BigRedX

I do. Although I use a Bass VI for this. In one of my bands, the keyboard player and myself alternate between bass and melody parts, so when one of us is playing the bass part the other is doing chords or the melody and vice-versa.

Apart from optical systems such as those by Lightwave there are no true active pickups. However some conventional magnetic pickups are specifically designed to have a low output (for supposed tonal or low noise performance) and must be used in conjunction with additional active circuitry, which for the sake of convenience is built-in the the pickup housing. These are sold as "active" pickups although there is nothing active about the pickup mechanism - just the additional pre-amp used to match the signal and impedance to standard instrument level. So to answer the OP if you want to facility to be able to use your bass without any active circuitry you will need normal passive pickups and a separate active pre-amp that can be by-passed.

Personally I wouldn't bother with bubble wrap. You won't be able to put enough around a cab to make any significant difference in the event of it being dropped. Polystyrene slab or heavy duty cardboard tube at all the corners is far better and make sure that the cab can't move even slightly within the box when all packed up. Heavy duty cardboard should be available free from any shop that receives goods in large cardboard boxes. IME cycle shops are always keen to get rid of their unwanted boxes and packaging. Do use extra layers of card over the front to protect the speakers and at the back around the where the sockets are. Finally as @Deedee mentioned cutting holes in the packaging to allow the use of the handles on the cab is an excellent idea.

@BrunoBass yes definitely a Hagstrom or one of its rebadged variants - I got one second hand in the early 80s with a Futurama logo on it. The whole front of the bass is a single piece plastic molding, you can see the screws holding it on. The body would have been plywood covered in textured vinyl. Red and pale blue were the most common colours. Nice looking Burns guitar being sported by the guitarist on the right in the second photo.

For me friends are people I will see socially for things that don't involve music.

What do you mean by colleagues? People you work with outside of the band?

Mr Venom signed The Terrortones up to PledgeMusic when we first considered making an album, and I had a good look at the system to see what the pros and cons would be. I couldn't see any PledgeMusic "community" that would result in our campaign getting noticed or cross-promoted on the site itself. In the end we decided not to use the service, because we wanted to make the album in our own time when we had the right songs to record and an when we were happy that we had the right versions recorded. Also IMO there is nothing sadder than a band with a PledgeMusic campaign who don't manage to hit even their most basic targets. From experience having punters say they would buy your album after a gig doesn't in any way guarantee a sale when said album becomes available. The Terrortones album cost about £5k for 7 days recording, overdubbing and mixing, mastering all the tracks including a few extra that didn't make it onto the final release, packaging design and artwork, pressing 500 copies on vinyl, printing the packaging, and also making a promo video for one of the tracks and the first wave of promotion costs. We could have done it for a lot less (probably half the price at the most) if we had gone for CDs instead of vinyl and simplified the packaging, but we decided that the cost wasn't extravagant for a band that was out gigging every week and selling plenty of merch off the back of our gigging, plus divided between the band members it was by no means an unobtainable amount. As for sales and distribution, IME "independent" bands (who would normally be PledgeMusic's main customers) sell far more product at gigs then they ever do on line. For The Terrortones our total income from on-line sales of physical product, downloads and streaming was less than 10% of our sales of CDs and vinyl at gigs, and nearly all of those came through BandCamp who only take 10% of your sale price (as opposed to the 15% PM take). And for "independent" bands even in the days where record shops and distribution deals counted for something, the chances of actually seeing your money or getting your unsold stock back in the condition you originally supplied it was negligible. You might as well have given your stock away for free. In the past, I've known bands who lost all their records or CDs when distributors and record shops went bust. These days I wouldn't consider selling any of my band's physical product through a distributor or record shop unless I got the money up front, when it is far more cost effective and just as easy for the audience to buy the product directly from the band.

Having played a Dingwall bass which has more extreme fan-fretting, it took me about 30 seconds if that to adjust.

And I would agree, but in that case having a speaker pointing at your ears as opposed to your knees is still more important than the overall dispersion pattern.

