BigRedX

I had a 4-string Wesley Acrylic bass which had the frets taken out, and din't think it was heavy. If was certainly a better instrument IMO than the Squier VMJ that was supposed to replace it. I've played one of the Percy Jones clear basses, and it was very heavy and pretty horrible to play. Also close up it looked terrible, with lots of unpolished surfaces. While it might look OK on stage or in a video, for a hand-made custom instrument I wouldn't consider that lack of attention to detail acceptable. Again the fit and finish of the Wesley was far superior.

Yes. I've bought several basses from Ishibashi (U-Box) without any problem. They are geared up for international sales and handle everything well. Other Japanese sellers can be reluctant to deal with foreigners and may totally ignore you as a result. Don't forget that you will need to pay VAT and import duty on the combined price of the bass and shipping. Add 25% to the cost of the instrument and the shipping price and you won't have any nasty surprises. Also I have sold and shipped a bass to Japan, again with no issues. I didn't do anything different to shipping a bass anywhere else. Pack it up with plenty of padding and if you don't have a hard case, double box it. For international shipping I always use a courier service that will be the same company both here and in the country I'm sending to, such as UPS or FedEX. It costs more but IME it's always more reliable. Remember to tell your buyer that they are responsible for any import taxes. Good luck.

IME if you need to max out any EQ band (let alone all of them) then your equipment probably isn't right for the sound that you want. Good studio engineers will normally try and achieve the sound they want by cutting the unwanted frequencies rather than boosting the wanted ones. This is what I always do with my signal chain. Ultimately if you are getting EXACTLY the sound that you want then it's probably OK, but if this was me I'd be wondering what was wrong with the rest of my gear, because I would want to apply subtle EQ once in the signal chain and leave it at that, and if I couldn't do that, I'd be looking for what was getting in the way of achieving the sound that I want and replacing that. If you are boosting all the frequencies to max or close to max you are probably overloading an input somewhere in your signal chain and what you probably want to do is add an overdrive/gain pedal instead.

Hurtsfall will be playing Goth City 7 - To Live and Die in LS in Leeds on Saturday 15th July. We're playing the main stage at Boom opening for Auger (who are great) and will be on at 8.30

I don't get this romanticising of wear. And I'm sure that if Gibson and Fender had known just how rough the "rock n roll lifestyle" would be on the finishes of their instruments they'd have picked something more hard wearing than nitro in the first place. And at what point does wear get in the way of the playability of an instrument and when it does what should you do about it? Case in point my Red Gus G3 Bass will be 25 years old next year. That will probably make it "vintage". It stated off as one of the display/demo models that Simon took to various musical instrument shows and trade fairs, and at some point after the end of 2001 it was sold to the person who owned it before me. For the next 5 or so years it must have had a very hard life because when I bought it, second hand, early in 2008 both the bass and the Hiscox case it came in were severely worn. The purple/green flip paint finish had chipped off in multiple places including the back of the neck which made it somewhat uncomfortable to play. Some parts were missing and others had been replaced with non-standard items. Having decided that overall the bass was a keeper, I got in touch with Simon at GusGuitars to find out what my options were. Due to the way the flip paint works it would be impossible to retouch the worn areas, and the only options would be to leave it as it was an try and smooth out the chips on the neck to make them less uncomfortable, or strip it back to the primer coat and apply a new finish. Since I wasn't particularly taken by the colour (this was the main reason why I didn't buy the bass when it was "new" back in 2001) I decided to have it refinished in Candy Apple Red and at the same time have the whole bass refurbished, which included new chrome for all the metalwork and re-profiling the aluminium horns that were somewhat out of shape. (How on earth had that happened?) When I got the bass back apart from still having the same old worn case and some slight wear to the frets it looked like a brand new instrument. For the past 15 years this has mostly been my main bass and has done well over 100 gigs, and while it has picked up a ding or two, it is not showing a fraction of the wear it displayed when I first got it. Has the refinish and refurbishment affected the value? In this case it has probably made it worth slightly more. Having the work done by the person who made the bass originally probably helps. What might count against it, is that being the first 5-string bass Gus made the instrument in it's original condition is well-documented on the Gus website, and of course it not longer exists in that state...

