BigRedX

Strange that the manufacturer goes to all the trouble of replicating the much less common slot-head design, but still uses a bolt-on neck.

No, in the case of the song in the OP each note has very short release and a noticeable gap between notes which gives the bass line its distinctive feel, so not only do you need to mute the other strings to avoid tracking issues but you also need to be able to stop each note that your are playing in the appropriate place without producing another thump that will re-trigger any effects you are using.

Open back is only risky for bass use if you want lots of bass and/or lots of volume. For the first two years of playing bass I used my Carlsbro Wasp 10W guitar amp which had a 10" speaker and an open back design. My band was mostly a recording project so we didn't need to play very loud (and most of the time I was channeling my inner Peter Hook), and if we did need to use it live, it was mic'd up through the PA. In the days when I ran a bi-amped rig the top end was supplied by a 2x8" cab which I had made myself based on the dimensions a guitar combo I used to own. And if it's not real, open back can sound great with bass guitar. At the moment my favourite amp/cab combination on the Helix is their emulation of the Roland Jazz Chorus Combo, something that you would never use for bass in real life, but which sounds surprisingly good for the type of music I play.

Any effect that uses pitch or envelope tracking will probably require you to modify your technique to some degree if you want to to get consistent and usable results out of it. The problem with the example in the OP is that the performance (before we even consider the sound) is very much derived from the fact that the original bass line would have been played using either a keyboard or a sequencer

TBH I was never that keen on the SH09/SH101. When I bought my Wasp synth, the SH09 was the only affordable alternative. I had to weigh up if I'd rather have a proper (if somewhat clacky keyboard) and a Filter capable of going into self oscillation against two Oscillators and two Envelope Generators. In the end the additional sonic capabilities of two Oscillators and Envelope Generators won out. I later picked up a second hand SH09 which was used mostly for background sequencer parts and for really fattening up the bass sounds we were getting from out Korg MS20. One of the other band members had an SH101 complete with modulation grip as a primitive keytar.

So many colleges and universities had EMS synthesisers somewhere in their music departments. Nottingham University had a Synthi AKS, and IIRC someone I knew from another local band got a job as an audio-visual technician at one of the 6th Form Colleges here and discovered lurking in the back of a storage room a fully functional VCS3 that had been put away for over a decade.

Did you know Dean Poole who ran the "cassette label" Sexy Records from your time in Cardiff? I missed out on the joy Division gig either because I was still in Swansea (where I was at university) or because I had decided instead to go an see Vice-Versa (electronic fore-runners of ABC) play in Sheffield, but had moved to Nottingham in time to see Bauhaus play at the same venue later that year.

IIRC Simon of Gus Guitars fame is a graduate of one of these courses. I think he originally went to learn how to make furniture but became more interested in applying the techniques to guitar making.

I have every single Z-Block release apart from the one you were on :-(( (although I do recognise the band name from John Peel). I was a massive fan of both Reptile Ranch and YMG (I saw them play at the Boat Club here in Nottingham where they were persuaded to do 5 encores by a very enthusiastic audience and only allowed to leave the stage because they had no more songs left to play). I was introduced to Z-Block by John (IIRC) from Puritan Guitars who "bought" (they were available for free to anyone who sent us a blank C-60 and an SAE) a copy of our first cassette album and then wrote back berating us for having released it on a free cassette rather than putting some of the tracks out as a single or EP as in his opinion the music was certainly good enough. I had to politely explain to him that firstly even at Desperate Bicycles production prices producing actual vinyl was way beyond what we could afford, and that secondly since we didn't gig I didn't see how we would ever shift any copies. We did distribute over 100 copies of the cassette in less than 6 months though.

As the great man himself said after playing this track: "Well mine are real and really rather lovely", which we then sampled lo-tech style on cassette and spun in as part of the intro to the "dub" version which was on our next album. Johan Kugelberg was quite enamoured too... You probably couldn't get away with either song from a lyrical PoV nowadays. At the time we justified it by claiming to be ironic.

