BigRedX

@Al Krow but a bigger pedal board may not be an option. My Helix which is probably smaller than a lot of people's pedal boards is at the limit of what can be comfortably fitted on a lot a stages I play. Others have already stated that there is insufficient stage space for a keyboard synth. For them a bigger pedal board may well also be out of the question. The tracking speed is worrying. Almost all the synth bass clips I have seen using processed bass guitar are slow to medium paced songs, or ones with a lot of space between the notes in the bass part. Most of what my band play is over 130bpm and the bass lines are mostly 1/8 notes or faster. That's going to be a problem. The other thing I have spotted is that if you are using synth sounds for rhythmic parts everyone will expect the timing to be absolutely spot on because these are usually handled by a sequencer of some sort. Your audience will be able to hear that something is wrong even if they can't pin point exactly what it is. For me the ideal solution which doesn't involve using a keyboard would be to put the bass through a MIDI triggered Filter and VCA device, but I only know of one and that's a relatively large rack-mount unit which is no longer being produced.

But I don't. I have a Helix Floor which is essentially its own pedal board. Any additional pedals would either be free-floating which bring their own unreliability or would require me to have a board big enough to hold the Helix, whatever synth pedal I decide to use and its PSU (and main power distributer for both units). That makes it bigger on stage and bigger in the band transport. One of the reasons my band gets and does as many gigs as we do as because we can have a relatively small on-stage footprint and economical transport. Even so it's sometimes pushed to the limit. I've done a couple of gigs where I have been sandwiched between the headliner's equipment and the front of stage wedge monitors with just enough room for my feet and the Helix. Anything more and I would have been out of space. Also by limiting the amount of gear we take to gigs we are able to get the whole band, our equipment and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. At the moment everything fits in when packed in a specific way. If my pedal board case was larger than it is currently, there's a good chance we may not longer get everything in quite as comfortably. Also who is to say that someone with a more conventional pedalboard set up already has both room and PSU capacity for an additional synth pedal. Based on my reasoning above if I'm going to bring additional gear I might as well bring the right gear, and not extra stuff that is still a compromise. Many of my bass synth sounds use cross-mod and AFAIK none of the pedals offer this facility. As I said, if I we start to get regular gigs on big stages and more time to set up and sound check then I'll start bringing keyboard synths for me to play. As an aside one of my all-time favourite bands, Polysics, made the decision that when they played outside of Japan there were a number of their more popular songs that they would not perform because they felt they couldn't do them justice with the stripped down equipment rig they used on international tours from both a cost and logistics PoV. This was somewhat disappointing for me as an audience member.

If the screws are working loose then I would suggest the plugs are either poorly made or the screws haven't been sufficiently tightened. I don't think I've ever come across screws working loose. Even if they did, due to the construction of a standard UK mains plug it should make any difference if the cable is properly clamped in place there is nowhere for the conductors to go even if a terminal screw were to work loose. As for moulded plugs has anyone cut one apart to see what's inside? I doubt that they are soldered. AFAIK the moulding process holds everything together so there wouldn't be any need for it and besides the heat of the moulding process would probably affect the integrity of any solder joints.

Then you might want to question whether you actually need a synth pedal at all? There are a few songs in my band's repertoire that would benefit from me playing synth on them at gigs rather than Bass VI, but until we are regularly playing on bigger stages and have more than 20 minutes to set up and sound check, bringing another instrument simply isn't an option. Using a pedal isn't really an option either. Unless it has the full set of facilities as the keyboard synth it is replacing, I'm unlikely to be able to get the sounds I want out of it, also from the PoV of space on stage I don't really have room for yet another pedal and one that would require an external PSU with the all the complications and unreliability that would entail. If I did I'd probably have room for an actual keyboard synth. So until we are playing suitably sized stages with enough time to sound check an additional instrument I will continue to use my Bass VI with a few standard effects on it. I can guarantee that the majority of the audience don't notice the difference and the few that do are would rather we play the song with a slightly different bass sound as opposed to not at all.

I'd done a cursory search, but hadn't yet tried various Reddit and Gearspace threads that might have been more promising. I suspected that it might be possible to recreate some things manually, but TBH that's more messing about than I am prepared to undertake for the sake of a few interesting looking Kontakt-based instruments. It a pity because the Logic Sampler instrument is great, but could do with some updated conversion utilities like the Akai sampler library one that would even allow the Mac to read Akai formatted discs to make them available for the conversion process.

Due to the bridge placement and the headstock size, the Eastwood Hooky, despite being a short scale, is actually a couple of cm longer than my 34" scale Gus G3s.

It looks as though there is a similar guitar handing up next to it...

