BigRedX

Really? I've dipped in and out of this because IMO it's way too boring to watch all 45 minutes in one sitting, but the overall impression I get is that maybe instead of making videos worrying about AI, he should just knuckle down and make some more music of his own. And rather than watch the whole video that's what I'm going to do.

Yes, although it is a Bass VI.

No you haven't touched a nerve, it's just that IME most people who claim to boycott streaming also appear to have given up listening to anything made after 1976 and in that respect your avatar wasn't doing you any favours. So it's gratifying to hear that you're out supporting new bands. For me (and my band) streaming is essentially advertising that actually pays us, so I have no problem with it. I know that it pays a pittance, but it does pay and we actually get to see the money from it, unlike releasing records and CD in the 80s and 90s where unless you were massively successful the record company ended up with everything. If you really want to cut out "The Man" from benefiting financially from music we'd probably need to go back to the DIY cassette days of the late 70s and early 80s. On the other hand instead of spending the best part of 6 months duplicating cassettes in real time to reach less than 200 people, I can put up a new song on Spotify and reach that number in less than a single day.

Warwick StarBass

So what are you doing to support bands - person whose avatar is an album cover from 1972? I hope you are out at least once a fortnight going to see new bands and buying a T-shirt from their merch table.

Exactly. You're a musician so you bought from Bandcamp. There's loads of well-known and mainstream artists on there. However I can guarantee you that as a proportion of their overall sales, those from Bandcamp are minuscule. My band's music is available there, but we sell more CDs at gigs than we do downloads from Bandcamp. There's a good chance that at the end of this year our income from Spotify will have overtaken that from Bandcamp.

To my ears Holding Absence are more like Sempiternal-era Bring Me The Horizon, but nowhere near as interesting and 10 years too late. So basically an already derivative rock band are complaining because someone has used AI to create something similar. As I said in my earlier post, it's a publicity-seeking non-story.

And even then how can they tell that the artist hasn't got AI to generate the original musical idea which they have then re-created manually?

Unfortunately IME Bandcamp is a muso/indie ghetto. Fine if all you want to do is reach other musicians and a few hardcore music fans, but nearly useless for reaching ordinary people. The sort of people you need to reach if you want to really grow your fan base.

This. I've been able to get rid of a load of tat that I didn't need anymore with minimal effort on my part, especially when it came to working out the postage. I even made some money too.

Before we all get worked up with our keyboard outrage, has anyone taken the time to actually listen to the two bands in question? Holding Absence are rather formulaic bland modern pop-rock so it's really no surprise that AI has supposedly been able to replicate their "style" of music. I'd be interested to know just why Lucas Woodland has decided that Bleeding Verse are copying his band and not the countless other real bands doing the same kind of music with rock guitars, keyboards and alternating melodic and screamo vocals? There's no real story there at all. I'm sure that Holding Absence have managed to get some more streams and maybe a few more fans, but it all smacks of publicity seeking to me.

It depends whether you are listening with your ears or with your eyes. This sounds just like a P-bass:

Normally I'd be thinking about sticking up a poster and details for our next gig, but I've been informed that it has sold out already. Don't be too impressed. The venue is less than 100 capacity, there are 5 bands in total playing and the headliners, Social Youth Cult, are the hot new goth band who have just released their debut album.

Just remember that problematic rooms are a function of both time domain and frequency domain issues, and a frequency domain solution may only make it better at the point of measuring/listening and may well be making the problem worse elsewhere in the room. Often moving or changing the direction in which the PA points can have just as much effect as EQ. If you are going to use EQ make a point of standing in various different locations in the room to check the effects.

As has been said, who decides who qualifies as an "artist" and who doesn't? IME people who are driven to create will find ways of doing so no matter what their financial circumstances are. That's certainly how I have operated all my life. Also IME when money is available for "popular" arts you end up with bland mainstream dross. In fact Coldplay. They have done very well for themselves out of the system, but the have hardly changed the face of popular music and the world wouldn't miss them if they and all their recordings disappeared tomorrow. And to get back slightly off-topic, working from home hasn't killed my social life. After a day in front of the computer screen on my own I'm ready to go out 2-3 nights a week to interact with people. The difference is I am no longer forced to interact with witless twats who just happen to have the same employer as me. Instead I rehearse with my band and play gigs where I get to meet other interesting creative people.

Just because lots of people do it doesn't mean that it is a desirable or healthy (both physically and mentally) lifestyle. And we should be progressing, not trying to get back to the bad old days.

Maybe other offices are different but in the days before I worked from home I didn't spend any more or less money on these things. I had organised my life so that I lived within walking distance of where I worked, I didn't "grab a sandwich or a coffee" on my way to work. I would have breakfast before I left the house, if I needed lunch, take it in with me, otherwise I wouldn't bother, and then I'd have dinner that I made myself when I got home. There was no time to go to the pub at lunch time or after work, and unless I was rehearsing or gigging I would have things to do that would preclude going to the pub. The office would need cleaning every day irrespective of how many people were there.

Most of my screwdrivers are magnetic by default. It helps to pick up the screws.

Everyone has a pre-amp in a box. Usually it's part of their amp.

To most of the audience it's a guitar.

I currently own 4 basses. Only one is active and it is run with all the tone controls centre to their centre dente position. I'm seriously thinking of removing the preamp and wring it passive. Of all the basses I have ever owned two-thirds of them have been passive. The only active basses I have owned where the electronics did anything useful (IMO) were the Pedulla Buzz and Sei Flamboyant both of which were fitted with ACG01 Filter Pre-amps, the 1985 Overwater Original fitted with the Overwater filter pre-amp and the Lightwave Sabre whose pickups don't even function without power.

No.

Why?

Being able to play a number of different instruments - albeit mostly badly - and the fact that I have in the past spent considerable time trying to make synths sound like other instruments and using other instruments to try and control synths or produce synth-like sounds, means that now I can see that the easiest and most efficient way of producing various sounds is to use the instrument that produces them in the easiest and most efficient way. Also in a live situation being able to reproduce those sounds exactly every time becomes very important. Back in the 80s when I first started seriously dabbling with controlling synths from my guitar or bass or trying to make my guitar and bass produce more synth-like sounds I quickly discovered that for me the learning curve for developing enough keyboard technique to be able to play the parts I wanted was far shallower than the one required to modify my playing technique to get the synth sounds to trigger accurately and more importantly in a way that could be replicated every time I plugged in my instruments. I've also found that for all the good guitar and bass synth demos that are on YouTube, if you couldn't see that a guitar or bass is being used to trigger the sounds you wouldn't know that they weren't being produced by a keyboard player. Notwithstanding the fact that most of these demos require a huge number of takes in order to get a performance that is suitably glitch-free for public consumption. That for me completely negates the point of using a guitar or bass to control a synth or produce synth-like sounds. It's not easy/good enough to be repeatable, and for me the things that make plucked stringed instruments so expressive are all the things that simply don't translate when trying to do pitch to synth and instead produce unwanted glitches in the sound or pitch instability. I would definitely be using a keyboard synth for some songs in my current band were it not for the fact that at the moment we are concentrating on keeping the equipment we use at gigs as simple and easy/quick to set up as possible. Until we regularly get more than 30 minutes for setup and sound check those songs that will have to wait and the songs we play live will be those that we can do with the existing instrumentation.

It's the one that used to belong to me. It's from 1985 according to Chris May. Does that make it "late"? The other Original I used to own was from 1983 and had the pickups in the same place. The battery box is on the back under where the bridge is on the front.