chriswareham

The Japanese made Hondo's were very decent instruments, probably made in the same factories as many of the Ibanez ones. For some reason their Rick copy was farmed out to a Korean factory before they had upped their game to match the quality of the Japanese ones. From what I've read, Hondo was actually a brand dreamt up by an importer from the US, something similar to the Univox brand. And a music shop local to me have just acquired a Japanese made Rick copy from an estate sale. It's minus its truss rod cover, but it looks like was most likely branded as an Ibanez or similar. They want somewhere in the region of £800 for it, which given what similar copies are going on eBay or Reverb doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

I've still got an old SparcStation 5 in the loft. If you come across that card then I'd love to have it to see if it I can get it up and running - I seem to recall it was essentially a single board computer with a 386 or 486 processor on it.

I honestly think that if there had to be only one model of bass guitar then it should be a Fender Jazz neck on a Fender Precision body. Probably why I like the Sterling RAY4 so much, as it's pretty much a Jazz neck on the body of something descended from Leo's attempt at a "better Precision than a Precision". I even prefer the RAY4 to the more upmarket RAY34, which definitely felt like a better quality bass (and on a par with the US made Stingrays I've owned) but with a neck that wasn't so easy to move around on.

I just posted in another thread about my time as a contract programmer for a big press agency (there seems to be a surprising number of IT related threads on Basschat this week). One of the agency's permanent staff was an utter bodger, and bizarrely proud of it, who went off to do PHP programming on the bit of that NHS system developed by British Telecom. Made me fear for the health of the nation.

Because I play in a Joy Division tribute act, so it's expected that I play something that resembles a Rickenbacker 4001. Peter Hook played a Korean made Hondo copy, and I did the same for about five years until the neck snapped near the heel. I now play a genuine Rickenbacker, and the Hondo was a far better instrument to play even if it was made from plywood.

When I first saw that thread I thought it was about the bass playing in rather excellent Anglo-Australian band The Church.

That was Interactive Unix, which was completely separate from Sun's port of Solaris to the x86 architecture. They had another product that would run Windows under Solaris which I played around with in the 1990s. Then Sun bought Star Division, who made the office suite StarOffice, and the easy availability of that negated any need I had to run Windows applications on a Unix platform. StarOffice became OpenOffice, which after Oracle mucked it about following their acquisition of Sun was, ahem, eclipsed by being splitting off to become LibreOffice.

Not true. Most Linux kernel development is by programmers employed by major companies that benefit from it, such as Intel, Amazon, Google, IBM/RedHat and MicroSoft. The latter may be surprising to some, since their ex-CEO once called it a "cancer", but they benefit from people using it on their Azure cloud platform or running it virtualised from within Windows. Most work on the other key elements that make up a Linux "distribution" (the complete operating system built on top of the Linux kernel itself) is also done by commercial developers. As for being "public domain", that is again wrong - and why Steve Ballmer called it a cancer - since the Linux kernel has a license that insists any changes that are distributed in binary form are also available in source code form. True "public domain" software, or even software with less restrictive licenses than the one the Linux kernel uses, can be sold in binary form without providing the source code.

I recently stopped using a Yamaha UX-96 USB MIDI interface, which I bought over twenty years ago and used with my laptop as my other USB MIDI interface is a bit bulky. I only stopped using it as a friend offered to buy it off me since it seems to have some special functionality when used with a specific bit of Yamaha kit he owns. And my laptop? A 2011 vintage MacBook Pro which has run Linux for the last eight or so years since I bought it. My main music composition tool is a Roland W-30 workstation, which is 1989 vintage (although the floppy drive in it has been replaced with an emulator that uses SD cards). When it comes to computer add ons, look for USB "class compliant" devices. There are standards for things like MIDI and audio that mean compliant devices don't need vendor specific drivers, and will use the generic drivers that come with Windows or Apple's operating systems. (Ironically, the UX-96 I mention above wasn't class compliant as I think it predated the USB standard for MIDI, but Linux has a dedicated driver for it).

