BigRedX

Exactly. You're a musician so you bought from Bandcamp. There's loads of well-known and mainstream artists on there. However I can guarantee you that as a proportion of their overall sales, those from Bandcamp are minuscule. My band's music is available there, but we sell more CDs at gigs than we do downloads from Bandcamp. There's a good chance that at the end of this year our income from Spotify will have overtaken that from Bandcamp.

To my ears Holding Absence are more like Sempiternal-era Bring Me The Horizon, but nowhere near as interesting and 10 years too late. So basically an already derivative rock band are complaining because someone has used AI to create something similar. As I said in my earlier post, it's a publicity-seeking non-story.

And even then how can they tell that the artist hasn't got AI to generate the original musical idea which they have then re-created manually?

Unfortunately IME Bandcamp is a muso/indie ghetto. Fine if all you want to do is reach other musicians and a few hardcore music fans, but nearly useless for reaching ordinary people. The sort of people you need to reach if you want to really grow your fan base.

This. I've been able to get rid of a load of tat that I didn't need anymore with minimal effort on my part, especially when it came to working out the postage. I even made some money too.

Before we all get worked up with our keyboard outrage, has anyone taken the time to actually listen to the two bands in question? Holding Absence are rather formulaic bland modern pop-rock so it's really no surprise that AI has supposedly been able to replicate their "style" of music. I'd be interested to know just why Lucas Woodland has decided that Bleeding Verse are copying his band and not the countless other real bands doing the same kind of music with rock guitars, keyboards and alternating melodic and screamo vocals? There's no real story there at all. I'm sure that Holding Absence have managed to get some more streams and maybe a few more fans, but it all smacks of publicity seeking to me.

It depends whether you are listening with your ears or with your eyes. This sounds just like a P-bass:

Normally I'd be thinking about sticking up a poster and details for our next gig, but I've been informed that it has sold out already. Don't be too impressed. The venue is less than 100 capacity, there are 5 bands in total playing and the headliners, Social Youth Cult, are the hot new goth band who have just released their debut album.

Just remember that problematic rooms are a function of both time domain and frequency domain issues, and a frequency domain solution may only make it better at the point of measuring/listening and may well be making the problem worse elsewhere in the room. Often moving or changing the direction in which the PA points can have just as much effect as EQ. If you are going to use EQ make a point of standing in various different locations in the room to check the effects.

As has been said, who decides who qualifies as an "artist" and who doesn't? IME people who are driven to create will find ways of doing so no matter what their financial circumstances are. That's certainly how I have operated all my life. Also IME when money is available for "popular" arts you end up with bland mainstream dross. In fact Coldplay. They have done very well for themselves out of the system, but the have hardly changed the face of popular music and the world wouldn't miss them if they and all their recordings disappeared tomorrow. And to get back slightly off-topic, working from home hasn't killed my social life. After a day in front of the computer screen on my own I'm ready to go out 2-3 nights a week to interact with people. The difference is I am no longer forced to interact with witless twats who just happen to have the same employer as me. Instead I rehearse with my band and play gigs where I get to meet other interesting creative people.

Just because lots of people do it doesn't mean that it is a desirable or healthy (both physically and mentally) lifestyle. And we should be progressing, not trying to get back to the bad old days.

Maybe other offices are different but in the days before I worked from home I didn't spend any more or less money on these things. I had organised my life so that I lived within walking distance of where I worked, I didn't "grab a sandwich or a coffee" on my way to work. I would have breakfast before I left the house, if I needed lunch, take it in with me, otherwise I wouldn't bother, and then I'd have dinner that I made myself when I got home. There was no time to go to the pub at lunch time or after work, and unless I was rehearsing or gigging I would have things to do that would preclude going to the pub. The office would need cleaning every day irrespective of how many people were there.

Most of my screwdrivers are magnetic by default. It helps to pick up the screws.

Everyone has a pre-amp in a box. Usually it's part of their amp.

To most of the audience it's a guitar.

I currently own 4 basses. Only one is active and it is run with all the tone controls centre to their centre dente position. I'm seriously thinking of removing the preamp and wring it passive. Of all the basses I have ever owned two-thirds of them have been passive. The only active basses I have owned where the electronics did anything useful (IMO) were the Pedulla Buzz and Sei Flamboyant both of which were fitted with ACG01 Filter Pre-amps, the 1985 Overwater Original fitted with the Overwater filter pre-amp and the Lightwave Sabre whose pickups don't even function without power.

