mike257

Nobody musical in my family and my parents thought pursuing music was a terrible idea. I started playing guitar at 13, and after a few months on a borrowed acoustic, asked for an Epi Les Paul Special II for Christmas, on offer from Soho Soundhouse for £99. "Can't you find a cheaper one. It's not like you can really play it anyway" was my Dad's response. When I wanted to take music for my GCSE options at 14, the blocks were put on by my parents in collusion with the head of year "You can't read music now, there's no point carrying on studying it". Didn't stop me playing, and a few years later my shitty unsigned band ended up being one of the first shitty unsigned bands to be offered a headline tour of O2 (or Carling as they were back then) Academy venues. With my parents still nonplussed, I was pressed to stop chasing my dreams and ended up at 21 working with my dad at the same company he'd worked for since he was 15 years old, and the band folded shortly afterwards. Seven years of increasingly dull corporate misery later, engaged, with an infant son and a second one on the way, I took a chance, to my parent's sheer horror, and left the sensible job to make a living from music. Until COVID struck, I'd managed to sustain a career for eight years, although I do very little bass playing now and primarily work as a sound engineer and tour manager. I don't see my parents any more, but when I landed the biggest gig of my career last summer, touring as a monitor engineer for an artist who's music was always played in our house growing up, I finally got some acknowledgement, with a one word comment from my dad on a post on my company's Facebook page after mixing the main stage headline slot at Boomtown Festival - "Congratulations". That was it. I didn't feel compelled to reply!

Had a set for years that's migrated across various basses and always sounded great

If you enjoyed learning Sir Duke, you could stay with Stevie and add I Wish and Master Blaster to the list. Both fun lines to play. There was an isolated bass part of the original Sir Duke line posted on here a little while ago, worth looking that up for a little listen!

Yep. The reality for small to medium sized venues is that you need a pretty well packed house to break even. When you slash capacity to 20% but you also need more staff in to enforce distancing measures, you don't have to be a genius to realise the numbers won't work.

Sorry to hear that. There's an awful lot of people in a similar position. The government have played a blinder in coming out with great, headline grabbing schemes that they can shout about come the next election, whilst simultaneously making the small print full of enough challenges that an absolute ton of businesses and individuals have been left without any real support.

Cheers mate - frustrates the hell out of me when people act like we've somehow got it easy being outside the world of "normal" employment. I'm receiving a small grant from HelpMusicians UK which, whilst I'm immensely grateful to receive it, is a monthly amount equivalent to what I'd normally earn in one day on tour. I put in for the Crew Nation scheme that Live Nation are running but they were just overwhelmed with applicants. Was in line to be working on their summer of drive-in concerts before all that got pulled too! I was doing some delivery driving for a local brewery but they've laid off all the home delivery drivers now they're back supplying pubs. There's little bits happening - I'm involved with a live streamed festival happening at the end of August, and possibly doing some installation work for a couple of new bars/venues, but everything has the shadow of a return to lockdown hanging over it, especially in light of this week's local restrictions in some areas. It's very hard to plan ahead with any confidence.

This stinks of the tired assumption that the self employed are all on the blag. I work in the touring production industry. I trade as a limited company, even though it's just me. This means I'm not "self employed" so I wasn't eligible for that support. I can't furlough myself, because I still have to undertake what tiny little business activities I can, otherwise I'll have no business to come back to. I don't have premises that are eligible for business rates, so none of the grant schemes apply to me (I did have a small unit but it was within a self storage facility and not counted as eligible premises. I've had to give this space up for financial reasons). I've got precisely zero government support. The government support that does exist will cease in a couple of months, long before our industry is able to return to normal. There will be no concert touring, festivals, theatre productions etc in 2020. There is no guarantee they'll be back in their normal form in 2021. Will the government continue to support artists, musicians, technicians, production companies, venues, event trucking and bussing suppliers, tour caterers, stewards, security, all the huge supply chain that supports live events? Like hell they will. Redundancies and dead companies will be all over the place. @dudewheresmybass, like me, will not see his income return to normal levels from live music for quite some time. Our mortgages and bills won't go away. Our kids still need to be fed and clothed. I won't be working for free.

Thanks! Touring techie here. The year's diary completely wiped out for myself, and all the freelancers and companies that I work with. Lot of people and businesses at real risk of going under, it's certainly a strange time to be in this industry. I'm sure it'll come back eventually, but the high profile pulling of the country-wide drive in concerts hasn't exactly boosted consumer or industry confidence. Attempts at getting shows up and running are going to be hamstrung by the debate of who takes on the risk (and the costs) if a second wave/local lockdown/plague of locusts causes cancellations.

That's a truly wonderful bit of bass playing, that song.

Only came here to excitably yell "Oceansize!!!” Huge amounts of Biffy Clyro stuff is in things that aren't 4/4, and they're very good at squeezing it in but making it sound perfectly natural. This shifts effortlessly from 3 to 5 and back again... And this goes to a whole bunch of different places musically and dynamically in less than five minutes....

