BigRedX

The Newtones suit my playing style better, normal bass guitar thickness on the E and A string and a bit more lighter and flexible on as you go higher which suits the guitar-style lines played on the higher strings better. Plus they are cheaper than LaBellas.

You're welcome. I prefer the Newtones. And contributing to this thread has just reminded me to order some spares!

The stock strings for all budget Bass VIs IME are based on the typical fender Bass VI string gauges - 84 - 24. Most people seem to be much better off with the heavier gauge strings from LaBella which are 95 - 26. Personally I like the Newtone Axion Bass VI strings (only round wound) which are lighter at the top and heavier at the bottom - 100 - 24.

If I could find a Bass VI with a neck as wide as that of a typical Classical Guitar, I'd be a happy chap. The Squier Bass VI is definitely in narrow 70s Strat neck territory. Also be aware many of the Bass Vis available for some reason have the outer strings positioned quite far in from the neck edges compared with most guitars and basses, so the nut widths given can make the string spacing at the neck seem more generous than it really is.

I'm using a Bass VI exclusively for one of the bands I play with. I have a Squier Bass VI and a Burns Barracuda. TBH I don't like the Squier very much as I find the string spacing on the neck far too narrow. Whoever thought it was good a idea to take a neck that is already narrow by electric guitar standards and fit even chunkier string to it was obviously not thinking straight - even my 6 string electric guitars have a wider neck than the Squier Bass VI. I started a whole thread about my quest for a more suitable Bass VI for my needs here where most of the alternatives have been discussed. And having said that the Squier's string spacing at the nut is too narrow, the Burns has better neck string spacing, but is less good at the bridge (compared with the Squier). IMO the problem with most of the these instruments is that they are essentially guitars with long necks shoe-horned on to give a 30" scale length. Out of all the Bass VIs I've tried the Burns Barracuda is the one that places the least number of restrictions upon my playing style, but everyone is different so you really need to try each bass and make up your own mind. Personally having played both, I'd pick the Revelation over the Squier, they are fairly similar, but the Relation has more usable tonal variations and slightly more space between the strings which makes it (for me) a bit easier to play. All of these budget Bass VIs come with strings that are really too light for the average bass player. It is less noticeable on the Burns because it has a different style bridge, but all will benefit from changing the strings to either LaBellas (flat or round wound), or Newtone Axion Bass VI Round wound stings ( my personal choice).

Apart form a couple of years when I was using a MiK Warwick StarBass and the Burns Barracuda I currently use with one of my bands, my main basses have all been made in the UK: Burns, Overwater, Gus, Sei. Same with my guitars, Home-made, Fretking, Gus. And when there are so many quality parts made all over the world, it seems pointless to "re-invent the wheel" just so that you can say everything on a bass was made in the same country. And where do you stop? Do you insist that all the raw materials used to make those parts come from the UK too?

The only way you can find out if the arrangement of tuners is functional is to actually try them both sitting down and with the bass on a variety of different length straps. While having the tuners pointing towards the body of the bass might look more practical and ergonomic, IME it doesn't actually make any difference from a functional PoV. As a designer I think the problem stems from the fact that the current design has the post for the D-string tuner too close to the end of the headstock, and with the tuners on straight, the tuner key sticks out beyond the end of the headstock on that side which doesn't look right. When you were designing the headstock shape did you visualise it with the tuners in place? If you are going to use this headstock shape on future designs I would either make the offset less extreme or move the D-string tuner slightly closer to the nut.

Just re-enforces my belief that personal computer grade connectors have no place on stage at a gig.

As overs have said just because a unit is old doesn't affect its functionality. The software for the Helix range is being continually updated for free, so my recommendation would be for whatever out of the range best suits your needs. And to underline the point about old not necessarily meaning out of date even in the fast moving world of high-tech musical equipment, until I got the Helix, the main component of my guitar rig was a Roland GP8, one of the very first multi-effects units available, dating from the mid-80s, and still going strong. The only one of my previous effect units I've kept is a Linn Adrenalinn Mk1 which itself is almost 20 years old.