You shouldn't because the screws on the terminals don't clamp down as efficiently onto soldered wire as they do onto stranded. If you are talking about actually soldering the wires in the mains cable to the contacts in the plug, then the heat required to do this would most likely also melt the conductor insulation on the mains cable.

Has anyone come up with a way of automatically converting Kontakt Player instruments to work with Logic's ES24/Sampler? Having had a poor experience with NI in the past and also having made a decision not to have any 3rd-party plug-ins that require me to install anything other than the plug-in itself, I'm not going to install Kontakt Player, which means that I've missed out on a couple of interesting instruments that have come up recently that I might have wanted to explore.

Mine: 1. A month in the studio with Trevor Horn producing. 2. A small tour bus complete with driver and road crew.

I used a piece of holographic sticker cut to shape stuck to the front of the guitar I made in the late 70s:

Those of you complaining about what Facebook shows you must either have the wrong friends or be following the wrong groups. All I see is posts from my friends and those groups I have chosen to follow. Any "friend" who consistently posts crap I'm not interested in gets unfollowed, likewise with any groups. I get the very occasional suggested or sponsored post which I always mark is irrelevant. Having said that Facebook is not installed on my phone or any other mobile devices. I signed up to it using a one-time email address and it runs sandboxed in its own browser on my desktop computer which is used just for Facebook. I only have that browser open while I am looking at Facebook and quit as soon as I am done. While I am looking at Facebook I don't use anything else to access the internet. Anything that pops up in my feed that looks interesting is noted down and checked out in a different browser after quiting Facebook.

While it can be possible to remove the stickiness using IPA, it will come back, and IME much sooner than a couple of years. It's a manufacturing defect with the plastic/rubber used and once the material has started to break down there is nothing that I know that will stop the process and cleaning off the stickiness just exposes new material that has already started to degrade. Ultimately the only permanent solution will be the replace the parts in question with something made out of a more stable material.

I the early 2000s I joined a band where I felt fretless bass would go well. To test this out I bought a cheap defretted Wesley Acrylic bass off eBay which told me I was right. After something a bit better and being somewhat short of funds at the time I was attracted to the Squier VMF Jazz which had received nothing but positive reviews in the musical instrument press and plenty of love on the bass forums. I played one for about an hour sitting down in the shop and it seemed perfect. Unfortunately once I got it home I discovered it wasn't as suitable for me as I thought. I wasn't used to Fender-style basses, up to that point my greeted basses had been a Gus G3, Overwater Original and a short scale Burns Sonic, and so I wasn't prepared for how relatively large it was and how badly it hung on the strap on my small body. I couldn't reach the G-string tuner without shifting how it hung. Even the 36" scale Overwater felt more ergonomic and well-balanced in comparison. The biggest problem was that it sounded weedy compared with all mu other basses including the £60 Wesley and the ancient Burns Sonic. I bought a Badass Bridge for it, which tightened up the tone somewhat but didn't make it any less weedy sounding. I then fitted a J-Retro pre-amp which gave me lots more tonal control from the bass but didn't make it sound any chunkier. I was seriously considering going back to playing the Wesley, when I spotted a Pedulla Buzz for sale which I could afford, and which for me was everything the Squier was not, and which was my main fretless bass until I finally received my custom-built Sei Flamboyant.

For me it would be having what I make from music as my primary source of income.

Regarding the stickiness, if it's just a coating that is sticky you'll have to remove it, otherwise it will come back no matter what you do. If it's the actual material itself then the only real solution is replacement. Maybe some nice wood for the end cheeks and see if someone is offering 3D-printed replacements for mod and pitch wheels.

When I was a kid, most boxed sets were made once and then the bricks went into the general collection so I could make whatever I thought of. Back then the main reason to buy a boxed set was to get hold of some of the specialist bricks that weren't available separately. That doesn't seem to apply these days.

Not only that, but IME once I stopped trying so hard, the bands I have been in have been more popular and more successful at a grass-roots level.

I'm only on Facebook so I can promote whatever band I am currently in. While I don't think I'd quit if I wasn't using it to promote my music I'd probably only look at it once a week tops and my page would simply be whatever my friends had tagged me in.

