and you were protected through paying by PayPal, once we had the Bandcamp page set up our website sales went to zero overnight. Personally I wouldn't bother with selling direct from a band website, because it was a lot of effort to set up compared with doing it through bandcamp.

As others have said Bandcamp or direct from the band web site. Bandcamp waive their revenue share on the first Friday of every month, so if you want to maximise the amount of money that goes to the artist(s) wait and buy everything on 5th February. Also buy a T-Shirt. IME from producing CDs/Vinyl/T-shirts for my various bands, there is a lot more profit to the band off a T-Shirt sale then there is from a CD or record. Unless the T-shirts and very complicated multi-colour design and the CD/record packaging cheap and cheerful, most artist make 2-3 time the profit on a T-Shirt sale as they do on music.

My plan, once I know that the band are about to start rehearsing again and that we are definitely going to be without a drummer, would be to buy both and spend a week getting the existing drum parts from the 6 songs we have recorded programmed in each device. Then decide which one suits the band sounds and my workflow the best and return the other one under the distance selling regulations.

I have been looking at this as an alternative to the Roland. I think the only way to know for sure which is the best for you is to try them.

My drum machine history goes like this: 1. 1981-1982 Boss DR55 Doctor Rhythm. Used live. Had just about enough patterns (one per song) for a 10 song set with careful use of the A/B switch and some external triggered percussion sounds to add variation to duplicated patterns. Didn't sound anything like "real" drums but the band had a percussionist to add the rhythmic interest. 2. 1983-1985 Roland TR808. Recorded to cassette for live use. Just one song memory so recording to tape was the only way we could get a whole set out of it. I did see a band use one live instead of a drummer, but it could only be done with a lot of lateral thinking and live pattern/fill-in changing. Still didn't sound much live "real" drums, but we were an all-synth band so it didn't really matter. As we were recording all the drum parts we took full opportunity of external percussion sounds and studio processing to get the rhythm track sound we wanted. 3. 1985-1987 Yamaha RX11. Recorded to cassette for live use. Had up to 99 pattern and 99 song memories, but in practice the rhythm parts for 2 songs would use up all the available pattern memory. Typical 80s sampled drum sounds. Kick, Snare and Closed HiHat were pretty good, the rest were generally replaced or augmented with extra samples or synthesised percussion. 4. 1988-1991 Alesis HR16. Used live in conjunction with a drummer playing an acoustic kit. Now that finally had a drum machine that sounded (at the time) like a real drummer, I spent most of my time trying to manipulate the built-in sounds so they wouldn't conflict with what our drummer was doing. Use to add some extra percussion sounds (and something for the drummer to keep in time to) for about half the set where we also had sequenced synth parts. That pretty much used up all the available memory. 5. 1992-1996 Ensoniq EPS16+ Sampler with build-in sequencer. The sampler part was great, but the sequencer wasn't a particularly user-friendly way of programming drum parts. Most of the time I would bash away at the keyboard until the quantisation gave me the rhythm I wanted. If the beats were out, it was generally easier to have another go than try and edit them into the correct place. Used live. With the expanded memory there was just enough room to get all the sample we needed for a complete set loaded up simultaneously. The sequences for each song had to be loaded as required from floppy disk, but it was fast enough not to ruin the flow of the set. From 1995 onwards I got a Mac and Logic V2 (IIRC) sequencer, and all the rhythm parts were programmed on that which was a lot easier. For live use they were saved on floppy disks as Standard MIDI files and play back from a MIDI file player, which was probably the most unreliable piece of high-tech equipment I have ever had the misfortune to own. It would go wrong (usually in a quite spectacular way) almost ever other gig. Was finally replaced by... 6.1997-2002 Akai S2000. Pretty much as before but all the drum parts were created in Logic and loaded into the Akai as MIDI files. The Akai was expanded to the max with Flash RAM which allowed 16MB of samples to be permanently loaded and retained even after the power was turned off. The MIDI files still had be loaded from floppy disks, but went into RAM rather than being read in real time from the drive, so it was rock solid. We liked the drum sounds we had sampled so much than when we came to record our album all the live drums were replaced by them except for the HiHats. 7. 2002-present. EXS24 sampler plugin in Logic. The original version would read Akai formatted floppy disks and sample CDs so I simply loaded all my Akai programs into it and this is what I have been using ever since. For live use the drum and percussion tracks are saved as a stereo audio file since reading that from an SSD is more reliable than running the plugin.