So what is supposedly wrong with shiny pickups? IMO better than nasty matt black lumps of plastic that Gibson insist on fitting to their "Thunderbirds".

Ironically the instructions for getting information out of a YouTube video without needing to watch it are in the form of a YouTube video...

Do you have an RD bass to put through it?

At home, if I'm just playing or composing I won't even bother to plug in. That way I concentrate on the tune and not get side-tracked by the sound. Once I've ready to work on the sounds I plug in my Helix and either go through the speakers in my "studio" or headphones. At rehearsal for one band I use my Helix into my RCF745, and for the other it's Helix into the rehearsal room PA. Live it's Bass > Helix > PA.

It's also a question of efficiency. Most of the YouTube stuff I watch is because I need the information, and watching a video seems to be the only way to get it. Since I can't "skim-read" my way through a video I have to watch from the beginning waiting for the 30 seconds that will hopefully tell me what I want to know. And while I'm being bored with all the other stuff, I notice all the inadequacies of the "script", the editing (or usually lack of it), the presenter's appearance and weird accent, and all those other things that really ought to be invisible, and would never be noticeable in a written piece.

Being able to make a living out of music is just like any other artistic/creative job. You have to accept (especially in the early days) that in order to make sufficient income you are going to have to take on the (much) less interesting work as well as the things you would really like to do. I've learnt from my creative business (graphic for print) that you get the work by say yes to pretty much everything, and doing exactly what you employer/client wants. You can't afford to turn anything down or have your own opinion until you have got to the point where you have so much interesting and exciting work that you can politely turn the less riveting stuff down and be able to recommend someone else for those jobs. Remember that you may always need to pick these back up again the in the future if the "good" work starts to dry up.

Because it is assumed that everyone understands cars and therefore will get the analogy. Except if you are like me and don't care about cars and therefore have no idea what they are on about.

I've posted this before, but in context of the OP it bears repeating. In 1979 before going to university I had a part-time job working at my local musical instrument retailer that was then in the process as repositioning itself from being mostly a seller of home organs to becoming a seller of typical rock band instruments and in the process getting some more and better guitars and basses than just the few Grant and Columbus copies that had previously graced their walls. As a result one of the eagerly awaited deliveries was about 30 Fender guitars and basses. Unfortunately when they arrived it was a major disappointment. Not only were the majority in rather nasty colours - predominantly stinky poo brown and a horrible slightly see-through white that looked like the sprayers had finished early for the weekend rather than a deliberate colour choice, every single instrument exhibited some degree of poor construction. The three-bolt neck models were the worst with all having far to much play in the neck pocket, such that one of the outer strings was no longer over the neck at the top end. The only person who looked even remotely happy was the freelance guitar tech who could see hours of additional paid work coming his way trying to make these instruments playable. If it had been up to me I'd have packed them up and sent them back, but I believe they'd been acquired in some "dodgy deal" that had by-passed the UK Fender distribution service in order to get a more competitive price. I certainly looked as though we had received all the instruments that no one else wanted. The manager seemed to think that having the Fender name on the headstock would be sufficient to make the sales, but they turned out to be rather slow moving and a significant quantity were still there looking very sorry when I bought my first bass from them 2 years later (unsurprisingly it wasn't a Fender). Compared with the Ibanez and Aria guitars and bass that arrived around the same time, and were perfect in every way and most even in tune when taken out of the box, these poor Fender instruments did little to enhance the brand name. It's hardly surprising that they had been surpassed by the copy makers in early 80s...

