BigRedX

I'd love to switch (along with the rest of my band) to IEM, but IME if you are not running your own PA you simply don't know what the monitoring facilities will be like at every venue. While most will be digital with multiple sends you can't guarantee it. With digital desks, I've seen bands we've shared the bill with interface their IEM with varying degrees of success. However not every venue is so well equipped. We've just done some dates with B-Movie and the one support we couldn't do in Leeds, the PA was reportedly controlled from a 16 channel analogue desk with one monitor send. I have no idea what we would have done if we'd turned up there with no backline and IEM...

I don't know what kinds of gigs your band plays, but remember that computer plugs and cables are not even remotely as robust as your typical jack or XLR lead.

If you want it to look boutique get a 5-year old to draw you something and then burn it on with a soldering iron. Ideally everything in the signal path should be shielded to avoid interference pickup.

If that's your pedal board and the DI is being placed at the end of it, unless every single pedal is true bypass it won't make a scrap of difference to the DI whether the bass is active or passive.

Fair enough, but to me the setup sounded intriguing enough for me to at least want to meet the other members. I've used JMB once. I was very specific about what I was looking for both musically and in terms of organisation and ambitions, and the one band who answered my ad were as a consequence exactly what I was looking for. I'm still with them now.

The other thing to realise is that on nearly every set of bass guitar strings the highest tension string is the D. Then as you move higher or lower from this, the tension reduces with each string. The result is that the B string is by far to lowest tension string in a 5-string set and for anyone without the lightest of light touches when playing it is very noticeable. For me 130 is the thinnest low B I would consider and usually I would want a 135 minimum to go with the feel of a standard 40-100 4-string set.

I assume you must all be playing covers in pubs with vocal only PA systems then? Having spent most of my gigging life playing in "originals" bands, full PA support has very much been the norm except for a handful of tiny venues. My switch to FRFR came as a result of a succession of gigs where I'd been asked to turn down my bass rig on stage so far, that despite the fact than I was stood right in front of it, I could hear the bass guitar louder from the guitarist's monitor wedge on the other side of the stage. It was at this point that I had to admit that the rig was 100% for show and nothing after the BassPod was contributing in any way towards what audience were hearing, and often nothing to what I was hearing either. And a lot of the time when my rig was expected to provide a decent volume for the audience to hear the bass guitar, it was so loud on stage I was having trouble hearing the rest of the band! For the last few gigs I haven't even bothered with the FRFR, relying solely on the PA monitors to hear the bass. It has made no difference to the on-stage sound at all, and I'll only be taking it to the next two gigs because they are at venues I haven't played at before and I don't know how good the supplied foldback will be.

Exactly. Which is why I have stopped using them and rely on other methods to get the bass sound I want.

I would suspect that the majority of bassists using FRFR cabs over a "traditional" bass rig are using them, like I do, solely for on-stage monitoring where being able to hear what you are playing is far more important than having a "awesome tone" - that's being handled by the FoH system. Since I switch to an FRFR system I've only once had to use it without the benefit of PA support and that's when I was using my Bass VI so the additional HF support and projection was useful.

But in order for anyone else to get the benefit of this "magic" the cabs need to be mic'd up rather than the bass DI'd.

I had Yodel deliver parcels for me twice to an address with the same number and street name but in a completely different part of Nottingham - NG1 as opposed to NG7. If the address had been hand written and the 7 looked like a 1, then I could have forgiven them, but the labels were printed and it was very clearly a 7. Besides the second part of the postcode is completely different.

TBH very little of this matters if the electronic music fan has some decent musical ideas that you can turn into great songs, any serious recording will be done at least in part in a proper studio, and the singer might just be the person required to make the band stick out.

For both bands it's by consensus. However I always think that the flow of the set should be dictated as far as possible by the songs rather than any practical considerations. If two songs are hard to sing/play back to back then you just need to practice some more IMO. Similarly starting with something easy to "warm up". Do your warming up somewhere off stage and come on ready to give it your all with your second-best song (the best one should be saved for the end) rather than compromising the set so you can have an easier time.

I've been using effects on the bass pretty much since I got my first one back in 1981, but then I also play guitar and synthesisers and I've always been interested in "sound". These days I run a Line6 Helix which give me everything I need and allows me to tailor my bass sound to fit into each individual song for both my bands that have very different overall sounds (and for which I use very different basses).

Thanks for taking the time to do this and the results were pretty much what I expected.

But how much did that combo contribute to either the FoH sound or what went on the records? I got rid of my rig because anywhere I played that had PA support - which is about 99% of all gigs I do - the contribution the speakers make to what the audience hears is zero for all except a very small number right down at the front stood directly in line with it.