Unfortunately just because several manufactures make their 8-string basses with a single saddle for each course doesn't mean that they are right. It just means that they are saving money. Both 8-string basses I have owned had individual saddles for each string and they needed it, and 8-string basses are especially suited for bass lines that reach further up the neck than usual. It used to be that the go-to bridge for an 8-string bass was a special version of the Schaller 3D bridge, but that is now out of production, and any left in the retail chain have seriously high price tags attached to them because of their scarcity. The only other 8-string bridges with individual saddle that I know of are the two-piece bridge/tailpiece used on the Dean, Schecter and similar asian-made basses and those fitted to Tune basses. I have no idea how you would go about buying one separately.

They are "weird and wacky" US band who were briefly interesting about 20 years ago.

The parcel I have been having problems sending to Belgium has finally gone. When I was able to complete the booking I needed to print and sign 3 copies of the customs invoice, something I have only previously had to do for expensive items going to South American countries. Also Interparcel couldn't automatically generate the shipping label and I had to contact them and they had to send it in a separate email. I don't know if this was a one-off glitch or it it was a delay due to them checking the EORI information and/or Tarif Codes. That added an extra 30 minutes onto the process. Now I just need to see if the parcel reaches it's destination without any further problems.

But nowhere near as expensive in real terms as it was back in the early 80s when programmable drum machines first appeared. The TR808 my band had, cost about £800 back in 1982 IIRC, and the better alternatives - LinnDrum, Oberheim DMX, and Movement MCS were all significantly over £1k.

Which is why you don't use a set neck design with a bolt-on neck.

Just imagine having to disinfect all of those before the next "gig".

But the Behringer is essentially a TR808 which isn't much cop for creating realistic sounding and feeling drum parts. I know because for the best part of the 80s my band had an actual Roland TR808. With a studio's worth of additional sound generating and manipulating equipment you can get closer, but it's not exactly easy. However the Roland TR-8S will leave it standing in terms of sounds and user-friendliness.

Some people want dedicated hardware. I use a laptop for the backing of one of my bands, but we also have a drummer, and what it supplies is very much secondary to the live instruments. However in my other band, when we get back to rehearsing and gigging, we are most likely going to be without a drummer, so I am looking at a serious drum machine that can both replace a conventional drummer as well as produce unusual percussion sounds. For this I'd much rather use a hardware drum machine rather than having the cart round the laptop and all the associated interfaces etc.

From what I have seen of both the significant number of extra controls on the 8S make it a lot easier to use. Also the 6S only supports 6 channels simultaneously so some things like multiple tom patterns are going to be more difficult to program since AFAICS it has to be done either by sacrificing the availabilty of other sounds or by programming in pitch changes on a single tom sound. Having looked at both there are too many compromises to the 6S

There are just so many variables even in the construction of mass produced factory instruments, that is no wonder that two supposedly "identical" basses can sound very different. This is why I always maintain that worrying about the wood a solid electric instrument is made of is a waste of time for anything other than aesthetic reasons. Once you switch to man-made materials the consistency will increase, but even carbon fibre sheets can be laid up in the mould in a different way with potentially differing sonic outcomes. Having said that my two Gus 5-string basses apart from the fingerboard woods (cocobolo vs ebony) and the electronics (single coils with pre-amp vs humbuckers with passive controls) are the same. Switch off the pre-amp on one and activate the coil tap on the other, and they are inter-changeable from a sonic PoV.

Does that mean each course is tuned in unison rather than octaves? IME 8-string basses with octave courses are noticeably out of tune in the course above the 7th fret if both strings in the course share the same saddle.