Al Krow

Nicely put

It depends on the venue? Eg if 100+ punters stay an hour longer and each buy 1 or 2 pints, which certainly can be the case in several of the venues I know, the sums do add up pretty quickly. Which is why they have live bands on 2 nights a week often followed by a DJ and many such venues are doing very well. They know what they need to be doing to be a destination pub. Totally appreciate that's not going to be true for all venues.

Not necessarily. A decent band, even without a following, can keep punters on site. A number of venues get their bands to start and finish later - ideally as close to closing time as possible, because they know the venue starts emptying pretty rapidly when the live music finishes. A pub makes a very decent [typically around 70%] gross margin on wet sales, and they can easily figure out whether it's worth their while putting on live music, or whether they're better off with a DJ or no music other than the JukeBox or their own playlists.

Interesting discussion - I personally don't see too much of an equivalence between an open-mic / jam night and a covers band pub gig, though? Open mic/ jam night: organiser has venue hire costs, typically provides all the PA equipment and lights, performers will be a pot luck standard and typically have around a 15 minute slot, give or take, and audiences will be chilled about the quality of the music ? Pub covers gig - typically 2 hour performance time, band provides and sets up PA and lights and packs down at the end of the night and audiences expect a decent standard; if you don't come up to scratch you don't get invited back. Can involve a couple of hours of travel to and from the venue and another couple loading / unloading kit and setting up / packing down. Seems entirely fair to be paid for the time and effort involved in being able to deliver all that? Sure it can be a really fun night out, but any reason a pub should expect the musicians to provide all of that for free just because they enjoy the work? I note you excluded function bands from playing for free, but many function bands will also be doing pub gigs and my experience is that pub venues are keen to book them precisely because they are a good enough standard to be doing functions.

I've tried soooo many dirt / drive pedals over the years (like many other BC'ers!) and currently have a collection of 6 or 7. Within a couple of weeks of starting to get to grips with the GT Core, I found a couple of dirt/clean blend tones that was a ton better than anything I had got on my much loved Zoom B1-4 and, for my own tastes, better than my current dirt pedal collection which I need to get around to moving on at some point! An unexpected / welcome surprise! The Core's not the bees knees at pitch shift though!

GT1000 Core Parallel path Job done (again 😅)

Have spent a bit more time getting my head around the Focusrite - v. easy bit of kit to get to grips with. But also had a detailed trawl through the A&H user forum and several other bods have also struggled with the no output / DAW issue. Perhaps that pointed me in the right direction or something else triggered the solution, but it's proven to be a ridiculously simple fix in the end! I'll share it in case of use to anyone else: On the CQ Config screen all the inputs have an "Input Source" selection. This has default set to analogue (for instruments and mics). The easy fix, when using the DAW is to set the playback input (in my case Stereo In 17/18) to USB. Playback is automatically set up that way on the Focusrite, with no choice in the matter. On the desk, likely to need to swap back to "analogue" if you want to get other input sources from the PC through the Stereo In (e.g. from Spotify) which is where my confusion possibly arose. But seems super obvious, now I've figured it out!! And if I set the buffer at 512 instead of 1024 the latency also halves from 10.7 to 5.3ms, which is then comparable to the Focusrite's 4.0ms. Thinking my little love affair with the Focusrite could be short lived - great bit of kit but (fingers crossed) going to be superfluous! They have an excellent 30 day return window for online purchases.

Nope, the bespoke A&H CQ USB driver: Windows ASIOTM/WDM Driver v5.50 I've seen a number of comments on the net about the asio4all driver giving rise to identical issues, though.

Good to hear from you @51m0n! I've missed your erudition on all things compressor related! Hope life is treating you well, and the music is still being made with your band? @dave_bass5 - mate, re. your question, I think I may briefly have had an iPad many years back, long before I (finally!) got stuck into a DAW at the start of this year, but all my set up is non-Apple based, so I'm keen to see if I can make it all work with Windows. Interestingly another mate of mine (an experienced bass player) said he'd had the exact same experience with his digital desk and Windows: ie inputs all fine via ASIO, but no output! Thank goodness for Focusrite (and other trad digital interfaces) for us luddite Windows/PC users, eh?! Literally took just a few hours to get up to speed on how to use it with the help of a couple of online tutorials. I suspect @Sibob will be happy for me to have finally made the plunge 😊 Fyi - my gen 3 Focusrite 2i2 gen 3 was just £109 new (including P&P), from Focusrite, which seems like v good value to me?

