BigRedX

And as I have said many times before, selling my old (big and heavy) bass and guitar rigs paid for me to buy a Helix Floor and RCF745 FRFR cab new and come away with a slight profit. And on hindsight I could have got away with a lesser (cheaper) FRFR as it only gets used for rehearsals with one band and the occasional smaller gigs where the quality of the foldback is unknown.

In the days when I was using a full backline, for local gigs it was cheaper and convenient to get a taxi. Taxi drivers have no qualms about "parking" in the middle of the road directly outside the venue for me to load in and out. The fare both ways was only slightly more than the cost of parking and definitely less if load out was after midnight, and the overall convenience of not having to carry the gear great distances or messing about looking for free or cheap parking outweighed any additional cost.

There's plenty of undiscovered electronic music gems from the 80s. That record isn't one of them.

The thing with the current Line6 HX/Helix range is that all the upgrades are done in software. Not only that but they are all free. So although my Helix Floor looks the same as it did when I bought it six years ago, inside it's is very different. I'm currently on V3.7 of the firmware and I believe that there is at least one update that I haven't yet got around to installing. There was a major update a while back that improved most of the amp and cab models so that they used less processing power, which allowed you to have even more modules in a preset (not that I have ever come close to running out of processing power yet). I'm sure at some point there will be some major improvement which will technically render the current range "obsolete". But so what? As long as the devices still work they are still relevant. After all there's musicians using amps, cabs and pedals with technology that is at least 40 years old and they seem to be perfectly happy. My Helix does 99% of the things that I want and does all of those things perfectly. The 1% it doesn't do are highly specialised to my needs (MIDI-triggered gates and filters) and although I have a request in, I suspect my requirements are a long way down the list of priorities. However I've found work-arounds for what is missing. I've been using programmable multi-effects for 35 years now and the Helix is by far the best in absolutely every respect.

After all that, it's a pity that the song in question is so mediocre and uninspiring, and considering that it came out in 1987, was on the cusp of being totally eclipsed by acid house, so not really surprising that it was totally ignored at the time.

I played in a band where the drummer would commute twice a week between Coventry where he lived and Nottingham where the rest of the band were and where we practiced.

This is why I'm enjoying playing in an originals band that has no backline. PA and lights plus someone to operate then is supplied by the venue. We get the whole band, our gear plus our roadie/merch seller in the synth player's estate car, and the 8 pieces of gear we have (two of which are stands) are easily carried by the four of us between the car and the venue.

So long as any visible wood looks attractive, I don't care what it is. And TBH I'd rather it didn't say "Gibson" on the headstock as they are currently of no interest to me and by the looks of things rapidly going downhill. Hopefully they won't take Epiphone with them.

I was just about to say exactly the same thing. My girlfriend does the WGW market and despite there being a dedicated WiFi access point for stall holders there are always problems when it's very busy and everyone is using their card readers. At the October weekend she discovered there was a new SumUp update that allowed her to bypass the card reader entirely and use her phone as a contactless reader. This system turned out to be much more reliable maybe because it removes one level of wireless connectivity - between the phone and SumUp machine?

Gibsons are a lot more expensive these days. Besides these are far more authentic. Gibson "Thunderbirds" these days are little more than basses with a similar body shape to the original model.

Is this supposed to be a good price? (Facebook is done on a different device so I can't view links). I've seen a Alembic in Sam Ash Music in NYC that was barely worth a couple of hundred $ due to the terrible condition it was in.

Music is not competition. It really shouldn't matter who is being inducted into the "Rock n Roll Hall of Fame" and who is not. Ask yourself this... If you had been a moderately successful musician some time in the previous century, and now mostly forgotten, mostly known for a hit or two from 40 years ago, would you not take the opportunity for the publicity and the possibility of reviving your musical career?

Try it one way. If the sound with both pickups on is thin and weedy then swap the wires. Easy.

Back in the early 90s when I bought my first 36" scale bass (Overwater Original), Newtone were the only string manufacturer capable of making a suitably long B string that sounded good.

IIRC one of the major forum updates deleted all old messages as the format they were saved in was incompatible with the new version of the forum. There were even warnings about it before the change occurred. The oldest message I have is from early 2018, and I know I had messages before that, but they have all gone.

According to the figures currently quoted on the Squier website, the neck is a couple of mm wider at the nut than it is on mine which was bought in May 2016, and other parts may have been updated along with this. As I said intonation on mine was fine with the original strings and only the low E string is out with the heavier Newtone Axions. As soon as I started using mine seriously with the band I discovered that I had a fundamental problem with the neck width (or lack of it) which stopped me going down the rabbit hole of various mods that could be done to the bridge and vibrato mechanism, and down a completely different rabbit hole looking at all the different Bass VIs available (there's a lot more than you would think) to find something that suited my playing style better than the Squier. Edit: TBH I wish I could have got on with the Squier as it's a fine looking instrument, especially in purple. Plus the Eastwood ended up being about 5 times the price of what I paid for mine, but for me the playability made all the difference.

Yes. Constant problem on a Squier VMJ Fretless. One of many issues that eventually led me to sell the bass a replace it with something a lot better.

Probably series/parallel wiring of the pickup.

One of my bands has a SumUp. There are nearly always deals available where if you get a reference from a current SumUp user you get the device at a discount (half price IIRC) and they get £10 added to their SumUp account. However with the right phone, the latest version doesn't even need the actual card reader as the transaction can be done phone-to-phone which is even more convenient for everyone. You don't need a business account, but if you want to keep the merch funds separate from your personal finances you can always set up one of the those Starling (or similar) accounts that are being advertised and don't actually cost you anything. IMO the tiny fees charged are nullified the first time you make a sale to someone who doesn't have cash on them, and these people are becoming more common with every gig. The other band I'm in haven't yet sorted themselves out with a card reader and consequently they have not been selling as much merch recently.

Maybe my arms are just too weedy, or I'm too used to the lightly balanced vibrato systems of my guitars. However as soon as I put Newtone Axions on both my Squier Bass VI and Burns Barracuda the vibrato mechanism stopped doing anything useful. If I put all my effort into it I could move the vibrato arm but the pitch change produced was negligible. I'd want to be able to drop those notes by a semi-tone for it to be of any use to me.

One of the most important things I learnt when playing guitar in bands is that you don't have to play every note of those finger breaking chords. There will be at least one other instrument that you can pass off some of those notes to. And sometimes no-one needs to be playing them at all - they are implied by what happens either side of the chord. It's all in the arrangement.

Thanks although a big stage with great lighting and excellent photographers always helps. We have to just turn up and pose! Here's a few more that have just popped up on Facebook:

Gothic music has definitely had something of a resurgence in the last few years. You'd have thought it would all be people in their 50 and 60s trying to relive their youth, but some of my bands' most enthusiastic fans are only in their 20s! Besides all the great goth music is eminently danceable whatever your age!

In the late 70s I made a solid electric balalaika and a guitar in woodwork classes at school. Pupils weren't allowed to use power tools, and apart from the woodwork teacher cutting out the (very) rough shape of the guitar body on the band saw everything was done by me using hand tools. I probably spent more time sharpening plane and chisel blades then I did shaping the wood. If I was ever to have another go at making a guitar or similar music instrument, I would invest in every time and effort saving power tool available. Life is too short.

Do you actually need the space you might save for another pedal? If not and if everything is working fine with no unwanted hums and buzzes I'd leave it alone and stop worrying.