BigRedX

You do what you do for all "mission-critical" equipment - carry a spare. It doesn't have to be another pair of expensive custom moulds, a set of ZS10s (£45 from Amazon - even cheaper if you want to take a chance with AliExpress) will get you to the end of the gig. Cheaper than a spare amp or wedge and more than small enough to live permanently in your bag of gig essentials and unlikely to be left out because your couldn't be bothered to load them in or didn't have room in the band transport for a particular gig.

Strange how these amps get so much stick, yet my recollection of them is down entirely to the bass player in a Nottingham band in the early 80s who had the most phenomenal bass tone using one of these to amplify his Aria Pro II SB1000.

It will, if you put it at the other end to where it would usually go as the OP intends. IME a single thickness of good quality business card filling no more than one quarter of the neck pocket is usually sufficient. It has a bigger impact on the neck angle than you would think.

There are two separate issues at play here: Firstly the importance or not of having amps and speakers for the individual instruments on stage. IME if everything is going through the PA then at best your amplification rig is a personal monitor and at worst a stage prop that could be messing up the on-stage sound. As soon as you have multiple single instrument sources on stage trying to arrange them on a typical stage, so that all the musicians are able to hear what is coming out of them is nigh on impossible anything but the smallest of venues, and if you look at the typical band setup most don't even bother. If they did, the amps would be placed at the sides of the stage pointing across, but when was the last time you saw that? Once you start having to put anything with its own amp into the foldback, you might as well dispense with on-stage instrument amps and give each musician their own wedge monitor and their own personal monitor mix. Instrument amps only contribute to the sound of the instruments due to a historical accident, because amplified music became popular while the cheapest way of producing amps was using valves. Let's face it electrical engineers would never have purposely designed an amp to distort no matter how musically "pleasing" that sound may be. Their original intent was always to make the instrument sound louder without adding any additional colouration. This has also lead to the problem that both the amp and cabs become part of the instrument's sound which is a particular issue for bass players because the PA rarely mic's up the bass cabs and even if they do, they will also take a DI and you have no way of knowing which source is actually being used for the FoH sound. If you want the sort of colouration that ancient amplification operating outside of its intended parameter produces, then it makes far more sense to dispense with the on-stage amps and speakers and use signal processing instead to replicate the sound. These days IME in a band mix it is indistinguishable from the "real" thing. And. if you play in a band where having a large and impressive looking backline is still part of the image then get some light-weight, low-profile empty ones to use as stage props that take up less floor space on stage and can be folded away to save space for transport. As you can probably tell, I've dispensed with a dedicated bass rig. I found that I was playing two types of venue - small ones where I was being asked to turn down so much so as not to overpower the FoH sound that I could barely hear myself from my rig compared with the bass sound coming out of the guitarist's wedge on the other side of the stage; or the large ones where even my big and impressive-looking rig couldn't even begin to cover the whole stage and once again I was mostly reliant on the foldback to be able to hear myself. I was asking myself what was the point of taking this rig to gigs (3 items that were all ideally a two-person carry) when most of it made no contribution to what myself or my audience were hearing? I now use a Helix for my sound and an FRFR cab for rehearsals and the very occasional gig where the PA is strictly vocals only. I've done only a handful of these types of gig with any of my originals bands in the last 25 years, and the FRFR has been a massive improvement in terms of dispersion (and consequently on-stage balance) compared with my much more expensive traditional bass rig. I've gone from having to be so loud on stage that I could barely hear the other instruments in order for the bass guitar to project into the audience, to being just slightly louder than I would normally choose. So really the only bass players who need a traditional amplification rig are those who only play small-ish gigs with vocal-only PA systems, or those who play in bands where the majority of the other instruments don't require amplification (like big bands). It seems ironic then that much of the advertising for amplification relies on "big-name" endorsees for whom the equipment they are promoting has little real-world benefit. The other issue is that of IEMs: Neither of the two bands I currently play in have made the switch to IEMs even though I think both would benefit from it. One of the bands is definitely more open to the idea than the other, and I suspect that finances allowing, this one will be be using IEMs within the next 12 months. The biggest problem I see with IEMs is that the band really need to be doing their own foldback mix to get the best out of them. Quite a few of the bands that I have shared the bill with over the last few years use IEMs and all of them take much longer to soundcheck and suffer form numerous problems integrating their system with the house PA at the venue. This becomes even more complicated if you are also using the IEMs for things such as click tracks which are not wanted in the FoH. When I make the change it will be because the band will have also added the equipment required to do our own on-stage monitor mix that can be kept completely separate from the FoH and include things like click tracks, count ins and other band-only cues. TL:DR pretty much everyone who isn't playing in a small pub covers band with a vocal only PA would benefit from ditching the traditional backline and using IEMs. Ultimately it's going to produce a better sound on stage and FoH and overall there will be less equipment to carry and set up. It's early days yet but I suspect in 10 years time we'll be wondering why it was even necessary to discuss this.

