BigRedX

[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 The problem with the Mini Moog wasn't that it was old hat or that analogue subtractive synths were considered out of date, but it was monophonic and didn't have patch memories.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.

[quote name='paul_c2' timestamp='1504699481' post='3366657'] Yes it does. Simple example: There's one way to do it on the (4 string) bass.....its as clear as a bell. [/quote] But that only works if that part of the score is written expressly for the bass guitar, otherwise there are three different ways to do it.

[quote name='PaulGibsonBass' timestamp='1504650161' post='3366403'] Do those of you who use public transport ever feel uneasy about carrying your gear around, from a safety / security perspective? [/quote] No. Never.

Breaking a string is very much the main reason for me bringing a spare bass to gigs. No matter how lightly you play eventually strings wear out and snap. It is inevitable. And even changing your strings regularly doesn't protect you from a duff set where one of them will let go the first time you dig in a little harder than normal at a gig. And sure you might be able to swap a string in well under 60 seconds in the comfort of your home, when the pressure is on at a gig and the audience as well as the rest of your band are looking at you expectantly just as you drop your spare set of strings down behind your amp... Much better to have a back up bass you can swap to during the intro of the next song.

Well it didn't for me. The only way to get rid of it was to leave the site, which means it's not 100% modern browser compliant.

Nasty pop-up that won't go away no matter where I click, asking me to join their mailing list (which I am already subscribed to). Needs more work.

For most bass lines you really don't need more than two.

For protecting your bass, they are really good. If you need to use it to carry your bass on your back for any distance you should try before you buy. I find mine very uncomfortable to wear for more than a few minutes because the straps are too close together at the top and the bottom of the bag slaps against the back of my legs as I walk. When it wears out I'll be looking for something else. Other people don't seem to have a problem with it.

[quote name='blue' timestamp='1504553295' post='3365667'] In the US you can purchase a dependable used car for around 10k and insurance with a clean driving record would be about $50.00 a month. Question, is the notion of being able to hop into your own car at anytime and going anywhere you want not apoealing in the UK? How do guys take women out on dates without a car. Is this another cultural thing. You guys are aware in the States women judge men by the cars they drive. Blue [/quote] For me most of the places I would want to get away to, also involve getting on an aeroplane to get there, so owning a car is mostly irrelevant to me from that PoV. Although car manufacturers would like car culture here in the UK to be more like the US it never will be. Running a car is expensive. Petrol (gas) is really expensive here in the UK compared with the US. At the moment we pay £1.16 a litre which by my calculation works out at $5.66 a gallon. Also I can get a taxi for me and all my gear from my house to city venue here in Nottingham, and back again, for less than it would cost me to park my car nearby while I played the gig. As for dating - I doubt I'd be very interested in any woman who judged me by whatever car I did (or didn't in my case) drive. Plus if I drove I wouldn't be able to drink.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1504521476' post='3365360'] Don't mean to derail this thread, but surely any 2-channel power amp with the option to bridge the channels is ... erm ... a mono amp? [/quote] Yes and no. The problem with bridging into mono is that it changes the impedance requirements of the cab(s) being driven. A stereo amp capable of driving an 8Ω or 4Ω cab each side will require an 8Ω or 16Ω cab when used in bridge mode. So for one 8Ω cab it's fine, so long as the cab is capable of handling the bridged power, other cabs and combinations may require specialised cables to get the impedance load right.

[quote name='prowla' timestamp='1504306053' post='3364084'] And yes again, a blank panel is easily unscrewed. [/quote] Yes it is, but it's not so easily unscrewed mid-set which IME is when all the serious problems that require quick access to a rack occur.

Electrics should be very reliable these days. They tend to fail either when they are very new due to manufacturing defects or very old as the more suspect able components wear out. In between so long as you don't abuse them they should be fine. In 40 years of gigging I've had 2 amp problems. One was due to manufacturing defects (Ashdown Superfly) and the other from user error - I stupidly plugged both sides of a stereo amp into the same cab. IME mechanical things are much more likely to go wrong.

My ideal back-up bass would be identical to my main bass in every way except for the colour.

IME it depends on the type of band and whether you need a car for other aspects of your life. Covers bands from my personal experience of being in a couple and from what I've read hear do tend to be very insular. Every member is responsible for his or her own gear and each turns up to gigs in their own vehicle. For originals bands it's entirely different. For a start few have to worry about lugging PA and lights about (I've done only a couple of originals gigs in the past 10 years where the band has had to organise their own PA and lights because the venue didn't have any). Secondly any serious originals band playing outside of their home town will have a band van along with a driver/roadie/merch seller so individual transport isn't a requirement, and local gigs can almost always be accessed by public transport or taxi. Also IME originals bands tend to be a lot more accommodating if non-driver members can bring something else important to the band such as free rehearsal space, storage for band gear, free design and printing of posters and flyers etc. And it very much depends on whether or not you need a vehicle for the non-band aspects of your life. I've managed being in gigging bands for almost 40 years now and I still don't own a car. If I did it would only be used for band activities, so my income form the band would have to completely cover the purchase and running costs in order for me to justify it. I've never needed on for my work - before going self-employed and working from home I never lived more than 30 minutes walk from my place of work, the exercise certainly did me good, and on the few occasions when one of my colleagues gave me lift him, rush-hour traffic meant if I saved at least 10 minutes on my journey we were doing very well! The last time I looked into buying a suitable vehicle for gigging, I found I could get a year's worth of taxis to rehearsals and local gigs before I had covered the cost of buying and insuring said vehicle let alone the other running costs.

15 years ago before I started work on transferring my complete CD and record collection on my computer I spent a week comparing different encoding rates and listening to the results through both my HiFi and home studio systems. I discovered the following: 1. By far the most important thing was the quality of the digital file encoding. Ideally I would have used uncompressed AIFF or WAV files, but back then the 1TB hard drive I had bought to store all my music files on had cost me a small fortune, so I was going to have to go compressed. 2. Using the built-in DAC on my PowerMac G4 I could hear an improvement in quality as I increased the BR or the MP3 file until I reached 192BR. Higher bit rates didn't sound any better. However when I listened to same files though the MotU converters in my studio system I could hear improvements all the way through 320BR to uncompressed files which were by far the best quality. So the BR used on the MP3 files makes a big difference until you go beyond 192BR after which you also need a better quality DAC in order to appreciate the benefits of higher bit rates or uncompressed audio files. Everything else (such as the amp and speakers) is IMO entirely subjective, so long as you have something half-way decent, and when for the past 20 years you have been able to get good HiFi speakers and amps for around £100 each there is no excuse to not to already have something perfectly serviceable. Personally I don't like sub-woofers. IMO they sound artificial.

Time to ditch the MP3s and other lossy audio formats. One of the reasons you may be having trouble hearing the bass is because lossy audio compression works by removing parts of the sound that are supposedly being masked by others. Often this means details that we as musicians may specifically be listening for are being removed because something more important (louder) is happening at the same time. In particular bass instruments in time with the much louder drums. The MP3 format dates from a time when hard drive storage was small and expensive and a fast internet connection meant you had 512K board band as opposed to 56K dial up. These days storage is stupidly cheap and for the majority the internet is plenty fast enough to allow real-time streaming of uncompressed CD quality audio.

[quote name='scrumpymike' timestamp='1504263599' post='3363737'] I'd say there's a bit more to it than that. [/quote] Not a lot though... it's got a second coil on the bridge pickup and enhanced upper fret access which makes the body look a little awkward IMO. Other than that it's just a J-Bass copy.

Do we need yet another J-Bass copy?