BigRedX

Maybe it really is just me these days, but when I was first getting into music in the early 70s, one of the my main memories was that when my musical heroes made one of their infrequent appearances on TotP they would be wielding ever stranger custom guitars often from the work bench of a certain John Birch in Birmingham. Later on with the advent of punk and post-punk, sometimes the choice of instruments would be dictated as much by what was affordable as it was by what looked cool and interesting, but it also introduced me to the instruments of Microfrets, Burns, Hayman, Mosrite to name but a few. I always felt that if you chose to use an instrument that wasn't in the mainstream then maybe your music might be a little more interesting too and perhaps worth that extra effort to check out. Of course it wasn't always the case - no matter how cool Jerry Garcia's Travis Bean guitars looked it couldn't make me like the music of the Grateful Dead! And sometimes those imperfections can kill the music stone dead. I've lost count of the number of times a record has been completely ruined for me by the acquisition of a scratch or piece of grit stuck in the grooves of a vinyl LP, usually on my favourite track, and more often than not at some point after the record in question has been deleted and therefore difficult to replace with a pristine copy. CDs and lossless digital files are the answer to this, I no longer have to worry that the act of playing the music I love might destroy it for ever.

IME unless all the bases you play are fundamentally the same, you need to find the right string to match not only your preferences but also what suits the individual bass as well.

Generally the record company only owns the mechanical rights - i.e. they own the copyright on the recording but not the actual songs that go to make up the recording. However in the days when bands still signed recording contracts the publishing company which owned the copyright on the songs would usually be a subsidiary of the record company that signed the band.

Yes it is good, but they tend to dip in and out of basschat without having a regular presence and only seem to pursue the problems that suit them.

There seems to be a lot of confusion is this thread about how the different methods work and what they actually do. First off there is no pitch detection system that has zero latency. You cannot change the laws of physics which say that you need a minimum one full wave cycle to detect the pitch of a note. In practice, with guitars and basses because of the rich harmonic content of the notes produced by a plucked string, you actually need more than a single wave cycle to guarantee pitch stability, and the very best systems will need a minimum of one and a half cycles plus some clever programming along with it being set up the suit each player's individual style. This would normally rule out using any bass instrument as the latency for all but the highest notes is going to be easily audible. What generally happens with musicians who persevere with these systems is that they learn to play very slightly ahead of the beat to counteract this built-in latency. So what has happened is that a couple of alternative systems have been developed to try a get around the pitch detection latency. Industrial Radio use fret sensing to derive the pitch combined with trigger detection from plucking the string. The Roland V System and the Line6 guitar and bass use signal processing of the individual strings to produce their sounds, so there is no pitch detection needed. The Roland V System in particular works very well until you try and use the MIDI output to drive an external synth, at which point you end up with all the pitch detection problems outlined above. On top of that in practice all the different systems will require you to modify your playing technique to some extent in order to get the best out of them. Some more than others. The further you go from plucked string type sounds the more you will need to modify how you play the instrument, to get anything usable out of it. IME having been seriously interested in using guitars to produce synth type sounds since the first serious commercial models appeared in the late 70s, I've still to be even 75% convinced by any of them. The guitar is for me a very tactile and immediate instrument and many of those qualities fail to translate adequately to synth-type sounds. If I want to produce synth sounds I still find it easier to use a keyboard-base synthesiser. Even with my very rudimentary keyboard technique I can still get results faster and more consistently than try to use a guitar (or bass) to achieve the same thing.

Is it actually Radiohead, or Radiohead's publishers? There's an important difference.

A 12" LP in a nicely designed and printed sleeve as an artefact is a thing of beauty. As a delivery medium for music it's a piece of crap. Give me a CD or a lossless download any day. Maybe the way forward for selling music is to package your CD in a 12" vinyl type sleeve which gives you the best of both worlds? Wood id still used for solid musical istruments because it is still comparatively cheap as a material and it is easy to shape and finish compared with the alternatives. Plus most musicians are far too conservative these days.

And why would you want to sell it? If you’ve made the right choice of instrument, then you won’t need to.

Actually the low B should be the least of your worries as, it will be the lowest tension string on your bass.

