BigRedX

@BoomTing Don't worry, no offence taken, and besides I'm quite capable of scrolling past those posts I find unreadable. The reason I brought it up was because on another forum I frequent someone typed one of these (to me) incomprehensible posts asking for advice about about some instrument or software, and then someone else had tagged me as a person with the specific knowledge to be able help the OP with their problem. I had to point out that due to my dyslexia, and they way the post had been typed, I simply could not understand what had been asked, and if someone could re-phrase the question in a more legible manner I would do my best to supply the relevant information. It doesn't really apply to this thread because we were side-tracked into a discussion on the correct use of the apostrophe, and OP's original question was posed in a perfectly eloquent manner, however it is, IMO, always sensible if you have an important question to ask on a forum like this that you query is typed in the most comprehensible manner possible because that way you can engage with the largest number of people who can potentially help you.

For someone like myself who is marginally dyslexic it does matter, a lot. I have taught myself to recognise word, letter and punctuation patterns which helps me to be able to read and understand what has been written. This is fine if everything I read has been properly copy read, checked, corrected and edited. Unfortunately none of this exists on the more interesting parts of the internet (like this site and other music forums). There are several people here and on the other forums I read who probably have very interesting and important things to say but to me their posts just appear to be a collection of word-shaped letter combinations surrounded by random punctuation (if I'm lucky) and spaces. I simply don't have the time or energy to be able to decipher them (a lot of the time it would require copying their post into a text editor where I could manipulate it into something I can read and understand), and some are so bad that I have had to put the user on "ignore" because just looking at what they have typed made my brain hurt. This post has taken me about 10 minutes to compose and check and there are still likely to be mistakes in it!

It's never "vinyls" (and certainly not "vinyl's"). Just vinyl will do. And anyway the proper term is "records".

But can you play a Thunderbird and dance like the bassist from Freddie And The Dreamers?

I play in two bands and use a 5-string Gus G3 in one and an Eastwood Hooky (copy of the Shergold Marathon 6-string bass) in the other. At a push I could use the Eastwood for both bands although a few of the bass lines that use the low B would have parts that would need to be played an octave higher than I normally do. I certainly couldn't use a P-Bass as a substitute for the Eastwood as I go all the way up to octave G on the high E and I have the B string tuned to C to allow me to play some drone parts in C and Am.

Unfortunately The Clash are a particular bad example to use, as they got a reduced royalty rate in an attempt to keep the price of their albums down for their fans, particularly London Calling and Sandinista, where they were only getting a single album rate. If you really want to support bands financially you should go to their gigs and buy a T-shirt or two.

What sort of "soap-bar". On the bass other than it's a rectangular shaped lump of plastic (occasionally wood) that is wider than a standard J-type pick up, the term is meaningless. So long as there is room the pickup manufacturer can fit any coil configuration that they want in there, and unless it is specifically stated in the specification you won't even know what it is. Probably the most important consideration is the size of the pickups they are replacing because that might narrow down the options.

The Gus G3 5-string meets every single one of those requirements. Here are my two: Passive with humbuckers Active with single coils (with series/parallel switching)

I resisted the temptation to type that...

I'm not sure about the "history" - as I said I've been in Nottingham longer than Rock City has (I had tickets for one of the first gigs there which was cancelled on account of the venue not being finished in time); and its history isn't a fraction of that of the 100 Club (IMO). Maybe I'm just taking it for granted?

We're all old. Most of us grew up with physical media, and like what we know. I'd be happy to switch completely to streaming but, as I already said a lot lot of what I want to listen to isn't yet available here in the UK either due to geographical licensing constraints or because it's old and originally released on a small indie label. Also there's no guarantee that any of the streamlining services can ever be truly profitable and as a result may close at any point and then you'll have no music to listen to.

