BigRedX

[quote name='cybertect' timestamp='1443628374' post='2876419'] I beg to differ. XTC's [i]Senses Working Overtime[/i] made it to No. 5. in 1982. [/quote] I have to say that I agree - the early 80s with post-punk and the late 80s with acid house was where innovative non-mainstream music was able to make it into the charts.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1443621426' post='2876330'] Speaking of which, this surely cannot be the bridge as Kramer intended it? Look at the way the upper course strings run ... [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Used-Vintage-KRAMER-1980-XL-8-Aluminum-Neck-8-Strings-Bass-from-Japan-/291573896404?hash=item43e32894d4"]http://www.ebay.co.u...=item43e32894d4[/url] [/quote] Unfortunately yes it is. The big problem with the original aluminium neck Kramers is that apart from the neck and body they are essentially what I call "parts bin" instruments. That all the other hardware is whatever parts were easily available at the time bodged to make the instrument work as best they could. There was no custom hardware made to properly solve problems like this. Even the revolutionary aluminium necks are the same castings for all the models. All they did was to slot the fingerboard differently to give 19 frets long scale or 24 frets short scale. The headless models just had the headstock sawn off the standard neck. Now does it make sense?

Having owned two 8-string basses - a Washburn B20-8 and a Carlo Robelli (low cost Korean-made for one of the US instrument retail chains IIRC) I would offer the following advice: 1. Don't buy anything that doesn't have individual adjustable saddles for each string in the pair. Without this feature it is impossible to play in tune above the 7th fret. On a conventional 4-string bass this might not matter, but for me the whole point of an 8-string is that it lends itself to melodic playing in the higher registers while still retaining the bottom end, so if you can't do that because of tuning issues it's pretty pointless. 2. They all tend to be pretty weighty. And the less weighty ones tend to suffer from neck dive due to the size of the headstock and the number of machine heads populating it. 3. The current "easily" available modern designs from Dean and Schecter all use the same hardware and TBH are essentially the same bass with different body stylings. They do the job and the bridge has the required individual saddles, but having played them, they are all a bit "meh" (and heavy). 4. If I was going to buy another "off-the-peg" 8-string bass, then I'd be looking at Tune Japan. I've not been lucky enough to play one of their 8-string basses but the 4- and 5-strings models I've tried have been excellent. The company have an excellent reputation for building high-quality instruments, and they even do a model with an 8-string vibrato unit! They aren't cheap and your best bet is to keep a watch in the Ishibashi Ubox. There's been a few come up over the last few years, so they are not impossible to find. Edit: A lot of the older models such as those from Kramer, BC Rich and (IIRC) Hagstrom are short scale which may or may not be an advantage depending on your PoV. If scale length is important check first. HTH

Like any decade what we think is good or bad is simply down to individual taste. I personally don't care for the song in the OP but that doesn't mean that all music from the decade was awful. In fact I bet that every single forum member could find at least one record they like from the decade made by an artist that was at at their creative peak then.

I found my self agreeing with a lot of this that I read recently: [quote]As a rule, I hate other bands. Quite seriously. It happens less often these days, but when people interview you because you're in a band they always want to talk about other bands - what have I been listening to? what new bands are good? what's your album of the year? I never know what to say because I hate other bands, new ones especially. My album of the year is always whichever album I have made that year and I haven't been listening to anything except podcasts from America where one of them has a boring name and sounds like Randy Newman and the other one has a name like Grussbaum Snuzzibatch and sounds like a more sincere Chandler off Friends. I hate other bands. If I liked other bands, I wouldn't have had to form a band in the first place. That's why you form a band - because all these other bands just don't cut it and if no one else is going to make the records that need making it'll just have to be you. Music journalists don't understand that about bands - they think bands share an interest with them. But we don't. We hate other bands. We wish other bands would f*** right off.[/quote] Read the full article [url=http://www.indelicates.com/worthless/]here[/url] it's fairly enlightening although only the opening that I've reproduced above relates directly to the OP.

[quote name='JJW' timestamp='1443559915' post='2875848'] What even is that? [url="http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=5575090229&toolid=10001&campid=5337531593&customid=&icep_item=331667450889&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=229508&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=lg"]http://rover.ebay.co...&mtid=824&kw=lg[/url] [/quote] It's someone getting a placeholder ad up before their 20 free listings for September run out. I expect there'll be a proper photo and description up at the weekend when they have more time.

