JoeEvans

If you put the mic into a pre-amp on stage, you could then run it through standard FX pedals before sending it to the PA. I've done that with *ahem* accordion in the past and it's worked really well. The ART Tube Pre is great and seems to add a little je ne sais quois of its own too. That way you could take your pick of classy EQ pedals.

I would definitely give it a go, but they wouldn't be getting a whole load of chord structures... But there are bass lines (eg Respect Yourself) that contain a bit of harmonic movement in a form that would give the others some room without throwing them off

Yes - how much you can charge but also when the money starts coming in, people book wedding bands anything up to a year in advance, but you ideally need some good reviews and event pics to be able to get the bookings. So for a new band you're probably looking at 18 months of work to build up to a reasonably full diary. You'd also need to spend out up front on web presence, ideally a decent video, maybe website. It's doable though, my partner decided she was going to get into DJing, went out and bought some decks, disappeared into the bedroom for a fortnight to practice, came out and started booking gigs. She quit her day job not that long after and now does wedding and events gigs for her main income. She was already a working musician so the transition wasn't totally radical, to be fair; it's more about thinking it through properly and doing the right things.

Maybe the question is more, do you have an opportunity to get into an existing band? Or are you looking to start one? Very different scenarios, earnings-wise... And alongside that, are you already able to reliably perform the bass parts for maybe 500 popular tunes? Or would learning them also be part of the project? That would also have a major bearing on potential income.

I find that cables coiled this way are more prone to getting tangled when you uncoil them, for some reason.

It's all about how you deal with twist. If you want a coil of cable (or rope) to lie flat and not tangle, you need to give it a twist with every turn. 'A' appears to have had that done. If you store cables that way, you have to shake out the twist when you uncoil them. There are various no-twist methods such as halve and halve again, back and forth and fasten in the middle (figure eight), and there's the 'BBC' method where you coil it one way then the other, so that each coil is twisted in alternate directions. I still favour a straightforward coil, maybe 40cm diameter, giving a little twist between finger and thumb, then fastening with a reusable cable tie. You have to shake out the twist but they seem less prone to tangling done this way and it's easy and quick to do a neat job.

I haven't tried any others, I bought the Turbosound because I've been very impressed with the sound quality of the larger ip1000 PA system, which gives a gorgeous deep, rich bass. The ip300 isn't very big physically and it's an easy one-handed carry. Bear in mind that it's stereo, so 300w per channel; unless you split your signal, that's all you'll get, and it doesn't seem massively loud for the wattage. I had in mind to put a pickup output in one channel and the mic output in the other for a blended sound onstage with less feedback, then send just the mic side to the PA for front of house. I haven't experienced any feedback problems yet but that remains a useful possibility. They give very wide dispersion so they feel a bit less loud standing straight in front of the speaker, but they fill the room a little better.

For the acoustic treatment, you can make a frame from say 25x100mm planks on edge, perhaps 800mm x1600mm, pack it with high density rockwool slabs then wrap some nice fabric round it and staple it on to hold everything together. For a 6x7 room, maybe three of these on each wall, pretty much randomly placed, will do a lot of good. It's also helpful to cover one wall with something that isn't flat, to scatter reflections. Shelves of books are ideal if you can buy them literally by the kilo for next to nothing from somewhere. Or people sometimes make up panels with a sheet of ply covered with random offcuts of wood, all sawn at different lengths and angles. You can add all this gradually and see what effect it has stage by stage, so you don't do more than you need.

I've recently - finally - got the double bass sound of my dreams using a Prodipe BL21 mic into an Art Tube preamp then into a Turbosound iP300 active PA speaker. My bass but louder and a bit smoother and sexier. I'll be advertising my Elf combo on here shortly, I'm only playing DB these days and it just didn't give me the sound I wanted for that. Edit: I should add that the Turbosound ip300 is 600w and weighs 11.9 kg.

I played with someone once who took a socket tester out if his bass case and checked all the sockets before we started setting up. I haven't got round to buying one myself but it's not a bad idea, as much to avoid noise and unreliability as for health and safety.

I don't think you can steam bend ply, but you could certainly laminate up something nice from veneers. Robbins Timber in Bristol are the people to go to for the materials.

I didn't realise it was the audience's job to give the band a good time, I'd somehow got it into my head that it was the other way around. Evidently I've been doing it wrong all these years.

Yes - my understanding is that there's a big difference between the theoretical time taken for a particular computer to work through all the combinations of a certain number of characters, and the actual time taken to submit each combination one after another when attempting to get into an online service.

A ten digit password still has a crazy number of possible combinations, maybe 68 to the power of ten, depending on which special characters are allowed. Not sure that really long, complex passwords add much - the crucial thing is that they're all different. Edit - a couple of billion billion combinations, if I've understood my calculator's shorthand correctly.

Almost all account hacking happens because someone uses the same username and password across numerous websites. Eventually they get lured to sign in to a fake site (phishing) or they sign into a real site with poor back-end security, and their username and password get on a list and sold to other scammers. The end-user scammer hunts around to find the sites that the victim uses, trying their username and password until they get into a useful account like Basschat. The most important thing you can do to protect yourself is to use a different password on every single website or service. We're told that passwords need to be hugely long and complicated which no doubt helps, but it's vanishingly rare for a scammer to try and guess a password. Even a password that's a couple of letters or digits different to another one that you use will provide hugely improved protection

If you don't mind the weight, an older Trace Elliot combo will give you an extraordinary ratio of volume and sound quality to the pound. You can pick up various models for well under £200 that will knock the socks off you. I recently sold a GP7 1x15" combo that would have done you for any pub gig - any situation needing more volume than that could deliver would certainly have a big PA involved. If anything the problem with TE gear is that you don't often get the chance to crank it right up, when it starts really singing. I remember playing one gig in a London park with my old GP15 4x10 combo turned up to about number eight, and the tone and power were just awesome. But it weighed literally 40kg or something stupid like that...

I find playing barefoot or in very soft, minimal shoes to be helpful when playing double bass. Something about a loose, natural posture, I think.