BigRedX

But would he want to? Musically they are on different planets.

Exactly. Surely the whole point of the Thunderbird is that it's not a Fender?

More importantly can we turn the graphics off an use old-school text emojis without having them automatically converted? It used to be an option in previous versions of the forum software.

Age only matters if you (and the others in your band) let it matter. Having similar musical influences and ambitions (however big or small) are far more important. In The Terrortones I was by far the oldest member of the band (in my 50s) and by contrast one of our many drummers was only 17 when he joined the band, but we all wanted to play the same kind of music and be out there every weekend gigging so the difference in ages didn't matter. Same with my two current bands, although we are mostly much closer in ages we share a love of the same kind of music and want to be creative and gig.

Entirely depends on how the rest of the band play it and how closely their instrumentation and arrangement match the original.

I wasn't gigging but simply playing music for my own amusement, I'd probably sell all my basses and just keep a guitar and a synth.

I would hope so. The synth band I was a member of in 1984 had an original TR808, in the days when it was a pricy bit of kit, but the decent alternatives were even more expensive. We would struggle to get more than one song's worth of patterns in it and chaining them together to form a song involved actually running the song in real time and switching patterns manually in the correct place for the device to remember the order. If you made a mistake it was simpler to stop and try again then go back and edit it.

And value is relative. If my expensive gear gets stolen or damaged I can easily replace now it with something cheap that will do the job. If I'd had my first bass stolen or damaged back in the early 80s that would have been it. Despite the fact that it only cost £60, I would have taken me another 3 to 4 months of being careful with my food spending to afford a replacement, by which time the band would either have folded or replaced me.

I was thinking more of the potential for serious physical violence against myself or my fellow band members. I've played some "dubious" places in front of "scary" looking audiences, but because it's been originals and the people are there primarily to see the bands and listen to the music, rather than us being a distraction after the football, or a soundtrack to drunken posturing, there has never been any real problems. However I've been to see friends play in covers bands and the amount of violent knobheads that seem to use the presence of alcohol and loud live music as an excuse to kick off is staggering, even in pubs that don't normally have a dodgy reputation. Makes me glad I'm not involved in the covers scene.

As I have said many times before in threads like this, I have no idea why you would be worried about taking expensive equipment to a "dodgy" pub, but not worried about your person? If my equipment gets damaged or stolen it is replaceable. If my body got damaged it might well be game over for my playing yet no one seems to consider this.

No guilt whatsoever. Most because when I first started gigging in the early 80s I was mostly playing synthesisers, and at the time the entry level for a basic mono-synth was £200, for a poly-synth was £1000 and anything with user programmable memories on it was £3000 upwards. By comparison even the most expensive bass guitar is in real terms relatively cheap.

I don't either a Rob Allen MB2 or a Shuker Artist, but I have tried both, and I would go for the Rob Allen every time. Shuker make some very nice looking basses, but I have yet to play one (and I've played a fair few) that I even remotely liked the feel of. It could be just me because everyone else seems to think they are great, but as someone who has tried them and cannot got on with them at all, I ought to point out that they are not for everyone, and you should most definitely try before you buy.

Please let us know if you get a reply...

While Entwistle could most definitely play I think he got away with standing still because visually there were plenty of other things happening in the band.

That reminds me about a contender for worst concert for me - Fleet Foxes at Nottingham Trent University probably 2009 (after their debut album). Musically it was fine, all the great songs off the album complete with all those fantastic harmonies, but as a performance a disaster. Endless tuning and retuning between songs, rambling mumbled introductions to the songs that were mostly incomprehensible where I was stood about half-way back. Banter between the band members off-mic, and between the band and audience members at the front that was again incomprehensible where I was stood because I could at best only hear half the conversation. This would probably have been fine in a small intimate club, but in a largish (500-700 capacity) hall most of what was happing between songs was lost on 90% of the audience. All in all the messing about between songs made the gig go on about twice as long as it needed to, I have rarely been so bored at a gig.

Not vintage though. These were re-issed a couple of years ago and judging from the modern machine heads this is a re-issue.

I hope you will let them know that.

You should always use the balanced connections if both the interface and speakers have them.

I think you should call them. Ibanez are distributed in the Uk by Headstock distribution and their contact number is: 0121 508 6666

What exactly do you want to do? If it's just making sure that selecting a preset on one selects the correct preset on the other I would hope that at least one of these devices supports MIDI program mapping. If it's something else you'll need to provide more details.

Anyone who can't work out the chords for most of those songs in the OP should probably give up learning to play 😉

The red one.

I only very rarely go to "concert" sized gigs. Rock City in Nottingham tends to be my limit and even then it's normally too busy for me to really enjoy it. Back in the 80s when I was going there regularly, the capacity was much lower than it is now and never seemed as completely rammed as it has been at gigs I've attended since 2000. I'd rather go and see a band at The Rescue Rooms or The Bodega. The majority of gigs I've really enjoyed have been in places with less than 500 capacity. TBH by the time a band has "out-grown" Rock City sized venues they've had to move on musically to a place I am no longer interested in.

Back in 1980 when I moved to Nottingham, it was a time before Rock City and The Royal Concert Hall, (and after the Sandpiper) where there were few opportunities to go and see really well-known bands without travelling to another city or knowing someone who was a student at Nottingham University. The Theatre Royal put on a series of reasonably well-known bands over the summer - I saw Ultravox (with Midge Ure) and Lene Lovich there, but if you were into the sort of music that John Peel played The Boat Club and The Ad-Lib Club were fantastic. Over the next 9 months (until the opening of Rock City essentially killed them off as music venues) I saw Bauhaus, Classix Nouveax, The Au Pairs, Sector 27 (Tom Robinson), Young Marble Giants, U2, Comsat Angels, Bow Wow Wow, Orange Juice, and whole load of great Nottingham bands.

It would have been October or November 1980, on the tour promoting the "Boy" album. I'd just moved to Nottingham and it was one of the first gigs I went to. Other than having heard the name I knew nothing about the band, and was persuaded to come to the gig by a friend of mind who had seen them previously (supporting the Only Ones IIRC). Was massively impressed with the songs and particularly The Edge's guitar playing. We also went with someone who knew them personally from when they played in Dublin, so I got to meet Bono and The Edge afterwards...