BigRedX

@dave_bass5 Have you tried the Helix or it's recent "spin-offs"? The days of single parameter access for multi-effects is long gone for all but the most budget of devices. IME the reason most people need to fiddle with the parameters on their effects in a live environment is because they have got them wrong in the first place. If the device is programmable your effects settings are right every time you recall the relevant patch for the song.

Can you explain (or point me to a link that explains) the physics behind this.

Unfortunately on a consumer-grade printer you can't guarantee that a PDF file will print at actual size. My top of the range Canon ink jet printer prints everything slightly over-size. Usually setting the output scaling factor to around 98.5% gets me a more accurately size print. I'd also want to use a bigger measurement than 19mm between ferrules to check this against.

I find it hard to believe that there's not much money in merchandise T-shirts. From my experience of doing them for the various bands I've been in, T-shirts are the easy money. A good design well executed in 1 or 2 colours on a run of 100+ garments selling for £10 each will make your money back before you've sold half of them. Just remember to get the size breakdowns right. No matter how many skinny hipsters you have in your audience the people who buy t-shirts are all L, XL or 2XL... Certainly I've easily covered my costs with all the band T-shirts I've produced. I wish I could say the same for the music.

IMO if you can't get a suitable basic sound from just your bass and amp then one of them probably isn't the right one for you.

But you can't read an email that's already been deleted before you get a chance to see it.

I'd agree that an hour sounds too long. 30 minutes should be about right. Keep the topics short and snappy and everything moving along at a smart pace. My favourite podcast is about 40 minutes long but once you've removed all the advertising and credits theres about 30 minutes of actual content.

Is the audio quality of the Podcast going to be able to do justice to the subtleties of things like the difference between playing with a pick and finger style? Also are solo bass samples really appropriate generally? Unless you a strictly a bedroom player, it all depends on how the instruments sound in the mix, and that is going the vary from band to band. So how about a discussion on the futility of chasing your favourite bass player's tone?

The question is slightly wrong. It should be have non-programmable effects had their day? There are some programmable analogue effects units - I own one the Roland GP8, which apart from the digital delay and chorus/flanger is all analogue but digitally controlled so it's programmable. For me non-programmable effects had their day in the early 90s when I bought my first programmable effects unit. Before that in the 80s I was mostly playing synths where affordable keyboards with programmable memories couldn't come quick enough for me. When I went back to playing the guitar and bass, I briefly had a complex multi pedal set up, but the amount of messing around between songs, even if it was just to set the correct delay time was too much, and the moment I could afford a second hand GP8 I bought it, and haven't looked back. Over the years I've had a few different programmable effects units for my guitar and bass rigs - Roland GP8, Peavey Bassfex, Line 6 BassPod XT and now the Line 6 Helix which along with an RCF745 FRFR cab has completely replaced all my old effects units and guitar and bass amps. I can see why people think they need a particular effects unit to get a particular sound, but in the context of a full band mix is it really that important? In the studio I'm happy to try anything if I think it will give me a better sound for the song, but live the fact that I can hit a footswitch and know that I will all the correct effects in the correct order with the correct settings is far more important than whether my distortion or octaver is absolutely the most perfect one for the song when the programmable one in my Helix will be 90% right.

Will the 12 Step send a stream of MIDI CCs on preset change so that you can "program" a device with no memories but who's controls are mapped to MIDI CCs?

At that price point you really need to get down to your local musical instrument retailer and try everything your friend can afford. The usual suspects will be a good starting point but there's always a chance that there will something in stock that you've never heard of before that turns out to be a bit of a hidden gem. Also you'll get a much better guitar at that price if you don't buy one with a built-in pickup/electronics.

The dangers of the missing comma...

Then I've already beaten the lot of you. I made the one in the photo I posted earlier 40 years ago...

Electric balalaika? Nothing new at all. I'll just put this out here...

