BigRedX

If you want to relive your youth, go and see some new bands at small venues where you can get up close and personal with them.

New Hurtsfall gigs for October and November: Saturday 5th October as part of the Oxjam Beeston Festival. Hurtsfall are playing at The White Lion at 6.00pm. It's only £11 for a ticket that gets you access to over a 100 acts spread over 17 venues and the money goes to a good cause. Thursday 10th October we're supporting Byronic Sex & Exile at The Chapel at The Angel Microbrewery. Also playing are Jan Doyle Band Tickets £11.55 Tuesday 5th November were's supporting Aurelio Voltaire and Lesbian Bed Death at The Chapel at The Angel Microbrewery. Tickets £19.80 Apparently there are only a few tickets left for this one so get in quick! Saturday 23rd November as part of the In The Bl4ck Midwinter Festival at Shakespeare's in Sheffield. This is a 3 day event from Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th. Tickets for the whole weekend are £38.50 and for just the Saturday £22.00 Sunday 24th November as part of the Rock Against Racism weekend at Saltbox In Nottingham Tickets £10 for both the Saturday and Sunday events.

Yes, I've never got why people would like to dress up as if they are about to take a serious hike across the moors in inclement weather just to nip down to the shops or the pub... Or appear on stage with a massively successful band.

No MIDI, which makes it useless for anything I want.

TBH I could probably get away with looking like I was playing and the majority of the audience would be none the wiser. Having said that I don't know what people do to their basses that is likely to make them fail. The only equipment problems I've had in 50 years of playing in bands are a few string breakages, mostly down to faulty manufacturing of the strings and why I never change strings unless I know I'm doing at least 2 rehearsals before I'll be using them at a gig.

From what I've heard the music itself is pretty conventional, it's just the way she's promoting herself that is "modern". 25 years ago she'd have probably ended up briefly in Prince's backing band.

Except that in order to make most gigs worthwhile financially we need to fit the whole band plus our instruments into a single car. It's a good job we don't use any backline because we'd never do it. Personally I'd rather take an extra box of T-Shirts to sell than a back-up bass. And before anyone says that if the band band didn't play we wouldn't sell any merch, you would be surprised. We sold stuff to people who didn't arrive in time to catch any of our set at festival gigs before.

When I try and install it I get a message saying the disc image is corrupted. This is a download from Brave's own web site. Not exactly filling me full of confidence.

Could you provide some YouTube links that don't have 5 minutes of ads in front of them? I supposed that's the price for fame? The only things I could find where I didn't run out of patience before the ads had finished were her and a drummer with some pre-recorded synth noises.

All my band's gigs are paid. The spare basses come out for those where we are being paid more than just expenses and aren't local. I check all my gear between gigs and practices and luckily I've never needed to use the spare for the Hooky at an actual gig. But where do you draw the line with backup equipment? I notice that although plenty of people on here have a backup amp very few have backup cabs and IME cabs are far more likely to fail than amps. And what about the PA? I turned up at a gig on Friday at 4.30 expecting to load in and sound check only to find the house PA in bits and the engineer frantically rewiring things. It took until 7.30 before he even got a sound out of it, and we didn't get to set up and sound check until 9.00pm, and after all that the sound for the most part was appalling, I felt embarrassed to be on stage, and TBH wished that the PA problems had turned out to be terminal so we could have all gone home instead. Sometimes you just have to accept that technical issues have conspired against you.

She's attractive albeit in a fairly conventional way, although generally conventional is more palatable for mainstream success than anything even vaguely extreme. She knows how to make the most of her image which I can see will upset a forum of mostly middle-aged men many of whom wouldn't know an image if it slapped them around the face and seemingly most of the time can barely dress themselves. The music itself is the problem because from what I've heard IMO it's the sort of thing that mostly appeals to other musicians, and the sorts of pseuds that think a bit of showy technical ability is more important than having a memorable tune, and again the majority of these are men. And good on her if she's been able to persuade Fender into making her a signature bass. I'm sure that there's plenty of people on here who would like a (free) signature instrument from their favourite manufacturer. What happens next will depend on what she wants to do. I can imagine that after being a TikTok/Instagram/YouTube star, joining a gigging band might be a bit of a come-down.

I don't actually have a suitable backup bass for the Eastwood Hooky at the moment. For important gigs I take the Burns Barracuda but some of the songs would be challenging to play if I needed to use it.

They needed three guitarists and a keyboard player to do that?

So find someone who can build you a box with a BDDI and a (Class D?) power amp in it. Job done. Unless of course you want to spend ages buying and trying loads of new kit in which case fill your boots as they say.

There is a very good reason for this in that only Mac OS and iOS are designed from the ground up to allow applications to prioritise the transmission of MIDI and audio data, so that it is all sent at exactly the time you want it to, and is not stuck in a queue behind a number of other system events like because the OS has has no idea about timing critical data. Android devices are particularly bad in this respect which is why there are very few music apps for the platform and none of them appear to work reliably.

This is what I have done with technology-based bands in the past. I was in a band in the 90s where all the patch changes for keyboards, electronic drums, guitar, bass and vocal effects where synchronised with the backing track, including any mid-song changes. The first bar of each song set everything up, and at the end any extreme delay was muted on the vocals so that between song announcements would be legible. It made for a much tighter and energetic performance since no-one was anchored to their "pedal board" and could simply concentrate on playing and performing.

So why not go back to that?

The problem is that with a conventional bass rig your sound is a product of every part of the signal chain. If that was the sound I wanted I'd dump everything else after the BDDI. If you are really lucky you'll find an amp that can overcome the colouration of your cabs, but then you will need to use the same amp and cabs every time you play.

Less than brilliant gig on Friday night, for reasons I won't go into on a public forum, but anyone who has ever been to The Dog House in Nottingham will probably understand where I'm coming from.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you're not playing the same pieces week in week out are you?

This. If they can be placed somewhere discrete rather than front and centre that's much better. I suppose if your band has a repertoire of 50+ songs that will be chosen as the gig progresses and some are only played occasionally then it's probably necessary. However if you are doing a 10 song, 45 minute long set then get of your lazy ass and learn the songs, so you don't need any prompts. When I was gigging in the 80s and 90s we didn't even bother with set lists. We knew the songs inside out and we knew the order we were going to play them without crib notes.

You and your band should carry on playing as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Don't look accusingly at each other or do anything else that would signal that someone has made a mistake. The chances are that unless it was so bad that it bought the song to an unexpected grinding halt within 30 seconds of the start, no-one in the audience will have noticed. IME to sooner you stop worrying about what will happen if you you make a mistake the sooner you will stop making them.

There's your problem. You should have used the output jack.

There you go. Useful information for everyone. If you want to change your signature it is easier to do it on a proper computer.

While playing the fretless parts on a fretted bass would have worked even if if it wouldn't have sounded as good as I would have wanted, playing the fretted bass parts on a fretless bass was way beyond my ability, and the fretted bass was the one I was more likely to break a string on.