@BassmanPaul For cabs in parallel (which is what you get when you connect two cabs to an amp) the formula is: 1/R1 + 1/R2 = 1/R3 So for an 8Ω and a 4Ω cab together it is 1/8 + 1/4 = 3/8 = 2.67Ω which is too low an impedance for your 4Ω minimum amp and it will either go into protect mode or go pop depending on how ell it was made.

The Ibanez he played on the two occasions when I saw U2 in the early 80s and the yellow Auerswald he played on the Pop Mart tour. Everything else has been boring, anonymous or ugly (sometimes all 3 at once).

But it is great for illustrating just how important the pickup and electronics are and how little the material used to make it is.

The neck is an aluminium T-section where the top of the T forms the fingerboard and the stem is the centre of the neck. There are then two wooden pieces either side shaped to form a typical neck profile. The wood is nothing special, it has the feel of the sort of wood used for pallets only not quite as coarse. The whole back of the neck has then been painted silver. If you look carefully at the original photo I posted you should be able to see the "T" shape and these two additional photos should make the construction a bit clearer:

Are they posing for "Angry People in Local Newspapers"?

That looks really good (although the demo was very bass heavy on headphones). However with only 16 user patches and no MIDI program mapping that's a deal-killer for me as it would eat into the available MIDI channels the band use. :-((

@SumOne These days almost all the connections for my equipment are made using XLRs and the fewer different types of cable I need to take to a gig the better. The only jack leads I use are the one for connecting my bass to the Helix and a short one for to connect the Helix to the DI box (and a spare for each). Everything else is connected with 6 XLR leads for which I carry just a couple of spares and besides the PA always has a few extra XLR leads should there be real problems. If I could I'd make all my connections using XLR leads and bin the jack leads altogether.

I'm improving very slightly all the time. I'm certainly more technically accomplished now in my 60s then I was in my teens and 20s, and I hope I've also got more tasteful in my playing (which is probably more important) at the same time. Musically I joined the most hardworking and most popular band I have ever been in just before I turned 50.

I've definitely got (almost) all the the gear and plenty of ideas, but probably not a lot of technical ability compared with the typical Basschatter. However I'm sufficiently competent to be able to play the music I want to play and I'm able to play the songs in time and in tune and get to the end of each one without causing any problems that would be immediately noticeable by the majority of the audience. And while I have goals for improvement, and I am slowly working towards them and have been doing so for the past 50 years, mine are probably slightly different to there typical musician - rather than learning any new techniques I'd like to be able to execute those I can already do whist being able to throw some serious shapes and poses on stage and not miss a note. I also like to have nice things (or at least nice things that I am interested in) and for me the musical equipment goes with the band image. Of course "nice" is totally subjective and in the world of bass guitars not always an indication of the instrument's worth. So I have some interesting looking guitars and basses that cost me quite a bit of money. But it's money that I had available at the time of purchase and money that I wanted to spend on musical instruments. Also bear in mind that there are plenty of people on hear with vintage Fenders that (IMO) look like stinky poo but are worth considerably more than my flashy looking basses. No-one would ever give them any crap about "All the gear..." So don't worry about it. You're probably already a "better" bass player than me, and if you can afford it there's no shame in having nice instruments and other musical equipment. Also even for someone like me a good musical instrument does make you play better. I know that for a fact, whether it is because it's easier to play or because you can no longer use your gear as an excuse - a bit of both in my case.

Since it's mostly hollow aluminium tube it weighs very little.

The optimum height of a pickup will depend on lots of different things including but not limited to: The strength of the magnets The gauge of the strings How high/low your actions is set How hard you play How far up the neck you play Where the pickup is situated in relation to the string length It's best to dispense with the ruler and use your ears to hear when they are the right distance.

