BigRedX

Your choice of string should be entirely down to the sound you want to get. I've used round wounds, fait wounds and tape wounds and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to sounds I could get out of them. If you are after that early 80s fretless "mwah" there really isn't any alternative to round wounds IMO. The biggest cause of fingerboard wear on a fretless is using the wrong kind of vibrato. Roll along the string rather than pushing the string up and down across the fingerboard. However I found that tales of fingerboard war from round wounds to be over-exaggerated, and if you do get wear that affects the playability you can always get the fingerboard reshot smooth. No different to getting a refret.

If he likes Ed Sheehan get him an Ed Sheeran song book.

The latency figures are still wrong. The very best pitch detection systems require AT LEAST one and half cycles to accurately track a note which adds a minimum of 50% onto your delay time. And there are loads of things that guitarists and bass players do (a lot of the time unconsciously) which simply don't translate when doing pitch detection. If you are going to have to play a different instrument (guitar) or play and octave higher or modify your technique, then IMO you are better off investing your time in learning how to play a bit of keyboards where you'll almost definitely be able to do the same thing with far more accuracy and repeatability. For me the whole point of using a guitar or bass to produce synth sounds is that I can can use all of my guitar or bass playing techniques and apply the expressiveness I get from these techniques to synthesised sounds. @Al Krow One of things that is important to me is the ability to assign different synth sounds to different strings which rules out the SY200 and SY300 and that currently leaves just the SY1000 which requires the now outdated 13-pin connector cable system. Plus I'd need a custom 6 way pickup to cope with the string spacing of the Eastwood Hooky being much wider than a guitar and other Bass VIs but narrower than a 6-string bass. From what I've seen the new bass version of the pickup will accommodate my needs. I'll just have to wait until Boss/Roland release a new version of the SY1000 that works directly with the GK5B pickup.

This is from personal experience as a punter. In the bigger venues (I'm talking Rock City main stage and upwards) it might have sounded OK if you were stood by the mixing desk, but down the front the vocals were bordering on inaudible. In smaller venues like The Boat Club it was just a barrage of loud sound.

GK system just refers to the multi-way pickup being used. Technically the new pickup should be better as it uses a far more robust 3 conductor cable with jack leads instead of the fiddly 13 Pin DIN leads of the previous versions. However the sound generation unit is IMO a step backwards because we return to pitch detection and all the issues associated with it. Hopefully there will be a new version of the SY series of "guitar synths" which will offer modelling and signal processing options, that uses this new pickup and then maybe there will be system that I can actually use.

This is the problem for me. Playing the guitar or bass opens up a completely different type of expression from playing on a keyboard, but using pitch detection most of that expression either gets lost or has to be filtered out of your technique to get decent results. One of the other things I'd like be able to using a bass guitar is fast sequencer type synth bass lines, but latency, tracking and glitch notes all conspire to make that nearly impossible, or at least never sound as good as an actual sequencer driven line.

You are never going to be able to defeat the laws of physics. Even on the guitar there is still going to be pitch detection latency with the open E string being at the very best 18ms. I'm surprised that Roland appear to have abandoned the far more usable and guitar-technique-friendly wave-shaping and modelling of the V-System for a return to pitch detection.

That's stunning!

Very impressive until you get to the last minute and a half when the reviewer explains that there is still a quite serious problem with tracking and latency on the lower notes and that many of the impressive pieces earlier in the review needed to be played multiple times in order to get a decent glitch-free take. Still not ready for live performance IMO.

There's a bit more information about this model of bass on the Cheesy Guitars website.

Sorry I was thinking of mid-70s and earlier in response to comments by zrbass, unfortunately that wasn't obvious from my reply. I certainly don't miss the multiple takes and drop-in anxiety of recording to tape, especially at the budget studio end where limited track counts meant that each drop-in would replace what had been recorded previously on that track and you had to hope that each subsequent take was going to be better than the previous one, because there was no "undo" function. It was all fine when the record companies were prepared to indulge and develop bands which meant serious time in the studio was a possibility. Has anyone here from a performer PoV spent more than a couple of weeks continuously recording and mixing an album in a proper commercial studio?