Video finished - expect to see a separate post about it some time tomorrow. Artwork for the album almost done - just some last minute changes to be made. It looks as though we may have some to sell in time for our next gig!

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1443547609' post='2875737'] How about this, then, from our very own Marketplace..? [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/265681-venom-m-audio-midi-synthesiser/"]Venom M-Audio Synth ...[/url] Ticks all the boxes, methinks..? [/quote] The only downside I can see is that if you want to create your own sounds, the editing software isn't explicitly supported by the most recent operating systems for either Windows or Mac.

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1443545799' post='2875717'] Surely a MIDI keyboard and a MIDI expander would do the job..? No laptop needed there... Just sayin' ... [/quote] Agreed that a laptop of iPad is a poor choose. Not because of the sounds and features which no doubt are excellent, but because IMO these devices simply aren't robust enough - especially the connectors - for pub gigging use. While a MIDI keyboard and expander would be fine, it's more gear over a self-contain keyboard with sound generating capabilities. From having spent years gigging with this sort of gear you are best going for the least number of connections and individual pieces of equipment that you can.

[quote name='Roland Rock' timestamp='1443542714' post='2875683'] I had no idea that NRRF had been going so long. [/quote] O/T IIRC the R&R Festival started in 1982 - funded by money that was available to fix some of the inner-city problems that had led to the Hyson Green Riots the previous year. It was a free festival for all of the 80s and IMO lost its way in the 90s when the fence went up and the organisers tried to charge money to get in. i can remember in the mid-90s sitting on the slope outside the fence enjoying the music for free while the tiny number of people who'd paid to get in milled about looking very unhappy.

[quote name='Roland Rock' timestamp='1443541666' post='2875674'] Can you give us a clue as to the decade that picture was taken BRX? [/quote] Can't you guess from the clothes, hair and my youthful looks? Me onstage with my synth rock band at the 1986 Nottingham Rock & Reggae Festival

[IMG]http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n249/BigRedX/Keytar_zpstkhomlis.jpg[/IMG]

If you are quick my customised Yamaha KX5 is currently up on eBay ;-)

[quote name='gafbass02' timestamp='1443524769' post='2875471'] Cheers folks. That last one looks perfect. Tiny size, just enough keys and sounds built in. Perfect now just to find one cheap enough. Is there a known budget equivalent? Behringer type of thing? I know literally NOTHING of keys [/quote] This why I chuckle to myself every time people go on about how much expensive basses cost. The Novation is the budget option. Unfortunately being monophonic (only one note at a time so no chords) it won't do everything that you need. Back in 1980 when I got my first synth you'd be looking at paying about three times that as a minimum for a basic mono synth with no patch memories and about half the sound generating facilities of the Novation. If you wanted (limited) polyphony there was nothing under £1k and anything half way decent with polyphony and patch memories would cost about the same as a cheap house. And none of them would even remotely be able to do a realistic piano sound. Having said that, you should be able to find something that will do what you want second hand for around £200-250 provided that you don't want anything too modern and most realistic of realistic sounds for the non-synthy ones.

[quote name='Skol303' timestamp='1443527547' post='2875508'] I never knew that...! I currently have my audio interface linked to my 'puter (Mac) using a hub, to which other devices are connected (MIDI keyboard; portable hard drive). To date I've yet to encounter any latency issues when recording - nothing noticeable anyway - but this seems like good reason to connect the interface using a dedicated USB port, rather than via the hub. Enlightened, I shall now re-wire my wires [/quote] Before you change anything check that your individual USB ports on the Mac are actually on different busses. IIRC the cheaper end of the Mac market has a limited number of busses and the external USB sockets might all actually be on the same bus. My MacPro has 5 USB busses (you can check the number of buses and what is attached to each in the system profiler and you can also see the hub structure) but one of them is internal only for the built-in Bluetooth controller. It also shows that at least two of the USB sockets on the back of the Mac are on the same bus, and at least one of the sockets on the front is on a different one. (You do have to quit and reload the system profiler to show new devices connected). HTH

