BigRedX

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.

This has been known about for almost a year. TBH unless you have a lot of songs all getting just under 1000 streams a year it isn't really going to make a lot of difference to most people's Spotify income. Since the payment pot for Spotify is fixed each year and distributed according to the percentage each song receives from the total number of streams of everything, it should mean that payments for those songs which do reach the 1000 streams in a year threshold will go up. Time to get promoting your Spotify catalogue and get some songs onto popular playlists. We've put a lot more effort into Spotify promotion in the last 12 months and it has most definitely paid off. Our most popular song gets at least 20 streams a day and the last two releases have already reached the 1000 stream threshold.

One of my bands is thinking of doing this...

Hurtsfall will be playing at the Peculiar Market in Stevenage on Saturday 17th August: It's a daytime gig starting at 11.00 and we'll be playing at around 1.15pm

As I always say when someone starts one of these threads. If you feel strongly enough about the situation to have posted in a publicly visible part of an internet forum, then you've probably also made up your mind that either you or the problematic band members need to go.

Any increase in sustain will come from the fact that they are engineered in a way to reduce unwanted movement of the parts in response to the vibration of the string(s). The increased mass makes little difference, it's just that to achieve the first goal it is easier to construct something that just happens to be more solid and have a greater weight. If you compare the weight of the modern version of the Badass (224g) with the typical BBOT bridge (100g) it looks as though the Badass gives a 124% increase in mass. However what the marketing conveniently ignores is that the bridge and the body essential become a single unit, if they didn't the tension of the strings would pull the bridge away from the body, and when you consider that the typical bass body weighs around 2000g, then the percentage difference is less than 6%, and even smaller if you consider the whole bass including the neck and all the attached hardware as a single whole.

Spotify pays plenty. If you are not getting very much it's either because you haven't done enough promotion or because you've signed too big a share away to your publisher or record label. Sure the noise to signal ratio is much higher these days when anyone with a recording and a spare $50 dollars can have their music available on every streaming (not just Spotify) and download service. But you still need to find a way to make your music stand out. Unfortunately being technically accomplished on your chosen instrument(s) or being able to write a "good" song (entirely subjective itself) is and never has been sufficient criteria for a successful career in music. You need to be entertaining, just the right amount of different, and work far, far harder than the typical musician can be bothered with.

You can't. It's marketing guff. Most high-mass bridges work better (although that is subjective depending on the sort of bass sound you want) because they are more robustly engineered and less string vibration is lost vibrating the flimsy parts of the typical BBOT bridge. The actual additional mass itself is negligible when you consider that, when properly fitted, it is coupled with the body of the bass.

The GR300 is much more modern and IMO the way forward. Deriving the oscillator frequency from the pitch of a plucked string is IMO a complete non-starter for bass guitars. The very best systems require ultra-clean, non-aggressive playing technique and a minimum of one and a half wave cycles to be able to detected the pitch of the string. That means under ideal circumstances the synth note is going to be 15ms late for open G and 36ms late for open E. 15ms is noticeable latency for most people and 36ms is very definitely in slap-back delay territory. Most of the time pitch detection will take longer.

Personally I wouldn't bother with an IR. If your EBS MicroBass is essentially your sound and you are happy with what you can hear in your IMEs already then leave the set up as it is. IMO cabs are the sonic weak link in most bassists signal chain and if you can dispense with them you'll probably sound much better FoH. I would only bother with IRs if you normally use an amp with a an all-valve power section and cabs that add a very obvious colouration to your sound, in which case you'll need to be able to capture exactly your setup to produce a custom IR. If that doesn't apply or you can't do it, then leave it alone.

@rwillett I don't know what you are doing wrong but I do this all the time when I am selling off old Macs after upgrading. I've recently done a wipe and re-install on a 2012 MacBookPro that was exhibiting some weird behaviour and I didn't want to go up to the latest version of Mac OSX that it would support because I want to keep an older version of Logic on it. I simply booted from a USB stick that had the installer for the version of Mac OSX that I wanted, wiped the SSD and performed a fresh install of OSX. If I had been selling this Mac on I would have quit the process when I reached the Welcome screen. Since I was keeping it I went through the usual user set up as if it was a brand new Mac.

You can still get the same result with a more modern version of Mac OSX if you wipe it from the recovery partition and do a brand new install. Then quit when you get to the "Welcome" screen. This would give the new user exactly the same experience as if they had bought a brand new Mac from Apple. I've recently done this with two relatively new Macs so I know it works.

