BigRedX

Why not? And how do we know your name really is Kevin Dean?

[quote name='SpondonBassed' timestamp='1505381384' post='3371427'] I always liked the Smiths. I never liked Morrisey. There, I've said it. While I respect his contribution to music I don't have to like the fellow. I think the Smiths might have stayed on the scene longer with a different front man. Hindsight's a bugger. [/quote] IMO there's a pretty good chance that with someone less controversial and a more conventional approach to singing and melody as a front man, The Smiths would never have anything more than another Manchester band with a couple of cult singles released on their own label.

[quote name='Japhet' timestamp='1505380522' post='3371416'] I'm not a huge Beatles fan but the thing that completely blows me away about them is the way their music evolved over such a short space of time. To go from 'She love you, yeah, yeah, yeah' to Across The Universe in a handful of years is quite extraordinary. I can't think of any other band whose evolution has been anywhere near as spectacular. [/quote] I would like to think that any group of half-way decent musicians and songwriters, give access to the artistic influences, technological support and development and lack of financial obligation to stick to a winning musical formula, that The Beatles enjoyed would be equally capable of showing the same kind of development. Just look at what The Pretty Things achieved from their debut album in 1964 to "Parachute" in 1970 with a fraction of the resources that the Beatles had. On the other hand there are those who would argue that "She Loves You" is a far superior song to "Across The Universe".

[quote name='mikel' timestamp='1505338698' post='3371235'] Agreed. The Beatles have to be taken in context. Back in the day they were the pilot fish for the rest of the music world. People held there breath when a new recording was imminent. Exciting days, I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who did not live through the 60s. Anything and everything was possible. [/quote] I was born in 1960, but spent most of the decade interested in Lego, Meccano and model aeroplanes and tanks rather than pop music. In fact I wasn't really interested in music of any kind until I heard T. Rex on the radio in 1971.

Here is the The Terrortones website. It was set up originally for the purpose of being able to sell T-shirts and CDs to those members of the audience who had been unable to buy them at one of our gigs (where we sold by far the largest amount of merch). Apart form the merch page it mostly acts as a portal to all our other web presences and social media pages, and very conveniently comes out top when you Google the band. I do think that having a dedicated band website makes you look a bit more serious, as anyone with a spare 30 minutes can set up a Facebook page, but TBH most of our promotion was done through Facebook and since we joined Bandcamp we've sold far more CDs and records through them then we have through our website merch page (despite the fact that most items work out cheaper directly from us). The website was created by me with direction from Mr venom, but it was mostly hand-coded in Dreamweaver, which I have because was originally an Adobe Creative Suite user and now Creative Cloud subscriber. Hosting is done by Vidahost and is using a legacy offer that gave us free web space when we bought the domain name through them. Since the site is small, fairly low traffic and any high-bandwidth elements on the site are hosted elsewhere, we don't need anything fancier. Since the band isn't currently active, the main purpose of the site these days to maintain a web presence and provide links to places where people can buy our music in either physical or digital format. Even when the band was gigging every week, traffic was low and most of the interaction between the band and promoters and fans happened through Facebook and our monthly mailing list emails.

The electrons will have to work much harder to flow vertically rather than horizontally as they would in the amp's normal orientation. You may loose some of the "heft" in the sound.

[quote name='dmccombe7' timestamp='1505122402' post='3369561'] Its a nice looking bass and I don't know much about Lull basses but not sure i'd pay that kind of money for what seems a standard looking bass. Are they that good ? I was expecting exotic looking woods or fancy electronics to be honest. Sorry if my response is a bit negative. You have obviously tried one and know how good they are. Wishing you all the very best with it. Dave [/quote] IME exotic woods might look nice (if you like that kind of thing) but they don't really add anything else to the bass. Same with fancy electronics, which unless you are Wal or ACG and are specifying your very own custom circuits are just some off the peg pickups and pre-amp shoe-horned into the instrument. AFAICS Mike Lull makes the best new Thunderbirds you can buy, while Gibson continues to drop the ball when it comes to bass guitars.

