BigRedX

But did deleting the quote box require me to click the "+" sign first or had the panel that allowed me to remove my saved post just not loaded the first time?

If I was playing in a band like that I'd have light-weight fold-flat Ampeg SVT and Fridge façade to go in front of my FRFR.

LaBella Steels have black silk wraps.

"Better" tone is always subjective. "Fuller" tone might well not be appropriate in a band mix as it will likely be fighting with other instruments for sonic space. Also how long did you spend experimenting with the various parameter on the Helix before deciding the "real" amp sounded better? IME it takes at least a couple of rehearsals to get the sounds dialled in so that they work in the context of the band. What sounds as though it is going to work when played on its own at home at practice volumes is going to need more editing when you play it at rehearsal/gig volumes with the other instruments in the mix. I'm still tweaking some of my sounds. They get better each time. And very few of my Helix patches have an amp sim in the signal chain and none so far have a cab sim. After all an amplifier is just some tone controls in front of circuitry that can drive a loud speaker to the required volume, and all bass amps and cabs are colouring your sound in one way or another. So on the Helix all you need is some tone shaping that works in a pleasing way to your ears and allows the bass to sound the way you want it and you are set. Whether this is a stand-alone tone module or the tone shaping within an amp sim is irrelevant.

About a week ago I was in the middle of answering a post in a thread, when I had to do something else and never got around to finishing my answer. By the time I got back to the thread the conversation had moved on and my answer was no longer relevant, so I left it. Today I wanted to reply to a new post in the thread. When I try to do this I find that my unfinished answer from last time has been helpfully saved at the point I left off, and is displayed ready finish. As I don't need this anymore I try to delete my old unfinished post. All the text from both my new post and the post I was quoting can be deleted without any problem. However the "Quote box" is left in place without any obvious way of getting rid of it. It can't be highlighted. I've tried pretty much every combination of Control, Command, Option and Shift while clicking on it without success. Under the old version of the forum this would have been easy. I could have activated "plain text mode" from the switch above the post field and all the quote code would have been revealed and simple to delete. Since this function is not available in the new version of the forum, there appears to be no way of removing all the quote information. Any ideas? EDIT: Sorted. When I went back to the thread for another look, after clicking on the "+" symbol above the empty quote, a panel appeared beneath the post entry field giving me the option of clearing my previous post. This had definitely not be there the first time I looked. Whether that is just a glitch or that is how the forum software works I don't know.

So you can do it quickly silently at a gig. There's nothing more irritating or amateur than the tuning song.

Taken to it's logical conclusion you'd need to be using a single pickup bass with no tone control direct into an FRFR amp/cab. Of course if the PA plays a significant role in your FoH sound then it's all irrelevant, since the engineer will be applying EQ and compression at the desk.

The more instruments I can play, the better I can understand their role when composing/writing songs.

Are there any non-Bluetooth wireless headphones? They would have to be either WiFi or analogue. IMO analogue consumer wireless always needs companding to get the signal to noise ratio down to acceptable levels. This is going to play havoc when listening to multiple sources.

I can't help but think that all this "wrong bass" nonsense is down to "badge envy". It only seems to affect those who play Fender-style basses. There's no big mystery for how to make a Fender bass - their simplicity and ease of construction was one of their main selling points and is what originally made them affordable. As the basic designs have been largely unchanged for over 50 years, it really shouldn't be any surprise that other manufacturers can make a similar bass better and cheaper than Fender. In fact the big surprise is why one with a Fender logo on it is now so expensive.

My favourite is on the Electrix Mo-Fx. It's been discontinued so you'll have to find a second hand one.

If it's the one you like playing and it fits visually and sonically with the band then it's not the wrong bass.

All active and passive mean in terms of monitor speakers is that active monitors have the amp built in to the speaker enclosure. Therefore if you go for passive monitors you'll need a separate amplifier to drive them.

You are still not selling it to me.

So adding tags to a thread, will cause a sidebar to appear with other posts with the same/similar tags? Well in that case I'm going to stop using tags because the sidebar takes up what is IMO valuable screen space that would be better used for thread content.

True. But only if the person working the DAW needs/wants/is capable of doing it.