My second band recorded both our demos (including the one that had CBS records interested in signing us) in the music and drama studios at Trent Poly where both myself and our singer were studying. The "music studio" was a tiny room with a 4-track reel-to-reel machine, 4-channel mixer and a Mini-Moog synth. We failed to get any decent sounds out of the Mini-Moog either because it was broken due to years of abuse at the hands of uninterested students, or because I simply didn't know how to work it compared to the Wasp. In the end I think we managed to coax some white noise percussive sounds out of it that were used on one track. The studio was only available during normal teaching hours which meant that people kept knocking on the door and telling us to keep the noise down. We managed to record and mix two songs in the course of an afternoon session. By contrast the Drama Studio was a massive hall with the recording equipment (1" 8-track reel-to-reel and 16 channel desk) in a raised booth at one end. This time we were able to record over a weekend so there were no problems with noise complaints. However we did have problems getting a suitably hot signal from the drum machine and synthesisers onto tape, and ended up having to put them through amps and mic them up. Unfortunately this meant we didn't have enough amps to play and record live so everything had to be built up one or two instruments at a time. We did the drum machine and bass first, with me standing as far from the amp as my leads would allow and the singer singing at me very quietly so I knew where in the song we were but she wouldn't be picked up by the mics! It took us the whole weekend to record and mix 4 songs that way.

Did that originally have a cover over the bridge?

In fact the whole history of my DIY cassette band could be viewed as an exercise in making do with what you have. For the first 3 years of the band's existence at the end of the 70s our instrumentation was: two acoustic guitars fitted with magnetic pickups, a solid electric balalaika that I had made in woodwork classes at school, two reed organs that were not in tune with each other so only one could be used at a time. Our "drum kit" was a home-made affair composed of anything that made a suitable noise when hit, fitted to stands made out of broomsticks using retort clamps "acquired" from the school chemistry lab. Our singer also played a plastic toy trumpet and sometimes managed to almost get tune from it. The only amplification we owned was a Carlsbro Wasp 10W guitar amp. For recording purposes we were able to borrow a bass guitar, but because none of us had spent much time thinking about bass parts, it was only used on the occasional song. We would also hire a mixer amp, microphone and speaker from our local musical instrument store each time we did any recording. This was the set-up we used to make the first album and most of the second one. By the time we came to record our contribution to "Angst In My Pants" we also had two "proper" electric guitars - a no-name Stratocaster copy and one I had made in the woodwork shop at school whilst I should have been studying for my A Levels. After that we added a Boss Dr Rhythm drum machine, Casio VL-Tone and I bought my first bass guitar and later a Wasp synth out of my student grant money.

Which band were you in? There's a good chance that I have your record!

Yes right at the end of the year. We were the last of the 8 bands to submit our recordings which were done late June/early July when we were all back from university and then sent straight off to Deleted Records for the cutting session (done by Porky). I got my copies of the EP just before Christmas, and about a week after John Peel had played it for the first time. That was the kind of lead time you were looking at for vinyl back then, and since it was our first proper release it seemed to take forever. My next release on vinyl in 2013 took less than 8 weeks from sending off the master recordings to receiving our records and that included over a week's break while we approved the test pressings.

IMO the frets are more likely to wear the strings than the other way around. If I ever leave the strings on my basses for too long when I come to change them I find that they have slight indentations at the most commonly used fret positions. The only time in 50 years of playing guitars and basses have I ever worn any frets to the point of needing replacement, was one position on a guitar. A band I used to be in (playing guitar) had a song that required me to produce a note by hammering onto the string using my plucking hand and then "bow" the string against the fret to produce a sustained note for close to 30 seconds. Given that I played this song roughly 10 times a week (either practicing or gigging) for almost 3 years (that's about 30 hours of wear in total), it's not surprising that after all that time I had produced a significant indentation at that particular fret position to the point that normally fretting the sting no longer produced a consistently clean note. If you are subjecting your instruments to this level of abuse then my all means consider trying a less abrasive string, but otherwise you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

The Midnight Circus (named after The Pretty Things song). Off the back of a glowing review by Johan Kugelberg in Ugly Things magazine of our contribution to "Angst In My Pants" we were asked to produce a retrospective CD for Chicago's Hyped To Death records which is still available even though the cassettes and vinyl are long gone...