Is it the replacement speaker that has blown? For the cab to have an overall impedance of 8Ω the speakers should all be 8Ω each and wired in series/parallel pairs. If this replacement speaker really is 4Ω then the impedance of the whole cab will be under 8Ω (6.86Ω approx) which could also damage you amp if it isn't rated for loads under 8Ω, or it's valve amp and you are using the wrong transferee tap output. Also what is that bit of orange tape doing on the white wire? Is it just for identification purposes or is it covering a join? If it's a join I'd be looking at that as a possible source of any unwanted noises, and replacing it with single continuous wire.

I bought my first tuner (Boss TU-12) back in 1983. At the time I was playing synth in an electronic band and we wanted to stop having to do the "tuning song" at the beginning of our set where we used a middle C drone on the backing tape to tune the synths. We all though it was unprofessional and a terrible thing to have to inflict on the audience. IIRC it cost over £40 which was a significant amount of money back then and more than any of the effects pedals I had bought previously. I haven't been without some sort of electronic tuning device since then. The TU-12 got repurposed into a 2U rack unit in the early 90s along with a regulated 9V PSU and a couple of interface circuits for the synths I was using at the time. I still have it somewhere in storage.

I had exactly the same amp with exactly the same problem (one that was well known and widely discussed on line) that I had owned from new, and Ashdown simply did not want to know. I was fobbed off with excuses and excessive charges for simply looking at the problem and eventually they stopped answering my emails. The amp ended up being sold for spares and repairs on eBay for next to nothing. I would have put it down to the fact that the amp was poorly designed and essentially unfixable, and unsurprisingly Ashdown would want to wash their hands of it, until I read the original story post by @TheGreek of his experience, which left me even less happy than before. Personally I will never buy anything from the company again.

It's one of the parameters available when the tuner is active. You change it using the "Type" control. I have mine set to "Strobe" as I've found it the easiest to use on stage. There's even an option to use the tuner pedal to route the signal through an external tuner. However I found that the Helix one was just as accurate as the Peterson StroboRack that I was using previously.

Which mode are you using it in?

I've never owned a tuner in pedal form. Apart from my first tuner - a Boss TU-12 - all my other tuners have been either rack mounted or part of another device. Currently I use the tuner in my Helix.

For me amp and cab sims are a bit of a red herring. IMO they are just EQ presets with limited adjustment. Instead I just use separate EQ and drive modules on the Helix. That allows me to pick the most suitable EQ and drive for each song without having one permanently linked to the other. When I do pick an amp sim it is used primarily for the drive sound and takes the place of the dedicated drive module. For the Bass VI I do use an amp and cab sim on some of my sounds, but it's the Helix version of the Roland Jazz Chorus combo, a device that in "real life" would be totally unsuitable for the bass guitar. For me that is the best thing about modelled effects and amps, in that I can't damage them by sticking the "wrong" kind of signal through them. The worst that can happen is that I won't like the sound, and then I can try something else instead.

Not music, but I'm self employed and do well enough to make a living out of it. However my business has been entirely built on two things: 1. I built up a reputation as being VERY GOOD at what I do while I was still working for my last company. 2. I became self employed because the company in question went into liquidation and I was able to pickup several well-paying clients a result which got me through the first few years. Extrapolate that into the music business and that will give you a starting point.

Backing tracks that I'm making some adjustments to, in order for them to be ready for the next couple of gigs.

Flip paint needs to be applied in a single spraying in order for it to flip in the same way which is probably a significant factor in the cost. Also this means that it isn't possible to retouch any damage at a later date, as there was no guarantee that the new finish would flip the same way as the original. This is why my Gus was resprayed in a different colour. Had it been possible to do a repair to the existing finish I would have gone for that option, but as it had to be refinished from scratch whatever colour I chose I decided that I'd prefer CAR.

Personally I only want to do one A/D conversion for all my sounds. So once it has been digitised it stays that way. Each A/D D/A conversion will add a slight amount of delay to the sound. For one of my bands only the vocals and the Bass VI have to be digitised. Everything else (drums and synths) is generated "in the box".

Playing music I love. Best high ever.