BigRedX

Anything that wasn't made in massive numbers is already seriously overpriced. Also many of the classic instruments from the 70s and 80s are full of discontinued components with an ever-increasing chance of terminal failure. It depends whether the market considers that a nice-looking example of a non-functioning instrument is actually worth anything.

Sei's in particular are far too personal to the person they were originally made for them the become collectable just for the name IMO. Shuker makes too many different designs many of which are copies of other brands. For luthier-made instruments to become collectable in themselves you need a situation like Wal where there are a limited number of designs, which are not over-personalised to the person they were originally made for, and a couple of well-respected players with distinctive sounds to start using them exclusively. And then for the supply of new instruments to become limited. I can't think of any others that fit those criteria at the moment.

The split P-bass pickup is a humbucker.

There is no sound of "active basses". It's just plugging a passive bass into an amp except the wire between the pinup and the tone control is shorter.

The big money won't be in anything that has already started to become desirable as you are already too late to have got the best buying prices. If you want to play the long game you'll need to find something that is currently unfashionable and cheap and hope that it gets taken up by someone who goes on the become a famous or at least well-respected musician.

Warwick Red Label Or have a look at what Newtone offer.

Surely tariffs only work if you are trying to protect locally produced items or those being imported from countries you don't have a problem with? Since the US doesn't currently have the capabilities to produce a lot of what is being affected themselves, and Trump seems to have a problem with everyone, I really can't see it working even in the long term.

Next Hurtsfall gig is onSaturday 5th April at Corporation in Sheffield supporting Deviant: We'll be on first, so get there early if you want to see us. Tickets available here.

Maybe Trump is doing us all a favour and the UK and Europe can finally wean themselves off American-made crap.

How so? You can't define the sound of any cab from the number and diameter of the drivers it contains. Every cab sounds different. That has always been my experience when I have owned cabs with the same driver configuration made by different companies. If they didn't sound different there would be not point in having multiple manufacturers all offering supposed similar cabs. And it wasn't surprising that my similar cabs sounded different. They had different internal volumes. The porting was different. They had different brands of driver, probably with different specifications, inside. The only thing that was the same was that they had the same number and size of drivers. So why are we so hung up on the driver configuration when it says almost nothing about the sound and performance of the cab?

Not my experience either. The top three basses with the best sounding and feeling low B strings that I have owned were all 34". They were also the three most expensive basses I have owned. The two 5-string bases I have owned with 35" scale length were no better than equivalently priced 34" scale when it comes to low B. IMO it's all about construction. Scale length on its own only makes a difference when you get to 36" or over.

The only time you need an XLR lead with the same connector on each end is when you are using a passive DI box for re-amping in which case you'll want a female to female cable.

Friday saw Hurtsfall in Coventry at The Arches Venue for the Necroscope Goth and industrial night. Great venue although a little difficult to find if you've not been before, and a great promotor. Pity I can't say the same about the sound engineer. Set up and sound check went very well, we were playing last so sound checked first, but there appeared to be a lot of unplugging and moving of cables between our soundcheck and getting the other two bands set up including a lot of worrying sounding pops and bangs coming through the PA as unmuted channels were plugged and unplugged. When we came to play we were told that there was no need for a line check as none of our stuff had been moved since the original soundcheck. Come the first song there's no sound from one of the synths. We play through regardless, but pause to get the problem sorted before starting the next song. First the promotor has to go and find the sound engineer as he's gone outside. Then there is an almost point blank refusal on his part to accept that the problem isn't with our equipment. Finally when we persuade him to check the connections to the PA, and after even more pops and bangs through the FoH it turns out that the PA's XLR lead connecting the synth to the stage box is dodgy. Once that has been replaced everything is fine. I accept that if you work at a venue not every band that plays there is going to be to your musical taste, but you have one job and that includes being there in case there is a problem with the sound during each band's set. In a way programmable digital desks have made some less than enthusiastic PA engineers even more complacent. I didn't say anything on the night because we hope to playing there again and I don't want to see what happens if he deliberately messes up our sound, and anyway come the end of our set he was nowhere to be seen and his assistant who was very pleasant and easy to get on with was left to pack everything away. After all that we played really well, so it's pity that the audience was somewhat on the small side. We were competing with another Goth gig in Coventry that night and it was also the first night of Corrosion in Morecambe where more than a few of our fans were in attendance (they were all posting photos from there on Facebook). Still those that were in attendance seemed to really like the band, and we sold a surprisingly large number of T-Shirts and singles afterwards. The promoter is very keen to get us back later in the year when hopefully there will be a bigger audience. I'd saved posting this hoping that there would be some photos on social media over the weekend, but despite seeing at least one professional-looking photographer in action during our set nothing has shown up so far. Our next gig is in Sheffield on 5th April supporting Deviant at The Corporation.

Thanks. Not too late we're still deciding.

Or maybe they wanted something more musically interesting than a load a terrible metal/rock bands

One of the advantages of being in a band that doesn't have a proper guitarist and is mostly keyboards driven. I get the sound engineer to EQ the Bass VI so that it is sufficiently bright when I'm playing "guitar" parts on it and then it sounds right for the Peter Hook-style bass parts too.

So long as both bands aren't expecting to be out gigging every Friday and Saturday night you should be fine.

Funny how these bands are even on the bill.

I assume then that the rest of the band will be playing to you? Set the tempo as part of the patch and the tremolo to 1/8 notes. Make sure that you can all keep in sync. There's nothing worse than a sequencer part that sounds out of time.

Unless you are lucky and hit upon a combination that suits your playing style you are unlikely to be able to get an envelope to match a sequenced synth. I use a chopped up sound on the chorus of one song which is done live using distortion into the Tremolo with a falling sawtooth wave. However for recording it has been completely replaced with the Step FX in Logic which gives me a lot more control over the envelopes. The problem with trying to do this with Tremolo is that the waveform you really need isn't there. The square wave is to abrupt a cut off and the falling sawtooth wave doesn't have a sustain potion. Having said that the song you linked to appears to be slower than ours so you might get there by playing with the duty cycle of the tremolo waveform and hope there's a sweet spot that does what you want. Of course there's also the issue of synchronisation. I use MIDI clock from the computer that is our drummer and second synth player to keep the Helix in sync with the backing which works on our song, but I have had problems in the past with songs with odd bar and beat counts where using something like tremolo can end up 180° out of sync which is the last thing you want. What is really needed is a MIDI-controlled Filter and gate with full ADSR envelopes for each. I've put a request in on the Line6 IdeaScale but it needs more votes...

Duran Duran and Kraftwerk are not incompatible. I saw both within a couple of months of each other in 1981.

But the problem with US isolationist tendencies is that since the end of WW2 it hasn't't been even remotely so. The US sticks its oar in all over the world when it suits them to do so and have military bases in Europe and elsewhere in the world. If the US wants to be isolationist that's fine, but they need to stick within their own borders and leave the rest of us alone.

Thank you for all the suggestions. However, based on multiple recommendations on other fora, we're going to try Tim Debney at Fluid. He appears to have done lots of tracks we like.

Interesting, because that's not the impression I got at all. I'm half German so I spent a lot of time in Germany staying with relations and friends during the 60s and 70s. Certainly in the 70s when I was older and more politically aware the East/West Germany situation was on the German news almost every night (in a similar way to how Northern Ireland situation was being covered in the UK) and all the Germans I knew who were very middle-of-the-road politically were pro reunification. That may have changed once the Berlin Wall came down and the reality of the situation hit them, but whilst it was still just a dream reunification was always the goal for all those I knew.

And he's not wrong.