BigRedX

A band is never "better than that venue" and even if you think you are don't say it out loud. If you don't want to do the gig politely turn down it down, saying the band are not available that night. You never know some point in the future this might become a gig worth playing and you don't want to ruin your chances now by something you'll regret later.

I take it the saddles are as low as they will go, and the action is still high? If so you'll ultimately need to re-print the neck pocket, either shallower or at an angle depending on what suits you best. I'd start by adding a shim in the body-end third of the neck pocket to see what sort of an angle or how shallower the pocket needs to be. Start with a single thickness of business card and build up in necessary until you get a decent action on the neck and the scales are no longer sitting flush with the bridge base plate. Then you can use that to calculate how much higher the neck pocket needs to be at the body end when you reprint it. You are correct about the nut, the fact side faces the fingerboard, the curved side faces the machine heads. Regarding the hum - have you earthed the bridge? If not run a wire from the bridge base plate to the earth on the output jack and see how much difference that makes. You'll probably want to shield the control cavity and maybe the pickup cavities too and bond them all to the signal earth. Otherwise that is looking good!

In Isolation will be playing our version of "I Believe In Father Christmas" at all our December gigs. There will be a CD single available to buy as well.

It's just a question of undoing the screws, carefully lifting out the panel and then shinning a torch inside to see if there's anything attached to the back of the magnets and feeling around inside for anything loose rattling about. Looking at the photos of the cab on the PJB website removing the top carry handle should also give access to the insides. However if you really don't want to do this I'd start by blocking off the additional screw holes that are letting air out and see if that makes any difference.

The easiest songs to learn are the ones where the bass part is roughly what I would have come up with had I written it. It has nothing to do with how simple or complex the actual part is. The ones I find difficult to play and/or learn are sparse lines with unusual (for me) rhythms and songs where the all the parts use the same chords but in different orders.

Photos from Hurtsfall's Wednesday night gig:

Have you had the cab open yet? I had a weird distortion/rattle sound on my Tokai Talbo Jr guitar which has a built-in amp and speaker. When I took the back off I discovered several ball ends from broken stings attached to the speaker magnet. Removing them also removed the weird sounds. It may be that something has come apart inside the cab and is causing the problem.

Rare mid-week gig for Hurtsfall last night at The Angel in Nottingham. This was actually our first proper "headlining" gig with support from Beck Stacey. Debdepan, Feather Trade all of whom were brilliant. With four bands playing, the evening over-ran slightly and there was no time left for us to do an encore even though there were requests for us to do one more. There were a couple of glitches one where it seemed like the whole PA cut out for a beat during one of the songs and our singer came in too early for the last verse of the last song, but I suspect most people didn't notice either. A decent turn out for a gig on a "school night" although not as packed as our last few. Nice to see plenty of familiar faces in the audience which means that we most definitely have a "following" now and also a lot of new ones, some of whom appeared to know the songs! Hopefully photos will appear later on Facebook that I can repost. That's it for Hurtsfall live for 2023. We'll be finishing off the "Christmas Song" this weekend for release as a single in early December, and working on other new songs for the gigs we already have arranged in 2024. On Saturday I'll be back at The Angel with my other band, In Isolation, supporting B-Movie when I'm expecting the venue to be packed as tickets sold out weeks ago!

I'm down to 4 from about 40 - a main and a spare for each band (I play 5-string in one and Bass VI in the other). If I could use the same bass for both bands I'd be down to 2.

Have you tried one? I had massive gas for one of these when I first discovered on-line bass forums. When I actually came to play one I was extremely underwhelmed.

Both of the basses that I currently use for gigs cost over £1k and both also have long wait times should I need to order a replacement. Think the last time I had a cheap easily replaced bass for gigs was back in the early 2000s when I had started dabbling with playing fretless. If I didn't use them at gigs there would IMO be absolutely no point in owning them. I just make sure that they are in their cases and somewhere reasonably secure when I'm not actually on-stage playing them. TBH when I first started off gigging and was using a second hand Burns Sonic bass that had cost me £60, having that lost or damaged would have been far worse as in those days I rarely had enough spare cash to buy replacement strings, and the loss of my bass would have stopped me from playing completely. That pretty much puts the current situation into perspective.