Rock City and the associated DHP venues are both blessing and a curse as far as the local music scene is concerned. As an audience member Rock City was great in the 80s and early 90s when they were taking chances with less well-known bands and there was a good atmosphere at gigs. These days it seems as though live music is very much secondary to getting the students in for club nights, and even gigs feel uncomfortably full and the moment the headliners have finished the last encore you're being hustled out. Maybe it's over-familiarity, I arrived in Nottingham just before Rock City opened, but from both a performer and audience member I don't really see what so great about it compared with any similar sized venue elsewhere. I've been to some good gigs at Rock City, but there really great ones in Nottingham, IMO, have been elsewhere.

Only if what you want to buy is fairly mainstream. Anything released in small quantities and no longer available new can be surprisingly expensive. I had to price up my CD and vinyl collection for insurance purposes about 10 years ago and some of the CDs were worth a lot of money (and those were actual sold prices on Discogs - not what unsold CDs were being offered at).

Anything that you bought from iTMS will already be on Apple Music. iTunes is not just the iTMS store. The advantage is for CDs that you own and have added yourself (and vinyl if you own the means of digitising it) that haven't yet been made available for streaming.

Unless you are buying CDs or vinyl directly from the bands at their gigs or through Bandcamp they still won't be getting very much.

If you feel the need to ask this question on an open forum, then you should probably leave.

If everything you want to listen to is on one of the streaming services then you are probably best sticking with that. However at least a quarter of my record and CD collection still hasn't made to any streaming service, and that includes a lot of albums and songs that I would consider indispensable for my listening enjoyment. You could consider the combo of Apple Music and iTunes on your computer because that way you can also make the contents of your iTunes library available to stream for you via Apple Music which gets around the problem of ant essential tunes being missing. This is what I have done, my complete CD collection (around 2500 CDs and most of my vinyl) has been digitised at 16bit 44.1Hz on a 4TB SSD attached to a Mac and then made available to stream to my Apple Music account.

Bad guitarists are no worse than any other bad musician. Get rid ASAP, because by keeping them in the band your are only enabling their bad habits. If you kick them out (and tell them why you are kicking them out) then maybe they will eventually learn, or stick in the environment where they are currently best suited - playing by themselves at home.

For playing or as an audience member? And what types of music do you play or like to go and see? As someone who has lived in Nottingham since 1980 from a musician's PoV it's never really had a "scene" in the same way that cities like Sheffield, Leeds Liverpool, Manchester etc have had at various times, and two of the most "successful" bands from the city (Stereo MCs and Tindersticks) had to move elsewhere in order to get that success.

Hurtsfall are in Leeds on Friday 5th May at Warf Chambers opening for The Webb and feather Trade.

My first public performance in front of a paying audience was in 1976 aged 15. It was held in the local old-people's community centre and organised by various music teachers in Loughborough one of whom was the woman who taught the folk guitar evening class that myself and two friends went to. We played 3 semi-improvised instrumentals that we had written ourselves, much to the bemusement of the audience as the rest of the evening was full of earnest teenagers playing well-known classical music. The line-up of our ensemble was me on guitar and piano, and my friends playing guitar and percussion (bongos and chime bars). My first proper gig in a more conventional venue was in 1981 at the Ad-Lib Club (later the be better know as The Garage) in Nottingham. It was the only time the full line-up of my first band The Midnight Circus played live, but as we weren't sure exactly who from the band was going to be able to do the gig we played under the pseudonym of The Sickle Clowns (if you know your Pretty Things songs you'll get it). I played half the gig on guitar and the other half on bass.

Spalt Hybrid., I think I've tried or owned pretty much everything else I've been interested in bass-wise over the last 20 years. There's a few guitars I'd still like to check out - any by Jens Ritter or Teuffel.

Again I should either be writing invoices for jobs completed last week or doing some drum programming for a new song we hope to be playing on Friday, but instead I'm browsing internet forums. I will be doing the other stuff ay some point today... promise!

When I did the 3.5 firmware update to my Helix Floor it rebuilt the patches 3 times - first time immediately after the update, then again after I did restore from my backup and again the next time I switched the device on. I won't be doing the 3.6 update until I know I'll be using it at home at least 3 times before I next have a rehearsal or gig.