The drummer equivalent would be if you had a second kit with metal-shelled drums that you wanted to play on a single song. Besides I used to be in a band whose drummer had a single rack tom and no other toms at all. Just by listening to his playing you wouldn't think that it wasn't at least a 2-tom kit.

What is doing your IR? And what are you adding with your IR? I assume it's just a cab since your EBS is essentially an amp. Do you really need it?

You don't need to set up a dummy account if you are passing a used Mac on. All you need to do is Quit and shut down when you get to the point where the re-installed Mac OSX is asking to create a user account. Then when the Mac is next started up it goes straight to starting a new account just like it would if it was a brand new Mac straight out of the box.

Bands who want to use an instrument for just one song that requires extra setting up and additional sound checking is a massive bugbear of mine. I suppose if you are the only band on and have plenty of time to set up and sound check it's OK, but in the musical world I inhabit unless you are playing last having more than 20 minutes for set up and sound check is luxury and even if you are "headlining", every unnecessary minute your band spends on the soundcheck takes that time away from the other on the bill and IMO makes you come over like petulant prima-donnas. I been able to cut down on the amount of gear and hence set-up time one of my bands uses and talk various band members out of bringing additional equipment that's only going to be used for a few minutes in a 30-45 minute set. I know we all think that everything we do and all the equipment we use is absolutely essential, but I can guarantee that most of the audience would never know the difference if a song was played on a six string or 12 string guitar, and any tuning differences could be compensated by using a capo or just singing a semi-tone lower.

That only works if the PA is entirely responsible for what the audience hears. Also as I said in another thread recently I was at a gig where it was painfully clear that EQ alone cannot fix room problems. The venue is well known for being problematic with regards to sound quality mostly because the room is higher than it is wide. Over the past few years since new owners have taken it over the sound has been much improved by the addition of a bit of acoustic treatment and a better PA system. However it's still far from perfect. Normally when I go to gigs there one of my bands is also playing so we're normally stood at the back near the dressing room and close to the mixing desk location where the sound is usually pretty good. On this occasion being a punter only I was down the front for one band where the sound was very strange - almost no guitar audible and the bass guitar was mostly composed of nasty nasally mid-range tones. Retreating to the back of the room where I would normally stand and everything had a more suitable balance and the bass had the right amount of body. The headlining band sounded much better because they weren't using any backline, and although it still wasn't as good near the stage the difference in sound front and back of the room was much less pronounced.

The manual should include instructions for setting up the synth pickup and associated parameters to get the best response and tracking. One thing that strikes me is that the synth pickup is much further from the bridge than would normally be recommended which I find very strange as Roland's advice for their pickup system, when sold separately, was always to fit it as close to the saddles as was physically possible. It might also be worth fitting a new set of strings.

Does the direct jack from the bass into an amp work OK, and do all the associated controls on the bass that should should work in this mode function as expected without noise and crackles? If so the next thing I would do is to get your multi-meter out and check every contact on the multiway cable ideally while flexing it to make sure there are no intermittent faults. If both of those check out OK you'll need to get an analogue synth specialist to check the floor unit and the synth control on the bass. Go and ask on the Sound On Sound forums as there are people on there with the relevant info. Expect anyone good to be expensive and busy so it may be some time before they can get around to fixing it. I'd also suggest that if you intend to use the synth part live that you invest in a spare good quality multi-way cable.

IIRC the Jack Casady Bass doesn't have a central block in the body and pickup is attached to the free-floating top. Hollow-bodied basses are notoriously prone to feedback issues with high-gain signal paths. My Reverend Rumblefish would feedback like mad at when using anything more than the most subtle of drive settings, and I believe that @Bassassin had problems with the hollow aluminium body of his Tokai Talbo bass - I never used mine at anything above home practice volumes so never had a problem. My Warwick StarBass II was much better behaved but it had a solid wooden block extending all the way through the middle of body and the top was relatively thick and rigid compared with other hollow-bodied instruments I have owned.

Yesterday evening it would have been a cool impulse buy. This morning when I was finally able to get past the product page, I realised that I wasn't that bothered about having one. I'll put the £100 I've saved toward my next Mac which will actually be useful.

However they have released the Theremin 100 album which has got people who can really play including Bruce Wooley's Radio Science Orchestra and Charlie Draper.