BigRedX

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:

I tried the 5 string version of the Gibson Thunderbird Studio at a point in the 90s when it was the only way of getting a 5-string bass in a Thunderbird shape without going for a custom build. Very underwhelming IMO, because it was simply a very ordinary 5-string bass with a Thunderbird-shaped body. Had almost nothing in common with a classic (76 re-issue or earlier) Thunderbird other than the shape. Proof (if any more was needed) that even Gibson can't get their legacy basses right.

I'm using ImgBB. It's not the slickest of sites or interfaces, and it occasionally has problems detecting that I'm logged in, but it does the job and doesn't look as though it's going to be charging for its services any time soon.

I use a system whereby anything important that warrants long term availability is hosted on an external image site, and the Basschat storage is for stuff that doesn't matter if I'm going to need to delete it in 6 months time.

It's not so complicated. Eight identical channels so once you've figured out how one works you know how to work the other 7 as well. Also the bottom half of each channel doesn't do anything unless you need side-chain processing (where the signal being processed is controlled by a different signal - i.e. compression/gating of the bass guitar being triggered by the kick drum).

Really? Didn't sound like it from some of the comments on here.

Some harsh truths: The vast majority of commercial recordings made in the past 20 years will have had some degree of pitch correction applied to at least one of the parts. Some will be completely unnoticeable, some will be done as a definite effect and others somewhere in between. Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean it's not there. I wouldn't be so sure that that there's no post-processing applied to "live" broadcast performances. They're all recorded to multitrack and unless the concert was aired in real time who knows what has been done to the audio between the performance and its broadcast. Remember all those "live" albums of the 70s that were tickled up in the studio before being released to the public. Why is a drop in acceptable and timing or pitch correction of a previously played part not? I can can play pretty much anything one bar at a time, but I might not be able to string all those bars together no matter how much I practice. But for some people comp'ing it together from a multitude of takes is somehow OK while correcting the pitch and timing of errant notes from a single take is not? For me there's no difference. Use whichever gives the best audible end result. I think one of the reasons why there's a lot more processing of live vocals is because these days you can actually hear them at gigs. Certainly most of the gigs I went to in the 70s and 80s often the best you could hope for regarding the vocals is that you could hear there were some. Being able to tell if they were in tune or if the singer had remembered the words was anyone guess. IMO for a long time so long as they could cobble together a decent performance in the studio, it didn't matter live because most people couldn't tell in the gig mix. That however doesn't cut it with todays much better PA systems, so is it not surprising that musicians are opting for various effects now that they can be properly heard?

Agreed. In the past Id have done this myself even if I hadn't had exactly the right tools for the job. These days, and especially for a brand new instrument I'd want it to be perfect out of the box. Therefore I'd be sending this one back to be exchanged for one that had all the correct parts as standard. The alternative would be if there were no more in stock and no more likely to be in stock any time soon and I REALLY wanted this bass, in which case I'd be looking for a discount equivalent to the cost of getting a decent luthier to do the job for me.

I've been looking at the "Sphere" option. IIRC you get about 30 months usage plus a load of extras for the same price as buying Studio One outright. Within that time frame I'd expect to have think about at least one paid upgrade if I went for buying outright, and if I find I'm not using it enough to justify the subscription I can always take a break until I do need it again. OoI how often does the software "phone home" to check that you are still paid up? If I was to go this route it would be mostly for the live use facilities and a lot of the places where my band plays have limited opportunities to connect to the internet. Worst of all our underground rehearsal space doesn't even have any mobile phone reception!

Agreed, there's a difference between a mistake that is simply something other than what you intended to play but still works in a musical context and something that is plain wrong. However, some of these "modern" effects are anything but. Sparky's Magic Piano which uses a primitive version the vocoder effect was recorded in 1947. The ring modulator was patented in 1935. Both ring modulators and the all-electronic vocoder have their roots in telephony electronics.

Let's face it any studio recording that has not been performed and mixed live in a single take direct to a mono or stereo recorder has some degree of artifice. That doesn't make it bad, it's just when the same performance is going to replayed many times, I would suspect that most performers would like there to be no glaringly obvious errors to it. I know I would. And there are many ways to get there all of them perfectly valid. Even those that were recorded completely live in a continuous take. How many performances were required to get a recording that all the performers were happy enough with for it to be for public consumption? And if you are going to fix things in the studio what is acceptable and what is not? And how do you justify drawing the line at the point you have chosen? I think anyone apart from the one take live purists would be OK with a musician redoing their part again on a multi-track recording, but what about a drop-in to fix a verse/chorus/middle 8? What about a one-bar drop-in? A single note? I see digital manipulation techniques as being no different to these and in many ways much better for the overall performance as on the whole they only affect those parts of the performance that the musician/engineer/producer want to affect. I certainly don't miss the nerve-wracking days of the analogue tape drop-in where no only did you have commit to being able to do a better performance than the one you were over-recording but you also had to rely on the engineer getting the punch-in/punch-out points spot on, so as not to ruin the performance before and after the drop-in. I know I would much prefer to manipulate a selection of dodgy notes/phrases or replace them with examples copied from elsewhere in the performance. I also don't have to worry about the potential for ruining the parts that are already correct. Everybody wins. The thing to remember is that studio and live performances are completely different things. If I make a mistake live, it's gone in the next second, and unless it was glaringly obvious to the audience no-one will remember that I've made it. On a recording where my mistake will be heard over and over again if it's not corrected, I want to correct it. How it gets corrected is irrelevant to me so long as when the recording is finished I like the end result. That all that is important.

Can some please explain with science why constantly clipping the front end of an amp will cause it to fail, because I can't see any reason for it? In 40 years of playing I have only had two amp failures. One was a very ancient and badly looked after valve amp that I had acquired for next to nothing and which stopped working between sets for no apparent reason the second time I used it. The other was user error when I inadvertently plugged both sides of a stereo amp into the same speaker cab and released the magic smoke.

Not in the late 70s when Ibanez first started producing "original" designs for export sale. I was building my own guitar at the time and a large proportion of the hardware was Ibanez spare parts, as they were easy to get hold of, excellent quality and very good value for money. It's a pity that no longer seems to be the situation. Regarding having to replace the whole pre-amp, I suspect that from a service PoV it will be easier to swap out the entire loom than fiddling about with lots of extra soldering and working out exactly which components have failed.

I've found that having idiosyncratic amplification to be the safest route. IME other musicians are either completely terrified of it and touch nothing, or they quickly find something else to use. I used to own a rig that only had three obvious user controls on it - input volume and 2 output volumes for a bi-amped speaker system. No-one ever messed with that! My current rig is a Helix and FRFR. I have a reasonably generic patch on the Helix that other bassists are welcome to use, but otherwise, unless one of the heavily effected patches that I use with my bands is suitable they are going to be SOoL.

TBH unless you are a reasonably well-known band with a decent following it's "playing last" rather than "headlining". In these situations the best time to play is second to last. You generally tend to get the biggest/most receptive audience.