Having now seen all three programmes, I have to say of the three I enjoyed the drum one the most, probably because its the instrument I know the least about, and I wasn't worrying about the simplifications and inaccuracies I kept finding in the bass and guitar/effects programmes (although I'm sure there were just as many and they were just as bad to those who do know their drum history). However what was the point of the sections with Taylor Hawkins? He didn't have anything interesting to say and to paraphrase John Lennon, he's not even the best drummer in The Foo Fighters!

But unfortunately there are only a handful of guitarists that would actually use these guitars who can afford to buy any of them.

IME any stage large enough to move about on tends to have decent monitoring and I can always hear myself better (and have a better balanced sound of the whole band) in the monitors, unless I am stood right in front of my rig.

Surely dispersion is only important if the bass isn't also going into the PA?

I'd agree with this. In real terms it is cheaper than ever to record and release your music. And you still need to already have a sizeable following to make schemes like PledgeMusic work for you, so I really can't see the point. Maybe it's time for someone to do another Desperate Bicycles and see just how cheaply it is possible to record and release 500 copies of an album.

Which Pretty Things album was this?

Get a Theremin and let your singer play the part.

Weird isn't it. Without the famous name owner that instrument would be significantly devalued because it is no longer in completely original condition.

No. What a ridiculous thing to do.

Not easily, but there are a couple of techniques you could try. You could see if the drum hits are in a differently place when the run repeats and cobble something together by cutting and pasting sections with no drums over sections with drums. Alternatively you could run the whole sample through a high pass filter to remove as much of the drum thuds as you can without affecting the keyboard sound. Then if the drums are still noticeable cut the sections where they are audible out completely, cross-fade the join and stretch the whole sample back out to the original length without shifting the pitch. I doubt any of these methods will be able to completely remove the drums without leaving other noticeable artefacts, but you might get something that will do the job well enough.

But I have learnt my scales as theory. I just haven't learnt how to PLAY scales. I also know that any of the notes in the key will fit over a series of chords and which notes make up any given chord, but playing those notes while technically correct won't automatically give you the best melody you could come up with. In fact IME they never give you best bass line or melody. If someone sings a melody to you can you immediately play that melody back note perfect on your chosen instrument? I know some people who can but most of us will struggle with some of the notes until we find the ones that are the exact right ones. That's how I compose. I know whether I need to go up or down in pitch and I will know which notes are most likely to be right because of the key, but I won't always find the exact notes I want on my first attempt, but I can hear how the ones that could be better (they are not "wrong" notes but just not the ones I could hear in my head) are out and then I'll have a much better idea one what the best notes to use are more likely to be.

I compose by hearing what I want to play in my head and figuring out where the notes are on the fretboard or keyboard. Once I've got a couple I'll have a reasonably good idea of what the key is going to be and therefore where I'm likely to find the other notes that I want. However I don't need to be able to play a scale in that key in order to be able to find the notes. This whole digression started off because several people earlier in the thread mentioned that they incorporate playing scales in their practice routine, I wondered why they did this because they are almost never used in playing actual musical pieces.

Except that the following runs are different at the end and you will need them all for the intro.

There are two different problems at work here. Firstly almost all cheap 5-string basses are not very good, and secondly this apparent need to swap between 5-string and 4-string basses. I suppose I was lucky, my first 5-string bass was a vastly superior instrument to my 4-string so I never saw any need to go back, and my subsequent 5-string basses have all been even better. I did have a spell when I was getting into fretless bass where I played fretless 4-strings and fretted 5-strings, but this was because I hadn't yet found a fretless 5-string as good as my fretted ones and because I was playing very different things depend on whether I was using the fretless or fretted bass. As soon as I found a properly good fretless 5-string bass I sold all the fretless 4s. Also I've always played lots of different stringed instruments with different numbers of strings, string spacing, tunings and scale lengths, so now don't really have that much problem swapping between instruments. I currently play in two bands, one using a 5-string bass tuned B-G and the other using a Bass VI tuned E A D G C E.

I think it very much depends on what music you liked back then. When I look at my music collection, there is a noticeable dip in the numbers of albums I was buying between 1974 when glam rock stopped being interesting and 1977 when punk bands started releasing records. The reason for this being there was very little new music released that I wanted to buy.

Our milages obviously do vary. TBH my comment was actually aimed @Deanol who posted at the same time as you.