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Last night turned out to be a good one, despite having a particularly heavy cold that seems to be doing the rounds. I still have some in-date covid tests and it's apparently not, so on with the show. The gig was guest-headliner at a Metal 2 The Masses competition heat (playing while the votes are being counted and the judges are deliberating), so I swapped my usual 10-6 shift at work for the 7-3, got to the venue for 4 as instructed, sound-checked at about 6, nipped to Tesco for a picnic that I couldn't taste, and then just loitered in the dressing room until showtime at 9:45. I would have liked to see the competition bands but I was best off sat on a sofa with my menthol sweets and a bog-roll. Stage time came around fast enough, and although the drummer had been at the JD a little more than usual, he only made a couple of mistakes and I managed not to have any fits of coughing, sneezing or otherwise malfunctioning. There were plenty watching and all the inter-song noises were positive and enthusiastic, but the highlight for me was the looks on the faces of a pair of lasses down at the front. I may be wrong, but I got the feeling that they'd perhaps spent the night dutifully supporting their boy/friends in one of the more shouty-thrashy bands, so being faced with two corseted sopranos in an operatic-symphonic outfit at the same gig seemed to catch them off-guard; they looked somewhere between emotional and mesmerised ...in a good way. Packed up and tried to help as much as possible with loading out, but I was at the 'if I start coughing I'm not sure I'll be able to stop before I run out of air and keel over' stage, so I made my apologies and my exit. Had a gloriously rough night and now need to spend the next three days helping my lass to move house. Epic. Gear was my RB Streamer LX 5 -(G30)-> [XS-1 -> BC-1X -> VT Bass v2 -> BDDI v2] -> TC BAM200 -> Blackstar house cab, and it really sounded quite good from where I was stood so hopefully that translated to FoH. Noticed that I was getting some very brief drop-outs on the G30, which is very unusual for it in my experience, but I eventually spotted that it was happening every time one of the singers operated the switch on her radio mic. Will have to see whether it was a one-off or maybe a different channel will be less susceptible to issues. Took the Hardly Benton along as backup, and the one photo I was bothered to take all evening is of it...

From my outside view… it feels like the FI1 was a reissue of the DI with more things a synth geek would want - that then gets added too and more and more functionality. Which is cool and you end up with a pretty awesome bass synth … that requires a bit of knowledge to program and tweak… but a lot of people want a microkorg, with a big knob that they can select “trance patch 1” and not tweak. I think with the DX7 stuff that might be even more of a thing as I’ve messed around with Dexed and it kinda made my head explode a bit!

Have you ever used your cabs on their sides to avoid the overhang with your 400+? (I realise LFSys recommends rotating the horn for ultimate performance)

The Letter - Joe Cocker

Excellent

Mr Postman - The Beatles / The Carpenters

I took me a while but I'd love to come along. Bringing G&L 2500 x 2 (One Tribute) P basses: P-Retro'd Warmoth, 32" scale Zoot, 54 and basic Warmoth. 2 amp heads, 1 x 12" Accugroove Line 6 Helix LT with Laptop. Peter

Paging @Silky999 - he's used quite a few imported roasted necks in builds recently. He will have the knowledge of where to go and what's good value.

Return to sender - Elvis Presley

The guitar player in my band ordered a 2x10 guitar cab at the end of September, and he still hasn’t got it. Wait times now appear to be quite long.

Just ordered the new Boss GX-1B multi fx to try out Decided to cancel my Tech 21 VT order as I feel I can get more from the GX-1B for less money Will let you know my thoughts when it arrives

Please!

Really appreciate your efforts to push the product in the right direction, like you said earlier maybe the MXR was needed to show what the market wants. The addition of FM is just a dream bonus that I never imagined would be possible.

If I get a spare moment, I might manage a couple of clips of some of the DX7 sounds I’ve made.

I’d like to hear what you think. I had and loved this pedal for years but sold it before I got hold of the Grand Slampegg and Bassrig Fifteen so haven’t been able to compare. I’d be curious to try it again.

I've got some very good MIM Fenders. No Japanese ones though, but I'm not sure that the factories they came from were pushing out the world's finest instruments at the time; mostly midrange stuff.

This is a tricky thing, and partly a result of muddled/lack of marketing/market research. The FI is derived from a pedal that was a bass-only product. However, the FI goes way beyond that. The patches show what the device is capable of in terms of programmability. The manual reflects the pedal’s ability to cover lots of territory. However, the marketing continues to focus almost solely on its being a “bass” pedal. This does mean that bass players have understandably felt perplexed by the seeming lack of bass-focused patches. Now it is a synth so there probably was an expectation for users to roll their own sounds to taste. However, earlier versions of the editor weren’t so user-friendly in terms of ease-of-connection, layout and patch management. These are things that I’ve pushed to improve in every iteration since 2019 and I feel the interface is much easier to work with than it was. Sure, it still has its own quirks and isn’t as slick as other companies’ editors, but it’s reasonably straightforward now and doesn’t suffer the software bloat/overload of other editors. The depth of on-panel parameter editing was also finally improved in v4 (I’d been pushing my implementation since 2019). Notwithstanding the aforementioned improvements, there are still many users who couldn’t or didn’t want to create their own patches via the editor. I hope that with a chunk of new classic sounds, the newly-added ability to copy and move patches directly on the pedal, and the deeper on-pedal parameter editing capability, these users will finally feel catered to; they’ll be able to modify the classic patches to their taste and copy the result to a new slot. As regards the DX patches, in addition to the obvious ones from the original DX7 internal patches which were all over records from the 80s, I’ve aimed to create and locate decent bass patches. If these don’t make the factory set, I’ll share them anyway via the cloud.