BigRedX

As I have said before in similar threads, I ditched my all my rigs (2 bass and guitar one) in favour of a Helix Floor (full version) and an RCF745 FRFR at a combined new cost of around £2k. That might sound like a lot, but one of the bass rigs that it replaced had cost me quite a bit more than that, and most of it had been bought second hand and 10 years earlier, so in real terms the new set up was a complete bargain.

I play live standing up. Therefore I practice at home standing up too.

And to answer the OP's question, if you read any of the interviews with bass players in IM in the 70s, nearly all of them would detail how they would swap out whatever strings their new basses came with for Rotosounds as well as removing the pickup and bridge covers, as soon as the bass was in their hands. There were two people who owned a bass in my year at school in the mid 70s. One was a home-made job which looked as though the constructor had seen a photo of a P-Bass once and then created this bass from memory. That was strung with Rotosounds because they were the only strings you could buy from the local musical instrument store. The other was Mosrite-influenced Kay(?) which was strung with flats - presumably these were what the bass came with and having shelled out almost £30 for the instrument they certainly couldn't afford to buy new strings for it!

Back in the 70s, if you bought International Musician magazine there was a card attached to the pages near the back which you could tear out and fill in for more details on any of the instruments advertised in the mag. About a month or so after sending it off (by which time you had forgotten all about it), the brochures of the instruments would appear over the course of the next few weeks. The ones I definitely remember getting were the Bell's catalogue, John Birch and Yamaha. There certainly wasn't a Fender catalogue amongst them, and TBH I don't even recall there being a Fender ad in the magazine in the first place.

Sitting down? They are designed to be played in rock bands standing up, preferably with one foot up on the monitors whilst punching the air when you don't have to fret any of the strings. Buy a boring P-Bass if you want to play sitting down.

It's the same with 12-string guitars. That's why the best ones have low-output single coil pick-ups.

Add to the fact that for a two-piece body made of equally sized pieces of wood, there are 8 different ways that those two pieces of wood can be glued together, which may or may not have a different outcome to the sound of the resulting instrument. Edit to correct the number of ways the 2 pieces can be glued together from 6 to 8

I always find it hilarious that some of our "American Friends" think that Liberal means some radical, far left, neo-communist revolutionary dedicated to bringing down the good old capitalist establishment, whereas in the UK in stands for wishy-washy, dull, ineffectual middle of the roadism...

Vampire Weekend. Not vampires or even the slightest bit Goth. In fact some of the most insipid ska I have had the misfortune to have to listen to. There used to be a Nottingham band called Hot Japanese Girl, composed of three beardy white blokes, so none of them were Hot, Japanese or Girls.

If we all felt so strongly about how terrible Spotify are (and remember that Spotify are only bad at paying musicians because their record companies sold the streaming rights for a relatively small amount and keep the lion's share of this money for themselves) then we could vote with our wallets and cancel our premium subscriptions. But we don't.

Ignoring the fact that gigging currently isn't possible, if one of my bands was popular enough to be getting a million streams in a year, then we'd probably also be selling more than enough physical product and downloads to be close to making enough to completely finance all the band's activities and turn a profit. Certainly IMO the revenue made from streaming has always a tiny proportion of any band's overall income. I've always looked on it as nice little extra bonus.

There's an extensive thread about stand-alone drum machine and DAW plug-ins here.

If you look more closely he's only worth that much because the Spotify share offer and the fact that gullible investors have gone out and bought them, despite the fact that Spotify have still not managed to show how to make a profit running a streaming service, even at the bargain basement rates that the record labels have agreed upon with them. It's all "Emperor's New Clothes" and at some point the investors will realise that and pull the plug.

Another update... According to the Interparcel tracking the parcel is still in Belgian Customs awaiting clearing. The person to whom I am sending this parcel has heard nothing so far, so it's not being held up because they haven't paid VAT and/or Import Duty, although. According to the Belgian Post Office web site the customs delays are 20-24 days. The 24 day deadline expired last Friday. I got in touch with Interparcel and they promised to escalate the enquiry and I would receive a reply with 72 hours. That deadline expired at CoP on Wednesday. Further conversations with Interparcel revealed that they still haven't heard anything and are apparently chasing it up again. It will be Monday at the earliest before I hear anything, at which point the parcel will have been in transit for 6 weeks. If Interparcel can't give me an update by then I am going to push for the parcel to be declared lost and get my insurance.

But they are tat. No-one back in the 70s bought these instruments because they really wanted this particular guitar or bass. They bought them because they were all they could afford, and if the terrible quality and lack of playability didn't put them off playing for life, they were unceremoniously dumped as soon as they could afford something better.

This is the sort of mis-information put out by CD Baby and other Aggregator services who are based in the US and aim their advice mainly at US based artists where the rules on getting royalties (especially for publishing are different). What you need first and foremost is ISRC codes which in the UK you can get yourself for FREE simply by registering your "record label" with the PPL. That gets you a unique record label identifier code and then ability to generate as many ISRCs as you need forever. It's the ISRCs that are used by the PRS to identify tracks for performance royalties. The UPC/EAN codes are part of the service the Aggregators provide, and IIRC are a tiny percentage of the admin fee for getting your music on the streaming and download services. Also if you are a UK-based artist you don't need any of the Aggregators' "publishing services" because what they offer is entirely covered by PRS membership, and they don't actually do any proper "publishing" - i.e. services that songwriters would expect for someone taking a percentage of their performance royalties such as promoting the songs for use in TV and film production, or trying to get other artists to cover them. In fact before the rise of using "rock" music (in all it's various sub genres) as the sound track for films and TV programmes I would have said their was very little point in any non-mainstream artist having a publishing deal as they were unlikely to get any benefits but simply lose a fair percentage of their income. Also if other people have uploaded your music to YouTube you can find and register these with the PRS and claim the royalties. One of the bands I'm in does quite nicely out of this arrangement.

