BigRedX

IMO most live albums are essentially "Greatest Hits" with more honed/developed versions of the songs from the original recordings played a bit faster and often with simplified arrangements to compensate for the lack of studio overdubs or the fact that some of the more complex parts could not be played whilst also singing or throwing some "rock n roll moves". All of this can be a good thing. Unfortunately this can be counteracted by extended guitar solos, drum solos and other over-long sections, plus embarrassing between song banter. There is also the problem with live albums released on vinyl where the original set list running order may have been sacrificed to satisfy the pressing/cutting requirements of not having loud and energetic songs on the last third of each side, which can kill the flow of the gig the album is supposed to be capturing. Having said all that my favourite live album is "Steppenwolf Live" or at least it was until I discovered that the crappy Dansette I used to play it, produced one side of the stereo much louder than the other. Playing it properly balanced revealed lots of very loud and very insipid organ parts which ruined it for me. These days I prefer my gig/concert recordings to be accompanied by visuals so my favourite is the DVD release of Shena Ringo's Gekokujyo Xstasy tour.

BTW none of the new cookies from Ezoic appear to be listed on the Basschat cookies page. Does that not need updating?

As I've said before, I have completely given up on limited edition product releases and previews of things that are still being designed. If a product isn't available for me to buy in a shop and take home with me today, or order on line for immediate shipping, then I am simply not interested and will make do with those things that are available to buy right now.

Not as bad as I gig I once did with The Meteors who turned up with just a guitar and expected to borrow everything else (including a double bass and all the drum "breakables") from the 3 support bands. They weren't travelling particularly "light" is they also brought a van-load of T-shirts to sell!

Hi and welcome to Basschat. It would help if you could post some close up photos of the bass showing where the missing parts should go along with some additional measurements. The problem you are likely to find is that early copy guitars and basses only bore a passing resemblance to the original instrument and therefore standard replacement parts may not fit without a lot of additional work. It will also depend on how authentic you want your restoration to be. For things like machine heads, modern versions will be far superior to almost anything off a 60s copy instrument, but getting something that looks exactly the same and has the same fitting will be difficult. Most people would settle for ones that have similar keys so the instrument still looks the same from the front, but accept that the screw fittings on the back won't line up with what was there previously.

I've played in some loud bands but have never been so loud that could actually feel the sound pressure waves coming from my rig. If I had I suspect I would probably be even more deaf than I am.

The sorts of gigs that the Foo Fighters do even if they were all on IEMs and had no amplification or foldback speakers on stage it would be far from quiet. There would be enough spillage from the FoH to keep things lively and loud. It's not the Dog and Duck you know. But it looks wrong without the amps on top of the cabs.

It's fine in Firefox, Opera and Chrome. I suspect it's an incompatibility between this version of Safari and however these icons are generated. Flushing the cache doesn't make the icons appear.

No formatting icons visible in the dialog boxes for starting a new topic or replying to an exiting one. The spaces for them are there and the grey highlight shows up when I move the mouse pointer across them, and AFAICS the formatting can be applied. It's just That I can't see what I'm applying until I start typing. Mac OS 10.13.6, Safari 13.1.2 (I know it's old but until I can afford I new Mac that all I have). Alt tags are visible, so I'll probably manage without.

Can you make a meaningful assessment of the bass amp capabilities when what you are hearing FoH is probably direct from the bass guitar?

Interestingly no amps visible and one one (perhaps) microphone on any of the cabs in the fist photo. Maybe they are just stage props?

But Stradivarius was essentially improving an instrument that had been around for hundreds of years. Loudspeaker design is comparatively young and we're only just reaching the point where there are "giants" to "stand on the shoulders of".

The problem is that employers even for McJobs expect their job to be more important than anything else in an employees life which makes trying to simultaneously run any "career" in music almost impossible. If you're lucky you will be able to do weekend gigs down the pub with a covers band, but IME for just about everything else the important gigs (as either a band or a session player) tend to be the ones that you pick up with almost no notice.

Which Ash? There are over 40 different species of tree that are classified as "Ash", and it's further complicated by the fact the Swamp Ash isn't a separate species, but simply a tree of the Ash family that has been grown in swampy conditions. And where has the Ash that is going to make your bass come from? Ash trees grow in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. That's big range of growing conditions all of which will affect the structure of the wood, and if the wood is important to the tone of the instrument then it will also affect the tone.

Weirdly enough I've had this happen to me as well. I think I've posted in one of these forum issue threads. If I have time tomorrow I'll see if I can find out which thread I was having problems with and if it has resolved itself since then.