Exactly. There will be vinyl pressings of anything that actually got released out there somewhere and a good restoration engineer can work wonders with those.

But MP3 and DAB are no longer serious delivery systems, now that the bandwidth is available for uncompressed 16bit 44.1KhZ audio. They are the dictaphone tape of digital world.

Analogue tape recording is always best viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of those who have never spent much time using it (or who only used it in top flight studio where there were always good engineers to shield them from the complexities). Straight off even a standard CD quality (16 bit, 44.1kHz) digital recording will have a larger dynamic range and better frequency response than the vast majority of analogue recordings. How good your recording on analogue tape is, will be down to many factors but tape width and speed are two of the most important ones. But every improvement you make also has a trade off. Increasing the tape width per track increases the signal and noise ratio and the dynamic range available, but at the same time you also need to increase the tape speed to compensate for high frequency loss due to azimuth wander as the tape passes over the playback head. So you would think that all you need to do is to have tape with wide tracks running at high speed. Unfortunately as you increase the tape speed, while high frequency response increases, low frequency response will decrease. Everything is a compromise, and while you should get better results on a stereo master running at 15ips by going from 1/4" tape (with a 1/8" track width) to 1/2" tape (with a 1/4" track width), you have to remember that your audio is coming from a 24 track 2" tape where the track width is only 1/12", so the audio quality has been compromised before it ever reaches the tape for the final mix. And all of these systems are outperformed by the humble CD.

No, Bu if you are a 4-piece band playing sub three minute pop punk songs, then you should be able to take most songs from the initial idea to something that is close to being ready to gig within the space of an average three hour rehearsal. The trick is to come prepared. I have a load of musical ideas that are always ready to be the starting point for a new song or used in conjunction with someone else's idea to turn a simple riff or tune into a close to finished piece of music. If the rest of your band is like this writing and arranging new material should be quick and easy.

IIRC you are using a load of digital stuff as part of your signal chain which already adds a degree of latency to the signal, and the wireless is just adding enough extra for the cumulative effect to be noticeable. Unfortunately sone of the more popular digital wireless units while perfectly capable on their own are already very close to the acceptable latency figures and couple these with any other digital effect you will be into noticeable latency. Also as EBS-freak has pointed out if you are monitoring in software rather than hardware when recording again the cumulative effect might be just pushing the latency over the edge. What wireless units have you been using and what is you studio signal path?

I'll get as close as I possibly can to the right sound(s) for each song on my Helix, but it won't be until I'm in rehearsal with the rest of the band playing that I can make the appropriate fine tunings.

If the band is good and the musicians all on the same musical wavelength, it's dead easy. It also helps if your singer has a bookful of lyrical ideas, and just needs to find the right ones to fit the music. The song may well develop over the course of the next few gigs and rehearsals but the recorded version will be 90%+ the same as the one we played at the first gig.

