BigRedX

A couple of photos by Kevin Stevens from last night's gig:

Because of the non-GDPR compliance of the WhatsApp EULA, any serious business using it for transactions with an EU country could find themselves in legal trouble should anything ever go wrong. I used to work for a client whose business terms and conditions and NDA which I had to sign, specifically forbade me from having WhatsApp (and Zoom - although that has got better since the pandemic) installed on any device that I used for my business activities.

If you've got a web form for initial on-line contact then there shouldn't be any reason to publish your email on your website, and if you do use email then you need to take steps to ensure that both your emails and your customers reach their proper destinations and don't end up being marked as spam or even worse being blocked completely.

I play in a genre that is image conscious (goth/post-punk/dark wave). So far I have been able to disguise that fact that I'm in my 60s by still being relatively slim, having enough hair to actually have a suitable hairstyle, a bit of make-up, and doing my best not to act like an old man. The fact that I still look quite a bit younger than many of my contemporaries who haven't aged particularly well, definitely helps.

10 minutes ago, Mykesbass said:

Ah, common problem for some of us. I used to play in a band covering a lot of Dylan and similar style material. Sometimes a helpful landlord would try and set the scene and as we were setting up we would have to hastily rearrange the set list. Good job we had plenty of material!

In this case the song isn't particularly well-known, although it's one of those songs that people remember when they hear it. We'd picked it because it's a song we all like but haven't heard recently at any of the goth nights or between bands at goth gigs that we've been to in the last few years. And no-one other than the band knew we were going to be playing it last night.

I'd have been happy to drop it in favour of one of our own song,s and also because IMO we've been struggling to capture the feel of the original. Despite the fact we play it a couple of BPM faster than the record our version still sounds slow. However the rest of the band were insistent that we played it.

Last night In Isolation played the Infest warm-up event at Nightrain in Bradford. A venue that, judging from the posters, normally puts on rock tribute acts, but for one night was taken over by gothic electronica and us.

We were a little out of place with all the other bands being much more electronic than we are (we were the only ones with a drum kit) but we'd got the gig because we'd had to pull out of a previous year's event with a more suitable line-up due to a last-minute date change which then conflicted with our singer's wedding. Having said that we seemed to go down well with a surprising number of people dancing at the front and plenty of applause between songs. One embarrassing thing - for the last three weeks we've been rehearsing a cover of The Bolshoi's "Away" which we have managed to keep quite about, so guess what the DJ chose to put on just as we were getting ready to play...

We left after Deviant's set which meant I was home at a slightly less stupid time in the morning, but disappointed because the two bands still to play had sounded awesome during the soundcheck. I will probably be listening to Tilly Electronics on Spotify while I work today...

K&M are highly regarded because not only are they more robust than most of the competition, but should something break they make spares easily available. 

My band doesn't have any speaker stands because everywhere we play has in-house PA systems but all our instrument and equipments stands are K&M and personally I would have to have a very good reason to consider anything else.

US local sales taxes are significantly less than UK VAT.

The large bridge base plate only makes sense if it has the string dampers attached.

Certainly if you are an originals band having a unique band name is more important than ever. The name for my current band was chosen by joining two slightly related words together, even so when using any of the search engines I still need to put quotes around it otherwise they think it's a typo and also bring up results with the two words separated.

Also it is important to consider the title of your band's album(s). When my first band were asked to produce a retrospective compilation we decided to call it "Richard, Roger, Rodney, Rastus, Raoul, Roderick, Randy, Rupert" which is a line from one of our songs. Unfortunately that means that lots of on-line resources think it's an album called "The Midnight Circus" by Richard, Roger, Rodney, Rastus, Raoul, Roderick, Randy, Rupert. And when they do get it right and provide a link to a download or streaming version of the album it's turns out to be a different album by another band also called The Midnight Circus.

5 hours ago, acidbass said:

There might be studies that say it doesn't matter, but to my ears, front porting sounds much better and I have tested this extensively in real world environments.

But were the cabs EXACTLY the same in EVERY respect other than fact the port faced the front or the back?

If not you can't say for sure that the port direction is the defining factor.

As has been said previously in this thread front porting generally requires a larger baffle area and therefore maybe a larger cab, and when you consider that a lot cabs are technically too small the increase in size might be what makes them sound better.

19 minutes ago, Beer of the Bass said:

I suspect they wouldn't like the Stylophone theremin as it has only a single antenna and the "real" instrument has one for volume too.

To be fair, having owned a two antenna theremin, to get anything other than spooky/sci-fi noises out of it you really need the volume one. 

1 hour ago, bassmansam said:

Unfortunately our Behringer XR18 isn't capable to extend with CAT5.

 

I'll probably go with this Lynx box. It has the exact ins/outs we need and is good quality. They offer it on a drum but it's quite a bit more expensive. 

IME having the cable on a drum makes it a lot less likely to get damaged when coiling it away.

6 hours ago, rogerzilla said:

The advantage over a piece of card is that you get full body to neck contact with no gaps, and no risk of a kink in the neck over time.

