Killerfridge

To be fair, I'm pretty target audience for it; I am a big fan of both Nathan East, the Laney Digbeth line, and your reviews! Can't say I'm surprised to see the video, but I clicked on it thinking it was a BGM review!

It's a great video, got pushed to me naturally by 'the algorithm', so was nice to see just appear!

Can't believe I forgot this beast

That's much prettier than their previous version of the Ant

They were made by Yoshi Kikuchi, who originally founded Atelier Z and worked in Rogers shop. You might be thinking of the original MiJ MetroExpress

Yeah I guess that's probably a good analogy, although I would say its more like the Squire custom shop costing more than the Fender Custom Shop. I just don't really get what the market positioning of the Sadowsky Metroline is anymore. When they launched it originally, and it was run by one of his protégés in Japan I got it: they were the same as the NY ones, except you couldn't get custom options. That was it, that was how Roger positioned it on his website too ("If you don't want custom colours/woods/chambering, just a 'standard' Sadowsky, buy the metroline". They didn't even say Metronline on the headstock, they just didn't say NYC.). When he moved production to Germany with Warwick, there was a price creep, but they also made improvements (just-a-nut, invisible frets etc.). But now they it's very easy to buy one from Warwick that costs more than the NYC ones, just without the 'prestige' of saying either Warwick Masterbuilt or Sadowsky NYC.

Most of the big boys/girls have been mentioned already, but there's a couple that sometimes fly under the radar: Federico Malaman Vincen Garcia

Also, looks like Trickfish are doing pickups

The Masterbuilt Metroline series is a conundrum for me. It's Warwicks master builders, and they are some of the best in the world so I get the price point. But when the price of the Warwick shop exceeds the price of Rogers NY shop, but you get a "Metroline" stamp on it, as if to say "Well it's not a real NY Sadowsky", it just feels weird. It's almost a disservice having the Sadowsky name attached for all parties involved.

That's about right - I was in the shop last year and they gave me a new price list that starts around £3.5k

Fair enough. I know little enough about either company, but my initial thought when I saw the two-tone Headstock with the big "A" was Alpher - for all I know Alpher is based on their design!

The headstocks look like they've taken "inspiration" from Alpher, no? At least that's my first impression

Honestly I think there is a whole load of that "see digital, hear digital" problem, and its really difficult to get past. I know I suffer from it, and flip flops between my digital rig and my analog rig. However I definitely think this new era of modellers/capture devices (QC, Anagram etc.) have a very realistic "feel" to them. I know it's a rubbish comparison, but when compared to something like my old PodXT, the pod just feels dead.

100%. You can't necessarily hear a huge difference, but you can feel it when you play it. He did another video of "beginner with expensive Vs pro with cheap", and obviously the difference was in their playing. But the pro pointed out that he spent a lot of his energy fighting the instrument, rather than allowing it to be an extension of his body

I was asked to play this with a few days notice on a gig. Safe to say I didn't get it down by then, but spent another week or so trying to get it nailed down:

100%, really happy to see this in the update, was starting to fear they weren't going to do it! The speed and rate of these updates has really got me craving one

Honestly, they sound pretty much identical. The feel is significantly different though; I've always found the carbon fibre neck a bit 'sticky' compared the to the sanded maple neck. I've also now realised that every single one of my basses has a maple neck/maple fingerboard (apart from my currently out of action Warwick)

A buddy of mine was telling me he didn't like the chunkiness of the beautiful flamed and birdseye maple neck on his Stingray. By chance I have a Stingray with a thinner Status Graphite neck that looks a bit out of place on my honeyburst Stingray, so I offered to switch them. I don't have any photos of the red Stingray before, but I think they both look phenomenal now:

Look what you can now do... VID-20251128-WA0001.mp4

Having some fun learning some fills I've never gotten around to going - here's my go at the Thundercat/Mac Miller fill from What's the Use

Yeah I can't say how it works, but it definitely appears to work! It also turns out I "like" the settings I think I should like. I scrolled through the Cali76 captures until I found one I liked (no.29). When I saw that on CortexCloud they had annotated the captures with their settings, I went out to find a fast release/slow attack at a 4:1 ratio. Which capture was it? No. 29!

The new bass cabs should just be in the devices i.e. the cab block (I assume those are available on the nano cortex?)

Yeah you can't stack too many on any particular pair of rows without it having a moan at you

The monosynth is pretty silly: