Cato

I suspect we're about to be hit by a tidal wave of AI generated music. The idea you can potentially get an AI to write a hit song for you in minutes despite having zero musical ability has all the makings of a classic 'get rich quick' scheme. Of course most of the resulting music won't get any commercial traction at all, but that won't stop large numbers of people churning the stuff out in the hope of getting that one track that hits the jackpot.

If AI video generation keeps advancing at the current rate in a year or so the scandal won't be that influencers are decieving their followers, it'll be that they never existed in the first place.

Once you get beyond promoting your next gig or your mates mates posting their holiday snaps most social media is fakery to some extent. Whether it's lifestyle influencers faking an idyllic, carefree existence or the fitness fanatics who enthuse about a healthy lifestyle while neglecting to mention their own heroic steroid intake, or the straight up thieves trying to steal your money with crypto scams. Even most of the funny animal clips are clearly staged. Add in that posting content can also be highly lucrative and it's not that suprising that a lot of content creators don't seem to know or much care where the moral boundary is between presenting the best version of yourself and outright deception. I'm not sure a lot of the audience it's aimed at is that bothered either, right up to the moment the outrage bandwagon starts rolling.

Even someone who's never played must be able to see that when she's hitting the strings has no correlation with the timing of the notes in the background music. Seems daft to get annoyed at someone who doesn't seem to be trying very hard to deceive anyone. Unless there's a previously unknown massive audience for 1980s Spanish package holiday hotel bar background music I imagine most of her followers probably aren't that interested in her musical skills anyway.

I saw the other day Bax were advertising Fazely guitars again on Instagram. Glad they finally came through for you, that's a lovely colour, in fact a nice looking instrument all round.

The Fender Custom shop stuff at Andertons is a bit like the DFS sale in that I'm not sure I've ever seen it advertised without at least a grand knocked off the 'official' price. It's certainly discounted (allegedly) often enough that you'd likely be in for an unpleasant suprise a few months down the line if you paid the official price for one.

Nice! I didn't know they'd done the Kelly shape as a bass, I've only ever seen the Kellybird Thunderbird inspired models. Balance always seems to be a bit of an issue with these explorer type basses, but they certainly look the part.

I got one of the purple ones from Andertons a couple years ago. I bought a set of Bass VI Newtone rounds at the same time because I'd heard bad things about the stock strings and I was prepared to buy a new bridge to sort out the widely reported intonation issues. However when it arrived I quickly decided that it was fine as stock, it even took me over a year of playing it pretty much every day to put the new strings on it. The E string on the old set required a fairly gently touch, hit it too hard and it would choke out because of the low tension, but nothing that really required a big change in my picking style. The new strings, when I finally got round to fitting them sorted that, although they did make the trem a fair bit stiffer it's still completely usable, although I use it in a fairly subtle way to add a bit of vibrato. I'm not trying to do dive bombs with it. Played through my HX stomp with a ton of reverb and a touch of compression it gives me exactly the baritone 'surf' tones I bought it for. All in all one of my better purchases, I guess maybe I just got a bit lucky or the specs on that particular FSR run were slightly different to the earlier models that most of the online negativity is directed towards.

I like those a lot, nice mix of features from other basses with the original design, looks like the neck and string spacing would be a fair bit more comfortable players more familiar with post Leo bass design

With the revolution in digital modelling over the last decade there's just no need for guitarists to play through maxed out valve rigs anymore. It may be 'authentic' but it's always been problematic in smaller venues and these days there are better solutions. A lot of stadium filling rock/metal bands have made the switch so there's no excuse for blowing out the windows in the Dog & Duck trying to hit the saturation sweet spot on a valve amp.

Musical Exchanges in Birmingham was the first guitar shop I ever went into as a teenager in the 80s Might be rose tinted memories, but no guitar shop I've been in to since has come close to the sheer eclectisism and variety of new and used stock that Musical Exchanges had in those days. For a while me and my mates would go there just to hang out & try stuff we couldn't afford just about every weekend & the staff seemed more than happy for us to do so. It was a genuine Aladdins cave.

The Fender Standrds sit in a odd niche if you look at them as part of the overall guitar market rather than as part of the Squire/Fender range. Put bluntly there are better specced guitars from the likes of Sire, Ibanez and others in that £500 bracket and the Standards themselves are, with the most generous interpretation, at best a step sideways from the Squire CVs, rather than a step up.

