BigRedX

If you are not already a member you need to join the "It's Goth Up North" Facebook page which cover most of the gigs in and around Sheffield/Leeds/York.

Like that a lot! Any plans to play in Nottingham?

There used to be a synth called the Moog Rouge. I was under the impression that both words rhymed if Moog was pronounced correctly.

Having used synths without programmable memories back in the 80s when there were no affordable alternatives, I really couldn't recommend one for live use in this day and age. If you were to use a synth like the Model D live you have basically three options: 1. Stick with a single sound (or variations of that sound that can be achieved by tweaking just ONE or TWO controls) for all the songs you are going to use it on. 2. Memorise the locations of every single control for each different sound you are going need. This is just about do-able on a simple single oscillator and envelope generator synth like a Roland SH09/SH101; on something much more complicated like the Model D it's not anywhere like as easy. 3. Take printed patch sheets on stage with you showing to locations of the controls for each different sound that you need. I did this back in the early 80s and TBH it looked very amateurish although back then there was no alternative unless you had lots of money for synths with patch memories. Bear in mind that options 2 and 3 take time to implement in the middle of the set, and today's audiences may not be quite so forgiving of long inter-song pauses as they were 40 years ago. My band back then had 15-30 second intros to the start of EVERY song to allow us the set up the sound(s) while the song started, and even with the printed patch sheets, human error meant that there was no guarantee that when you pressed the key for the first note of your part you weren't going to be presented with either silence or worse still some massively loud atonal noise, instead of the sound you wanted.

When the finish starts lifting off like that it's normally because moisture has got in somewhere and the only effective way to fix it would be to strip off ALL the old lacquer and refinish. You can see from the "milky" appearance of some of the finish that is still in place that it is no longer properly bonded to the wood and any of the old finish that you leave in place is just going to be a starting point for new problems later on. If you take it someone who really knows what they are doing they may be able to save the area around the logo provided that the finish hasn't already started lifting elsewhere on the front of the headstock.

Looks like more Fender copies to me....

For Hurtsfall it's almost every single song, since most of them are built around the bass line which becomes the main riff and/or instrumental melody.

Unfortunately it can't. If you were able to do this it would have been so trivial for Behringer to add patch memories that they would have done so. For a MIDI controller to be able to do this you would also need to be able to read and write digital values for every knob and switch on the synth. Once you've done that you might as well add the memory to be able to store and recall these values to the synth itself as that is the easy and relatively cheap part compared with the former.

But no programmable memories for your sounds which pretty much rules it our for live use, unless you are going to stick with a single sound for all the songs.

What sort of band do you want to be in? If it's covers and there is a decent amount of local pubs still putting on covers bands then it will probably be OK. If it's originals then bear in mind that Exeter isn't particularly close to anywhere else and if your band outgrows the local circuit then you are going to be looking at long journey to play gigs in other towns and cities. It is always useful to see how many venues in Exeter are putting on out-of-town bands which will give you an idea how easy the place is to get to (and conversely to get out of). I discovered this problem when I spent a year in Swansea and discovered that all the well-known bands on tour didn't come any further west than Cardiff and that as a result the local music scene was over-saturated and stagnant.

The CryBaby mod will only work if the Donner pedal has a similar circuit.

Anything that doesn't involve tapping the speaker coil is going to be wildly inefficient and wasteful of energy.

As I said in another PMT thread (probably the one that Frank Blank has linked to), I went to the Nottingham branch last year to look at synths and MIDI controller keyboards. As the synth section was completely closed off I had a general look around while I was waiting for someone to come and let me in. The guitar and bass sections had a fraction of stock on display compared with the last time I'd been in (just before the first lockdown) and generally looked very run down (as did the whole store). After hanging around for 15 minutes with no-one forthcoming to accompany me around the close synth section, I left and subsequently bought a controller keyboard off Amazon.

This what I have been saying for years. EQ in the analog domain can cause changes in phase at certain frequencies. Something that is very detrimental to a good solid bass sound. It is always best to EQ in a single place in the signal chain. If you need to have two sets of EQ controls then you have the wrong equipment for your sound.

If you are playing to a fixed BPM you can work out the required delay time in milliseconds with a bit of simple maths.

