Franticsmurf

I think that goes a long way in any profession. I've always tried to be professional in attitude and approach at gigs - it shows respect to the venue/manager and these days (it seems) makes you stand out above other bands who don't feel they need to. Unfortunately I've been in bands where the same attitude isn't shown by all the members and it can get embarrassing.

Welcome Jack. A fellow converted guitarist here, who saw the light/grew up/realised everyone was better on guitar than me. 😃

I would definitely have a back up. If a string or battery goes, you can swap mid song and carry on, changing the offending wire or battery between sets. If the tone/look is essential to the band performance, then decision made. If not, I'd go for something different, my justification being that it just for emergencies so the facts it doesn't look or sound the same is acceptable. Also, with the different bass, you might find songs that work better with it. My current back-up is a Steinberger Spirit headless - looks and sound much different from the Stingray HH or American P Bass I usually use, but small, light, always in tune and easily to hand.

If I can do it, then you certainly can. 😃 Start simple and like @lidl e says - go for it. Even if you do decide to get someone to build it for you, you'll need to tell them where everything is going, the type of effects and the signal chain so you'll have to do some experimentation first. You may as well try putting your own board together. Start off by deciding what is going on the board and in what order. There are plenty of ideas on this site and plenty of people who are willing to share their experience. Initially you can try out your 'board' on a piece of wood or cardboard without velcro. Get something you're happy with and measure the footprint of the resulting 'board'. You can buy or build your own board base (I made mine from offcuts of plastic fascia board from B&Q covered in black gaffa tape). Get velcro strips (mine came from Amazon) and transfer your template board to the real one. You can get power supply blocks or a wall plug and daisy chain leads (better than individual batteries) and before you know it, you have a board. Then you'll see someone else's board on here and want to change/add/swap pedals. 😃

Count me in. Hopefully those three little words will help me save money and learn to play better with what I have. Please do your laughing here.... 😂

Last year was the first time I put a proper, thought out board together. Before that I didn't use effects much. I've thoroughly enjoyed the process. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I've been putting the 'final version' of my board together for several months (see above for the latest 'final version') and none have survived more than a couple of gigs. 😃 (To be fair, I've played with 4 bands this year, each with different sound requirements). I've learnt much from this thread but I've also been given GAS from many of the photos of boards shown here. Be warned! 😂

Great news! Don't forget, the secret to being a lead guitarist is VOLUME!

Welcme to the site TCee. Happy new year. 😃

I think it would have been better if they had been. 😃 It was just boring.

Hawkwind in the mid 90's at Cardiff University. I used to see them often - I loved the show element, lights, sound effects etc - and my first originals band was looking to do something similar. But they started going off and on this particular night they were awful. There were three support bands on and all three were much better at doing what Hawkwind used to do really well. Hawkwind came on and it was bland, flat, uninteresting. It sound like they were jamming a lot of the time, but were bored as well. It was the last gig of theirs I went to see.

The latest iteration of my 'do it all' board. I belong to two bands and I often dep with two others. This board will cover the two deps (a wide range of genres and styles) and the blues band. It is subject to change without notice. 😃 I am contemplating a separate board for the blues band with Behringer pedals - the Tube Amp Modeler would then go on that board. The Glowplug and the compressor are always on. I'm still fine tuning the Glowplug but it's close to what I'm after - warmth rather than overdrive. This goes into a Peavey Minimax 600 and a pair of 1x10" Trace Elliot cabs. The Hulla band board is much simpler, partly due to the songs and arrangements and partly because it's a large band (12-13 in total) and space is often limited. The Zoom gives me a chorus, a spacey flange patch and a defretted sound. As we add new songs or re-arrange existing ones the Zoom will provide most of what I may need. The Digbeth goes straight into the desk for the main sound and I take a feed to my TCE BAM200 into one of my 1x10" Trace cabs. With this band, I'm slowly moving to in ear monitoring and the backline is largely for confidence/back up. Both boards are home made from plastic fascia board off-cuts and copious amounts of black gaffa tape.

For free - I'd like to give one of the Ibanez headless 4 strings a go. Nothing against Fender, but I have a P Bass and as this would be costing me nothing, I'd want to try something new.

This years it's been 4 in: HB Fretless Jazz HB Guitarbass VI Fender Player Precision Sire V5 And 3 out: Signature Les Paul copy Cort Jazz copy Sterling Stingray 5 +1 for me.

Welcome to the site.

Early on in my social club ciruit 'career', I made the mistake of buying a book and winning. It didn't go down well.

And the bingo? 😃

Me too - from biro to Sharpie to jumbo marker. Sourcing a 1" paintbrush for next year. 😃 My personal experience of tech is that it's one more thing to go wrong. That said, a few years ago I was relying on crib notes on the setlist at an outdoor gig, and the three sheets of paper I was using blew away with a gist of wind. An iPad wouldn't have done that!

I can't compare it with the others mentioned here, but the EHX Bass Clone is my chorus of choice.

We played a venue and afterwards, as we were being paid, the entertainment sec told us about the band that had payed a couple of weeks before. "All they did were ABBA songs," he said. "The members hated it and we had to stop them halfway through the night." We were trying to leave but politely showed interest. "What were they called?" "Abbamania". 😂

Hi Pete, welcome to the site. I have a vague memory of seeing Here and Now in the Marquee many, many years ago.

Hi Tridimnaw, welcome to the site.

The first album I bought (actually, I asked for it for Xmas from Santa) was Sparks - Kimono My House. I still have it and listen to it. When I first got into music properly, I was being influenced by my mates who were slightly ahead of me. Deep Purple, Genesis, Tubeway Army and then Gary Numan. On the Top 30 radio programme I heard Wonderous Stories by Yes and Fanfare for the Common Man by ELP. Yes became (and remain) my favourite band. I went into and out of ELP fairly quickly. I love the idea of punk, which in the late seventies I was put off by the punks themselves. Through the 80s I disliked most of the top 30/40 tunes. With hindsight I think I was expected to as a teenager because listening back I find a lot of that stuff - The Police, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, REM etc etc - really good now. Through the 90's when I was working on my first band, playing originals, I was very much in a prog/hippy/space rock place. I never really got into Britpop at the time but I ended up in a covers band playing it. Since I've been playing bass my tastes have changed although there were quite a few years when I played songs that I would never listen to outside the context of the band I was in. Being with other musicians that I respect has shown me new stuff from their collections (the sound guy with one of my bands, the Hulla band, is currently doing his own musical version of 12 Days of Christmas by sending us 1 song a day from his own eclectic collection). I think the biggest change for me hasn't been in my taste as such, but in being more receptive to new (to me) songs and bands. My collections (by which I mean songs on the iPod that I listen to a lot) includes jazz, prog, folk, punk, more prog, dance (I'm not sure of the sub genres but System 7, The Orb, Junkie XL), a little bit of prog, some pop ad classical. Oh, and some prog. My 15 year old self would have hated me for what is on the iPod. 😂

The most I've spent on a bass was just over £1k for a new Stringray 34HH a couple of years ago. But like many of the posters here I wouldn't buy new again - not because of the experience but because there are plenty of used bargains. My American P bass was a little less than £500 ('B' stock), my Sire S5 was £300ish, also 'B' stock. Add my HB Bass VI (less than £200) and I have three 'new-to-me' basses for the same price as the 'Ray. To answer the OP's question, I think there's now a psychological barrier for me at £1000. If I say it out loud it it sounds much more than when I see it written down and I can't justify the spend based on my level of skill and the frequency and level of gigs that I'm likely to be doing.

Welcome to the site.

One of the reasons I started playing headless bass. 😃 I still take it to gigs as a spare and if I know space will be tight.