Hurtsfall have their next gig on Friday 8th September at the Angel in Nottingham supporting Cold In Berlin:

Back in the 90s I played a band that had a lot of heavy flight-cased gear that had to loaded in an out of the venues we played and often stacked in creative ways to fit everything in the smaller stage areas. I always wore gloves while shifting the gear about and they only got taken off once everything was in place and we were ready to start cabling. These days the bands I play with have mostly ditched the heavy gear. The most unwieldy and heavy items are the drummer's hardware case in one band and the synth player's keyboard stand in the other. Both are in proper cases with decent handles, so I haven't bothered with the gloves recently. Having said that it might be time to reconsider.

Because most of the audience can only see their head. Can also work for some keyboard players depending on how prog rock their rig is...

Definitely no. I have been in bands where we have worn our band T-shirts while setting up, but we always got changed into our stage wear before playing. Personally I wouldn't wear on stage a T-shirt or any other clothing with an obvious logo or branding on it unless I was being paid a significant amount of money to do so.

And we are still projecting the attributes of acoustic instruments onto solid electric ones. Have none of you actually looked to see how different the methods of construction are? Take a typical acoustic guitar. The body will have been made from 5 pieces of very thin wood (2 back, 2 sides and the top) held together with the minimum amount of glue and bracing needed for the construction to not come part under the tension of the strings. It's a design and method of construction that has developed over hundreds of years. Other than a similar shape a solid electric instrument has nothing in common when it comes to construction. Several chunky pieces of wood slathered in glue to hold them together. Take a look at a typical selection of two and three piece bodies and your see that the joins aren't even consistently placed. It's done simply to get the greatest number of instruments out of the fewest number of planks. As I keep saying, the problem I have with assigning tonal properties to the wood used for solid electric instruments is that firstly every piece of wood is different - even pieces cut from the same plank. It is naive to assign those properties to a single piece of wood within an instrument without also considering all the other factors that also go towards making two instruments sound different. You simply can't isolate a single item in a guitar and say that it and it alone is responsible for making this instrument sound different from another one. And all the user experiences concentrate on why two different instruments sound different. There should be no surprise there. It's easy to produce two instruments that sound different. If wood in solid electric instruments behaved in a predicable way, then every Fender P-bass made with the same body neck and fingerboard woods would sound EXACTLY the same. But they don't. It's an universally acknowledge fact that you will have to try multiple supposedly identical instruments to find "the one". By the way, here's great sounding P-Bass: The only wood used in the construction are two soft wood fillets glued onto the back of the aluminium T-section that forms the bulk of the neck and fingerboard, and were probably used because they were easier to shape than aluminium to form the back of the neck. I could also post the Ritter and Bas Extravaganza basses made out of plywood. While each sheet of wood that made up Mr Ritter's bass was probably individually selected, the Bas Extravaganza bass was made from a couple of standard sheets of ply picked at random from his local DIY superstore.

They might be Warwick Black Labels. However all the strings (B to G) I have currently fitted show the less tightly wound wraps seen in the first photo the set I'm about to fit have the winding tight to the end.

This is a common mistake made by players of solid electric instruments who also play acoustic instruments. While on acoustic instruments the body is crucial for shaping and projecting the sound, on a solid electric instrument it is there mostly to have somewhere to fit the bridge (and strings), pickups and controls and have an attractive and/or ergonomic shape. And while the construction and materials used for the body will have an influence on the amplified sound, it is minimal, unpredictable and inconsistent. This is why a lot of the time two identical looking instruments can sound very different when plugged in. Most of the time the materials used are picked mainly for their constructional strength and occasionally for their appearance; although most fancy looking woods are either veneers or thin laminates, glued onto something more practical but boring looking. And this is why you don't really want the body to be resonant, or at least not in the frequencies that you want to project, because then they are being absorbed by the structure of the instrument rather than being captured by the pickups.

"Good" tone is entirely subjective. And what works with one type of music and/or combination of instruments doesn't necessarily work with others. In a resonant bass string energy is potentially being wasted exciting the the materials used in its construction, and unlike an acoustic instrument this is not always a desirable thing. A solid body doesn't directly affect the output of the pickups and it what little effect it has happens in a non-predicable way - if it was predicable we would be having this discussion in the first place. Remember also that resonance is responsible for dead spots on the neck, something that you definitely don't want.

I use a non-standard tuning on my Bass VIs (EADGCE) because we do a lot of songs in Am and C and being able to have a drone C string is far more useful than a B. I have one guitar permanently tuned to drop D with an appropriately heavier string for the D, but I count it as standard tuning but making some chords and riffs easier to play. In the past when I have played with guitarists who used drop D, I stuck with standard tuning on the bass. When I was playing Dad Rock covers then band did quite a lot of songs that would have been recorded with the guitars tuned a semi-tone down but we always played them a semi-tone higher to avoid having to retune or to take multiple guitars to gigs. Out of interest I found several of the Thin Lizzy songs easier to play at their original pitch but in conventional tuning, then I did a semi-tone higher.

Here's mine. This setup is also our drummer and second synth player.