However you've forgotten that on the whole up to the late 80s sound quality at gigs was appalling compared with what even the lowliest of pub covers bands expects these days. For much of my early gig-going days (as both a performer and an audience member) the best you could expect from the vocals is that you could tell there were some that corresponded with the singer opening their mouth. Whether they were in tune or the correct words was anyone's guess. Combined with the fact that all but the biggest PA systems sounded as though they were operating close to their limits meant you could get away with a lot of things live that could never happen now as it was masked in a wall of overdriven instrumentation. And when it came to recording as soon as someone else was paying (i.e. the record company) any musician not up to scratch in a studio environment would be replaced in a heartbeat. Other than the singer(s) the musicians you saw performing at gigs wouldn't be the ones on the record(s).

Nearly all the time a live performance and a recording are two entirely different things and serve entirely different purposes. Unless the recording has been made of un-amplified music with a stereo pair of microphone direct to tape or some digital storage medium and the balance achieved by moving the microphones as a pair rather than the relative positions of the musicians, there will also be some degree of artifice to the final product. What degrees of artifice are acceptable is down to the whims of the artist and the producer and also the end listener, although they will rarely be in a position to know exactly how much of what they hear has been "tickled up" to make it acceptable for commercial release, and that is always considerably more than the typical listener would expect. Of course making it sound like it was captured live in a single take (if it is appropriate for the style of music) when in fact the end result has been painstakingly assembled from multiple takes, numerous overdubs and drop-ins (and that's before we consider modern manipulation techniques such as quantisation and Autotune) is all down to the skill of the engineer(s) and producer(s). I suspect that very few artists would want things that sound like obvious mistakes preserved for posterity on their recordings (I know I don't) and anything that can help the process in the studio should be embraced. Remember just because you can't obviously hear a technique doesn't mean it's not been used and most of the time the best fixes are the ones that are impossible to detect even when you know they are there.

Strings and frets will wear. That's why they can be replaced. To give you an idea of how much effort it takes to wear a fret to the point where it affects the playability consider the following example from my guitar playing days: Back at the beginning of 2000 I got a brand new guitar to use with my band. At that time we had a song in the set where I sustained a note for 20 seconds by hammering on using my right hand and then bowing the string against the fret. On average I played this song at least once a day (either at a gig, rehearsal or home practice) every day for almost 3 years, which works out as roughly 6 hours of continuous bowing of the string against the fret. By the time the band split and I stopped playing the song there was a noticeable groove in the fret at this point only. The rest of the frets which were just subjected to normally playing wear of a couple of hours a day for 3 years were fine. This is the only time I have had any noticeable fret wear and it took concentrated effort to achieve. You'll be fine, and if/when your frets do get too worn, take you bass to a decent luthier for a refret or get a new bass.

I played there in the early days (about 11 years ago) with The Terrortones, and it's improved massively since then. That time we played in the bar area and stayed in one of the rooms upstairs which was essentially a building site.

Thanks. I'm down to 5 from about 40 ten years ago. I use the red Gus G3 with In Isolation, and have a very similar one in all black (including the metal work), as a back-up. For Hurtsfall I have the Eastwood Hooky and a Burns Barracuda, as a spare, which I'm hoping to replace with another Hooky. I've also got a Squier Bass VI that I need to get around to selling.

The next In Isolation gig is at Ye Olde Salutation Inn in Nottingham on Friday 8th December. Support form Discord and Rhyme who are Last July playing 80s synth pop covers and Ombudsmen. In Isolation will be on at 10.00pm and since the gig partly clashes with NMA at Rock City we'll be allowing anyone with a NMA ticket who comes after their gig half-price entry.

