BigRedX

What is it you want out of being in a band? An outlet for your artistic expression? An extra £50 a week? Simply the chance to get out of the house for an evening? Where do you live? In a large town or city with a vibrant music scene, or somewhere out in the sticks, miles from any venues and rehearsal rooms? What kind of music do you want to play - originals or covers? and what genre(s)? and if it's originals do you need to have a major creative input? What can you bring to the band other than a bass guitar and (hopefully) the ability to play it? Only once you have answered all those questions can you start to look for the right band for you. Interestingly in the descriptions of the bands in the OP, absolutely nothing was said about the music each was playing. Reading between the lines I'll assume that the first was originals and the third covers but I still don't know what genres. But that says to me that the OP is lacking in musical direction. As someone from the other side of the audition process, a lack of musical direction is nearly always a massive problem, because the musician won't be sufficiently focused on the specific music the band want to play. For me the music always comes first and I'll worry about the other things afterwards - that's what the audition is for you are auditioning the band as much as the band is auditioning you. From my own perspective, I've never had a problem either finding a suitable band or finding suitable musicians to form one. While I live in a decent sized city, it's not really on a par with others for well-known musical talent, I'm quite picky about the sort of music I want to play and I'm at best of very average technical ability, but none of these things have been a obstacle for me. However IME as a musician you need to be aware of the music scene in your locality and in particular amongst the kinds of bands that you would like to be the bassist for. It is my experience that most bands like to stick with people they know, but that can just as easily be the bloke who come to all their gigs as well as the bassist that one of the band has worked with in the past. For the two bands I currently play in, I knew one of them from having shared a couple of gigs with them in my Terrortone days, and having enjoyed their set was following them on Facebook so I saw when they advertised for a bass player. I probably wasn't the most technically proficient bassist they auditioned, but the band knew who I was, and in turn I knew about the kind of music they were playing the direction they were talking about taking the band. The other band I found by placing an ad on JMB where I was very specific about the kind of music I wanted to play and the level of commitment I was looking for in a band. It took almost a year before anyone got in touch, but they were exactly the sort of band I wanted to join, and unsurprisingly I was exactly the sort of band member they wanted.

Minging.

And if the flow of the set on stage is important to you, I'd also suggest that unless your two basses are very similar, that you do at least the occasional rehearsal just using the "spare" so you can be confident that you can dial in any EQ and gain changes it might require and that you can play everything in the set using it. For one of my bands I play Bass VI and my main bass is an Eastwood Hooky (Shergold copy) and the backup is a Burns Barracuda. The Burns has much narrower string spacing than the Eastwood, and for that reason is a lot more challenging to play. Until I can afford to replace the Burns with another Eastwood, I make sure that I can play everything to a suitable standard on it even if it's just a play-along to the drum track at home once a month.

In 40+ years over gigging I've only ever had to cancel twice due to not being able to get to the venue. The first was when the band van broke down just outside Stoke on the way to Liverpool. RAC were unable to get us going and by the time the recovery truck arrived the gig was over so we got them to take us back to Nottingham. The second was when I woke up feeling very rough on the day of the gig. Normally I'd have taken a handful of painkillers etc and played my way through it, but this being a couple of months post-lockdown, I didn't think that was acceptable behaviour. The band waited until mid-afternoon and when I still didn't fee any better, told the promoter we couldn't play. Other than that the bands I have been in have always been able to get to the gig somehow despite the weather and/or adverse traffic conditions. The next worst was going to a gig in Birmingham when we were stuck on the motorway for 2 hours due to an accident, and missed our performance slot. Luckily the promoter was able to persuade the band who should have been playing after us (the much better-known Pussycat & The Dirty Johnsons) to play first and we got to the venue just in time to get our gear on stage and play, before the headliners were due on.

I've never had a bass fail at a gig, only broken strings, and while I could fit a new string mid-gig, you can guarantee it won't go as smoothly as it does at home, and it looks completely unprofessional. Plus when you've only got 30 minutes for your set you don't want anything unnecessary eating into that time. It's only happened 3 times IIRC, but the first time it happened I'd never even considered that it might be a possibility, so not only did I not have spare bass, but I didn't even have a spare set of strings, and ended up having to use the headlining band's bass which was a Violin Bass copy strung with ancient flats and on a strap so long in hung somewhere just above my knees (at the time I wore my bass at chest height and used a twangy round-wound sound). Before the next gig, not only had I bought two sets of strings, but also a spare bass. Since then I've always taken a spare instrument unless if there has been no room for it in the band transport.

For me the vibrato unit problem was two-fold. 1. Once I had fitted the heavier E and A strings the various forces required to cause the vibrato mechanism to function, and even more importantly to return to the correct pitch, simply became too great. Ideally heavier strings should mean a stiffer spring and that would make the mechanism even more rigid. 2. Even with the original lighter strings the degree of "wobble" was still so subtle that it was essentially lost in the band mix. I had exactly the same problem with the Burns Barracuda, which has a different (more Strat-like) vibrato mechanism.

Not my experience at all. In the days before Speakon connectors I used 2 core orange mains cable to make up speaker leads for my band so it was obvious what they were and wouldn't get used as signal cables. The last time I went looking for any it was all 3 conductor only.

For me a set of Newtones and a shim was sufficient to get it playable enough to use. I found that as soon as I fitted the heavier strings and increased the break angle over the bridge and the vibrato mechanism became inoperable. If you really want to make sure the bridge doesn't wobble about at all have a look at fitting collars made from plastic or metal pipe off-cuts around the bridge posts. Much cheaper than a replacement bridge. As for upgrading the pickups it will depend how you intend to use it. I have 3 Bass VIs (Squier, Burns Barracuda and Eastwood Hooky) and play Cure/Joy Division/New Order type bass in a post punk/goth band where, even though the bass is prominent in the mix, by the time I've applied the appropriate amount of EQ, drive, chorus and delay using my Line6 Helix the different basses are virtually indistinguishable from each other. I've now abandoned my Squier in favour of the wider necked (and much more expensive) Eastwood Hooky.

I'd rather have this Travis Bean bass.

Depends on the gig and how the band are getting there. Ideally one and a spare, but sometimes if we are travelling light there won't be room. TBH in over 40 years of gigging I've only needed a spare bass on three occasions (and didn't have one on only one, where I didn't even have a spare set of strings and I had to borrow the headlining band's bass), unlike when I was playing guitar and it was a rare gig when I didn't break at least 1 string. The most I've taken to a gig was 5 - 2 fretted and 2 fretless basses and a spare guitar for the guitarist who didn't have one.

I think @Bassassin would be interested in this and may have some additional information.

The passive tone control rolls off the top end (based on the value of the capacitor used). It also adds a very slight resonant peak at the cut off frequency.

Personally I'm glad that my "rig" has been reduced to a single FRFR which hardly ever leaves the rehearsal room as most of the time the PA does all the "lifting" for me. Regarding reliability I've owned valve, solid state and class D amps. Nearly all have worked perfectly. The only failures in over 40 years of playing have been an all-valve amp that went pop in quite a spectacular way mid set, and a class D that suffered from a well-known design fault.

Live albums occupy a weird niche in performance terms. Most of the time if you make a mistake playing a gig it's over and gone in a fraction of a second, and most of the audience will never even have noticed it. However once you capture that performance for posterity, it's a different proposition. If a mistake is obvious, then I think most musicians would want to fix it before making the recording available to the public. Even if none of the performances required individual attention, the recording will have been mixed at leisure, often with the same attention to detail that a studio album would have received. On top of that most live albums will have been compiled from multiple gigs - in the case of WOA the just under 2 hours of album represents the best taken from 90 hours of recordings - so there is always some degree of artifice.

The concerts that made up Wings Over America (album) and Rock Show (film) were recorded on multi-track tape (probably 24-track) using one of the many mobile studios that were popular for live recordings in the 70s, so having a different mix to that heard FoH with the bass guitar louder would have been simple. How does the mix compare with the audio only version on WOA? Like most "live" albums of the time, various parts were overdubbed afterwards, in the case of WOA specifically the backing vocals, but anything else that required attention would have been touched up if necessary. Both releases were complied from multiple concerts and in the case of Rock Show it is possible that footage from a different performance to the audio was cut to fit, if the best audio and visual performances didn't come from the same gig. Very few "live" recordings of any kind are done direct to stereo, even when they are being broadcast in real time, the broadcast mix will be done separately to the FoH mix, and nearly always recorded to multi-track to allow for the possibility of fixing errors and adjusting the balance at a later date for release or rebroadcast.

Unless you as the buyer specifically asked for the seller to use a different delivery service to their usual one(s), then the responsibility is with the seller all the way, for both the goods and the method by which they have sent them.

Are you using the built-in WiFi router or an external one?

The clip is from the "Rockshow" film, which comes from the same concerts as "Wings Over America".

Was that before or after she was doing backing vocals for The Eurythmics? Mine is that I turned down the opportunity to work with William Orbit, although it was pre- Bassomatic and his current band Torchsong were a bit crap IMO.

Thanks. I've been lucky enough to have played with some great drummers in the various bands I've been in.

If you're using a computer to play back your backing then you can use MIDI sync which is what I do. Allows a lot more besides.

To the OP, you'll hopefully get a bit of time in the soundcheck to work out an IEM that is comfortable for you, but unless you need the click for the count-ins or to keep time in sections where there are no live drums (personally if I had created the backing I'd have these elements separate to the main "metronomic" click), I'd keep it low in the mix and work off the live drums instead.

I think it's probably got more to do with what genres of music you listen to and play. I've spent most of my playing "career" in bands with some sort of click or backing track since 1981 - I'm now in my 60s so I doubt I count as a "younger" musician.

Spot on although given that you included tempos I suspect you stuck the tracks in a DAW to see how well they lined up start to finish with a fixed tempo grid (that's what I would have done!) StickyPants speeds up slightly all the way through and there is no way that it could have been done with a click. We did look at a variable tempo click for DoodleBug Blitz, but the amount of changes made it impractical and it never felt quite right. However if you weren't specifically listening for it I doubt anyone would have spotted which were done with and without. We were helped by having a super-tight drummer (his other band was live drum and bass) who would often make us rehearse at 3/4 tempo to tighten up our playing as a band.

The original performance will have been recorded onto 24 track, so it would be trivial to overdub or replace any parts that weren't quite up to scratch on the evening. Remember that other well-known "live" albums of that era had been seriously tickled up afterwards.