[quote name='cytania' timestamp='1504895145' post='3368193'] Norman Watt-Roy did a session for Trevor Horn where he laid down various tasty riffs that Horn sampled. Alot of these made it onto the classic FGTH hits. [/quote] Riffs? I think you are seriously over-estimating what the Fairlight could do sampling-wise back in 1983/4 when FGTH's first album was recorded. The individual notes might well have been NWR but the "performance", which is the important bit, will be whoever worked on the Page R for the bass part.

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1504879007' post='3368002'] True, but there are fingering positions. In the same way as a fretless bass has positions, albeit the fretless bass has them marked with dots. [/quote] I've only ever seen tablature for fretted instruments where IMO it makes the most sense. For me the whole point of fretless instruments is that you can play "in-between the notes". Incidentally how does standard notation show quarter tones and the like? Apparently according Wikipedia there also tablature for chromatic mouth organ!

They sound exactly the same to me. MacPro optical out into Denon amp Mission Speakers.

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1504865154' post='3367835'] You don't actually need an Instrument in your hands to sight read, or where to place your fingers. You can look at the chart or score and visualise the note, or indeed just sing it. [/quote] How do you visualise the note - in terms of the finger position(s) required to play it? If you are looking at the score for a transposing instrument what note do you sing, the one your instrument produces when it has transposed it?

[quote name='lojo' timestamp='1504862716' post='3367813'] I know we are going off topic but the thing I've never understood is why the sax player is always saying his key is a tone higher than the guitar key ? [/quote] This because the saxophone is a transposing instrument. On the tenor sax if you play a note with the fingering for "C" the actual note is "Bb". For an alto sax the same fingering produces an Eb note. This has been done to make it easier for woodwind players playing from a score to be able to switch to different instruments since they nearly all share the same basic fingering. The score takes care of transposition between the different instruments, so although it looks as though each part of the score is different, when the correct instrument plays it they produce the same notes.

[quote name='The Jaywalker' timestamp='1504858524' post='3367776'] 2 ways it can be done: 1) Written at pitch - the notes are the notes and its up to the player to relearn their fingerboard position according to the tuning used. I guess easier for the composer and trickier for the performer. 2) Written as if the instrument is tuned normally - i think this is called scordatura in orchestral and classical guitar stuff. Can get weird with key signatures being wonky, but ultimately is trickier for the composer and easier on the performer once tbey get used to reading something which "sounds wrong". [/quote] As a composer I would most definitely prefer the first way! If the second way was chosen there would be places where it would be necessary to also indicate which string was to played otherwise there is a possibility of playing the wrong note. And now I am going to be controversial! I seems to me, from what I have seen in this thread and others about notation and tablature, that a lot of sight readers don't actually "read the notes" but read where to put their fingers on the their instrument to play the required note(s). That would explain all the musicians who can competently play more than one instrument but can't sight read for all of them. The thing about transposing "solo" double bass in post #252 would also tend to confirm this where the player "reads" E, plays the fingering for E, but because their instrument has been tuned differently for that piece actually sounds F#. Isn't that what tablature does?

[quote name='The Jaywalker' timestamp='1504853161' post='3367735'] Alternate tuning is specified at the start but the piece is written as normal. For example, "solo" tuning for classical double bass is a tone up - F#, B, E, A - but a solo concerto in B minor would be written in A minor. In other words, you read and play "as normal" - first line below the bass clef you play as your open E but it sounds as an F#. Alternate tunings basically function the same way as transposing instruments like trumpet, sax etc. [/quote] I can see how that makes sense for a simple transposing tuning, but what about a tuning where the intervals between the strings changes from the normal, like DADGAD on the guitar or one I've used on occasion on the bass - DADA?

Incidentally, if a piece requires your to tune your instrument differently to the conventional tuning is that indicated in standard notation and if so how?

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1504803740' post='3367472'] Also, why don't serious classical instrumentalists use it? [/quote] Because there are very few fretted, stringed instruments in classical music.