If I was going to invest in hardware synthesis again, I'd probably get a second hand Nord Lead, which was the best synth I've ever owned. Unfortunately lots of other people seem to have discovered how good these are, as the second hand prices have increased considerably since I sold mine... I couldn't afford a Juno at the time, but several musicians I knew in the early 80s had them and I was always completely underwhelmed when I had a go on one. I seemed to be nothing more than a 6 voice SH09 which I did own and was used mostly for background sequencer parts and percussive noises controlled by an MC202. Since the Juno lacked CV and gate inputs it couldn't even be used like this. I won an Akai AX73 in an E&MM competition which had almost identical architecture to the Juno but had the additional disadvantages of an extra octave of keys making it huge and unwieldy (and more so in the flight case it came with) and parameter access programming. I think I stuck with it for a couple of months before I had saved up enough additional money to trade it in for a Casio CZ5000.

And here is the obligatory gig photo from Sunday:

Hurtsfall supported Byronic Sex & Exile at The Angel in Nottingham last night. Got a small but very enthusiastic audience out on a Sunday night for two fairly niche acts, but we made some new fans and it looks as though we'll be playing the final night of this year's Goth City festival in July as a result. Sound wasn't quite as good on stage as last time we played The Angel, nothing that we couldn't cope with though. BS&E were fairly quiet FoH so I'm wondering if there has been a policy of turning the bands down since our last gig here. No photos on Facebook yet, but I could see people taking them, so I'm sure there will one or two up in the next couple of days. Next up it's three weekends of gigs with In Isolation during March followed by Hurtsfall on "Goth Friday" in April. Busy times...

If you're prepared to go on the waiting list for the announcement of the next batch an Audiothingies Micromonsta 2 will do pretty much everything that the matrix could for about £250. Me, I'm perfectly happy with the soft synths that come with Logic.

My parents had little interest in listening to music for enjoyment in the house, even though my dad could play the piano competently, and it turns out that mum is very musical and later in life she has been a member of several serious choirs and now in her 90s plays in a oldies Ukulele band that probably gigs more frequently than I do! For a long time the only music playing device we had was an ancient valve-powered radiogram that was guaranteed to damage any records you played on it. My musical tastes are entirely formed by discovering Radio One in 1971 and deciding for myself what I liked (70s glam rock) and what I didn't (just about everything else). I don't have kids but if I did I would very much hope that the music they enjoyed would be completely and utterly impenetrable to me, in the same way that my parents couldn't understand in the slightest what I found interesting and enjoyable about the music I chose to listen to.

In that case, pretty much any analogue style polysynth with 2 oscillators and 2 full ADSR envelope generators per voice, VCF capable of going into self oscillation, plus the ability to work as a proper monophonic synth will do the job. No-one making 80s "classics" at the time was using a Juno. And almost no-one bought one out of choice. We bought them because it was the cheapest polysynth on the market and we couldn't afford the synths we really wanted like the Jupiter 8, Oberheim OBXa or Prophet V. Had any of us been lucky enough to score a record deal with an equipment advance, the Juno would have been gone and replaced with something that actually sounded good without needing to be be swamped in chorus effect.

Having spent some time with the Deepmind (our synth player has one) comparing it to the Roland Juno series of synths does it IMO a massive dis-service. Certainly it is capable of Juno type sounds but it's got 2 oscillators and 3 envelope generators so you are by no means limited to the weedy and disappointing sounds of the Junos.

My local musical instrument shop in the 70s was a Traynor dealer. Since they mostly sold "home organs" along with a few Grant and Kimbara badged copy guitars and basses, I never saw the brand as anything to get excited about back then as I lumped them in with all the other low budget crap they were selling. Besides back then in the UK everyone wanted a Marshall or an Acoustic 360. However my band at the time would hire one of their 6-channel (valve?) mixer amps for a few days whenever we were recording which worked well enough I suppose.

If the bass goes through the PA then it really doesn't matter what cabs you use, as they will make zero contribution to what the audience hears; and depending on the size of the stage and what the rest of the band have in the foldback, their effectiveness as personal monitors may not be that great either. Pick something that fits the image of the band and/or genre of the music and be done with it. If you rig is 100% responsible for what the audience hears then the choice of cabs is more important. It's a fact that identical cabs should give you a more consistent sound throughout the venue. It's essential to remember that if you do mix different cabs, what sounds great to you on stage may have turned your tone into something entirely different in various parts of the venue.

So long as they had used a different delivery service otherwise your second pedal is likely to end up at the same Argos as the first.