IIRC there used to be a Basschat list of "problem" eBayers along with their eBay IDs so that they could be blocked form bidding on your items. Maybe it would be a good idea to resurrect that list and add this person to it?

I would like to stick with Warwick Red Label. According to the tag on my StarBass when I got it, those were the strings fitted at the factory. Unfortunately it seems to be near impossible to get a set with a taper-wound low B so I've had to change to Black Label in order to guarantee this.

What's the scale lengths of the 5-string Dingwalls? And are there EADGC sets available for them? I think that the Dingwall Combustion Basses are designed to get the best out of "conventional" BEADG stringing and you may find that even if there is a suitable E-C set made the high C will be too high tension and consequently rather brittle sounding. Certainly my experiences with a 34" scale 5-string bass strung E-C, a 30" Squier Bass VI tuned EADGCE, and a 28" Baritone guitar tuned B-B is that 30" scale is for me the optimum to get a nice feeling and sounding high C string. That doesn't mean that the fan-fret design is a non-starter for E-C stringing, just that you might need to look at alternative scale lengths to what is normally available.

Although my natural inclination was to pick up the guitar left handed, I found that I was equally rubbish no matter which way round I tried to play it. I must have wanted to be able to play the guitar so desperately, back then when I was 13, that I stuck with it for 9 months of barely being able to do anything even vaguely musical on it, and then suddenly almost overnight I found that I could competently strum my way through the chords to all my favourite songs.

IMO that puts a whole different perspective on the feasibility and attractiveness of the Basschat Podcast. Someone with your abilities at the helm makes the finished product far more likely to be of a quality that will appeal. IME of listening to podcasts, poor audio quality overshadows interesting content every time. Make your podcast sound professional and you you'll have far more success persuading people who have interesting things to say to take part.

Like uk_lefty I'm right handed for some things and left-handed for others. The I first time picked up a guitar my natural inclination was to play left handed. Luckily the guitar I picked up was very obviously right handed and so that's the way I learnt. TBH I could have probably learnt either way, but ultimately I'm glad I persevered with playing right handed because the choice of easily available instruments is massively greater than it is for the left handed player.

Have you done something like this before? If so how successful was it in terms of audio quality? I think the fact that you are rely on each individual member of the discussion being responsible for their own audio recording is likely to be a concern. How does mixing the final conversation work with each contributor being in their own individual acoustic space? There is a possibility for it to sound rather weird especially for people listening on headphones. I realise that I am coming across rather negatively, but IME good podcasts need to have compelling subject matter, interesting and eloquent people taking part, and be technically well produced. Otherwise it's a lot of effort for very few listeners. The podcasts that are being mentioned as being examples of something simple and easy to produce are probably anything but. It's making it sound simple and easy that is the trick.

Skype comes with it's own separate set of problems, not the least of which is that audio quality can be very variable depending both on the available bandwidth at both ends of the connection and the fact that you are reliant on the person at the other end of the connection being able to make the best of the audio/recording equipment that they have, which will most likely end up being the built-in microphone of whatever device they are using to make their end of the Skype call. Earlier this year I endured a podcast interview conducted via Skype of one of my favourite web comics artists. The general sound quality of the interviewee ranged from poor to almost incomprehensible and was littered with plosives and sibilance. The interviewer by contrast sounded great although in his effort not to talk over his subject there were great pregnant pauses at the end of each answer that hadn't been edited out and consequently completely ruined the flow of the conversation. I stuck with it because the person being interviewed was someone whose work I admire and who also has plenty of interesting things to say. For pretty much anyone else I doubt I would have lasted even 5 minutes.

IME working with just speech requires a whole different set of skills and techniques to working with vocals for a song. With spoken work the most important thing to aim for is clarity and comprehensibility. Not necessarily something that most music producers are going to be worried about when they are capturing a "performance". And all those extraneous noises on the vocal track that disappear in the mix will be out there in all their unwanted glory for all to hear and get very irritated by if they occur with any great regularity.