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1504792908' post='3367358'] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X7qgBVnMfY[/media] [/quote] Interesting, but IMO not really accurate or relevant. You simply can't make the connection between reading words in sentences and paragraphs and the ability to be able to read notation more easily than tablature. As someone who is marginally dyslexic, I have trained myself to be able to read properly formatted text by being able to recognise word shapes. However I can't see the similarity because despite the fact that you could in theory put any combination of letters together to form a word, all the common words use set letter patterns, and sentence structure means that the words themselves generally follow set patterns. I know this because if they didn't, then I wouldn't be able to read at all. When it comes to music there are a lot less in the way of rules to help you work out what is happening. As a composer I can put any two or more notes together to form a chord, and I can follow any note with any other note of any length. True you can use the key and the time signature to help as a player to narrow down the choices, but only the simplest of music is going to constantly fit into the easy choices. You don't have to be playing prog rock or jazz to encounter accidentals, key or time signature changes in what on first listen sounds like a completely straight forward piece of music. Music IME is a lot less predictable than literature. Or maybe it is simply that I don't find either notation or tablature easy to read. Give me a piece in either format and eventually I'll be able to work out what I need to do in order to be able to play the piece, but for me music is simply to complex and unpredictable to be able to sight read. Tablature its not better or worse than notation.

[quote name='pfretrock' timestamp='1504787478' post='3367304'] Not sure if my memory is correct here.... Sometime in the mid 80's I picked up a couple of keyboard magazines (they had interviews with Keith Emerson in). It seems everyone wanted a DX7 and was re-mortgaging, or something to get one. And whoever took over Moog at the time was selling off Model D's, for a couple of hundred dollars. Nobody wanted them. [/quote] You shouldn't have needed to re-motgage anything. The DX7 when it came out might still have cost about £1200, but it was stupidly cheap compared with all the other decent polyphonic synths of the time, and much better specified than any of them. 16 voice polyphony, aftertouch, breath control, 32 user memories, expandable with plug-in cartridges, and a decent feeling keyboard. The problem with the Mini Moog wasn't that it was old hat or that analogue subtractive synths were considered out of date, but it was monophonic and didn't have patch memories. As a synth player at the time when the DX7 first came out (one of the other members of my band had one of the first DX7s in the UK) these were the things we wanted most of all. If someone could have made a polyphonic Mini Moog with programmable memories for the same price as a DX7 we would have been just as happy. IMO in those days if a synth had a sound, it was down to missing features - only one VCO and/or envelope generator per voice. The DX7 had features in abundance. Unfortunately the unfamiliar synthesis method and user-unfriendly parameter access made it tricky for everyone to program. We got some great analogue style sounds out of ours, but it took much longer to get anything compared with our analogue synths.

[quote name='bazztard' timestamp='1504774334' post='3367164'] The M80 Dual bag is $690 AU. yes, $690, a couple of hundred more and you have a new Fender MIM . I just bought a second gig bag for $60. Lets face it,a bag really only protects from small knocks and drops,anything more and a bag is useless. [/quote] My Mono M80 bag completely protected by bass when someone knocked my EBS-Proline 2x10 cab off the 4x10 cab it was stacked on directly onto the bass which was lying on the floor in its case. That's a weighty cab falling about 2 feet. The cab actually bounced off the case and the bass inside was completely unscathed. As I said in my original post the protection the Mono bag provides is excellent, it's a pity it's so uncomfortable for me to wear on my back for any length of time which negates it's usefulness as a gig bag.

[quote name='grumpyguts' timestamp='1504725452' post='3366937'] I nagged him out of his electronic kit for the following reasons. 1/ I don't want to rely on the foldback in order to hear what he is doing. 2/ The audience expect to see a kit, it provides a focal point - a few black plastic circles is disappointing visually. 3/ I don't think it sounds as good. Thank you for all the replies, as I expected my question was a bit pointless as there are so many variables there is no easy answer. Mr Drummer has yet to find an acoustic kit. However, I have a dep gig on the 16th with an acoustic kit in attendance - I will pay a bit more attention and see what if any goes through the pa. [/quote] IME audiences and musicians do a lot of listening with their eyes rather than their ears. I used to play in a band that had during it's lifetime 3 different drummers with 4 different electronic kits. The one that the audiences seemed to like the most was the drummer who's kit looked like a normal acoustic kit, but had heavily damped drum shells fitted with bugs which provided the triggers. In reality all the different drummers were triggering exactly the same drum sounds which came from a rack full of synths and samplers, the only difference being the playing style of the drummer and how well they had set up the trigger to MIDI parameters on their drum brain modules.