No.

Why?

Being able to play a number of different instruments - albeit mostly badly - and the fact that I have in the past spent considerable time trying to make synths sound like other instruments and using other instruments to try and control synths or produce synth-like sounds, means that now I can see that the easiest and most efficient way of producing various sounds is to use the instrument that produces them in the easiest and most efficient way. Also in a live situation being able to reproduce those sounds exactly every time becomes very important. Back in the 80s when I first started seriously dabbling with controlling synths from my guitar or bass or trying to make my guitar and bass produce more synth-like sounds I quickly discovered that for me the learning curve for developing enough keyboard technique to be able to play the parts I wanted was far shallower than the one required to modify my playing technique to get the synth sounds to trigger accurately and more importantly in a way that could be replicated every time I plugged in my instruments. I've also found that for all the good guitar and bass synth demos that are on YouTube, if you couldn't see that a guitar or bass is being used to trigger the sounds you wouldn't know that they weren't being produced by a keyboard player. Notwithstanding the fact that most of these demos require a huge number of takes in order to get a performance that is suitably glitch-free for public consumption. That for me completely negates the point of using a guitar or bass to control a synth or produce synth-like sounds. It's not easy/good enough to be repeatable, and for me the things that make plucked stringed instruments so expressive are all the things that simply don't translate when trying to do pitch to synth and instead produce unwanted glitches in the sound or pitch instability. I would definitely be using a keyboard synth for some songs in my current band were it not for the fact that at the moment we are concentrating on keeping the equipment we use at gigs as simple and easy/quick to set up as possible. Until we regularly get more than 30 minutes for setup and sound check those songs that will have to wait and the songs we play live will be those that we can do with the existing instrumentation.

It's the one that used to belong to me. It's from 1985 according to Chris May. Does that make it "late"? The other Original I used to own was from 1983 and had the pickups in the same place. The battery box is on the back under where the bridge is on the front.

If I'm putting a bass or anything else up for sale, it's because I don't need it anymore. What happens to it after it has gone is no longer my business and TBH I really don't care.

The position of the controls in the photo above is probably very close to my standard setting when I used to own that bass. Volume on full, neck filter to bassy, bridge filter to trebly, balance slightly toward the bridge pickup.

Everyone's string preferences are different, so a thread like this can only be a series of recommendations, and unfortunately the OP will have to work their way (expensively) through them until them find a set that suits them. IME Rotosound are incapable of consistently making good string sets that aren't standard gauge for 4-string 34" basses, so even if you've been getting on fine with their sets on your Jazz they probably won't suit your 5-string. Plenty of people on here like DR strings. I've not been able to get on with any of the ones I tried. My recommendations for good 5-string sets would be Warwick Red Label, Warwick Black Label if you want a taper-wound Low-B or LaBella Steels although I believe they are changed the design since I last tried some. I stopped using the LaBellas because while the last set I had were better than the Warwick Black labels they weren't twice as good despite the fact they cost twice as much.

@Al Krow I think what you want out of "synth bass" and what I want are two very different things which is why I wouldn't have bothered with anything synthy for the example you posted in another thread and why I am not satisfied with any of the synth bass pedals because none of them will give the control, evenness and consistency of sound that I can get from using a keyboard synth, or even better by programming it in my DAW. And I am a bass player. I just haven't limited myself to solely the bass guitar for producing bass sounds. I'm "lucky" in that I have enough technical ability to be able to choose the most appropriate tool for the job, and from experience a plucked stringed instrument is not always the best choice. And having said that my technical ability on all the instruments I play is pretty limited, so IMO if I can do it anyone can!

Most of the time my band book a small rehearsal room and set up facing each other. However from time to time, and before any really important gigs we book the big room and set up as we would on stage all facing where the audience would be. From experience it is important to do this so we break any unconscious visual cues that we might have been using when playing the songs and can work on how we are going to project to the audience. What we actually practice: Generally we will work out a set order for the next gig and run through it to make sure that the flow is right. If we plan on changing the order from this we'll either do the whole set again in its new format if there are a lot of changes, or just the short section that has changed if we've just moved one or two songs. Then we'll work on any new songs that we have on the go, and after that if there is still time go through the set again. Often we don't use our full 3 hour booking because we would prefer to go when everything is sounding good and there is no more work to be done, rather than carrying on just because we have time that we have paid for.