TimR

There's no way a 9v battery will last 10 years!

I only use one for gigs. The other stays in its case. My main bass has failed twice. The first time was in 2009 and the second time 2019. I've been playing bass since 1985, so close on 25 years without a failure. Funnily enough the singer offered to bring his bass to the gig as a spare and I'd asked him why would I need a spare? In 2019 I had a spare, learned my lesson 10 years earlier. 2 failures in 35 years is a reasonable failure rate. Both times failed machine heads on the E string, restringing a bass so the E, A and D strings are in the A, D and G positions during the first verse of the first song and then playing an entire gig on 3 strings is quite tricky. Spare bass wins every time over that outcome.

Neither. They're both a poor compromise. At what point does it become glorified karaoke? Singer with a guitar playing to full backing track? It's OK, but it's not a live band. My brother played drums in a band with sequenced keys parts that he programmed. In the end they got a non musical drummer in and my brother played keys. IMO they should have just lost the keys the drummer wasn't a good match. Its a different skill set playing to a sequencer. Not something I enjoy doing. I prefer to have some breathing within the music that you don't get playing to a fixed tempo, or and an opportunity to extend songs adding verses and choruses if it's going down well. Sound engineers who are PA operators aren't engineers.

I found playing in bands like that, you're given the dots to play. No improvisation, you play the arrangement. The great aspect of that is that you know the finished article will sound good, and you don't have to spend time working out your part. Turn up and play what's written. I remember once we bought in a pro conductor for a concert, he stopped us during a rehearsal and asked the drummer what the hell he was playing, the drummer couldn't read music, and up until then the conductors had let it slide if it fitted. 😆 If you think Sex on Fire is boring you want to try playing some Tuba lines...

I don't see how this is possible in a band of 4 people. Then in a bigger band it becomes more and more difficult to find music that every member of the band likes and that will engage the audience. No wonder so many of you don't want to gig and prefer to stay at home on your own. To me that's the opposite of why I play music. The sum of the parts and the socialising is what makes music fun.

It was an example. I used plumber because everyone keeps comparing musicians pay to call out plumbers pay. Could be any job, every job has some aspect that's menial and just has to be done. Some jobs are completely menial...

There are very few amateur musicians who can operate at this level. If you can, then that's the level of playing to aim at. It's the difference to playing Sex on Fire for the 1000th time and playing it for the first time. I've never played it, and I'm actually still to hear any band play that intro as per the original recording, not that it matters. 😆

Seems to be mainly bass players who feel they're not being musical if they're not playing music they like, or are playing music that's too easy for them. Seems to me that's being quite pompous. My point still stands, we can't all do something interesting all the time. That's life. If everything we did was fun and interesting there would be nothing to compare fun and interesting against and everything would just become one level. It's all about differences, light and shade, fast and slow, long and short, simple and complex. Especially in music.

Yes. And still have to do the boring stuff.

Steve Lawson plays gigs...

Possibly. But bass players? What does a bass player do who is not playing with other musicians?

Surely being a musician is the same as every job. There's extremely boring parts to everyone's job that we just have to knuckle down and get done. A load of people like to compare us to call out plumbers. I'm guessing a lot of call outs plumbers go to are unblocking drains or stopping floods. Hardly exciting new problems and creatively designing new installs.

My Spotify has no adverts. YouTube does have a play history but mine isn't limited to songs I've got to learn for the band. There's more than one way to skin a cat, I'm just suggesting one I find a lot more easy to manage and share. If we add a song to the playlist it automatically updates on everyone's list. Plus I can listen to an entire Spotify playlist or select a single track in the car via the car ICES, or even via google voice control. Not sure YouTube and diving are compatible.

The problem is you then have to keep a list of links somewhere and sit through adverts. I find YouTube a nightmare to learn songs through.

I have created a Spotify playlist. We use those songs as the reference songs and only those songs. However, it didn't seem to prevent the argument: "that version isn't the original one that everyone knows that's on YouTube that I already learned". Even though it was executed the same note for note. 🤦‍♂️

In terms of PA, there's a big difference to playing a pub or small club vs a dedicated music venue or theatre, or festival. I'm not sure anyone can generalise what other people should do, based on what they do, without taking into consideration the type of venue and band that they're in.

I agree with the hpf. Just turn down all his bass knobs on his monitor amp. But ideally you need to start thinking about your song arrangements more closely together. Rather than saying "Don't do this." you need to work together to find something that works on each different song. Sometimes the keys will be glad that they don't have to use their left hand (certainly some I've played with have said it's good not to have to play everything all the time.) Or maybe program bottom half of keys for string pads up an octave etc and just thicken the sound with one chord per bar type playing.

The DVLA have a database of registered keepers. And people do clone numberplates.

That could be any band in the world. It's the members of Pink Floyd, but it doesn't have the sound or feel of any Pink Floyd songs. Possibly due to the lack of Rick Wight's jazz influenced keys. Even the guitar solo is missing some kind of emotion. In a similar vein, The Who and Queen will be missing an essential part of their sound. The sum was always greater than the parts in certain bands. I don't know enough about the Worzels or UB40 to make much of them but I'd suggest the Beatles was John and Paul and pretty much anyone else could have backed them.

I thought the common scam was to nick your photos and advertise it somewhere else. If they also have the serial number it makes them seem like they have the article in their possession. If someone wants proof you have the article then send a photo of your bass beside today's newspaper. If someone asked me for a serial number I'd stop communications with them.

Oh and there's soft knee and hard knee compression. With hard knee that ratio is applied immediately you cross the threshold, a hard angle. With soft knee it's more of a soft curve from 1:1 to to the set ratio.

I'll add to what Ped says. A compressor compresses the peaks. Any sound that is above a certain level will be reduced. That level is the threshold. The ratio is how much that extra bit will be reduced by. So for a 1:4 ratio, you'll have the threshold level plus 1/4 of the bit above the threshold level. In addition there will often be 'make up gain' so the lower levels will have more gain added to bring them closer to the threshold. This results in a less dynamic output, but louder and more consistent. Depends really on the environment and music how hard you compress, how low you set the threshold and how high you set the make up gain. A limiter just stops anything getting any louder than that certain level. If you're playing loudly all the time above that threshold this will just result in distortion. The limiter is like a compressor where the ratio is infinite so all of the sound above the threshold is reduced to the threshold level. Difficult to explain in words. One of the most misunderstood topics. There's loads of YouTube explanations available, you just have to find one that you understand.

If you buy a bass and have a problem with it, do a Google and find loads of other buyers have exactly the same problem with it. You can either send it back for a refund, which you're unlikely to get if you've had the bass a long time, or you can swap the problem part out with a new upgraded part. I don't see how any potential buyer would be put of by a known issue that's been fixed and improved.

I drive home listening to the radio. When I have time to sit down and listen to Pink Floyd, I do. I probably haven't listened to the BC competition as it requires me to actively do so.

More water is consumed than wine. But I suspect as many people consume both just not in equal amounts. A higher volume of consumption can be fewer people doing it more often, it's not always more people.