There's definitely a history on here of everyone mobbing round whatever budget bass is found to be slightly less bad than you expect a cheap bass to be. Remember the SX craze? I think this forum must have bought most of their stock over the course of a few months. There'll be another one along soon, there always is!

A lot of lower end consumer models aren't built for rack mounting because most of their target market won't be looking to cart a rack around. All professional standard radio kit is built for rack mounting because 90% of the time, that's how it will be used. Second hand Sennheiser G3 kit is available for good prices these days. I wouldn't go for anything less than that. Huge step up in quality from the likes of Line 6.

That's crazy. The real thing was around £1250 when I got mine!

There's these guys....

Because like any popularity contest, the "greatest" basslines are, in the eyes of the public, the ones they most easily recognise, or the ones that feature at the forefront of their respective songs.

Put it on my 8 year old son's tabet and he spent the afternoon sat in the garden making beats. Definitely a worthwhile download, thanks again!

Nice spot! Just downloaded and killed 10 minutes making a beat when I should be cracking on with DIY. If the missus asks, I'm blaming you.

Agree that it's an additional carry (although your speakers get lighter, so it's a weight/space trade-off) but doesn't have to be more faff. It's not at all hard to put a tidy amp rack together with all the connections on a patch panel. Our usual setups that go on small gigs have the crossover and amps all racked up, permanently wired together, and it's just two XLRs and one power in, and speaker cables out. No faff. Likewise with monitor amps - four channels of amp in a rack, four XLRs loomed together for the input. It's much, much quicker and tidier than running loads of XLR and IEC mains cables everywhere. Thomann's own brand t.amp units are great value for money and they've got lightweight four channel amps (all 2u high) at various power levels. You could have a crossover and four channel amp for mains, plus a four channel amp for monitors, all connections neatly on a patch panel, and fit it in one manageable 6u rack.

I'm probably in a minority opinion here, but in my small sound company I've shifted almost all of our stock over to passive boxes and separate amps. You add a bit of pack space and weight, but you gain a little flexibility and, importantly for me, it's better for redundancy and maintenance. Whenever I've had an amp fail in a powered speaker, it's an expensive bespoke part from the manufacturer, often costing as much or more than the S/H value of the speaker itself. If I have an amp in a rack go down, I can swap an amp out for another generic item. If it happens mid-show, I can run more than one speaker off a single amp channel to get through the gig. There's less cabling mess on stage too, as all your signal and power stays localised in one spot and you only run speaker cables out to each box. With regards to monitoring - this very much depends on what your band are used to/happy with. Personally, when I've played pub gigs I've always just made do without, but doing function/corporate work I've always made sure there's proper monitoring on stage. With only two aux sends available for monitors, you'll struggle to satisfy a six piece band. You've mentioned that two of you use IEMs already. That leaves no monitor mixes available for the rest of the band. If that's an issue, you'll have to look at upgrading your mixer at some point - a popular low budget choice is the Behringer XR18, which gives you 16 mic inputs, a stereo line input, six aux outputs for mons, and a lot of processing options. I've got one in our stock and have it racked up with a WiFi router hardwired in and a tablet that lives in the case, and it's a very tidy solution for small gigs. Got to be honest, not a fan of coloured cables. Looks terrible on stage IMO. Colour coding the ends is one thing (or tape with a name/logo under clear heatshrink wrap) but I'd keep it black purely for aesthetics.

This. If you're actually recording ideas and adding your own parts then sending back and forth, working to a click track will make it much easier to sync up.

Less expensive than the Denon you mentioned, but I'm more than happy with my Sony MDR 7506 cans. Use them for reference when mixing love shows, monitoring when recording, and have been using them for a bit of lockdown bass playing through one of those nifty Yamaha things we've all been buying the last couple of weeks. Popular amongst the professional sound engineering community.

If you're playing in venues that have an in house system and an FOH, the FOH engineer may choose to chuck a DI box in there, but may be equally happy to use your amp's XLR out. I'll normally use one when I'm mixing a band I don't know, or a multi-band bill. Gives me consistency and takes an unknown/variable out of the equation. If I'm with a band that I'm touring with, I'll use any combination of pre and post effect DIs, amp DI and cab mics depending on what I feel is necessary to capture things effectively. If you do buy one, don't waste your money on a cheap Behringer etc. The absolute best budget boxes are from Orchid Electronics - a small UK builder, they'll do you a hand assembled great quality box for the price of an entry level unit from a big manufacturer. I've got half a dozen of their Micro DI and Classic DI in my touring kit, they're rock solid.

That's a lovely big fat sounding snare when the drummer finally starts laying in to it towards the end. Great performance.

Got one coming tomorrow too - I'd not played a gig in over a year having packed it in to focus on mixing them instead, hoping to use this lockdown to polish up my bass skills a bit!