BigRedX

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.

Just be aware that if you want to do anything reasonably complex with Canva you could run into trouble. These days a significant proportion of my paying work is fixing graphic design that has either not come out the way that was intended when committed to paper or is essentially unprintable. More and more I'm finding that these problematic graphics have been created in Canva. I'm finding that PDFs made by Canva are producing some very strange PostScript (the language used by professional printing systems) with multiple nested clipping paths and fill colours created by using a clipping paths around single colour bitmap objects. Both of these make the artwork unnecessarily complex and consequently difficult to edit in Illustrator which is what is normally required to name the artwork printable in the way the "designer" intended.

There's not a lot "modern" about Adele's music.

I have an off/on relationship with having a backup bass. In almost 45 years of gigging I've needed one 4 times (always for a broken string) and not had one once. All through the 90s and early 2000s I always had a backup bass and never once needed it. At one point I was playing both fretted and fretless bass and would have a spare for both. At the moment whether or not I take a backup bass depends on how important the gig is and how I am getting there. For very important gigs where there is plenty of room in the band transport (i.e. we're not a crammed into a single car) I'll take a backup. For everything else a spare battery if applicable and a spare set of new strings will have to suffice. Personally I think it's more important to have a spare for a short set where your band has 30 minutes to impress an audience who probably haven't seen you before and maintaining the flow of the set is essential as opposed to longer gigs where dropping one song because you need the time to change a broken string won't be the end of the world.

Sometimes it is beneficial for other forum users to preserve the original problem post and also provide the method by which you fixed it.

1. Burns Sonic Bass. The first bass I ever owned, bought in 1981, and the one I used in my first two bands including the recordings that got CBS records interested in signing the second band I was in. 2. Overwater Original 5-string Bass. The 4th bass I bought (in the early 90s) and the one that took over as my main bass from the Burns until... 3. Gus G3 5-string Bass. Bought in 2002 and has been my main bass ever since for all bands that need "conventional" bass guitar parts, apart form a brief stint when I was mostly playing fretless bass and another when I was using a Warwick Star bass for image reasons. I currently own two - one in black, with humbuckers and passive electronics and one in red with single coil pickups and active electronics. Unless I was being paid a lot of money to be in a band that demanded I use a particular bass for image reasons I couldn't see myself ever needing to buy another bass to do typical bass guitar parts. 4. Eastwood Hooky 6-string Bass. Bought in 2021 and the culmination of several years of searching for a suitable Bass VI to use in one of my bands where it is required in order to be able to play both "bass" and "guitar" parts. Playing and sound-wise it is perfect but, if I had the funds this would be replaced immediately with a Gus made with the same string spacing and scale length as the Eastwood.

£249?Just for a splitter/crossover. If the OP is prepared to spend that kind of money on a single device they might as well get a Helix Floor.

I think what is being suggested is to wrap the speaker in clingfilm and then box it.

Maybe the venues in Hull and London that will benefit do actually need the money and aren't part of a well-off parent organisation. All I'm saying is that they were doing the same in Nottingham it would be a mostly empty gesture.

Be aware that any significant re-shaping of the neck may well alter the sound of the bass.

So are these people doing their own rig captures are doing them in a properly acoustically treated space using a distance mic on the cab(s). Because lets face it that's the only way you are going to get the actual sound that you like.

So I had a look at the Music Venue Trust's website to see what counted as grass-roots venues in Nottingham... Rock City, The Rescue Rooms and The Bodega; all part of the massive DHP group. Rock City doesn't count as a grass-roots venue by any stretch of the imagination, and The Rescue Rooms doesn't really either. Metronome which basically the performance space of Nottingham Trent University. Rough Trade, again part of a much larger organisation and the venue itself is just an otherwise unused space at one end of the bar over the record shop, and Peggy's Skylight which only rarely puts on bands. I suppose if you think live music begins and ends with stadium and arena gigs then these might count, but there's a load of smaller venues than these who really are grass-roots and far more deserving of the publicity and financial support an organisation like this is supposed to bring. I'd be interested to know what people living in other cities think of what are supposed to be "grass-roots" venues...