BigRedX

The actual Jackson Pollock technique was to have the canvas on the floor and suspend a bucket with a hole in it above it on a rope. The resulting "finish" is very "3D" though. Whatever you decide to do I would clear-coat over the top.

What size venues are you playing? Does the bass go through the PA or do you rely on your rig for the audience to hear the bass? If the bass goes into the PA where is the feed taken from? DI from the bass? DI from the amp? Mic on the cab?

He's probably given up, as that was the last thread he contributed to and he hasn't been back since the end of 2014...

Absolutely! I'm in the middle of selling the two bass rigs and guitar rig that it is replacing. Also in one band it has allowed me to use my Bass VI without needing a complex dual amp rig for the "guitar" and "bass" sounds that I produce with it. In the other band the FRFR goes under the stand for the backing computer for a completely minimal stage footprint. I cannot ever see myself going back to a "conventional" bass rig unless I joined a band that required one for show (and it would only be for show) and they had a road crew to move it for me.

When I was last playing guitar live I was DI'ing my guitar amp. But then I was running a Hughes & Kuttner Tube 50 with a built-in Red Box DI system. We did an A/B test in the studio and the DI feed was virtually indistinguishable from that of an SM57 off-axis to the 12" speaker.

Lat year I switched to a Line6 Helix and an RCF745 FRFR speaker - total cost just over £2k new. The bass rig that they replaced cost me about the same at (mostly) second hand prices ten years previously.

It's a holiday. Enjoy the time away. On the few occasions when I have gone on holiday and taken my bass it has always been when I have gone in the company of other musicians. Invariably over the course of 7 days away we end up playing for a few hours in total at the very most. The rest of the time we are too busy doing fun holiday-type things.

IME unless you only run one program at a time you should go for 8GB RAM as a minimum. Always choose an SSD over a HD drive as that is probably the biggest speed improvement you can get. Other than that, so long as the Mac you choose will run the OS version you need they are all plenty fast and powerful enough for everyone expect high-res video and 3D graphics professionals. I'm still running a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2008 Mac Pro which are fine for all my needs. I am going to be upgrading my Mac Pro, but only because some of the programs I haver to run for my work, require a newer version of Mac OS than El Capitan. If it wasn't for this, the Mac would be more than adequate.

As others have said, cutting through is as much about not fighting with the other instruments for sonic space.

@Happy Jack

Even with a bi-amped rig and the bright box connected to the high frequency output, it made no discernible difference to my sound.

I'm very much into things looking good when gigging, but... In the past I've been in bands that had so much equipment on stage (not just amp stacks, but racks full of synths and samplers) that there was hardly any room left for the musicians, and when you are hemmed in on stage it is hardly conducive to putting on a good (visual) performance. These days when one of my bands does a "big" gig, the stage is normally already full of impressive looking rigs for the headlining band. We just set up next to these. The FRFR I'm using for the bass is practically invisible on these stages from the audience PoV so it just looks as though I' using whatever impressive looking bass rig the headliner has bought with them.

I owned one for a couple of hours (the time it took to get it home, try it out for 10 minutes and take it back to the shop for a refund) in the late 80s. Does absolutely nothing unless you already have a treble-heavy bass sound.

Not quite at that level... But this poster I created for a gig I played in 1984 is now part of the Victoria & Albert Museum's permanent collection. Also in Sound On Sound Magazine in the early 2000s there was an interview with Steve Levine in including photos of his home studio where the CD from the band I was in at the time was visible amongst a pile of stuff on his desk.

The quick and dirty calculation for working out VAT and import duty used to be to take the declared value of the instrument (for insurance purposes) plus the shipping costs and add on 25% plus an extra £20 for customs clearance and you won't have any nasty surprises. Unfortunately CITES has added a new level of complexity. Instruments with CITES listed woods need both an export licence (to be arranged by the sender) and an import licence (to be arranged by the recipient) and both must be in place before the instrument is sent. I've looked before for the cost of a CITES export licence from the US and can't find any actual prices. However the UK import licence is £76 IIRC so I would imagine that the US export licence will cost about the same. TBH for me CITES just makes the whole process too time-consuming, complicated and expensive.

For bass you probably would need to use a 300 Watt amp if you were going also use an impedance matcher, as any setting that isn't a 1:1 match is going dissipate at leat 1/3 of the amp's power as heat through the resistors rather than sound through the speakers.

Because in order to work their "magic" they will dissipate a significant proportion of the amplifier's power as heat through the resistors required to match the input and output impedances. The more different the input and output impedances are the less efficient it makes your rig in terms of power being used to produce sound. Also the particular device pictured is only good for amplifiers up to 100 Watts, which makes it virtually useless for bass rigs. A device rated for at least 300 Watts (which is what most bass players will need as a minimum) is going to be significantly bigger, heavier and probably require fan cooling. Most sensible people simply buy a rig where the amp and speakers are properly matched.

IME most Yamaha analog synths have weedy horrible filters.

For the band where I play "normal bass" two bass lines from songs I'm going to be playing in that night's set. One with a fairly standard bass sound and the other with the most "different" sound I'm going to be using from that standard. For the band where I play the Bass VI, any song that has a "bass" part and a "guitar" part in it. Form the PoV of getting an overall band mix, the best one I've seen was a rockabilly band with their own sound engineer who started with the vocals and then mixed all the other instruments around that. They had the perfect sound every night.

One of the venues where The Terrortones used to play regularly had a loose board on stage that co-incided with the position of the kick drum pedal and any backline. The stage was far too small to allow any positioning that didn't make this board a problem. Without the Gramma Pad the effect on the bass rig was not ideal. With it, the motion was positively alarming!

I ditched my Gramma Pad as I found it made little difference to the sound, and made my bass rig extra wobbly on uneven stages.

For the most flexibility in sound creation you need the following: Two oscillators (plus LFO) with cross-mod and sync Two ADSR (minimum) envelope generators. Everything else is just a matter of taste, but without these facilities you will struggle to create any really interesting sounds.

The example in the OP just makes me want to ask "why?" Boss pedals are some of the most robust and economically designed pedals ever created, so why anyone would want to rehouse it is beyond me. I suppose if you wanted to fake it to make it look like a boutique pedal, but then it really needs the graphics to be designed by a 5-year old and to move either the input or output sockets to a less practical position.

IMO amp and cab modelling is a bit of a red herring. After all the original purpose of a bass amp and speakers was simply a way of getting a loud sound out of a solid electric instrument. The fact that amps (and cabs) had "sounds" was mostly an accident or limitations of the technology in the 50s and 60s, and has only become desirable later on once we've all got used to hearing them. The original musical instrument amplifiers were never design to have a sound. They were supposed to as neutral as the technology and price point allowed them to be. Also most bass sounds we hear and like have never been anywhere near an amp or cabs. In the studio it will have been DI'd directly from the bass into some very expensive studio outboard EQ and compression units. On stage it will have been DI'd directly into the PA system.

Not very keen on the way the pick guard doesn't follow the shape of the body on the lower half.