But most people don't really need a fully-featured DAW. I've been a Logic user for almost 25 years now, and I only use a tiny amount of the facilities that the program offers. In fact for a lot of what I do these days Garageband would probably be more than adequate. Don't forget that the OP is a self-confessed beginner when it comes to recording, and the last thing he probably wants to do is get bogged down in an overly-complicated program just to get a few ideas turned into full-fledged song recordings. IMO a bit a simplicity can do wonders for focusing the mind and the basic task in hand which is recording your musical ideas and turning them into a fully arranged song. In fact if the OP is new to all this, then he probably already knows the songs and the arrangements and he just needs a way of recording them is quickly and easily as possible, and the fewer new things he needs to spend time learning, the better the end result is likely to be. Because these days you can buy the same DAW is that used by all the big name studios for a couple of hundred pounds at the most, the choices can be somewhat overwhelming for the new home-recordist. When I first started recording in the mid 70s you had basically three choices: Live into a mono or stereo reel-to-reel or cassette recorder Bouncing between to tracks of a stereo reel-to-reel recorder building up your recording one instrument at a time. Going into a commercial studio (which unless you had a lot of money to spend would probably only be 4-track) There was semi-pro studio equipment available, but even the most modest of 4-track studio set ups would cost you several thousand pounds in the days when a new Fender bass cost around a couple of hundred. It wasn't until the original Portastudio came out in 1979 that home recording started to become remotely affordable and simple enough for the average musician to get to grips with. And this brings me to another point. What exactly does the OP want out of the recordings he makes? And how much is he prepared to spend getting them to sound the way he wants them to. OK he has and iMac and Garageband, but he's still going to need an audio interface and some form of monitoring, he's taking about buying a keyboard for playing the Garageband instruments, and he'll probably also need a microphone, unless all his compositions are instrumentals. All of a sudden you are looking at spending money that could buy you a couple of days in a decent local studio where a well-organised and rehearsed musician could quite easily record and mix a 5-6 track mini album which will most likely sound far better than anything he can do at home. As others have already said, spending on studio equipment can make even the most rampant bass GAS look completely insignificant. I have my own cautionary tale of home recording. Having stated at the bottom, recording live onto a stereo cassette recorder and working my way through 4 and 8 track Portastudios adding analogue and then MIDI sequencing along the way, I finally upgraded to a fully-fledged DAW. by this time I had spent well in excess of £30,000 on equipment and the room in which it was all housed (most of which was done over the space of 7 years, and in retrospect for what I was trying to do would have been better spent hiring a pro-studio and producer). And while my recording were improvements over those I was making in the 70s, it was mostly technical improvements in sound quality (the elimination of tape hiss, wow and flutter, and not having to worry about sound degradation when bouncing tracks), and I still wasn't able to make recordings that sounded as good as the records and CDs I was buying. In the end I had the face up to the facts that the weak link in my recording was my (lack of) skill as an engineer - something that was very much brought home to me after a couple of trips to local studios with my last band where it took the engineer a matter of minutes to get a better sound than I was able to achieve on my own in weeks or fiddling at home. I've ended up selling nearly all my studio gear, and for anything other than basic MIDI sequencing and sorting out song arrangements I would go into a decent studio. So to the OP, think carefully about what you want to achieve. Home recording can be a lot of fun, but it can also be very frustrating experience. Just because you are a competent musician doesn't automatically mean that you will be a good engineer as well. From my PoV I'd much rather have a few really professional sounding recordings than what I do have which is lots of "home demos" in various states of (un)completion.

Why should it? If you think and item is too expensive don't buy it.

Why do you want 35" scale? Do you like the extra stretch between the frets?

I never saw the attraction either. I had a friend in the early 70s (when we were 10/11) who must have had one of the original versions. He looked like a complete idiot wobbling about on his brand new Raleigh Chopper and was the only person in our year who failed his Cycling Proficiency Test due to him not being in adequate control of his bicycle. Also the big fat tyres were rather prone to getting punctures compared with other designs and as a result we tended not to ask him out when we zoomed around the neighbourhood on our bikes as inevitably he'd slow us down when his tyres became defaulted and we'd end up having to help him carry his heavy and ridiculous excuse for a bicycle back home.

The whole back catalogue of IAMX, since I discovered them a couple of weeks ago.

Thanks! That's a significant improvement IMO over the Bass VI which measures 35.5 between the centres of the highest and lowest strings. If you wanted some better strings for this bass over the ones that came with it have a look at La Bella Bass VI set.

There is a difference in the suitability of doing this between bands who have their own PA and bands that use the PA in the venue; and I suspect that the OP is most definitely in the latter category. If I was playing in a band that always used its own PA system I'd have no hesitation in ditching my backline provided that the FoH was up to the job of properly amplifying the whole band and the monitoring system could deliver all the instruments clearly. However, for at least of 3rd of the gigs that I've done in the last ten years, either the venue PA and/or monitoring was completely inadequate for anything other than vocals. These gigs are fine with backline, but can be a terrible experience for both the band and the audience, as the band struggle to hear themselves and the audience is presented with a less than impressive FoH sound. And I certainly wouldn't want to risk using an unknown PA for a band that used acoustic drums and no backline.

I use to have one of those Wesley acrylic basses too and the break angle at the bridge was fine. If I hadn't been happy, then I would have looked at changing the neck angle with a shim instead.

Could you do me a big favour and measure the width of the nut from the lowest to the highest string. It would be interesting to compare it with the Fender/Squier Bass VI which IMO has an overly narrow neck. And you are right in assuming that it was originally intended to be strung EADGBE like a guitar only an octave lower. The scale length is really too short to go much lower than this, and while you could go A-A baritone guitar tuning, the single pickup and its position is more suited to bass tones rather than down-tune guitar.