Dankology

...very mysterious! The budget can be fairly elastic but I am a stickler for not overspending on features or capacity I won't necessarily need.

I really don't understand Macs at all... Am I better looking at an i3 from 2018 or an i7 from 2012??

I was looking at Mac Minis around £500: https://www.hoxtonmacs.co.uk/products/mac-mini-core-i5-3-0ghz-late-2018 Am I in the right ballpark there?

I've used Vegas in various forms since about 2006, I think, but I'm seriously thinking of moving over to an Apple based system for my video editing needs. I'll be buying secondhand/reconditioned but I've no idea what I should be looking at. We've got a fairly ancient iMac here but I was thinking of going with something less all-in-one. Currently using three GH2 cameras running hacked firmware so while only HD the bitrates can get a little fierce. What am I looking for here in terms of spec and outlay?

My band accidentally left some gear in a venue last night and can't yet get in touch with anyone there - is there anyone in the vicinity who might be able to pop in for us? Please send me a direct message if so.

Just before an otherwise great gig last night my Squire VI completely died. I've opened it up and the connection from the volume pot to the jack is broken - something not beyond even my ham-fisted soldering skills. But I can't see any evidence of any other connection to the jack other than a blob of solder on the other lug. Does the metal control plate somehow act as the earth connection? And should I add a wire as a proper earth connection too? And while I've got the soldering iron out, are there any clever mods I might try?

Are they wrong? I'd thought they were based on an early version but have never properly checked... Still, nothing can beat that "another council tenancy" mis-hearing 😁

The version of Song to the Siren on that LP is remarkable. Back on topic, the Fall's cover of I'm Going To Spain is horrific but the original is hardly a classic itself.

Just wanted to post a thank you to @tom1946for an excellent hassle-free and worry-free amp sale a couple of weeks ago - couldn't be happier with my new purchase and would recommend that other members buy with confidence 🙂

That's a great poster/photo. Did you do it yourselves?

I can't think of any famous ones but surely anyone called Pedro would be in peril here.

I've somehow joined one of my favourite bands for a short tour. Can't wait 😀

I'm not sure it is regarded as their worst album so much as an odd piece of pre-history but the self-titled live debut from Jane's Addiction is my favourite of theirs. Great idea for a thread 😀 looking forward to checking out the Cult LP mentioned above.

Just bumping this (cos I really want that amp)

I hadn't thought of that! I'm now wondering how much my amp actually affects the sound - I usually use quite a few effects... Will do a bit of experimenting. Thank you 🙂 These look great and are pretty much what I was looking at for at home too. I can't find any in stock at the moment though but I'm badly multitasking - will have a proper look later on. Thank you!

An odd turn of events has led to me playing a run of gigs with one of my all-time favourite artists. The shows will be slightly unorthodox in terms of the production and presentation and it has been gently suggested that I should be looking at a small amp. I currently have a Trace GP12 combo (which has started to malfunction this week, of course) and a Laney R7 (which I've often struggled with and usually gets sneered at when I've lent it to other people). I've had the Blackstar Unity things on my radar for a while now but I don't like the idea of having to buy their powered cab if I ever want to up the ante; the Fender Rumbles are of course ubiquitous and I quite like the look of the Session 77. I don't really want to spend a big chunk of money on a new amp so secondhand is a definite option and I'm not especially keen to do the sensible thing and just go via DI (partly due to habit and partly due to not knowing what the monitoring is going to be like). So, two questions: am I missing any obvious options here? And does anyone have something appropriate to sell me? Apologies for the vague details - don't want to jinx anything so early in the day but will definitely report back in full in due course.

I occasionally bring a fretless to rehearsal and no-one ever notices. This may be due to a multitude of factors, the least likely of which being impeccable intonation on my part. Musicians are generally conservative sorts - I'd suggest auditioning with what they want to see and then sneaking the fretless in later.

Been back for 3 days now, I'm afraid 😆

"and if they write their own I am too old!" May I ask how old you are? At 43 I'm the baby of our originals band 😀

I'm at the Holiday Inn in Hemel Hempstead until Friday morning when we drive back to Lancashire - fairly tied up with daughter's birthday activities but please send me a direct message if I can be of use.

Reading all these stories here has reminded me of our horrible old neighbour back where we used to live. She really was a caricature of a grumpy old lady: constantly complaining about parking, shouting through the wall when our baby was crying, lopping branches of trees & throwing them back over the fence, but also capable of a complete volte face and endlessly keeping my other half talking over the fence when she was trying to garden etc. I had bought a drum kit (it may even have still been one of those Arbiter Flats kits at this point) and tended to have a bit of a practice in the upstairs spare room when I got home from work - no more than 20mins at most at around 6pm or so. One day after comig back downstairs, I noticed that her TV/radio was at blisteringly high volume and I felt a bit bad that I'd forced her to turn up so loud. This kept happening and the length of time the volume stayed up became longer and longer - eventually lasting several hours after I'd finished playing. One day I realized that what I could hear was Buzzcocks playing at full pelt through the wall - very much not her sort of music at all. A bit of detective work revealed that she was putting Radio 2 on maximum volume in the living room and decamping elsewhere in the house. After several days of this I brought my little FM sender thing in from the car (the sort of thing that allowed you to tune a car radio into an MP3 player), tuned it into the Radio 2's frequency and spent many happy hours pumping horror movie soundtracks, weird Youtube finds and late period Scott Walker into her house. If I'd had access to the old War of the Worlds broadcast I'd probably have beamed that through as well. I suspect I'm an awful person. But nowhere near as awful as she was.

Thanks for the full and impassioned response @Baloney Balderdash It was a secondhand private sale so no hope of sending it back but I've just had a word with the local guitar chap and he's going to have a look for me. I really don't get Rickenbacker. Having lost many hours of my life to restringing my 12 string and putting up with its ridiculous approach to intonation, I should've known better. Which isn't to say that I don't love my new bass but some of the design flaws (not to mention the weird amount of attitude in the documentation and online) beggars belief. But it looks and sounds great so I'm going to make it work 🙂

I picked up a 4003s a few weeks ago and haven't spent a massive amount of time playing it yet. I've found that there's quite a lot of fret buzz at frets 1-3 on the E (and to a lesser extent when digging in on the A). The action is reasonably high - the E is about 4mm at the 12th fret. The neck seems uncommonly flat but that seems to be how it is designed to be. Having only recently ventured into the realms of truss rod adjustment, I am well out of my depth with a dual-rodded neck that is apparently meant to be set without any relief. Please could I have some pointers towards figuring out how to reduce the buzz?

Is anyone else experiencing issues uploading HD video to Youtube? I've always uploaded my HD material in wmv format after reading multiple recomendations to do so. Last week I uploaded one in MP4 (1080p 23.9fps; approx 80mins long) and it was still "processing HD" a couple of days later. I emailed the help desk - no reply but approx a week later it finished processing... but I was still only left with the downgraded 360p version. I deleted it and uploaded a new WMV version this morning and nearly 12 hours later it is still "processing HD". This would normally be a matter of minute-to-hours. A bit of Googling suggests a few people have had similar issues but the advice ("try a different format", "it might be your upload speed"(!)) doesn't seem very helpful. Have any of the Youtube users here noticed anything similar?

For running scales & arpeggios and general noodling it's a fretless Crafter acoustic that lives in the front room. Sometimes before a gig I'll play along to a rehearsal recording and plug into a Laney 2x10 combo but invariably not with the bass I gig with - and usually one strung with flats rather than my gigging rounds. I may need to have a look at this.