I'd suggest the Aenima album, it's got everything that makes their later albums great but with perhaps a little bit more emphasis on conventional song structures. The earlier Opiate EP and Undertow album are also great, but the latter does have a rather horrible mix (thanks to the loudness war possibly).

HP went to the dogs when they went all in on Intel's attempted replacement for the x86 processor, the Itanium (or Itanic as it became known). I wasn't unhappy with that turn of events, as HP not long before bought Digital Equipment Corporation and killed off so many of their great products such as the Alpha processor. As for Sun Microsystems, the brand no longer exists. Similar bad feelings about Oracle for effectively killing off great products like the Sparc processor and Solaris operating system. I hate Oracle with a passion anyway, as they have horrendous licensing scams, sorry, schemes, and their database is an antiquated nightmare to work with. And ICL... My first full time job was at a company who were in one half of a building with the other half occupied by a division of ICL. After Fujitsu bought them, that office closed down. The dinosaurs they emptied out of that building were interesting (and no, I don't mean the staff), ancient mini-computers that were only kept in case various government departments that relied on them needed spares.

Auditioned for a new band last month. Other two guys seemed nice, songs were great. We went for a coffee afterwards, and that evening the guitarist set up a WhatsApp group for the three of us. I check the WhatsApp group the next evening, only to find the guitarist had misinterpreted something the singer had said and had broken up the band. So that band lasted less than 24 hours!

There's a very good reason for that. Rather than use the Android operating system like everyone else, they use their own thing called Tizen and an utterly appalling software framework called Enlightenment. There's a number of very long and - to a programmer like me - entertaining articles and posts about them.

eBay has that feature as well for items that are collected, but in my experience most buyers claim they don't have the app on their phone or just don't understand how to use it. Things usually go OK, but I've had someone collect something, say they don't have the eBay app and then claim that the item wasn't received. It resulted in eBay refunding the buyer and me being left without the item. eBay refused to help saying I should have got the buyer to confirm collection, so I reported it to the police as theft, but they took no action.

Thoroughly enjoyed that video. I discovered Tool when I was working in the States, back in 1999. I was driving around aimlessly one evening, since there was nothing much else to do in Santa Clara where I was stuck during the working week, when a song came on the radio. The station was KITS Live 105, which played alternative rock, often in back to back segments only broken by adverts. The song had this amazing bass intro and then built up to a massive crescendo over more than six minutes, but the lack of any DJ voiceover meant I was clueless as to who the band were. Cut to a few weeks later, and I'm again cruising around and another song comes on - different song, but clearly the same band and another fantastic bass part. I pulled over next to a phone booth, cranked the radio to maximum volume, and called a colleague who was more into heavy music than me. "What the hell is this band?" I ask him, and he tells me it's Tool. The first track I'd heard was "H", while the second one was "Forty Six & 2", both off their "Ænima" album.

I've got one of these, pulled from a skip at the local recycling centre a few years ago. It just needed the plug rewiring and has worked ever since. If you crank them up, they sound bloody great. Surprisingly heavy for such a small combo though, as I think the cabinet is very dense and thick plywood.

In an interview, Justin Chancellor says he switched from a Stingray to a Wal when he joined Tool and started to record the Aenima album. The weird thing is, the bass sounds on the demos for that album recorded with Justin's predecessor Paul D'Amour sound almost identical to me tone wise - and that was all Stingray.

If you want a really simple and easy to use SysEx application, then Elekton's C6 is great: https://www.elektron.se/gb/download-support-analog-drive Versions available for macOS or Windows.

You can return an item within fourteen days of receiving it without needing to state a reason and without it needing to be faulty. It's the Consumer Contracts Regulations, which replaced the distance selling rules in 2014. If an item is bought sight unseen, by ordering over the phone, mail order or online, then with very few exceptions it's covered by the new regulations.

Name starts with an "A". Based in Guildford. I've been shopping there since I was an almost penniless student more years ago than I care to remember, and they were a tiny shop on a back street. Last time I'll order from them though.

