BigRedX

What cab(s) would be be using with this?

I'm afraid that you are going to have to be prepared to travel as we haven't got anything even remotely close to Mid Wales at the moment. And the nearest we are likely to come is if we get invited to play Goths On A Field next year. A BC GothFest might be something worth considering...

Now that the most recent post has added a new page it appears to have sorted itself out. However I did get the problem on 3 different devices earlier this morning so it might be worth checking that there's no underlying database corruption on the thread and maybe think about locking it and starting a new one as it is over 700 pages long.

Over the past 50 years I think I've tried pretty much every well-known bass except a Fodera, a Smith and I don't think I've ever played a BC Rich bass of any design. Until a year ago I could have also included a P-Bass in that list. Although I've tried and even owned basses with a P-style pickup in the correct place, none of them bore any resemblance to the typical Fender P-Bass in looks. Before I discovered bass internet forums I never knew that there was supposed to be something super-special about the Fender P-Bass. To me, to own one rather than something with Gibson or Rickenbacker on the headstock was just a simple choice you made in the same way that a guitarist would choose a Strat or a Tele or Les Paul or a Firebird etc... Just based on looks I wasn't that impressed, and nearly all the bass players in bands that I really liked played Gibsons or Rickenbackers or something Japanese from the late 70s or early 80s. When I final got to play one I was massively underwhelmed, and really don't think I have missed out not having tried one before.

While digital is definitely the way forward, I have yet to come across a CAT5/6 cable that is as robust and gig proof as a good quality multi-way snake. For a run of any significant length I'd still want it drum-mounted, so I know it's going to be coiled and uncoiled properly and I'd want to have at least one back-up immediately available.

This thread appears to have become corrupted. Pages 711 and 712 appear to be exactly the same.

If you can afford it, I would recommend getting one with the cable attached to a drum. I had a 20-way drum mounted one made up in the late 90s with the "stage box" in the drum centre and the other end terminated in a heavy-duty multi-way connector that plugged into a patch panel on the back of the case that held our mixer. Cost about £750 back then including the patch panel that had all the flying leads.

Our best performing song on Spotify is over 5 minutes long, and a good minute and a half longer than the next 2-3 most popular ones. We also have a song that is over 7 minutes long which got picked up for a popular Spotify new releases playlist and racked up a couple of thousand streams in its first month of release. IME song length is no barrier to the number of streams it will attract.

I've found that intonation goes away with both flats and rounds when the strings have become worn due to their contact with the frets, result in strings that are no longer a uniform mass along their length. Maybe the reason that flats users as less likely to notice this is a combination of the sound they prefer and the fact that they are less likely to venture above the 7th fret?

By the time I'd finished typing my previous post someone's put of some photos of us playing:

To back up what I said in my previous post at yesterday's gig we completely sold out of CD copies of our "Lucid" single which means that we'll probably have to think about doing a limited issue run of something else to tide us over until the album is finished. In fact all 5 of the bands who played did well on CD sales.

Daytime outdoor gig featuring five "goth" bands in a hot and sunny Stevenage. Now that's not a sentence you expect to be typing! Hurtsfall were part of the musical entertainment for The Peculiar Market at the "Event Island" in Stevenage. Not really sure what to expect when we agreed to play, but the whole afternoon was great, helped the sunny weather, even though it's not the natural environment for goths, and a decent turn out of people to watch the bands as well as a lot of totally bemused Saturday shoppers who just happen to be passing by. There were deckchairs and a sand pit, although a lot of the audience chose to watch from the relative shade of the grassy knoll... Once again playing the middle of the bill seemed to the optimum time for catching random shoppers who stopped to listen. Our cover of Enola Gay went down particularly well, and we completely sold out of "Lucid" CDs which means we'll have to think about another short-run CD single to fill in until the album is finished. Also completely sold out of L and XL T-shirts in all the designs. In fact merch for all the bands seemed to be doing very well. Afterwards all the bands - Glasshouse Museum, Byronic Sex & Exile, Hurtsfall, Jan Doyle Band and Chaos Bleak posed for a group photo: Back home before 7.00pm. No photos of Hurtsfall on stage have appeared yet. I'll post some up if they do.

Anyone tried this? One of our neighbours has a car wrap business but AFAICS wrapping a car is easier than a bass because it's done panel by panel. For a bass body there would probably need to be a join between the front and the back which has the potential to not look very elegant.

I realise that this question is primarily aimed at people who play covers, but I thought I'd add the perspective of an originals band. In our case we just don't do the gig. We had to turn down the opportunity to be support for Auger on a substantial part of their current tour because our synth player was on holiday with his family. It's disappointing, but other opportunities will come our way. Simply from a practical PoV having deps isn't feasible as there's more to being in this band than just playing the right notes. Any replacement synth player would need to have all the correct sounds programmed up, and someone replacing me would not only have to have a suitable Bass VI but would also need a decent multi-effects unit to allow them to switch instantly between bass and guitar sounds - one of the songs has several sections where it does this every two bars. We had deps for guitar and drums when I played in The Terrortones where getting a replacement was a lot simpler and the band was a lot busier, but a lot of the time the vibe on stage just wasn't right. Also one dep drummer managed to screw up the single twice in two different ways at the same gig (after messing it up in the main set we elected to play it again as an encore to make up for getting it wrong earlier). That was not a pleasant experience for the band or the audience.