On a decent audio interface the preamps should essentially be transparent so it shouldn't matter.

Originals or covers? Originals: probably do it unless it involves travelling a long way and there are no other bands on the bill. You never know if any of the handful of people there are going to give you a much better opportunity off the back of what looks like a poor gig. Covers: depends on where it is and how useful a "practice" at a venue with little pressure is going to be.

Well I've listened to 4 tracks and from what I've heard IMO you would be better off without backing tracks and look someone to play keyboards and trigger samples in the manner of Jesus Jones or EMF (and maybe double on second guitar). I couldn't hear anything that is absolutely timing critical so as long as your drummer can keep to roughly the tempos of the recorded versions you'll be fine. IME because the band can hear every nuance of the recording there is a temptation to include everything from the studio that can't be done by the live musicians on the backing track. Both of my bands are particularly prone to this to various degrees. As the person in charge of the backing playback, I have started turning down the volume of any stem of that I think is cluttering up the mix live by 1dB each time we practice. If I manage to turn the track completely off before anyone else in the band notices and asks for it to be louder, then AFAIAC it's unnecessary for the live version and can be removed. I'm sure that there are loads of things on the recorded versions that are considered "essential", but if your are ruthless about which noises absolutely need to be included, it will make for a more dynamic sound when you play live.

What you use depends on how "bullet-proof" you need the backing playback to be. The problem with using a phone is that it's a phone and gets used for a load of other stuff. You'll need to remember to remember to put it into airplane mode when you use it play live as the last thing you want is for someone to call it. Also if it's a iPhone with a single socket to connect to the outside world you'll need a adapter so that it can be plugged into the mains as well being able to connect the audio to the PA. Personally I'm not a fan of consumer grade computer connectors like USB (in any of its varieties), Lightning or Ethernet as from experience they are simply not robust enough to withstand content gigging use. If you must use they types of cables/connectors, have a backup or two and as soon as the cable shows any sign of wear bin it and replace it. You'll also need a DI box to connect to the PA and suitable cables to go from the playback device to the DI box. Don't rely on the PA having enough DI boxes. Buy a good one of your own to use - ideally passive so you don't have to worry about batteries, PSUs or the (non-)availability of phantom power. Don't use cable plug adaptors, they are crap for gigging use. Make up cables with the right connectors on each end to do the job (and have spares). Both my bands use a laptop fitted into a flight case along with all the additional devices to connect to the outside world plus all the necessary PSUs. Everything apart from the two USB plugs and power connector that plug into the laptop is bolted, hot glued and cable-tied into place. All connections to the outside world are made with XLRs apart from backup jacks for the main audio output, the power in which is on a Powercon connectors and the foot switch which controls the laptop which has to be on USB. I have a gig tonight so I'll post photos with explanations of what everything does later today when I get it ready to load out.

Nice, except the natural headstock looks weird with the red body. Is it a bolt-on neck?

There's lots of different ways you can go about this and it all depends on three things: 1. Can your drummer play to a click? 2. Will you have your own sound engineer for all the gigs? 2. How important are the sounds on the backing? - i.e. if it failed could the rest of the band keep going and would it be massively noticeable to the typical audience member?

A Travis Bean TB2000 would be more appropriate.

I started learning the guitar on my 13th birthday, and joined/formed my first band about 18 months later. It was just 4 people with similar musical taste from the same class at school. One of us was pretty good on the guitar. I could string a chord sequence together and the other two could barely play, although one could sing and the other wrote lyrics. We spent the first hour of our first "rehearsal" wondering what to do now that we were all in the same room together. It never occurred to us that maybe we should start by trying to play covers, besides it was the mid 70s and the dominant musical force was prog rock which was way beyond our abilities. Finally I started playing some chords, and the decent musician improvised a "solo" over the top. The others joined in with weird noises and percussion and that was the beginning of my first band. Over the next 7 years we slowly developed our sound. As a band we didn't have a bass guitar until I bought one at the beginning of 1981. But we did make a record that got played on John Peel's radio show.

