BigRedX

In the 80s the 4-piece synth band I was part of had a recording/rehearsal space in a cellar measuring approximately 5' wide, 12' long and just under 6' high.

What a surprise. Good job I have still plenty left.

So long as you are happy with "Assembled in Britain" at best.

Obviously not a serious tea drinker or you would have bought Yorkshire Gold, and not the cheap nasty Red stuff.

It's probably running loads of processes that are getting in the way of your music-making activities. Close ALL your applications except your DAW. Switch off WiFi and Bluetooth. If you really are 100% definitely disconnected from the internet then you can turn off any anti-virus, and malware section apps, but make sure you re-enable them all before reconnecting. Is this a laptop? If so you will surprised how many devices are hogging the USB buses, and will be interfering with your audio interface and hard drive.

Given, that previously the question of import charges was asked on average once a month when the information was well known and plenty of people had actual first hand experience of the process, do not be surprised that there are now multiple threads and most people still don't know what is going to happen when they buy and sell items to/from countries outside of the UK. AFAICS what @Steve Browning says should be correct, but right now it is just one (well-informed) person's interpretation of the rules. How others including HMRC actually interpret them once goods start moving may not be the same. Personally I wouldn't want to buy or sell anything aboard for a good few months until I've seen what others are actually experiencing.

Since there are several companies now coming up with this same problem, it would suggest that someone is giving them the wrong advice.

One of the easiest ways to cut down on processor and disk access bottlenecks when running a project is to use your effects in the same you would in the days before computer recording using buses instead of inserts. Keep insert effects just instances where a single track only needs that effect, and use buses for global effects like reverbs. The other thing to do is if a particular track contains multiple regions from multipole takes and edits, consider consolidating it into a single audio file, as it reducing the disc access burden. TBH unless you are creating massive orchestral soundscapes using sample libraries, there shouldn't be any reason for any modern computer to be running out of steam when recording or mixing a song.

They could have done. Not all the photos used in the ad are ones that I took of my Talbo bass, the other photos could be of the bass that is for sale and that one could have been imported as stated. However using photos which are not of the actual bass they are selling is not a particularly good idea, as eBay take a dim view of goods not being as described in the ads.

I had a look at my records and I bought my Talbo Bass in December 2007 from Ishabashi U-Box. It went back to Japan after being advertised on eBay in June 2013. Even allowing for the time that has passed, it was neither bought or sold for anything like the price of this current offering. It cost me just under £500 including shipping, VAT and import duty, and was sold for slightly less. IIRC the ones I saw for sale in the UK were initially being offered for £699. @Bassassin I recall the painted Talbo Basses from one of the guitar shows in the early 2000s, however I'm pretty sure that some of them had wooden bodies. A fiend of mine has a Talbo Jr Guitar with a salmon pink painted body which he bought direct from the UK distributor, which is definitely aluminium underneath. However it's the only painted Talbo Jr I have ever seen. I just did a search on Digimart to see what a Talbo Bass would cost from Japan, unfortunately there are none available right now. However it did bring up the EVO Bass which appears to be the latest version and has the partially cutaway body design of the Talbo Jr. However they are not cheap. A quick on-line price conversion comes out at around £2790!

Either, depending on the sound and feel I am after.

All my DAW project files live on a separate hard drive. I use Logic which has a handy function in the save command that ensures that all the required "assets" for any one project are copied into the same folder as the song file(s). I would expect any good modern DAW to do the same. I don't have loads of 3rd party plug-ins so managing them isn't a problem. They live in their default locations on my system drive. I could move them, but the spacing savings Vs the hassle doesn't make it worth while. I very rarely keep the installer files. My downloads folder only contains things I haven't got around to filing or deleting. As other have said there is no correct way. Just what works best for you.

"The Cloud" is a terrible idea for large file storage until everyone has a constant super-fast internet connection, also as far as backing up music project files goes 30GB is minuscule. Save cloud storage for email and small files that you need to access from multiple devices and get a good quality hard drive for your music files. If you are prepared to pay for a reliable backup service (not Google where you are constantly at the whim of their current user agreement) then cloud storage makes a decent second-tier back-up source (after your local backup source).

It's all very well saying that it will be more economical to support local musical instrument retailers, but remember that the vast majority of musical equipment isn't made in the UK and those items which are, rely on lots of imported parts. And while there's a lot of love for the mainstream brands, Basschat is also the supporter of plenty of small niche ones too. It looks as though, for a lot of them selling to the UK for the moment will simply be too much hassle. That's certainly what people with first-hand experience are reporting in this thread. Interesting times (in the Chinese sense if the phrase) ahead.

Never delete anything. You never know when you might want to rework it. Storage is ridiculously cheap these days, so there absolutely no reason not to keep everything. Just make sure you keep all the files you need for each project together. I believe GarageBand does this automatically (although you should check to make sure) Logic has a setting when you save to store all the associated external files with each project. For other DAWs check the manual.

I’d buy a big (4TB) hard drive for my computer plus an external CD/DVD drive if it did’t already have one. Total cost <£150.

Unfortunately the Kramer necks are too short. I did think about it when I had both.

One of the great things I like about my iTunes music library, is that if I just want to listen to "some music" I can just hit random play and not have to spend ages thinking about what I want to hear. The library is my ultimate "radio station" there are no crap tracks - any album fillers, uninspired B-side remixes, or bands I'm simply not interested in from compilation albums can be dismissed with a click, and a second click ensures they will never be inflicted on me again.

According to the web site Reaper comes with sampler and drum synthesiser plug-in instruments, but I couldn't find any information on either of them in the PDF manual.

IME vinyl weight once you get over 120g has zero impact on the sound of the pressing. I still have a few albums from the 70s and 80s on vinyl that have never had a digital re-release and a modern 120g pressing makes them feel like flexi-discs in comparison. These days I only buy vinyl if I really want the music and it isn't available in any other format. I then go through the rigmarole of transferring it to my iTunes server in 24bit uncompressed format, editing out any pressing faults in the process. From their it can be copied onto any of my mobile devices as required. IME modern vinyl pressings are far, far better than the typical records of the late 70s and 80s. They have to be or no-one would buy them. Most of what I bought back then were DIY/Indie releases and it wasn't uncommon to find releases that had problems throughout the whole pressing run. I can remember going through my local record shop's entire stock of one particular album in an attempt to find a copy that had been pressed on-centre. There weren't any. Even when John Peel played a track off his copy you could hear that it wasn't right. BTW the last time I had anything produced on vinyl the advice from the cutting/pressing plant was that for the highest quality reproduction you needed to keep the running time under 10 minutes a side and cut/play at 45rpm. Reducing the speed to 33rpm and/or increasing the running time of the side would reduce the quality of the record.

And as someone who has had an album released on both CD and vinyl, the CD version is noticeably closer to what we were hearing in the studio during mixing, and what we want our audience to hear.

And as I also said before the biggest advantage of the high-mass bridge is the better engineering of the saddles to prevent lateral movement.

I'm talking glass-mastered CDs, with production quantities of 500+. CD runs of under 500 are mostly CDRs which IMO don't count because they don't have the longevity required to be considered a reliable delivery medium.

Having had music that has been released on both CD and vinyl in recent years, I can say that the production costs for the two are not as far apart as the retail prices would have you believe...

As I said in a previous post and in previous threads, once you attache the bridge to the body, mechanically they become a single item. So although the high-mass bridge will add more weight than a typical BBOT bridge, in overall terms, unless you bass is a hollow-body, the increase is negligible.