I've had various roles in previous bands from having to arrange every aspect of the other band members musical lives (something I'm not keen to repeat unless it is guaranteed to bring me fame and fortune - I once stopped doing any band activity and took 6 weeks before one of the other members got in touch to ask what was happening) to other bands where I just turned up and played my instrument. I do have a tendency to take over if I think a band is being poorly run, so now my preferred situation is for band members to concentrate at what they are good at on top of their primary musical function. In my current band our singer who is most definitely the "face" of the band does all the social stuff including getting gigs organising our on-line presence and most of the interacting with fans at gigs. The synth player is the band transport and in charge of recording. I do the drum programming and graphic design. Songs are written as a collaborative effort between all three of us.

What sort of case? Light-weight gig-bag? Semi-rigid bag? Hard case? Full flight case?

You only need to follow the advice on the Newtone site if your are using their strings with round cores. You can safely cut the hex-core strings to length before fitting or bending them. This advice came directly from Newtone after I queried it with them. It appears that they still haven't updated the instructions on the web site or packaging.

I used to own about 50 guitars and basses, 3 bass rigs (with effects), 1 guitar rig (with effects), a couple of keyboard synths, plus two racks full of synth modules and samplers as well as a keytar. This was all kept in fully-spec'd studio suitable for recording anything except an acoustic drum kit with a 40 channel desk and a couple of racks of outboard gear. Over the last 10 years I have down-sized to 9 guitars and basses (3 of which I only still have because I haven't go around to listing them for sale) a Line6 Helix and FRFR cab plus a 3 octave controller keyboard and a computer for drum programming and tracking my bass parts. The studio room has been turned back into my home office.

Looks like standard low B to high C stringing to me. I suppose it could be E-E (one octave down from a guitar) like a Bass VI. I suspect though the two highest strings have come from a different set, hence the different ball-ends. They certainly look like bass string ball ends rather than guitar ones.

Show me a photo that uses it, and then challenge accepted.

@ped can you direct me to a sale post that uses this? Surely this is fairly easily faked and conversely the notes can just as easily be removed by people wanting to re-use the photos?

I think this very much depends on the genre of music. CDs still appear to be selling at all the gigs I go to both as a band member and as a punter. Apart from our first single which also came out on CD, one of my bands has only only made our music available as single releases on-line. However we have had so my people asking when we will have an album on CD available for sale, that we are now in the middle of recording new material for it. The other band I am in has almost completely sold out of all our physical product (3 albums all on CD). There will probably be a discussion soon about whether we are going to do a new production run of any of them, or simply wait until the album we're currently working on is ready to release.

At the moment for my bands streaming isn't really an income source, but a form of advertising that just so happens to pay us, even if it is only a small amount. Only one of the recordings I've made available for downloads and streaming has made back what it cost to put it out via an aggregator so far. But that's not what streaming is for IMO. Looking at my band's Spotify statistics there is nearly always a noticeable upswing in streams just before any of our gigs, especially when we are playing "festivals", so people going to these events are using the streaming services to decide if my band is worth turning up early for. Hopefully they decide we are, and they'll buy something from the merch stand afterwards, and come to see us play next time we're in the area. Also it's an easy way for promoters to check out the music when they are considering booking us for a gig. Over the past 15 years by far the biggest source of profit for my bands has been T-shirt sales, followed by PRS songwriting royalties. Sales of CDs and records at gigs comes next but only because the production costs, recording, printing and pressing tend to be a lot higher per unit than a T-shirt. Payments from download sales and streaming are a very distant 4th. For me on-line, physical media and other merchandise items all form different but equally essential functions. You need all of them and can't replace one with another.

For me there is no substitute for playing the songs over and over until each becomes becomes almost automatic. I'm slightly dyslexic so notes other than the most basic ones are of little use as I simply can't read and play at the same time. Also because I move about quite a bit on stage I can't guarantee that I'll be in a position to be able see them if my memory did go blank mid-song. Having said that I do seem to be getting better at remembering how all the songs I need to play go as I have got older. I certainly wouldn't have been able to remember how to play 30-40 songs in two different styles when I first started gigging 45 years ago.

I think we got on our most popular playlist because the person who runs it also moves in the same social media circles as us, and we happened to see when they posted asking for submissions. To give you an idea of how good one of these playlists can be, or most popular song will probably hit 20,000 streams before the end of this year at which point it will have been available for 5 years. About half of those streams will have been from 2024. And this is just for a niche Goth playlist. Also having done some more reading on the subject it appears that most of the songs affected by this Spotify policy haven't been paying any money to the artists involved because they have yet to reach the payout threshold for their aggregator service. The payout for 1000 streams according to 2023 figures is roughly 60¢. With most aggregators setting the payment threshold at $10 it would to take at least 17 years to reach that if the song was getting just under 1000 streams a year. And those with low Spotify streams but who are reaching their payment thresholds will probably never notice those few missing ¢s. As I said in my previous post the only artists who are going to be noticeably affected are those with lots of songs that are all getting slightly less than 1000 streams a year.