For some reason Phil Lynott never played a bass line on the original and I was initially trying to figure out why our band's cover of Thin Lizzy's cover felt fuller on the low end 😂

And if we're talking about great covers done by Thin Lizzy, we can't not mention Whiskey in the Jar can we?!

My bandmate has the CCR original in his solo set. But given his favourite band of all time is Green Day, I suspect he's going to love this!

Thanks - it does seem that the ASIO issue is Windows specific. Interestingly the CQ guide video shows the desk being plugged into Logic Pro i.e. obviously with a Mac rather than a Windows DAW. But I'm reluctant to switch from Windows to Mac as I'm not using a Mac for anything else!

Had a crack at using my A&H CQ18T as an interface with my Windows DAW. Input with ASIO was fine, but struggled to get any sound output using ASIO (and similar issues with a second DAW I tried) so I ended up having to resort to Core Audio (WaveRT), which has much lower latency than the other alternative of Wave, so that I could hear what I had already recorded. But then setting it up for multitrack recording - there was leakage across DAW tracks and a bunch of artefacts and delay on the recording. Horrible! Checked online and apparently issues with ASIO are not uncommon? Thought I'd go a more traditional route of getting a Focusrite 2i2 interface (Gen 3 are being sold new for a very good price), and bingo all was well with the world! Artefacts etc. all gone. PC able to input and output to the interface using ASIO. I'll therefore just use the desk as a mixing desk into the Focusrite, when pairing with a DAW going forward. The ability to multitrack record is still very much an option when recording a live performance using the SD card slot on the A&H desk, but you obviously can't see / tweak the levels being recorded.

Looks like an interesting alternative to the Zoom MS60B+ Liking the form factor, drum machine and 80 minute looper storage Seems to be geared primarily at guitarists, but hey...

George certainly did! But Ringo?

Apologies for zombie thread resurgence...but was just listening to favourite George Harrison track and just clicked that his was an excellent cover! George Harrison - Got My Mind Set On You (Version II)

@Chienmortbb Filling Out the Sound of a BGD Trio - Gigs - Basschat Here you go - maybe a few useful pointers in this thread for you. Tbf it had dropped to page 9 so was pretty buried!

@MrDinsdale Newbie Q: if I put a pedal in the send / return loop of the Core am I correct that it can be set to run in parallel and won't be impacted by any of the fx in the Core? I'm thinking that would be the ideal set up for little drum pedal for home use.

If your website generates a single paid gig per annum then my guess is it will likely more than cover its running costs for a year. We've just this past week secured a 40th birthday party booking via ours. It is just one channel of getting bookings for us, but once it's been properly set up, it shouldn't take too much maintenance. I know some of BCers's bands get a very significant portion of their bookings via their website, far more than my crew do.

@Quatschmacher you mentioned "neural net" refinements would be happening to some of the patches, and which will also lead to further improvements to tracking. What's the story there and what sort of timeframe?

Colour me interested! Speaking of colour...will there be any other colour options available down the line?

Love the fact that you still have a trusty Zoom B3 alongside an HX Stomp! Out of interest what sort of fx do you find yourself using the Zoom in preference over the Stomp for?

Just came across this post on Talkbass - really nice plug for the FI Mk4: "I’m either crazy or stupid, but I absolutely love bass synth pedals! Like a guitarist with OD and distortion pedals, I’m nuts for the synth. I have a C4 (which was actually my very first pedal) an FI v.4, 2 Enzos, a DigiTech Bass Synth Wah, a Boss SY-300, and now an Enzo X. I’m selling one of my original Enzos to a friend. I got the SY-300 for a crazy price last year, but I’m not crazy about it and plan to sell soon. If you want my advice (feel free to disregard), hang on to that FI if you have the ability. It’s a fantastic pedal that you don’t have to worry about settings during gigs. The real UI is done in a DAW, but there’s enough you can do with the factory patches using the basic pedal UI to keep things fresh and interesting. There are certain sounds on the FI that I’ve never been able to replicate using other synths. For me, the FI is all about having fun. It’s not about creating patches from scratch. The Enzo X is a different beast. It’s better for deep editing and experimentation. It’s about creating patches. The UI is part of the pedal itself, as I’m sure you know. I didn’t have the money to get it, ended up using credit, as I’d been waiting for it since I tried an LVX!"