[quote name='xgsjx' timestamp='1443471761' post='2875094'] I think it's just the one bus. Will the interface not work on a hub? [/quote] The problem isn't generally with the interface - USB speeds are more than adequate these days - but with any other equipment you might need to have connected interfering with it. USB is a dumb protocol, and each device connected needs its own driver. Many of these are built into the OS, but the less common types of device have to have their own custom driver installed. A lot of this stuff is designed first and foremost to work on Windows and often (certainly at the budget end of the market) the Mac driver is a quickly thrown together kludge "designed" with little regard to what else it is going to be sharing the bus. Most of the time this won't be a problem, but audio is a lot more sensitive. Having a hub makes little difference because all the devices on the hub are still all on the same bus. If you don't have any other equipment connected by USB (or at least nothing that isn't directly supported by the OS) other than the interface you should be OK, but personally I'd always pick a FireWire or Thunderbolt audio interface over a USB one.

Go and spend a day at one of the serious bass emporia - The Gallery, Bass Gear or Bass Direct and play as many of the basses that they have in stock as you can. After that you should have a good idea of what you want.

[quote name='BILL POSTERS' timestamp='1443456917' post='2874862'] Also helps you learn not to keep looking at hour hands on stage. [/quote] IME it doesn't help at all. Back in the 90s my band of the time used to rehearse at a studio where all of one wall was a giant mirror. I got really good at being able to play looking forward rather than down at my hands. Until we came to do our first gig and then realised I been looking at my hands in the mirror and without it was back to looking down at them again.

+1 for a filter pre-amp. Other than that my favourite "off-the-shelf" fretless was the Pedulla Buzz (especially after I'd fitted an ACG EQ01 to it!)

[quote name='Bilbo' timestamp='1443453677' post='2874823'] Practice the material the way you will be playing it, be that standing or sitting. [/quote] This. If you're just a bedroom player then it probably doesn't matter if you can't play standing up. If you intend to play live standing up then that's how you need to practice. You could arrange your strap so the instrument is at the same height whether you are sitting or standing. However you need to check your overall body posture, you may be hunched over or in some other position that can't be replicated standing. If you need to be able to play standing up you need to stop practicing when sitting down. Otherwise it doesn't really matter.

Neither of you have convinced me it's anything but convention. bassace's theory about swing might well hold true, but there's little for the audience to latch on to when the song starts, so IMO it's little wonder that they start clapping on the 1 and 3. If the drums had been there from the beginning there most likely wouldn't have been a problem. That's also why it's so simple for Harry Connick Jnr to repeat a one beat phrase to get the claps where HE wants them. Having worked with 5 different drummers in my band over the last few years I've found that everyone's micro-timing and how they push and pull within a bar varies from musician to musician. And as a songwriter I certainly don't always want to push onto the 2 and the 4. Right now I'm writing a lot of music that very consciously pushes onto the 1. It's the same with chord sequences. I don't find one of the examples given by BassTractor better than the other. In fact I don't really like the musicality of either of them and if I had to have a preference it would be for the second one. Maybe I'm just weird...

If this is for a Mac, I wouldn't recommend USB unless you can connect the interface to its own bus with nothing else connected. Bear in mind that depending on the spec of the Mac separate USB sockets do not necessarily indicate separate USB busses.

[quote name='bassace' timestamp='1443437590' post='2874583'] As the lady said.............'oh dear' [/quote] Sorry don't get it.

[quote name='yondergo' timestamp='1443203886' post='2873128'] Have you had a chance to check the pickup or control routs to see if its solid or ply? [/quote] You don't need to take it apart to see if it's ply. If the black of the sunburst extends over the belly cut as well as the forearm contour (as can be seen in the photo in the OP) then it is almost definitely ply. Not that it particularly matters if you like the sound and feel of the bass.

[quote name='bassace' timestamp='1443436586' post='2874572'] It was all summed up brilliantly during a recent interview in a BBC Prom concert devoted to swing. Singer Elaine Delmar was asked to define swing. She said something along the lines of 'you know, you meet the man of your dreams and the music starts. He starts tapping his foot on one and three and you think................oh dear'. [/quote] Why? Other than convention give me a good reason why tapping/clapping on beats 1 and 3 is wrong.