Probably a 1960 Gibson EB6. Although like most Bass VIs the neck will most likely be to narrow for me to actually use it.

I have a separate Preset (patch) on my Helix for every song that both of my bands do often several Snapshots within that Preset. On top of that all the Preset and Snapshot changes are being controlled by the computer that runs our back tracks and it also shows the running status of the backing track via the colour of the Tap Tempo LED. This means that I am probably make more use of the various functions than most on here, but I reckon I'm still only using 10% of what the Helix is capable of, as there are hundreds of amp, cab and effects sims that I simply have no use for. Should I sell it because I'm not using enough of the features? Of course not. Even if I found that I only needed one sound for everything both of by bands did, I'd still be using the Helix because it gives me "my sound" at the push of a button. Besides if I find myself in a different band then I might start exploring the functions I haven't used yet.

Anything digital should also have user programmable memories, MIDI with proper DIN sockets and not some propriety connector/interface that requires yet another device to convert it to proper MIDI, and program mapping so I don't have to reorder my patches to match my other MIDI devices. Anything less isn't worth the effort no matter how great it might sound.

But music has moved on since then. The sorts of parts that my bands have on their backing are simultaneously technically complex, repetitious and TBH rather boring to play (but don't sound boring as part of the overall song arrangement). Trying to find someone with the skills to play them accurately enough is pretty much impossible. It's much better to hand these parts off to a machine that won't complain or play them badly.

The problem with multiple-channel interfaces is that they generally rely on a dedicated "control panel" app to configure the routing and other functions and that no Linux versions of these apps exist. Therefore at the moment under Linux you only get 2 in, 2 out functionality and only if the device is "class compliant". However there is good news for owners of current Focusrite interfaces in that there is 3rd party development of a routing application happening with Focusrite's blessing and support.

There's two problems in this thread. Firstly "helpful" comments by people who have very obviously never played in a band that uses backing tracks in their life. I'm sorry but you really have nothing to add that will help the OP, all you are doing is showing off your ignorance. If you want to start another thread moaning about bands that use programmed or recorded backing as part of their live performance by all means knock yourselves out, but please don't clog up this thread with your prejudices. Secondly we are getting drip-fed morsels of information by the OP which mean the goalposts change with each new posts and assumptions that have had to be made to help find a solution to the OPs problem are rendered irrelevant by the next reply. So lets try and break down the problem piece by piece and try and find a solution that works for the OP. 1. How are your backing tracks created? Your first post suggested that you were producing them from scratch yourself, but subsequent posts seem to contradict this. 2. You mentioned that this cross-talk problem has only started to occur since moving to Logic. What were you using before? And why have you stopped using it? 3. What application are you using on your iPhone to play back the backing? And what file format is your backing track in? (If you are using MP3s I would try keeping it as a WAV or AIFF and see if that cures the problem). 4. Can you please post links to the cable or device you are using to split the stereo signal from the iPhone into two mono signals? The reason I suggested mixing down the backing separately to the click and then doing another bounce to combine them into a stereo file, is that is should completely eliminate any hidden routing issues that are causing the crosstalk problem. Especially if you do the final bounce within a brand new project file with no pre-configured routing. I've just done a trial bounce on one of my band's backing files within my copy of Logic panning the music hard left and the click hard right and I have total separation between the two which can both be heard in the headphones where there is no audible trace of the click on the music channel, and seen by looking at the waveform editor display where there is no visible sign of the music on the click side. Therefore AFAIAC the problem is not inherent in Logic itself, but is either user error when doing the stereo bounce, or occurring somewhere else in the process.