How do you know that they're not just another group of Japanese Visual Kei pretty boys? Have a look at some "Malice Mizer" and "Versailles" videos if you don't believe me.

The problem is not Spotify. It's the fact that the record labels take a massive proportion of the royalties that a Spotify play produces, and they sold the streaming rights for (relatively) next to nothing. Looking at what my songs earn from a Spotify play, if I had 1,000,000 streams I'd be doing quite nicely. Not enough to give up the day job, but certainly enough to finance the next round of recordings and videos for one of my bands - in other words a great deal more than £33. That's because I haven't signed a crap deal with a rip-off record company. On the other hand I don't have a 1,000,000 streams because very few people have heard of either of the bands I play with, so if a record label came along and could guarantee getting my music the sort of publicity that would generate millions of streams I might at least take a second look at that deal. The other problem is that streaming doesn't really pay anyone. None of the major players actually make any money off providing streaming services, even when they are paying peanuts for the privilege. They are either being propped up by the profitable parts of their parent companies, or gullible investors who still haven't seen any return on what they have put in. SoundCloud did manage to turn a profit for a while but that's because they weren't paying any royalties at all! Since that was discovered they have been in financial difficulties.

I used to be a Freur/Underworld obsessive and bought everything they released in every format. This was partly spurred on by the discovery that for the some the albums the CD versions of some of the songs were different to those on the vinyl versions. Since everything has now been put into my iTunes library, I've rationalised the collection and removed all those songs that are exact duplicates.

As well as being low in volume, does the signal from the turntable also sound weak in the bass and boosted in the treble content?

Not really cheap as: 1. Its still got a day or so to go and as everyone knows all the serious bidding on eBay happens in the last 10 seconds of an auction. If it was £199 Buy It Now then it could be considered cheap. However... 2. It's not in original condition. That pickup swap is particularly ugly, and there's replacement no-brand machine heads. 3. The action looks scarily high and it looks as though there might be neck bow issues (unless that's just crap photography). The only thing it has in its favour for keeping the price low is it's collection only.

Which part of the electronics does the board in question cover? If it is the Wal part then get in touch with Paul Herman at Wal. The MIDI part was designed by Steve Chick who now runs Industrial Radio and should be able to help you with that.

Any mid-scoop is all to do with the position of the pickups. Change their positions either in relation to the length of the strings or the distance they are apart or both, and you will alter the scoop frequency and/or the amount of scoop. You may even find an arrangement where there is a mid-boost. The only way that active electronic can help is if the centre frequency of the mids control corresponds with the centre frequency of the scoop cause by the pickup positioning. Then you can boost that part of the signal to compensate. Or you could wire them in series which will change it yet again.

And finally (I really do think that's it unless HJ has any specific questions that I haven't addressed), when you get your tracks mastered make sure that they are optimised for cutting to vinyl. There are certain things that are perfectly acceptable for digital reproduction that will render your record either uncuttable and/or unplayable. Things to watch out for a extreme low frequency boost and anything involving phase differences across the stereo field - vinyl being a mechanical playback medium absolutely hates phase changes that occur across the stereo field. A quick and dirty check for stereo phase problems (although it won't pick up everything that will be problematic for vinyl reproduction) is to play back your recordings in mono. If any effects or instruments either disappear or become significantly louder when you do this then there is a stereo phase problem. It is better to catch as many of these as possible before you have the tracks mastered as there is nothing worse than being told by the mastering engineer that you need to have stuff remixed because the current versions aren't capable of being cut to vinyl. Also you should have separate masters made for your digital versions - i.e. for submitting to your Aggregator for iTMS, Spotify etc. as well as for making promo CDs if you need these. Ideally get them "Mastered For iTunes" which should compensate as far as possible for changes to the mix caused by lossy compression used for downloads and streaming. Any mastering service that tells you you can use the same masters for both digital and vinyl isn't worth bothering with and you should look elsewhere.

I'm also in the audience on some of the Fra-Foa live DVD. They happened to be on tour while I was on holiday in Japan and myself and my travelling companions went to the the Kyoto gig. An all-round very bizarre experience. 1. Even though this was a small gig by an indie Japanese band, it was possible to buy tickets for it from the Lawson 24 hour shop through their nation-wide ticket purchase system. 2. On arrival at the venue, it appeared to be a "barn" at the back of a parking lot somewhere close to the main shopping area of Kyoto. 3. The tickets were numbered but there were no seats, so entry was done according to ticket number. If you had a low numbered ticket you could stand at the front. The higher your ticket number the later you were let in and therefore the further back you were. Our tickets were in the low 200s and we were about the last to be let in. However once the band came on all the politeness went out of the widow and we were able to get much closer to the front. 4. You were given a bottle of beer on entry, probably because there was no bar and therefore a way of letting the audience have a drink and not upset any local licensing laws. One of my companions tried to get a second bottle mid-way through the gig, which cause no end of confusion among the organisers!