If you liked the 130 B then get another. IMO unless you have the lightest of light touches when playing you'll find anything less far too floppy in feel and sound.

Is anyone capable of putting up their backdrop without having nasty looking creases in it? One of the reasons my band gave up using ours (apart from the fact that we lost half the stand at a gig) was that it was near impossible to keep crease free, and if we didn't it looked rubbish when we put it up.

According to info in another thread, no.

Yes please!

Weirdly you only get a warning if you follow the link from Baschat. If you do it from the YouTube page it appears to be fine.

Is that the person who made this album ;-)

In that case you are probably going to want something large and modular so it can be adapted to fit venues of differing sizes. The band I was in during the 90s had something like this made up of 3 panels each 9' x 9' black with the band logo/symbol (a stylised asterix/star) painted on in silver. This was supported on a home-made frame constructed out of tent poles. Depending on the size of the venue, we would put up the appropriate number of panels which would block out 90% of the clutter on the walls behind the band. The logo was positioned at the top of each panel and the frame was height adjustable so it would be visible no matter what the venue ceiling height was. However it was a lot of hassle to set up and it had to go up before any of the other band equipment could be put in place, and consequently it didn't get used at half the gigs we played. Eventually several key components got left behind at a venue where there hadn't been time to put it up, and were lost forever. After that we had enough parts to put up a single panel, which did't really look that good so we stopped using it.

Ideally I'd want my instruments buried with me in my Egyptian style hidden tomb. ;-) In the real world I really don't care what happens to them when I'm dead. None of my family is sufficiently interested enough to want to have them once I'm no longer using them. Maybe by the time that happens some of them will be sought-after desirable instruments with a value to reflect this. maybe they won't. However unless my circumstances change in a way that I haven't yet anticipated they won't be sold within my lifetime. And that's what counts.

In which case I probably wouldn't bother with a backdrop at all. Unless it goes up in seconds, takes negligible room in the band transport, and it's on-stage position doesn't compromise in any way the setting up of the band.

To me it is certainly very noticeable when anyone buys or commissions a build of something unusual (for that read something that doesn't look like a Fender P or J). IMO if you buy or have something made for you with an eye on the potential resale value, you are very unlikely to end up with an instrument that you want to keep.

Really? I still own my very first bass, and the main 4 basses I use these days (two Gus G3s, a Warwick StarBass, and a Sei Flamboyant) are the 4 perfect basses for me and I have no need or desire to sell them or replace them with something else.

I'm afraid I have to agree with jazzmanb here. All those windows back the background look cluttered and district from the band. Unfortunately that tiny backdrop only adds to the clutter. However I can also see the attraction of not having too many things to set up - especially things that don't contribute to the music/sound. IME if you simply want to get the band name about, putting out flyers on the tables is probably more effective than having a backdrop.

But how much of that is contributing to the sound you are hearing from your TV? The broadcast signal path is probably Bass Guitar > DI > Digital Mixer > Multi-band Compressor.

I've never understood the obsession with resale value. Maybe because I've never bought any instrument with an eye to selling it on at some point. I've always bought because I have an actual need for the instrument at that particular moment in time. If I can afford it and it's something I'm going to use then I'll buy it. At the time I rarely think I'll be selling it later. If at some point I no longer need it I'll probably sell it or if I think I might use it again in the future it will go into storage. When I sell stuff sometimes I make money compared with what I originally paid for it, and sometimes I lose money. If I loose money, I look at the that amount as the rental value of the instrument for the time I was using it. TBH the amount I've spent on guitars and basses in real terms is small beans compared with what I was spending on synthesisers in the 80s.

IME the most important thing is that you have a way of being able to put it up that doesn't rely on being able to gaffa tape it to the wall behind the band. Also that it can be put up high enough to be completely visible over the drummer and backline.

I play a Warwick too. It's a MiK pro Series StarBass, so maybe not quite on a par with a more "traditional" MiG Warwick, but... It's the only Warwick I've played that I didn't think was completely horrible (and that includes a couple of very expensive MiG StarBasses) and with a slight adjustment in playing technique and a quick EQ tweak it sounds just like my Gus in the context of a live or recorded band mix.