BigRedX

IME buffers are only useful if you have a very long lead to your amp, and nowadays most people in this situation will be using a wireless system which essentially acts as a buffer.

And an actual keyboard synth will do the job even better.

IMO most on board electronic don't offer anything that couldn't be done better, and more electrically efficiently elsewhere in the signal chain.

Both of mine had pickups that looked like those in the basses on the right of your photo. Control layout was the same as that on the far right. I think it was volume, neck filter, bridge filter in line with the pickup balance control underneath.

They were both active, it's just that the earlier one had the filter pre-amp replaced by a more conventional one. The DI output was still in place it but the XLR wasn't connected to anything inside the bass. No idea who made to pickups. They were "soap bars" (for what that's worth, as there could be anything under the cover) under wooden covers. According to Chris May the basses dated from 1983 and 1985 so that makes them reasonably "early" in the grand scheme of things. IIRC the 1983 one was the first 5-string bass that Overwater had ever made. I sold the 1985 model to someone here who might be able to add further info if they still have it.

Anyone moaning about what eBay fees should have a look at what a standard auction house charges buyers and sellers. I've recently been looking at vintage furniture from my local auction house, who add between 27% and 30.3% to the hammer price depending on whether you are bidding in person or on-line (as well as VAT on some items) and then deduct 15% from the hammer price plus an additional £2.25 for an internet listing (AFAICS you can't not have an internet listing). That means for an item that has a hammer price of £100, the buyer pays £127 if they attend the sale in person, and the seller gets £82.75. The auction house makes about 45% per listing sold. The photos for the on-line auctions are generally one per item which has been taken at an angle to show it in the best possible way. When you attend the viewing many of the furniture items are significantly damaged in the parts that can't be seen the photograph. There are also no weights or measurements given in the on-line listing, and the only way to work out if a piece is suitable for you needs to go and look at anything you are interested in person.

I used to own two Overwater Originals. The older of the two had the filter pre-amp replaced with something more modern, conventional and IMO boring. The other still had the filter preamp fitted. The filter pre-amp is active and like most 80s electronics eats it's way through batteries, leaving the bass plugged in over-night by mistake would almost always drain the battery and under normal usage I would be replacing it every 2-3 months. Controls 4 single pots for volume, pickup balance and a then a single filter for each pickup. As far as I could tell the filter added a peak which could be swept using the control. I would set the bridge pickup to a slight top-end boost and the neck to a more bassier sound and then use the balance control to change the overall sound of the bass. Most of the time it was set to favour the neck pickup slightly. The filter preamp also included a DI output on an XLR next to the standard jack socket.

It would be interesting to see how much merch and licensed items these bands sell generally on line compared with how much they sell when they are on tour. Certainly for smaller bands it has been my experience that the vast majority of merch sales happen at gigs and what little gets sold on-line nearly all of it can be directly linked to recent gigging activity.

Agreed. There is an inverse correlation between how well whatever band I'm in is doing and how many CDs/records I buy and how many gigs I go to solely as a punter. My band at the moment are doing rather well and we've been busy playing gigs, writing new songs and recording our debut album. I don't think I've bought a single CD this year and the only gigs I've been to as a punter were two that were occurred at Whitby Goth Weekend in April when I wasn't actually on stage myself.

Conversely my band's next gig which is still over a month away is already sold out. Admittedly the venue is small (under 100 capacity) there's 5 bands playing, and the headlining band - Social Youth Cult - are the hot new post punk/goth band and could have probably sold it out on their own...

I had contemplated buying tickets for Kraftwerk when they play Nottingham Royal Concert Hall next year. However my only other experience of going to a gig there was seeing The Cocteau Twins in the mid 80s and it was decidedly underwhelming being all seated with sitting down being rigidly enforced. They far more enjoyable and had a more appropriate atmosphere when I saw them some years later at Rock City. Anyway I just had a look and the only tickets available were now over £170.00! That's sitting down for a band that are all about dance music. Even if I did think that much was worth paying I can guarantee the gig won't be a patch on when I saw them in 1981 when I was down at the front and perfect positioned to "play a little melody" on one of their hand-held synths during Pocket Calculator. It probably won't even be as exciting as when I saw them again in 1991 at some seated hall in Sheffield. So that's a miss from me. At any price.

IME the age of the audience also depends on the genre of the music. Whilst a good proportion of the audiences I play to are in their 50s and 60s there are plenty much younger who come and see us. At the next gig we're playing, AFAIK, the rest of the bands are all in their 20s.