Just remember that a lot of bass amps from the 60s and 70s were essentially guitar amps with the name/badge changed. The great thing about modelling amps and effects is that you don't run the risk of damaging a "guitar orientated" one by putting your bass through it. The worst that can happen is that you won't like the sound. I'd run through ALL the amp and effects models before making a decision. I have a Helix and the amp/cab model I use the most is the Roland Jazz Chorus combo. A device that in real life would be totally useless for bass guitar at anything above home practice levels, but for the sound I want with one of my bands works perfectly.

My first experience in a "commercial" recording studio (i.e one we had paid for the privilege of using), was in 1980 at a 4-track facility in some "out-buildings" behind one of the music shops in Leicester. It was a fairly basic set up with a TEAC/Tascam 4-track reel-to-reel machine and an HH 4-bus mixing desk. The only effect available was some delay/reverb produced by running the signal out to a spare stereo reel-to-reel machine. At the time were still doing our home recording in the percussionist's parent's lounge and were used to all the high frequencies being absorbed by the soft furnishings and the fact that we were recording on compact cassette, so we didn't think to compensate for the fact that we were now playing in a far better acoustic environment and being capture by much better microphone (and that the results wouldn't have to go through two further generations of cassette tape before they reached our listeners). Therefore the results were a rather thin and overtly bright sound. That didn't stop John Peel from playing our songs when they were released as part of the "Angst In My Pants" double EP on Deleted Records.

We were only using analog synths live from 1983 until mid-way through 1985, by which time we had upgraded to a Yamaha DX7 and Casio CZ500 each controlled by a Yamaha KX5 keytar. However the idea that analog synths went out of tune a lot was mostly down to poor designed US-made models from the 70s. Once the Japanese had got involved, tuning stability was much improved. We hardly ever had problems with the Roland SH09 or SH101. The only one that generally needed tuning before a gig was the Korg MS20 and that was probably more down to the location of the tuning control than any inherent stability.

In some ways because of the types of music I was interested in playing, I was sometimes ahead of the curve. I bought my first electronic tuner in 1983 when they had just become relatively affordable (although it was still a lot of money at the time compared with something like an effects pedal), because in my synth band we were fed up of spending a minute before we played tuning the keyboards to a test tone off our backing tape (which the whole audience could hear too). In bands before that we tuned to whatever we had that was the most difficult or impossible to change the tuning of. For the DIY cassette band it would be one of our two reed organs. They had slightly different sounds and a different selection of chords, but were also tuned differently so the band's overall tuning would depend on which of the two we needed for the song in question.

If the click has already been recorded, then there should be a track for it that we should be able to see, and we shouldn't have to rely on a room recording of it for a timing reference. As I said there's something not right about the whole situation.

My first band who were part of the DIY cassette scene of the late 70s and early 80s recorded their first 3 "albums" live (one song at a time) directly onto a stereo cassette recorder. The mix was achieved by moving the mics and amps around the room until we were happy with the balance and the overall sound. Then everything would be left as it was until we had finished recording all the songs for that "session". The first album was done in the percussionist's (we didn't have a proper drummer) lounge whilst his parents were away on holiday. The next two were in the singer's garage. If we required more instruments for a song than we could play in one go, we'd record some of them onto an ancient mono reel-to-reel machine, stick the output through a spare channel on one of our amps, and play along with the results. For the last two albums we were able to borrow a "stereo" reel-to-reel tape recorder that allowed us to bounce one channel to the other whilst adding another set of instruments. Generally could only do this process twice before the hiss and hum had built up to unacceptable levels.

When you are actually recording are you playing to the click or the drums? You should be playing to the drums, because when the final mix is being made that is what your listeners will be hearing, not the click. As I said previously, when I have used a click only the drummer hears and plays to it. All the other musicians follow the drummer. That way the click sets the tempo and the band plays to the drummer just as though the click wasn't there. It's also weird that the click appears to fade in and is very long in duration (for a click). The click my band use doesn't look anything like that. Here's a bar and a beat of it to a similar scale: To me there is something very wrong going on with the whole recording process... BTW what genre of music is it? Im wondering if Abelton is the correct choice of DAW for what you are doing?

That's a nice looking instrument let down by Warwick's instance on having their ugly paddle headstock on it.