A long trek through the semi-snow from Nottingham to Gateshead on Sunday to play at The Black Bull with In Isolation, for a final night of the Dark Side of the Tyne "festival". It looked pretty grim in the morning, but it turned out that the worst snow was in Nottingham and once we were on the M1 it was fine. Unfortunately because of the weather it was a smaller turn out that the promotor and we had hoped, and hadn't been helped by Westenra having pull out of the opening night gig due to being snowed in at Whitby. However we played pretty well including all the new songs and to an audience who had mostly never seen us before and more importantly stayed to end when we sold a few CDs. Here's a couple of photos from the gig: Next one is on Friday at the Sal in Nottingham.

Stupid click-bate video where someone is deliberately doing it wrong in order to preach to his sycophantic audience. If he had a proper interest in showing how quantisation should be used, he would be demonstrating the right method, which is to create a "groove template" from the drumming as it is and then use that to tighten up the placing of any other parts that actually require it. Of course this method is far less interesting, and less noticeable on the finished track and doesn't pander to his audience's prejudices.

The simple answer is "it depends". On the whole trying to correct tempo problems after the recording has been made is normally far too difficult and unless the variations are very slight, in which case it's probably not worth bothering with, it will nearly always introduce other less desirable artefacts into the recording. I think also that you will find that most old tracks that would have benefited from a constant tempo are already pretty close simply because the drummer was good enough to be able to stick to the beat otherwise they would have been replaced in the studio by someone who could play to a constant tempo. These days the best way is to try it out before you go into the studio. That's what I have always done. Some songs benefit from playing to a click and some need those tempo variations. Remember that a lot of drummers have always been the one in the band who sets the tempo and consequently have never had to play in time to something else. I've played with a couple of otherwise excellent drummers who simply couldn't play in time with a click because it put them off. It may be a difficult concept for the rest of us to get because we are so used to playing in time with the drums, that as musicians we are almost always following someone else for timing, so it seems easy when if you've never done it before it most definitely is not. The trick is to make sure you have practiced before you go into the studio and don't try something unexpected and time consuming once you get there unless someone else is picking up the studio bill, in which case take as long as you like.

There's quantisation and quantisation. Dismissing it out of hand just shows your ignorance. After all the whole band are all trying to play on the same beats at the same time. It doesn't have to mean setting everything to an equally spaced grid. All decent modern DAWs will allow you to create a quantisation template from one of the recorded parts, usually the drums but anything rhythmic with the correct feel for the piece will do. When you do it this way because to are using an actual performance to set the quantisation points they are highly unlikely to fall exactly on the regular 1/8 or 1/16 note intervals. The rest of the instruments are then "quantised" to this template which will have the effect of just tightening up the whole performance without making the actual timing rigid. In conjunction with beat detection for tempo changes it just gives a tight performance with just enough "human" feel. I've also used this method with recordings that have been created entirely from sequenced/programmed sources except for the vocals by finding a drum pattern on a record that has the feel I want and using that to create my quantisation template.

I think it depends on what you are doing in the studio. If I've paid for a proper producer to turn my recording into a potential hit single (or at least make it sound loads better than I could manage myself) I'll will be happy to accommodate any changes they might want to make, including changing my sound or even removing me from the recording entirely.

Depends on the song and the musicians and also the skill of the engineer. The Terrortones would always try out any song we intended to record with and without a click. Some benefited from a constant tempo, and were recorded with the drummer plating to the click and the rest of the band playing to the drummer, others needed more push and pull between the different sections than playing around the click could achieve and they were done without. As has been said you need to practice playing to a click first, I've also worked with some otherwise great drummers who simply couldn't play when they were no longer dictating the tempo. And while having a bar structure on the recorded tracks can make life easier for locating drop in points for overdubs a good engineer shouldn't have to have them. It was all done by ear (and tape counter numbers) in the days of analogue tape. And besides all decent modern DAWs will be able to work out flexible bars and tempo from the recorded tracks to follow a "musical" structure.

The only way you are going to get a decent Moog sound is to use a Moog synthesiser.

In that case I'd remove Windows from the laptop install a version of Linux that you are familiar with and supports both your chosen DAW and the XR18.