A while ago I ordered a MIDI controller keyboard online from a well known UK vendor. It was on back order, and finally arrived last Tuesday. Cut to a couple of days later, and I finally had time to test it out only to find that one of the keys refuses to trigger unless I apply a lot of force to it - by which I mean I basically have to press the thing as hard as the hulk probably would. The rest of the keys trigger as I'd expect, with a degree of force commensurate to the velocity I'm trying to produce. I immediately contacted customer service, and had a response on Friday asking for a video showing the problem before they'd accept a return. Now am I wrong, or do the distance selling laws not suggest that I shoudn't have to jump through fecking hoops to demonstrate a problem with an item I order online? I've ordered several thousands of pounds worth of items through this company in the last year alone, and regardless of that I don't have a smart phone, so videoing a demonstration of the problem is a major ball ache. I appreciate that a lot of people use the distance selling laws as part of a "try before you buy", where they can get a go on a bit of kit and then send it back if they decide it's just not for them and the vendor then has to try to resell the item as "B stock". At the same time, I've had a brand new bass guitar turn up in the last year from the same vendor in a completely unplayable state that would have required an expensive setup. I only continue to use this vendor as they seem to be the only place that ever have stock from one particular manufacturer. Personally, I consider it a reasonable part of the change from bricks and mortar local music shops to buying sight unseen online - the vendor has lower overheads, but if they're too fecking useless to check an item out before shipping it out then that's on them. Anyway, rant over. Tomorrow I actually have to drive through the place where unusually for this kind of vendor they do have one bricks and mortar store. I'm visiting family not far away from there (albeit two hours from where I live), and I'm factoring in time to visit them with the defective item. It just boils my piss that they won't otherwise accept a return without a video of the problem.

Newtone are Peter Hook's source of strings for his Shergold six string basses, and I'm sure I read somewhere that Eastwood sourced the strings for their recreation of the Shergold from Newtone.

It's got the traditional "hairpin" truss rods, which are essentially a pair of thin truss rods that aren't very strong. I think the idea was that you could have different tension on the bass and treble sides of the neck to compensate for differences in string tension. I've also seen claims that they could be used to cure a twisted neck, but I doubt it. For the last couple of years RIC have started using conventional truss rods, which are stronger and easier to adjust. With the hairpin ones you have to remove the string tension and clamp the neck while adjusting them, a lot of guitar setup people don't know this and can potentially damage the neck by adjusting them like they would a normal truss rod. It makes for a lengthy setup process as well - slacken or remove strings, clamp the neck, adjust truss rods, unclamp neck and tension strings, only to find you need to do the whole process again.

From what I understand, the author insisted that the book be "warts and all", which Peter's sisters initially agreed to. The book covers the descent into heavy drug use that destroyed Peter's long term relationship, which then spiralled into violence and incarceration at a prison psych ward. Peter's sisters seem to have had second thoughts on reading this in the draft manuscript, but I've not heard anything to contradict the veracity of what was written in the book. The description of Peter's final hours is quite harrowing as well. Overall, the book could have benefitted from some better editing - the author is clearly a music journalist unused to longer form writing - but it struck me as honest and informative. Saw them about eight times from the mid 90s onwards, and barring one show they were fantastic. The last Type O show I saw was on the disastrous tour where Peter was clearly very, very unwell. He only agreed to continue because the cancellation fees would have bankrupted them, and he almost died the night of the Birmingham show only to try and play the London one shortly after. I then saw him at the Carnivore concert in London, and despite being in poor physical shape he seemed much more like the Peter Steele of old. I was a few feet from him, his humour was back and he seemed to genuinely happy to be playing to hard core fans at a small venue. It was a shock to hear of his passing not that long afterwards. The later albums always had stand out tracks, but as you say they lacked the tongue in cheek humour of the earlier albums.

My favourite find of the year was Virgin in Veil, a Finnish band. One for fans of the punkier end of goth like Rozz Williams era Christian Death or Southern Death Cult: