Doctor J

That album was such a disappointment. The live band - Jerry, Ralph, Kimberly, Folami, etc are absolutely phenomenal and they barely get a look in, in favour of big names which makes it really sonically disjointed to my ears. This is one of the few tracks where you get Jerry and Ralph, at least, and it's probably the highlight of the album because of it.

Alembic were in cahoots with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, CSNY, etc, building them custom PA rigs before moving onto instruments with them.

Was Pete Townshend not a force behind Marshall making amps which clipped? As I recall, Jim Marshall was trying to make a clean and loud amp and Pete insisted he wanted it to break up and be loud.

I've never had a subscription to have the satisfaction of cancelling 😪

Metallica lost me the day Load came out. As I listened to the tape, I had to take the inlay out of my pocket to check the lyrics corresponded to what my ears were hearing. That being said, I still find myself picking up the albums as they come out, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. Somewhere in there is still the band which captivated me as a kid with Master of Puppets and AJFA... but that band remains well hidden. I even have Lulu, saw it in a charity shop for a couple of quid and thought "How bad can it be?" The answer is very bad.

When I was playing in a mate's blues band, I used to drop it into the middle of Going Down

I saw her play with Triumph of Death (i.e. Tom Warrior playing Hellhammer) a couple of years ago and she was playing a short-scale white SG bass. She gives it full beans.

Nervosa from Brazil are more my cup of tea than the oul German power metal 😂

If you have to ask that question you'll never zah pap ah dil a doo woo bap a doo

Removing the scratchplate will solve this riddle very, very quickly.

Perhaps we should call the instruments Tonebasses to finally end the confusion? But then, you might end up with a tonebasswood Tonebass in your hands, which is a bit of a mouthful. Hmmm... it's tricky.

Regarding CDbaby, you have to register each song and get a UPC/EAN code for your music as part of a digital distribution setup in order to get payments. If you're registered with them already it will probably be cheaper but you still have to pay to upload and get the songs published to their "digital partners". You need the UPC/EAN codes to qualify for PRS payments. I would say it's worth doing but, financially, it might not be worth doing, if you know what I mean.

I shall return the favour and line a very small part of your pockets 😂

Alabama Thunderpussy. No cats, no meteorology, not even from Alabama.

For sure. I installed a tonebrass nut on a bass recently, along with tonestrap tonelocks.

Yeah, I know, but I'm asking about toneacrylic and tonegraphite now 😉

That was exactly the situation we were in and felt pushed into publishing it on the streaming sites. This one, which we gave permission for as the guy is good about publishing links back, was getting almost 1000 plays per day, initially, which was the trigger behind taking ownership of the music in the streaming world. It had gotten to around 14,000 plays before the licencing kicked in, which you can now see in the description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9mCQ9JXYYA Youtube can recognise the music published to it and will automatically apply a licence like that into a previously existing video. A lot of the people sharing music are monetising it themselves. They're getting paid for someone listening to your music. If they're "sharing" loads of band's music every day, however, it can start to add up. If you want to... not control it, you can't, but at least establish your ownership, setting up publishing with the likes of CDbaby is the way to do it. We didn't get paid for the first 14,000 or so plays of this and, granted, it's not like I'll be buying a speedboat, but I think the people who wrote and played the music should get something out of it instead of someone just putting up music they didn't have anything to do with. I am not a Spotify customer, they are the very worst thing to happen original music, but you're in a corner as an original artist. If you don't take ownership of your music, someone else will do it for you, sadly.

This is streaming only. Itunes Music or IMusic or whatever their streaming service is called. They're trying to get out of the music purchase game.

It's everything. The reason I was specific about the kind of music we play is because our three-track EP takes 27 minutes to listen to. That 27 minutes still only counts as three plays, however. I could get precious about our art and all that but basically it takes a long time to play four bars at 55bpm 😁 The whole thing is weighted in favour of having as many short tracks as possible above 30 seconds. Vulfpeck nailed it with Sleepify.

Here are some real world numbers just to show the bare bones of the actual situation. I don't know why people are so protective of this information, everybody should see how things really are. This is for some original music I wrote and released in 2019 and used CDbaby to publish to the streaming services which cost around $90 to do, if I recall correctly. This is all streaming activity since it was released right up to today. I hope to recoup by 2030. Ok, 2040 😂 Granted, the style of music we play - slow stoner/doom type stuff where our shortest song is 7 minutes long - is exactly the opposite of how to play the streaming game. Ideally, songs should be as little over 30 seconds as possible to register a play, hence why so many albums now feature short songs, short skits and other filler. We're in it for the doom, not the money, though. I have had to go to 4 decimal places to make sure everything gets covered. Pay is counted in US$. To clarify, we're getting 1.05 cents per stream on SoundExchange, for example, and 1/3 of 1 cent on Spotify. Why would you bother, I hear you ask? Well, something is better than nothing, I suppose, but only just. People are going to post your music to youtube and the likes, "share" it on your behalf, whether you like it or not, so you might as well get paid (yes, I know) for it rather than them. That was my logic, anyway, based on it being uploaded to Youtube by several different people unassociated with us. I felt forced into it rather than waste my time finding it and having it pulled down (we did that too, a few times). By contrast, we have around 100 digital sales on Bandcamp, priced at €3.00 and get roughly €2.33 for each sale there. If I ever come across as a Bandcamp fanboy, it's because they are, without question, the only decent digital music provider who aren't ripping artists off. Bandcamp also give you free streaming and downloads for every purchase of music you make. If anyone wants to check out the music behind the numbers, http://witheredfist.bandcamp.com is my shameless plug 😉 If you actually want to support an artist, Bandcamp or direct from the artist is the only way to do it, in my opinion. I'd be interested to hear what people think of those numbers, is anyone surprised by them?

Do acrylic or carbon graphite basses show more tonal consistency across multiple instruments? Anyone got two fully carbon Statii out there? 🙂

Instruments made of the same woods, sorry, tonewoods, sounding very different to each other? What trickery is afoot? We all know that if you take 10 of the most basic and mundane bass out there, the Precision, with ash bodies, maple necks and fretboards, they will not all sound the same. Wood is organic. No two pieces of the same species are the same. To apply blanket characteristics to something which, by its very nature, is inconsistent in cellular structure - before you get into age, how it is dried, how it is cut, etc, etc, etc, is just prone to error. Still no-one can present a list of wood species which are structurally suitable but tonally unsuitable for solid body electric instruments?

It also makes it spoonwood, chairwood, batwood, gatewood and any other application you may use it for?