But on the other hand consider this bass: Which I have taken to a couple of bass-bashes in the past. Pretty much everyone who has had a go on this says that it sounds just like a P-Bass (ignoring the fact most people who have played it also make it sound slightly different). Maybe that's because it has a P-Bass pickup in exactly the right spot rather than the wood it is made out of.

Too high can lead to weird overtones (somethings sounding out of tune with the fundamental note) and a "deadening" of the sound due to the magnetic forces dampening the string vibrations. If the pickup is a bit too low you can always turn up something in your signal chain to compensate.

One of the bands I play with ditched on-stage amplification last year, and although we haven't gone for IEM yet, simply getting rid of lots of conflicting sound sources on stage has done wonders for both what we and our audience hears. Admittedly with a line up of vocals, synths and bass VI live with drums and additional synths on the backing it's been easier for us than the typical band. We played a small "festival" (in a pub) last year where the foldback was a single tiny wedge monitor - no problem - we just angled the main PA cabs slightly back so we could hear them and ended up playing one of the best gigs we have done.

I realise that this statement has some humorous icon after it (which my computer has rendered invisible), but what I am saying is that nobody can pin-point the difference in sound between two solid electric instruments to a single piece of wood. You have absolutely no way of knowing how identical or different all the other components of two supposedly identical instruments are. It's the easiest thing in the world to make two different sounding instruments. You just build them and there they are. If the woods used made a quantifiable difference to the sound of an instrument it should be equally easy to mass produce instruments that all sound exactly the same, and there would be no need to go a try every P- or J- bass in the shop looking for "the one".

Certainly not in the past with record label funding. However if you look at the crowd funding proposal link in the OP you'll see that Stuart Hamm is only asking for $1,500 for a publicist for this project. Also these days the money's not in recording and releasing albums, but in tour and merchandise sales. The album is generally a promotional tool for the things that can generate an income. When the Terrortones released our first single we put up £2k (£500 each) plus 150 copies of the single for promotion. Some of it was money well spent and some pretty much useless, but what it did do was to get us was a foot in the door of the publicity machine, so that when we released our second single our promotion which much cheaper because we were able to target it so much more effectively. Also we made back our "investment" by playing gigs and selling T-shirts and CDs, so from that point onwards the band was pretty much self-funding. This is why I'm always so sceptical of crowd funding. The artists who need it most are those who are working on their first musical project and who are unlikely to have built up a sufficiently large enough audience to make it viable. Once you've made you first release the sales and other musical income of the back of that should fund the next, and so-on. If they don't then maybe you should be doing something different, or put up your own money and accept that it is simply a vanity project.

If I was making 70k a year out of music, I certainly wouldn't need to be crowd-funding my next album.

But as the OP points out you need to get the original money for a musical project from somewhere, and since very little is forthcoming from record labels these days where can it come from? Venture Capitalists? A Bank Loan? Crowd funding is all very well but you need a crowd in the first place to fund from, and unsurprisingly the majority of artists making crowd funding work for them got their crowd as a result of being signed to a "big bad" record label. For all their faults I can't see any other institutions taking over from record labels and taking the same financial risks that they used to. Can you imagine how you would word a business proposal to raise sufficient money to allow you and the rest of your band to take a year or two off work so that you could concentrate full-time on the music, at the same time providing the funding to make an album, a couple single and video to go with them, buying the band onto a couple of big-name tours in a support sort, plus all the other promotional activities needed to generate an audience big enough to make the venture self-funding by the time the original investment ran out? OoI has anyone on here successfully crowd funded an album release? I've been in bands that discussed it but my stance was - what if it failed - there's nothing sadder than a band who can't even raise the cash required to put out a album, and whose failure is there for everyone to see. The Billy No-Mates of the musical world.

The rug in the OP is the sort of crap my family would buy for me because I play "the guitar". Like all similar items it would go straight into the bin.

IMO the important thing about the original Peavey T60 guitar and the T40 bass was not the instruments themselves but how they were made, using copy lathes which allowed both consistency between instruments and for them to be offered at about half the price of their US-made competition. Many features of the design were done to facilitate this method of production. Of course these days with CNC machines which are capable of so much more than what was available in the mid 70s, the concept of the early Peavey instruments is mostly irrelevant. Once you are no longer constrained by what is easy and practical using mid 70 technology you end up with the Retrovibe version which is essentially a P-bass fitted with two MM style humbuckers.

Am I the only one who thinks that Australia's song is going to turn into "It's Alright" by East 17 every time they hit the chorus?