BigRedX

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.

IMO the big problem with the Fender and Squier Bass VIs is that they are essentially Jaguar/Jazzmaster guitars with a longer neck and thicker strings and aimed at guitarists who want to dabble with bass parts in the studio. Those lighter E and A strings are part of the appeal to non-bass players. Out of the box it works fine with the lighter strings provided you have a decent guitar technique and a light touch. I didn't have any problems with mine until I started using it with my band where I play a lot more aggressively than at home or in the studio and suddenly the E, A and D strings were flopping about uncontrollably and I was forever tripping over the wrong strings due to the tight guitar-like string spacing exaggerated by the thicker bass strings. This is when you discover it's all a compromise. Switch to heavier stings so it feels more like a bass guitar and the vibrato stops working, the bridge no longer has sufficient room to intonate the new heavier E string. You might be able to eke out enough travel in the saddles by shimming the neck to allow you to raise the action and if possible reverse the problematic saddles. So as you can see heavier string make some things better and other things worse. You have to decide which features are important to you and which you can live without. If you can treat it like a guitar with a long neck tuned down an octave and play with a pick and light touch, you may well be able to make it work as it is. IMO the only Bass VI designed for bassists is the Shergold Marathon 6-String Bass and the modern Eastwood copy of it.

If you are looking at "proper" keyboards now then the advice is entirely different. The big problem with Piano, Rhodes and Hammond emulations is that the way you play the keyboard is a massive part of making them sound convincing along with having a user interface that replicates the performance controls of the original. For acoustic and electric pianos the performance controls aren't really important so long as your instrument is capable of memorising the various settings. For organs especially the Hammond, access to all the drawbars as well as controls for the (emulated) Leslie cab are essential. The other issue you'll encounter is the keyboard action. Your three examples all have very different keyboard actions, and trying to play a Hammond part on a fully-weighted piano style keyboard is not going to be a pleasant experience and it will probably show in the sound. You might get away with a semi-weighted keyboard as a bit of a compromise, but you need to find one that suits your playing style for all the sounds.

As a Squier Bass VI owner I found the following: When you change to heavier strings any action you had available in the vibrato mechanism will disappear. You may also then run into intonation problems. Most people take the opportunity when changing the strings to shim the neck slightly. This has the effect of tightening up the feel of the lower strings and the increased downward pressure on the bridge will help stop it from wobbling about. If you are still getting too much bridge wobble then you'll need to add some plastic or brass tube inserts around the posts to stop the movement. It might also just increase the string length to counter the intonation problems of the heavier strings. Ultimately for me the neck was just way too narrow for my playing style and mine has been relegated to 2nd backup after my main Bass VI - an Eastwood Hooky - and my main backup - Burns Barracuda. It will almost definitely get sold when I get my act together and list the few remaining instruments that I'm not using. However I'm after a Joy Division/Cure type sound and flat wounds are most definitely not for me.

By using your ears? Technically any note from the key you are playing in will fit, and technically any of the notes being played in the chord should be a better fit, but none of them will necessarily be the best fitting one. The best note to be playing at any one moment in a piece of music will depend on a number of things, and at least one of those things is entirely subjective (i.e. taste). It will also depend on what all the other instruments are playing at a given moment. What all the instruments were playing previously and what they will be playing next, how long the note you are playing lasts for, and even the genre of the music you are playing.

Since I started my first band in 1975 I have been in 17 bands that have either done at least one gig or made at least one piece of music available the public. Of these 17: 7 have split up, usually due to one or more member(s) leaving and the majority of the rest of the band deciding not to carry on. 5 morphed into new bands that I was still in. 1 is still going after I left. 2 haven't technically split or finished but we haven't played or released any new material for years. 2 are still going with me in them.

Well then they have been poorly briefed. Or they just don't care. I have a friend who creates 3D models of products that don't yet exist as his very lucrative day job. He won't know the ins and outs of everything he visualises, and when that happens he will ask. If he was working on this image he'd have asked Fender for some wood samples what it is important for him to show on the product, and would have done 3 or 4 low res renders and asked which shows off the product in the best light. He's also obsessive when it comes to details and things like machine heads would be perfectly straight and evenly spaced. Stings would be line up evenly to the edge of the fingerboard and pole pieces would line up exactly with the string paths. If the measurements he was given didn't allow this then he would ask why not and if he should fake it so that they did or if he needed to follow the exact measurements how he should position things to make them look the best. Fender probably couldn't afford him which is why the product images look like crap.

IME it very much depends on what you are playing and that you have properly targeted your audience. In the last 20+ years I've plenty of enthusiastic audiences, but that because I've picked my musical genres and gigs appropriately. If you simply turn up with a random band at a random venue playing to a random audience then be prepared for you and your audience to be disappointed.

The thing with the US is that the overall audience size is so massive that there are serious opportunities for all sorts of bands whose hight of fame here was a couple of plays on John Peel and Rough Trade taking a 100 or so copies of their self-released single. My first band who were strictly DIY cassette scene noise makers here in the early 80s, have a retrospective CD released on a US label based in Chicago as a result of a rave review by US music critic Johan Kugelberg. We get regular airplay on WFMU and other weird US based radio stations. Here in the UK I doubt if anyone has bothered with us since our John Peel plays and fanzine reviews in 1980/81.