Dankology

I love TV Eye - one of the few live albums that actually sounds like a gig.

I wasn't aware that the original Love had toured internationally - must have been fantastic to catch them during that era. I think I've only left one gig early for anything other than travel reasons: Plan B at the Manchester Academy 3 - somehow we caught him in between his initial gritty acoustic rap phase and the majesty of the Strickland Banks album. Boiling hot small venue, songs that sounded like a dodgy boyband and the sort of audience I've never since come across at gigs. As we walked out the doormen seemed to approve "yeah, he's only got one good song". I do sort of wish I'd held out though - he was clearly in some sort of transitional phase, would have been fascinating to look back on it properly.

I do sometimes wonder if this sort of thing is a potential negative though. As a kid, if I'd bought a record (or tape, usually) it meant that I'd invested serious money in it and if I didn't enjoy it straight away I'd keep bashing away at it until I liked it or was sure I didn't. Still do that nowadays, to be fair. With a generation or two now reliant on streamed music, I do fear that the stuff that isn't instantly gripping can fall by the wayside. I suppose CDs made an early start on this by making it easy to skip tracks rather than having to play the whole album through to hear favoured tracks... A slight aside - does anyone else here use the Logitech Squeezebox/Media Server systems for their listening?

I heard an interesting (and possibly apocryphal) statistic about how many new LPs are being bought as ornaments and collectors items, never to be played. And the quality of some recent pressings is shocking. Anyway, I'm very fond of vinyl - as a teenager in the mid 90s it allowed me to scoop up loads of essential stuff without breaking the bank. Black Sabbath first 6 for £2 - £4 a piece, the Ramones' classic stuff for not much more, endless boot sale bargains (Layla on seemingly unplayed double vinyl and Bringing It All Back Home for 60p each being particularly memorable)... Latterly I've been able to pick up Van Morrison's OOP stuff for much less than the scarce CD versions but this is very much an exception. I still love the process and ceremony of putting a record on, the big sleeves and the magic of how the sound is actually extracted from the disc - something that seems far more fascinating than digital encoding. But they are an indulgence for me and I'd always want a digital copy too. Anyway, I've been plugged the gaps in my collection via ultra cheap Amazon, Ebay and pound shop secondhand CDs for the last few years. This wonderful song by Jeffrey Lewis could be the story of my life:

Jesus, that Facebook page... I do hope somebody is already onto this.

Yeah but most artists' live albums aren't back catalogue re-defining like old Neil's. Crime in the City on Weld, Transformer Man on Unplugged, When Your Lonely Heart Breaks on YOTH - all completely vitalize tracks that don't quite work on their original LPs. For me anyway... whenever I'm trying to get someone into Neil Young it's always the live albums I point them to.

They seem to have missed out all of the live albums - which seems to miss the point a bit. I know some purists don't rate them but Weld and Unplugged are often my go-to records for NY. And Year of the Horse has some beautiful moments.

I do. Not 4k but up to 6 cameras worth of 1080p 24fps on a much older machine and manage quite nicely. Again, I forego things like effects and colour correction while doing the actual editing and the rendering can be slow but that's why I use that machine - when I'm ready to render I just set it going and the kids can continue streaming and gaming on the less arthritic laptops.

I love SSDs - I can't believe the difference they make. I must say that I've been tempted by a new bespoke PC a couple of times but never quite pulled the trigger. (Pythonesque Yorkshireman accent): I still own my first car: bought in 2001, made in 1973 - although I can't pretend I'm holding on to it for reasons of economy 😆

I've been running 18-track (and more) 48khz/24bit sessions on a £130 reconditioned laptop. I've not had any problems with latency but tend to bypass effects and mute non-critical parts if we're overdubbing something. But I have to say that I absolutely hate spending money on computers (and cars) - I can physically feel the depreciation on the journey home 😪

Slight variation here: Had to return a parcel to Amazon (warped copy of Forever Changes!) and did so via their recommended Hermes "print label instore service". A few days later it still wasn't showing as returned on my Amazon account... Hermes tracker didn't recognize the number. Their online help bot was a Kafka-esque triumph of rigid adherence to rules over utility. The automated phoneline was even worse in that it simply wasn't set up to take an 8-digit tracking number and got stuck in an endless loop requesting me to re-enter it. Amazon's online chat widget confirmed that the package had been delivered to their depot and that a refund would be forthcoming. 24 hours later it's still showing as outstandng on my account. I think between demand, outsourcing and general don't-give-a-fûckery, anything that isn't a simple drop has the potential to be incredibly problematic at the moment.