This is why I'm glad that most of the bands I want to see are still playing smaller venues, and are relatively cheap to see. The biggest gig I have been contemplating going to as a punter this year is The Birthday Massacre at The Rescue Rooms here in Nottingham. Tickets are under £25 including booking fee. The venue is a 25 minute walk from where I live and I'll probably only buy one drink to enjoy whilst the support band are on. Total of around £30 for an evening's entertainment. Most of the other gigs I want to go to are free because my band is also on the bill.

You are quite right in that both drop-off and home collection need to be options. However, overall I think the current situation is marginally better, as I had numerous problems trying to use the Simple Delivery drop off points for larger items. The closest Yodel one would take anything even remotely big and while my current local Post Office is very good and efficient, some of the ones I have had to use before are terrible and I wouldn't trust them with anything that didn't go straight into a collection bag behind the counter.

Which is fine for me. I work from home and therefore I'm in all day, and having my item collected from home means I don't have to lug it to the "nearest" drop-off point.

Could that be done using MIDI program changes or controlled via running the project itself? This seems to be a problem for almost all hardware solutions that I might want to use in a live situation. So far I've not come across anything that does the job as painlessly or quickly as a Mac running Logic and Keyboard Maestro. I have an AirTurn with two footswitches, one which starts/pauses Logic and the other which runs a Keyboard Maestro macro which closes the current Logic project switches to the Finder scrolls down one file and opens that. This process takes less than 5 seconds even on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro. All I have to do is add a number to beginning of each Logic file in order I want to have the songs in the set and I'm ready to go.

How easy is it to change sounds using this method? Any glitches if you were to change as you are playing?

Width-wise the neck is very much in skinny 70s Strat territory.

Agreed. This year I have mostly used eBay for getting rid of a load of unwanted tat including several things that were sold unworking for spares or repair that would have probably otherwise ended up in a landfill. I didn't make a massive amount of money, but all the new automated process meant that most of my time was spent taking the photos and then boxing up the items when they sold.

The nut is cut fine. The strings are already a little too close to the edge of the fingerboard. The neck is just much too narrow for bass guitar thickness strings, which isn't surprising considering that my skinny-stringed guitars have wider necks (and string spacing at the nut) than this. Think if the Squier had the same relative string spacing (slightly adjusted for the thicker bass strings) as my guitars I would have been able to adapt, but I was forever playing the wrong string especially when I switched from alternating up, and down strokes to all down strokes or playing patterns that swap between the A and G strings which is something I do a lot in my current band. I got on better with the Burns Barracuda which had wider string spacing at the nut, but unfortunately narrow spacing at the bridge (compared with the Squier), but the best overall compromise for me is the Eastwood Hooky. Ideally I think I might want something with the same string spacing between the E, A, D and G strings as the Hooky but have the G-B and B-E string spacing just a bit wider than it is on the Squier.

I suppose it is because the majority of their business is guitar strings where slotted machine heads are much less common and therefore it is easy to fit the strings and tune to pitch before cutting them.

There may only be a problem cutting the strings first if they are round core. If they are hex core you can cut them to length before installing them as normal. It's poor advice on the part of Newtone. I've taken this point up with them previously and they really don't seem to be bothered about addressing it correctly on their packaging. All my Newtone strings are hex core so I just cut them to length and fit them. If you have bought round core strings they will recommend that you put a 90° bend it them where they go into the machine head post hole and then cut off the excess.

Then at the compositional stage limit yourself to a set of standard sounds. Worry about getting those right only when you finalising the arrangement or doing actual recording. Just because a device offers you a multitude of options doesn't mean you need to use them all. Stick with the ones that do what you want. As I have said in other threads about composition and recording, is that for me at least these are two very different functions with almost zero overlap. Also when I'm writing, I'm writing for whichever band I'm currently in which will have a specific sound. Therefore I already know what sorts of sounds I'm going to want before I even start.

Is that the width of the nut or the distance between the centres of the two E strings? The nut width on my Squier VM Bass VI is 41mm but the distance between the centres of the two E strings is only 35mm which puts the strings much too close together, and even more so when you consider that they are much thicker than guitar strings. For me this second measurement is the important one. Overall nut width tells you nothing about the string spacing. Compare this with the Eastwood Hooky which has a nut width of 50mm and 42mm between the centres of the E strings and is consequently much more playable (for me). As has been said shimming the neck is required to get a decent string break angle over the bridge. The increased downward pressure of the strings on the bridge by changing the break angle also goes along way towards stoping the bridge from wobbling around without needing to fit inserts. Wobbly bridges are fine on Jaguars and Jazzmasters if you want to do MBV impressions, but IMO have no place on a Bass VI. Plus once you've replaced the E and A with something more suited for playing bass, the vibrato mechanism goes from extremely subtle to almost inoperative.

IMO at least half of all YouTube content creators could do with a script, a producer, an editor, and possibly someone less irritating to actually appear in front of the camera.