54 minutes ago, rogerzilla said:

You must have different ones to.mine, then.  Mine are branded Muspor (no, me neither).  The 0.5° shim measures 0.93mm at one end and 0.52mm at the other, which is reasonably close to 0.5° given these are made from wood (trig says the difference should be 0.66mm and it's 0.41mm).

If the thinner end doesn't taper away to nothing then these shims offer no advantage real or imagined over a piece of card.

2 hours ago, tauzero said:

 

Gardiner Holgate charge about 25% for the buyer and 15% for the seller, so you finish up with 60% of what the buyer pays.

I think that's wrong. What actually happens is the buyer pays the sale price plus 25% which goes to the auction house, and then the auction house also takes a 15% cut on the sale price. You end up with 85% of the sale price.

I looked several times between 6.00am and 8.00am using three different devices, just to check it wasn't a specific browser or cache issue, and all showed page 711 and page 712 with exactly the same content. It appears that almost immediately after I reported this there was a new post made which created page 713 and appears to have fixed it. If you are happy that there's no underlying issue with the thread then I'm happy to consider the matter closed.

Unfortunately CDRs and CDRWs have a limited lifespan, and IME 20 years is really pushing it. 

The problem is that unlike a glass-mastered CDs, writable CDs use a laser-activated dye to encode the information. Over the years the dye tends to break down and eventually the discs will become unplayable. Also back in the day there were a lot of cheap dodgy CDRs in circulation whose lifespan is even shorter than normal. However even if these are a good quality brand like HHB, Sony or Imation your chances of reading the information off them becomes slimmer every year.

Being able to read old CDRs also isn't helped if you are using a flimsy modern CD drive built into a laptop. It might be worth looking for a tray loading, robustly made device with a higher-powered laser and seeing if that gives you any better results. If you do get the disc to read, copy them immediately.

20 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

Anyway it got me thinking about just having a small form power amp fed from the Zoom(s).  Is anyone using this type of setup, rather than a PA cab or a tradition bass amp/cab/combo?

What cab(s) would be be using with this?

21 hours ago, Jackroadkill said:

I must make it to see Hurtsfall at some point.  In fact, there's a few Goth bands whose bass players are BC natives - BC GothFest?!

I'm afraid that you are going to have to be prepared to travel as we haven't got anything even remotely close to Mid Wales at the moment. And the nearest we are likely to come is if we get invited to play Goths On A Field next year.

A BC GothFest might be something worth considering...

Now that the most recent post has added a new page it appears to have sorted itself out.

However I did get the problem on 3 different devices earlier this morning so it might be worth checking that there's no underlying database corruption on the thread and maybe think about locking it and starting a new one as it is over 700 pages long.

Over the past 50 years I think I've tried pretty much every well-known bass except a Fodera, a Smith and I don't think I've ever played a BC Rich bass of any design.

Until a year ago I could have also included a P-Bass in that list. Although I've tried and even owned basses with a P-style pickup in the correct place, none of them bore any resemblance to the typical Fender P-Bass in looks. Before I discovered bass internet forums I never knew that there was supposed to be something super-special about the Fender P-Bass. To me, to own one rather than something with Gibson or Rickenbacker on the headstock was just a simple choice you made in the same way that a guitarist would choose a Strat or a Tele or Les Paul or a Firebird etc... Just based on looks I wasn't that impressed, and nearly all the bass players in bands that I really liked played Gibsons or Rickenbackers or something Japanese from the late 70s or early 80s. When I final got to play one I was massively underwhelmed, and really don't think I have missed out not having tried one before.

While digital is definitely the way forward, I have yet to come across a CAT5/6 cable that is as robust and gig proof as a good quality multi-way snake. For a run of any significant length I'd still want it drum-mounted, so I know it's going to be coiled and uncoiled properly and I'd want to have at least one back-up immediately available.

This thread appears to have become corrupted.

Pages 711 and 712 appear to be exactly the same.

If you can afford it, I would recommend getting one with the cable attached to a drum. 

I had a 20-way drum mounted one made up in the late 90s with the "stage box" in the drum centre and the other end terminated in a heavy-duty multi-way connector that plugged into a patch panel on the back of the case that held our mixer. Cost about £750 back then including the patch panel that had all the flying leads.

15 hours ago, Woodwind said:

As @BigRedX says having music on Spotify should be regarded as promotion for something else not as an earner in and of itself (although in my case my music would not fare well on Spotify - with minimum of 6 minutes a track, which makes up part of a longer form piece.)

Our best performing song on Spotify is over 5 minutes long, and a good minute and a half longer than the next 2-3 most popular ones.

We also have a song that is over 7 minutes long which got picked up for a popular Spotify new releases playlist and racked up a couple of thousand streams in its first month of release. 

IME song length is no barrier to the number of streams it will attract.

I've found that intonation goes away with both flats and rounds when the strings have become worn due to their contact with the frets, result in strings that are no longer a uniform mass along their length. Maybe the reason that flats users as less likely to notice this is a combination of the sound they prefer and the fact that they are less likely to venture above the 7th fret?