Sorry - I'd bored even myself with all this... It all got quite odd, as it happens. The new loom sorted out the odd out-of-phase issue with the top two strings but, as noted above, I was still getting signal from the P pickup when everything was zeroed and so had everything apart and together again several times, checked everything with a multimeter and found that the problem seemed to be an intermittent earth connection. I could recreate this by putting the slightest pressure on the terminal block atttached to the the P pickup pot - but only when the pickup was attached. In desperation, I tried swapping the wiring around and found the following: -bridge pickup to bridge pot - all ok -neck pickup to bridge pot - all ok -bridge pickup to neck pot - all ok -neck pickup to neck pot - the problem came back again (ie output when volume set to zero) I can only think that one of the wires from the neck/P pickup doesn't quite mate with the terminal block - but even that doesn't quite make sense to me. Anyway, it works perfectly with the pickups wired to the "wrong" volume pots and the pickups sound absolutely immense - enough to make me ponder getting a set to replace the Dimarzios in my Aerodyne. The new strings (105 Warwick Reds) arrived yesterday but haven't been fitted yet - intrigued to see it they sort the various buzzes and rattles out - if not there's a great luthier nearby who I'm sure will whip it into shape. Going back to the pickup thing - I'm not sure if the guitar has been messed about with in the past: there were three screw holes for the right side of one half of the neck pick up and two for the left side of the other half. Only one of the mounting screws had a spring on it too. I'd hope this is all evidence of tinkering rather than a reflection of how these things come out of the factory. BUT - on balance I'm very happy with it: it sounds great (my last 3 purchases prior to this have been the Aerodyne, a US Jazz and a Squire VI and this was the only one that instantly wowed me, although this may just be a measure of how hot the pickups are) and I'm finding it surprisingly easy to play. I'll let my bandmates be the final judges on that one though...

I certainly don't envy you that. The closest experience I have to that was trying to sync audio from a cassette to an analogue video recording. I think I gave up in the end 🙄

Only if you've got everything locked to an external clock... In truth, the speed of a particular recording doesn't drift but the sync between two definitely will, for the reasons I gave above.

I meant more the issues relating to discrepancies between stated and actual clocking rather than between different stated sampling rates. eg if your camera has recorded the audio accurately at 48kHz but your external audio has actually been recorded at say 48.05kHz (due to the inherent inaccuracy within the clock) then over the course of a long enough file the two will drift out of sync. These discrepancies seems to be magnified by resampling (say if the external audio was 44.1 and needs to be 48khz for the video). The most frustrating aspect of my video work is getting the external audio to stretch/sync in this way.

Without wanting to sound a potentially negative note, it's worth remembering that audio devices are not necessarily all strictly clocked at 44.1 or 48 or whatever kHz. Which means, especially if you are aligning long recordings, there may be some drift in the sync by the end of the set. I've experienced this even when syncing recordings made on the same make and model of recorder. Ways to get around it are time-stretching the audio (either by ear or by calculating the length discrepancy), dropping a few frames of video or (my current preferred method) leaving some audience noise up between each track and adding and aligning each song separately. Of course, if you're just doing single song videos this may not be an issue.

Movie Studio Platinum - I think I'm still on version 11 on my ancient laptop but upgraded to v17 (at a generous £10 discount...) for my newer PC. I'm actually in the middle of editing a shedload of two-camera gig footage at the moment - I'm happy to do a quick Whatsapp video call at some point with anyone who wants to see how it works for me.

(ahem) Sony Vegas. Honestly, if I can make it work for me virtually anyone can: just drop your footage in (on separate tracks if you prefer) then cut, chop and copy to your heart's content.

I've used various versions of Sony Vegas for years - all of them them of the "non-pro" level. It allows you to be very flexible in your workflow and has lots of effects, titles, transitions, corrections and even audio plugins bundled with it. You can even use it to mix multichannel audio if you so wish, I bought a Mac a few years ago, largely with a view to moving my video and music stuff over to it but I just couldn't make the switch. Here's a recentish video that I did in Vegas, five or six cameras, audio mixed separately in Reaper and then dropped into the finished edit:

The J goes down to zero when the volume pot is down but the P goes from 7.9 wide open to 8.1 fully closed. Which I'm guessing is not right.

Here are photos of the original wiring, the very tidy new loom from KiOgon and then the back of the problem pick up.

Ha, if I tried to ignore it and do something else it would just eat away at me until I went back to it... Apologies re the units - showing how little I remember from school there 😣 I've wired everything back together and all seems well apart from there still being output from the P pickup when its volume is completely off. I can live with this but it's still annoying. When you talk about the pickups being shorted out when the bolume is turned down - how would I test this?

Thank you for taking the time - really appreciate this: first day of a much needed holiday and I really didn't intend spending it repeatedly taking a bass apart. It's passive with a VVT layout. The earth seemed well-anchored under the bridge and the continuity you describe above seems intact. I've just taken the P pick up out and run a multimeter across it: 8.4ohm across the two units and 4.1 when each is checked individually. This means almost nothing to me but it seemed promising that there wasn't a huge discrepancy between the two.

But it's definitely got worse since I started fiddling with it - there was no volume difference when the P pickup was soloed before which makes me think I've possibly damaged the coil while tinkering. I forgot to mention as well - when both volume pots are turned all the way down there is still some output...