And respectfully you are wrong. 1. Analogue recording for the most part is terrible. You are constantly fighting distortion against signal to noise ratio, and the dynamic range is poor compared to even 16bit digital. Every extra track you use at the multi-track stage and every time you do a mix down or bounce you are adding more tape noise to the signal. Add in the fact that many bands of tape for both multi-track and mixed masters is now starting to deteriorate badly - if you are lucky anything recorded on Ampex tape might make it through the single pass required to make a digital copy. A good digital transfer will be as good as the original analogue master allows it to be. 2. No, you can't know how good unreleased tracks are going to be without hearing them. But... listening to what does get released, IMO most bands struggle to write and record 50 minutes of quality music for each album. The best songs get released as singles, then the rest of the album is filled with the next best songs and what is left over is used for the B-sides of the singles. Therefore if there is anything left over, it will be less good than the least interesting B-side or album track. The same with alternative takes of the tracks that do make it onto the releases. The best version gets released to others don't. Certainly as a punter I have yet to hear a previously unreleased track or alternative take that I thought was better than the ones the band and/or record company chose to release at the time. 3. An original master is an important document, but I'm not keen on artists who go back and fiddle with the past to try and improve upon it. By all means have another go at recording the songs if you think you can do something better with them, but leave the original recordings alone. As a songwriter I have more fun revisiting old ideas with new bands/musicians and seeing what new elements they can bring to them, than going back and tarting up old recordings. A recording is a document of it's time, the technical limitations of the recording process are part of the sound, and you made the recording you had to based on the techniques and facilities available at the time. Don't for a moment think that if musicians who made their recordings direct live, direct to mono because that is all that was available would have made the same records if they had access to a modern multitrack studio. 4. Maybe not, but most of the music lost has sat un-listened to in a vault for 20+ years. If the record label though they were worth releasing, I'm sure they would have done so by now, after back catalogue is where the money is the days. As for the artists involved, none of them were making a very vocal fuss about the recordings until it looked as though they had been destroyed in the fire. That to me says they had all moved on the new things musically. And the most important fact of all is that AFAIK the vast majority of the recordings lost were the property of Universal Music, and while losing the originals of your back catalogue is poor business, that's all it is.

A productive rehearsal is one where you turn someone's idea for a new song into a finished fully arranged number and can play it well enough to be able to gig it that weekend.

By which I meant one of your T-Bird shaped basses. On the other hand just buy a Lull JT4. You know you want to. 😉

I that case, if it was me I'd buy the cheapest Fender Precision Bass that I could get on with and, if the project took off, look at getting something that still looks the part but is more comfortable to play (how about a Mike Lull JT4?). Although TBH from the description of the band surely one of your Thunderbirds should fit right in?

If someone asked me to use a Fender Bass I'd turn up with a Coronado or a Bass VI. Or perhaps buy that Alien Ant Farm custom shop model that turns up on eBay every so often.

Somewhat like the Klein Bass

It's very difficult to recommend a DAW as they all have their individual strengths and weaknesses, and what suits one person won't always suit another. I would make two points: 1. Reaper is nice and cheap but AFAICS it doesn't come with as many bundled effect and instrument plug-ins as most of the commercial offerings, so depending on what you need one of the more expensive DAWs might end up being better value. 2. If you are going to collaborate with anyone else, get whatever they are using. While OMF and AAF can do a great job transferring sessions between different DAWs my experience is that the conversion will let you down in a spectacularly bad way just when you need it most, so the easiest way to avoid disappointment is for all the people working on a particular project to be using the same DAW.

AFAIK there weren't actually any "lawsuits". It was more of a "cease on desist" that was already out of date, as by the time it was issued the Japanese manufacturers had either: 1. Moved on to producing their own original designs. 2. Changed the design of their copies enough to avoid copyright/trademark infringement. 3. Stopped exporting their instruments.

@akabane the bands that I like are still releasing music on physical formats and their fans are still buying them, so for the music that I would be interested in supporting there is a good chance that I would see a return on my investment. However these bands are selling their product off the back of gigging, and it has been my experience that unless your band is very well established (to the point where you shouldn't need crowd funding) the only way to continue generating sales for physical formats is to gig and sell copies to people who come to the gigs. Maybe as an alternative strategy in this age of streaming would not be to record albums at all, but to release a single song/piece of music every 3-4 months as a promotional item, and the only way people are able to hear the rest of your material they have to come and see you play live. Also, if as an artist you are serious business venture (as I suspect Rocco Prestia is), rather than just doing it for your own enjoyment then your business model needs to be one where income from each previous release funds the production of the next release. You might need to put in some of your own money in the first instance, but from then on it should be self-funding. That was certainly the way one of my previous bands operated. I put up the money to record and release our first EP, but the recording and production of subsequent releases were funded from sales of the back catalogue and other merchandise. If you can't do this then either your "product" isn't appealing enough or your business model is wrong. Start small and work your way up to an album that is going cost $50k to produce when your income from your back catalogue and royalties support it.