BigRedX

You need to be posting something interesting on the major Social Media platforms at least a couple of times a week in order to keep your profile up. Also you have a ready-made audience on here, so why not use it? Put links to your Bandcamp page, and/or wherever else your music is available in your signature (but keep the overall signature small or a lot of people here will hide it making it useless). Having a link to your music in each of your posts should also boost those pages visibility to search engines.

To the OP what are you doing to promote your music?

The laws of physics dictate that in order to accurately detect the pitch of a given note, at least one and half cycles of the waveform are required. For low E on a bass guitar this means a delay of 37ms as a minimum between plucking the string and the pitch being detected. Even for the open G string this delay is around 15ms at best. On top of this there will be an additional delay for the MIDI processing and handling by the transcription software. Since for most musicians anything over 10ms is easily detectable, this will be your problem. It's compounded by the fact that the delay is not constant but variable due to the pitch of the note being detected and the preciseness of the playing technique.

It would be put towards one of the following: 1. A Behringer XR18. 2. 100 T-shirts for one of my bands. 3. Printing and pressing the debut Hurtsfall album.

Hurtsfall release their Gothic Christmas song "December Snow" today on Bandcamp. It will be available on all the the other streaming and download platforms from Friday December 15th.

Really weird how respected Traynor are these days. Back in the 70s my local musical instrument shop here in the UK which mostly sold home organs and had a handful of Kimbara and Grant badged electric guitars and basses on display was for some reason also a Traynor dealer. No idea why. In those surroundings it made the brand seem like cheap rubbish. My band would on occasion hire one of their 6-channel mixer amps which did nothing to dispel this impression.

No Peter Hook or Mick Karn?

Isn't metal supposed to sound like that?

If I was running a commercial studio, all the work areas - control rooms and studio rooms would be faraday cages and there would be no WiFi. If you are in the studio or control room you are there to work. If you want to play on your phone go somewhere else.

Why is the link in German?

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.