The guy who engineered the track reckons quite a bit of work was needed to 'fix' Flea's original track in the final mix. https://www.guitarworld.com/features/why-fleas-bass-track-had-to-be-fixed-in-the-mix-on-alanis-morissettes-hit-record Recollections tend to vary on these things, but he sounds plausible.

Getting a first bass you like and get on with and actually want to pick up and play can be a key factor in whether you end up sticking the course when you first start learning. It sounds like for the OP that's the Ibanez. Any bass at any price point can develop fret buzz, generally if it happens it'll be down to envrionmental factors and it can almost always be fixed pretty quickly and inexpensively either by a tech or by the player with the help of a couple of youtube vids.

I suppose, if the OP has no plans to gig soon, a compromise might be a good little heaphone amp like a Vox Amplug or maybe even a budget multi fx that can be paired with headphones like the old Zoom B1on if they can find one. It will still be a decent sonic upgrade on the practice amp and should leave enough change for a bass upgrade too.

Bottom line is that a 10k bass will always sound bad through a bad amp, whereas a half decent amp will make almost any bass giggable. We're not talking £1000s either, for example, you should be able to pick up a 100w Fender Rumble on the second hand market for a lot less than the £300 budget and it will almost certainly be a huge step up from the practice amp you started with, certainly good enough to pair with any bass at any price point,and you can gig with it too.

I had a bit of a revelation at my uncle's funeral last year that sometimes when someone dies, along with the grief there can also be a genuine celebration of a life well lived, someone who played the game and won. I think Ozzy definitely falls into that category.

I remeber being hugely underwhelmed by Led Zeppelin Remasters back in the 90s, especially after all the hype tjere was at the time To be fair I was a poor student at the time and didn't have a high end hi fi system, but to me there was little difference between Remasters and the Led Zep albums I already had on cd, meaning I'd essentially bought a superfluous compilation album of stuff I already owned. I've been skeptical of remastered rereleases ever since.

I've got an Am pro ii strat which is lovely but I find myself playing the Mexican Baja tele more. My MiM Precision Deluxe Special is my main bass, at the time I bought it I could have got a US Standard Precision (or whatever the US model at the time was called) for a couple of hundred quid more, but preferred the Deluxe, very possibly because of the J neck as well as the active PJ thing. As for the custom shop stuff, the heavy focus on reliced finishes is a real turn off for me, regardless of how the instruments feel and sound so I'm very unlikely to ever want to pick one up

It's just the usual culture wars/outrage monetisation nonsense that's apparently replaced real news in the social media age.

Sections of the media have been trying get Glastonbury taken off the BBC for years. Events his year have given them a golden opportunity to demand the coverage is permanently cancelled.

They did a gig for Radio 1 a couple of months ago which I watched on iplayer. Top rate live band with some huge songs I'm a bit puzzled as why they're not much bigger.

Back when I used to go every year in the 90s it was mainly indie/alternative bands and some dance acts with a smattering of of world music and the odd curve ball like Johnny Cash. The music scene seemed a lot more tribal back then and generally peiple who were into one 'scene' wouldn't relly listen to orher genres, or admit to liking them anyway. The whole tribal snobbery thing was epitomised by the NME of the era which delighted in sneering at anything that wasn't obscure indie, including bands that started out like that but dared to become popular which is why they infamously gave the Stone Roses debut 4/10. I think attitudes are a lot healthier today with most people happy not to pigeon hole their musical tastes into one narrow genre and I think Glastonbury has become better for widening it's line up to pretty much a bit of everything, from tiny amateur bands right up to global superstars, across multiple genres If you're at Glastonbury and you can't find something you like, you probably haven't looked hard enough.

There's been a few threads from Basschatters who have taken a punt on this sort of thing from Chinese online marketplaces over the years. My impression is it's a bit of gamble, while some have been pretty pleased with what turned up, I think most of the instruments have required at least some additional work to get them up to standard. And , as pointed out above, if you're unhappy enough to want to send it back or nothing turns up at all then the usual consumer protections may well not apply with a Chinese based exporter

I am tempted, my musical tastes have gone in a very diferent direction over the years, but a lot of that line up is the soundtrack of my teenage years. Doubt I'll find the time to watch the whole thing in one sitting though so it would work better for me if they gave us at least a couple of weeks to work our way though it.