IME in a live band mix you are unlikely to hear any difference at all. What you tend to get with the more expensive DI boxes (that are just DI boxes with no features other than being able to take an unbalanced signal at a variety of different levels and convert it to a balanced line) is reliability and robustness. I have a couple of EMO DI boxes that I bought second hand about 30 years ago. One of them had obviously had a fairly hard life before I acquired it as most of the graphics on the casing had worn off, but it was working perfectly back then and it is still working perfectly now. Interested to see what exactly was inside, I once unscrewed the base to find that all the available space was completely taken up by the sockets and the transformers, with some fairly heavy duty wire joining them all together. There's no way any of the components can move and being a passive device housed in an extremely robust metal case, there's almost nothing that can go wrong. I've had "interesting" experiences with some of the more budget DI boxes in that they won't work properly with some equipment. Most notable was the Behringer DI that almost every PA seems to have that simply would not work with The Terrortones Etherwave Theremin. It wasn't an isolated experience either. If the PA was getting no signal from the Theremin, checking the DI box would show that it was the Behringer and replacing it with one of my EMOs would result in the Theremin signal getting to the desk. We never worked out why this was happening, but the theory was that the earthing system on the two devices was incompatible resulting the the output from the Theremin being shorted to earth. Not a good thing for a device that is supposed to sort out equipment interfacing problems.

It the bass line is anything like the average rock song probably no more than two.

I can't see the point. Instruments are meant to be played.

As a seller, I've encountered the maximum parcel size problem before when I tried to ship a guitar to an Argos address. There was no information from Argos itself and first I knew of it was when the guitar was delivered back to my address about 2 weeks after I sent it. Tracking showed that it had two delivery attempts that were refused before the courier gave up and brought it back. Since then I've simply removed the "click and collect" option from all my auctions irrespective of the size and weight of the item. I can't be bothered with the hassle.

I would completely agree from a presentation/visual aspect, but when you look at the price Vs a standard 4 page book and double-sided tray inset in an all-clear jewel case, it becomes much harder to justify the cost.

In the 45 years I've been playing in bands I think I have joined or formed bands by pretty much every method mentioned in the OP. I never actually actually answered an ad in NME or MM, but I did find a singer for one of the bands I was in by that method (after weeding out numerous weirdos first). A lot of the time one band would morph into another. I spent all of the 90s in a band that went through 4 different names, numerous line-ups including a 12 month period when I left the band and swapping from bass to guitar in the later incarnations, but with the style of music being played remaining consistent and I think when we finally split we were still playing at least one song from our first set. My first band formed in the mid 70s was just a bunch of friends from school who all had similar tastes in non-mainstream music and some degree of musical ability. The two bands I play in now... I found one through a Facebook post, although I was already a fan and they knew of me through gigs we had done together when I was playing with The Terrortones. The other is a morph from a band I joined through the JMB web site (although again they knew of me from previous bands I had been in).

A re-press on vinyl might be worth it if your cover artwork is fantastic and somewhat limited by the small size of CD packaging. Just make sure it is of high enough quality to actually look good when blown up to 300 x 300 mm.

IME audience surveys are about as much use as those Facebook event posts where people say that they are coming to your gig. At best you can expect 25% of those who want to buy a product in a particular format will actual shell out their money when said product becomes available. Even something that should be simple like basing T-shirt sizes on your audience demographic falls down because no mater how many skinny hipsters come to see your band on a regular basis, the vast majority of people who buy band T-shirts are size Large and bigger.

When The Terrortones released our second EP on vinyl back in 2013 it was new and different and the lead times were about the same as those for CD manufacture. The quality and production times were much better than the last time I made a record back in the early 80s when it could take several months from the cutting session to actually getting your single or album; and when you did the pressing was really thin and already full of pops, clicks and crackles that weren't part of the music. From what I have seen recently vinyl is starting to plateau. Production times are ever increasing unless you are prepared to pay a considerable premium, and from what I've heard the quality of the pressings is starting to come down as the pressing plants struggle to keep up with the volumes being produced. When the audio quality of vinyl is already below that of a CD, it cannot afford to be anything but the best possible for that medium. Without new pressing plants capable of high volume, high quality and low cost pressings, vinyl will eventually flounder as it reverts back to the bad old days of the late 70s and early 80s. Having said that as an artist, right now, I'd be stupid not to at least consider vinyl when it comes to releasing music even if it's just so that I can sell over-priced crap to hipsters. After all a sale is a sale irrespective of the medium, and unless you go mad with the packaging the mark up for an album on vinyl is much greater than that on CD. You do need to consider your audience though. I've done gigs where I have only sold CDs - at one we sold every CD we brought with us but not a single record on vinyl. I've also done gigs where most of the sales were vinyl although at these we've always sold CDs too. What I have discovered is that if you are selling vinyl you need to include a CD version in the package, as for many potential customers a download code is not sufficient. As an audience member/customer, I'd always go for CDs first and foremost. It's easy to transfer to my computer and then on to all my other digital devices. I'll buy a record on vinyl only if it comes with a CD version or at least an uncompressed/lossless download. However as soon as I have got my download and checked it's OK the vinyl will be up for sale "as new" on Discogs as I have no need to keep archaic physical formats.