I don't have a case for every guitar and bass that I own, but I do have enough cases to get all the instruments I might need at any one time to a gig or recording session.

There appears to be an underlying assumption in this thread that if you have standard notation for a piece it will be correct. I'm sure that anyone who bought sheet music for tunes from the hit parade as performed by popular beat combos from the 60s and 70s will attest this is hardly the case. While the notes (and guitar chords) might have been a legitimate musical accompaniment to the vocal melody most of the time, they bore little resemblance to what was actually played on the recording. The main score was generally an approximation of the original, badly arranged for bar-room piano. Most of the guitar chords were unplayable unless you had extra fingers and many of the songs appeared to be unnecessarily difficult to play keys. If you were lucky a more knowledgeable friend would have explained that the originals had been recorded with the guitars tuned down a semitone, or that the final mix had been speeded up at the mastering stage to make it sound more exciting, which would go a little way towards explaining some of what you found in the notation, but a lot of the time it was simply down to laziness and incompetence on the part of those doing the transcriptions, much like a lot of the tab you find on the internet today. The big difference was that you had to pay in order to get these travesties. Sheet music for single song cost upwards of £1.00 at a time when the same money would have bought a round for your band in the pub and still have change left over. As a naive teenager I had hoped that these sheets would help unlock the mysteries of the music I loved so much, but in the end it was hours spent listening to the record(s) over and over again (or if I was lucky 10 minutes with a friend who'd already done that) that allowed me to work out what was being played on some of my favourite recordings.

[quote name='paul_c2' timestamp='1504704605' post='3366744'] Yep - but does it really matter which of those three ways are chosen, since they all sound the same pitch/note? [/quote] Yes IMO it does very much matter, as even on very expensive basses they don't by any means have the same tone. For me it would depend as much on what the other instruments were playing at the same time as to which position I chose unless the best sounding position also made the part too difficult to play in which case I'd pick a compromise of tone and playability.

[quote name='SpondonBassed' timestamp='1504702777' post='3366716'] I may be wrong but isn't the bass part written always incorrectly to start with just to keep it on the stave? [/quote] Depends on the instrument. If it's a transposing instrument like the bass guitar then you play the notes a octave lower than written. If it isn't (like tuba and trombone IIRC) then you play the notes as they are written.

[quote name='PaulGibsonBass' timestamp='1504649910' post='3366399'] I only have one friend who doesn't / can't drive, adults in the UK that don't drive are definitely a minority. That said Blue, roads in the UK are chronically overcrowded and many are in some disrepair. From my experience, driving in the US is far more enjoyable, especially out of the cities. [/quote] I think it also depends on when you grew up. Until I reached by 30s (in the early 90s) few of my friends could drive and even fewer actually owned a car. Those that did had something that inevitably spent almost as much time being fixed as it did being driven. I can drive, but I hate it and I'm not a very good driver. Consequently I don't drive and the roads are a much safer place without me behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. Unfortunately there are plenty of people in the UK who seemingly don't realise how bad their driving is and continue to inflict their lack of ability on other road users. British roads would be a lot safer if these people didn't drive, and there wasn't a general assumption that virtually everyone who is capable of passing the driving test once, deserves the privilege of being allowed to drive. And overcrowded doesn't begin to describe the majority of British roads. Almost any journey unless it is untaken on motorways at the dead of night will involve sitting in slow-moving (or even non-moving) traffic simply because there are too many cars trying too occupy roads that were designed for less than half that number. Where I live parked cars line both sides of all the surrounding roads and despite blocking half the pavement, there is still only just enough room for a single vehicle to squeeze between them. If I did own a car, I'd be lucky to be able to park it in my street, let alone actually in front of my house.