About mid-way through 2002 the band that I had been playing for almost 13 years ended with a bad split up. I had got fed up with organising every band-orientated aspect of the other members lives and therefore following the split I wasn't ready to form another band. I did have a look at trying to salvage something from our finished and half-finished recordings but in the end I couldn't be bothered. Then at the end of the year for some reason I Googled the name of the first band I was in back in the late 70s and early 80s and came across a glowing review of our contribution to a multi-band double EP that was released in 1980. I got in touch with the web site that had published the review and it turned out it was run by a record label in Chicago who were seemingly on a mission to release every UK DIY band of the post-punk era. They asked me if we had any other recordings and if we did would we like to release a retrospective CD of them? So for the best part of the next two years I was involved with getting all our recordings that were on a mix of 1/4" reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes digitised, cleaned up; and then in discussion with the other band members about which tracks from about 4 hours worth of recordings should be included on the CD, and designing the cover for it. During that time I barely picked up an instrument and I certainly didn't write any new songs. When the CD was released in early 2005 I was just about ready to start making music again. I decided that my next band would be one where all I had to do was show up for rehearsals and gigs and play some bass (or guitar or synth). That was fine to easing me back into being in a band and starting to writing songs again. After that the next band I joined was the one that became The Terrortones, and since then I've not looked back. Having taken a break I came back much more relaxed about playing in bands and I would like to think I'm a better band member these days than I was in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Overall the bands I've been with for the past 20 years have overall been far more popular and successful than those I was in before.

To expand on my original post. In my current band, I use a 30" Eastwood Hooky 6-String Bass. Our band doesn't have a guitarist so myself and synth play alternate between playing the melody and bass parts:

The original is all programmed - probably on a TB303 by the sounds of it and the way the bass line divides up neatly into repeatable 1-bar blocks. The song also relies on the bass and the drums being absolutely metronomically solid and each note being precise, and therefore while the bassist in that clip is way, way better than I'll ever be, I found myself wincing over every tiny hesitation and slightly fluffed note.

I'm currently learning how to play my band's Christmas song. We have a gig coming up on the 28th November which is our last gig of the year so we thought it would be good to include it in the set. It will be an interesting proposition to play live as it was originally pieced together in the studio. I don't think I've ever played the bass/guitar part all the way through in a single pass and the part was written first and foremost to make the song sound good rather than as something I would be able to perform standing up on stage. There's some big leaps from one end of the neck to the other between the verses and choruses.

Streaming definitely benefits my band. It allows us to reach listeners all over the world. About 90% of our listeners are from outside of the UK. For better or worse it's where the majority of most artist's potential audience are. These days it costs next to nothing to be on streaming services, so why wouldn't you be there? Does it give a fair payout? How do you even begin to quantify that? Let's look at the "good old days" of record companies, albums and CDs... A new signed band might get 10% of the retail price of the record or CD, But that only came after they had paid off their advance, recording costs (often to a studio owned by the label), promotional costs like buying onto a major artist tour, making videos, paying photographers, record pluggers and all the publicity that a band with a record contract in the 20th century would have taken for granted. They would also have to sign with the record labels publishing company who would take one third of all their performance royalties. Most bands would never see any money other than what the label initially advanced them. And that was only for the very lucky few who actually got signed. If you were going to put out your own record, in the late 70s if you cut every corner possible like The Desperate Bicycles you could record and press 500 copies of your single for just under £200. Back then it took at least 3 months to get your records after you had sent them off to be pressed. If you were lucky and John Peel liked it enough to play it more than once and Rough Trade gave you a distribution deal and you sold all the copies, you could probably afford to make a second single and not have to cut every corner this time. Or if you were unlucky like my friend's band it could take the best part of a year from making the initial recording to getting your 500 copies of the single and then your distributor would go bust taking all of your stock with them never to be seen again. On the other hand streaming probably won't make any of the artists being streamed rich on its own, but if you do it right you should at the very least make back your aggregator's fees. Your music will be available for as long as the streaming service is running. Yes Bandcamp give you 90% of your download and physical product sales, but their reach is tiny compared with Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon. IME the people who do badly out of streaming do so because either they have signed a deal that gives someone else (usually their record label) the majority of their streaming income, or because they don't do enough promotion. The conservative estimate is that 20,000 new songs are uploaded EVERY DAY. So when you release your next single not only do you have to compete with the other 19,999+ songs released that day but you also have to compete with almost every other song ever released in the history of popular music. The charts (for what they are worth these days) have to apply negative weighting to back catalogue otherwise new artist would barely get a look in. So if you can't/won't promote your music how can you ever expect to reach an audience of more than your close friends and family? For me the short answer is that while I'm almost never going to make a living out of my music, at the moment my band breaks even overall in terms of what it cost us to be a band and what we make from playing gigs and having our music available to listen to or buy in various formats. And while it isn't a massive proportion of the band's overall income it makes an important contribution.

These days, the only originals bands playing mid-week are well-known ones with a couple of albums out who are on tour and have some sort of financial support from a record label or management company. Here in Nottingham gigs by new bands are on average £10 on the door (and at some venues free).