Downunderwonder

In that case it's fine for you to do the chicken roaster/ washing drying machine/ fridge type of backline. They did one on NZ Idol that was cardboard boxes painted black and lit from inside or might have just been cards with 8x10 etc holes and backlit screens. Go wild. It will be more interesting than a bunch of real cabs. You could make quite a wall of doom in cardboard that stores flat and slots together.

Get the bar to sponsor a free bar tab for random singers. You'll get the odd one that can't sing their way out of a paper bag but 'you get what you pay for'. Working singers don't mind lending their pipes if they can get a couple of nice beverages out of it

Tends to sound boxy in isolation, even moreso at low volume.

Not really. I don't know of any rack mount preamp that isn't proper line level. One poster above complained of a lack of oomph from his RBI. That guy didn't read his manual!

The one time I plugged and played I was sorely let down by the monitors. Never again.

Ignoring the cross section shape makes for a much simpler "back of envelope" guestimation. It's then all about the angle of the strings to the neck / body and the available displacement of the cable from vertical. X being the difference in 'altitudes' of the strings between nut and bridge ie fixed. Y is the displacement available to the cable, also fixed. T is the length of the string. T' is the vector quantity of the tension in the string. C' is the compression generated in the neck. S' is the sideways force on the neck.The unbalanced parallel forces of the sideways component at the nut and its resistance at the neck heel together require a balancing moment from the neck at the heel. We replace this with the an opposite unbalanced tension of the cable. Shifting vector S' across to the top of the cable we can imagine dropping a vertical to intersect the cable and the distance back to the cable top scales us the cable tension = T' x X/Y Note that compression in the neck is not generating moment, only the sideways component of tension must be resisted by the neck and cable. Calculation assumes zero contribution from the neck itself..This is all a bit different to the "girder hanging out of the building" analysis but I feel it's closer because the string is acting in pure tension in the first place, lending itself to vector analysis. Note also that no forces are required of the body at the end so nothing in the analysis changes with the no body stick bass.

I found out the hard way that 'line' on a Sansamp BDDI was something less than what I was used to. I was doing a show gig and done with rehearsals I had left amp and backup amp with the one cab safety locked up in the theater all set to go. Got last minute pub gig. Went home and grabbed up some gear. BDDI, 1000w Crown power amp, 210 cab. Plenty for small bar even if the drummer was a cousin of the drummer in The Electric Mayhem. Not actually, what with the just discovered gap between the BDDI output and Crown 1.4V rated input. It just managed to keep up by using all available output from the BDDI and cranking the amp.

Not so if you run the resisting cable through the building to the opposite side and the girder is minute ( like the nut). To boot the tensioning cable is at an angle to the vertical ( the bridge is higher than the nut ) so it's trivial to resolve to forces from the tensioning to a vertical pure compression and a sideways moment generating loading component. Then the resisting cable acts over a much greater lever than the tensioner. Its force triangle is very much more squat for the same horizontal component = less tension required.

What Rumble 500? The one I heard played by multiple bassists in a variety of bands sounded like it was smothered in duvets. I can't believe they were all incompetent at finding a pleasing tone in an unfamiliar amp so I blame the amp. It would have been a 2018/19 model. It wouldn't surprise me if your guitarist was in love with that 'no tone' bass sound. Less work for guitar to fill the mix, if I am being kind.

I thought OP decided on burying the cable so most of the neck thickness could be used as leverage for reversing the bending.

Yes it is the bending moment. The bridge forces do not induce any moment in the neck though. Carry on...

I doubt any bass player has such poor tonal discernment that would make it impossible for them to take up fretless. You need to have a proper go. There is a paradigm shift in having to DIY the pitch. It's not just plopping fingers down any more. It takes a bit of practice to develop the reflex to correct your positioning on the fly and even more to get the muscle memory. If you can hear when it's wrong then you have plenty good enough hearing for the job.

The strings are doing a number on twiggy by virtue of the nut and bridge introducing a bending torque as well as direct longitudinal compression. Curiously the twisting moment must be equal at both ends or twiggy would be spinning end over end faster and faster. Back in the day I treated these problems as free body potatoes to analyze reactions (buildings subjected to wind and earthquake loads transmit forces into the ground via floors and walls and columns). Perhaps someone will run with it, I have better things to do right now. Suffice that the purchase of the strings via nut and bridge is smaller than what is available within the neck for the cable so the tension in the cable will be comparitively smaller than the combined strings to balance.

Wow. Awesome if true. Can @Passinwind or @Adminemail the OP?

My drummer appreciates me holding the timing UP. Hard work sometimes.

Could be wrong but likely it's the igniter for the UV bulb.

Ding, ding, we have the answer.

A lot is rack width but many of the combos had extra width to match the cabinets.

That's just a regular gig. A residency is when your band is THE band and you play every night there's music on stage. This happens at casinos or cruise ships. The venue is the whole draw and you are the musical wallpaper to a much larger degree than a pub. The other kind of residency is you are weekly same night every week. You better be really good to pull that off.

Availability. Timing. Dynamics. If he's not there he can't test the maxim "it takes a very good drummer to be better than no drummer". If he hasn't got the right groove that can be sorted out, but I have never been able to sort out a lack of timing or volume sensitivity.

And what if fretting it takes away some of that sound that was it being fretless? That's not a risk I would take. The regret in stuffing up a perfectly good fretless would be horrible.

You can always turn the active part of the preamp off in a Fender P Deluxe and it becomes a passive P/J. Depending on where you have the vol and EQ set it can be louder or quieter switching between Active and Passive mode. Remember to check if you have it in Passive before tweaking EQ to no effect.