Kiwi

OK so another update.

1) Mimmotronics sent the modded pedal through but the EHX Freeze no longer freezes.  Noone knows why but Mimmo has offered a repair at no cost to me.  Now just have to wait until CNY is over before the post service is working again.  Sigh.

2) Now that the family is housebound, I had a play around in depth with the editing options on the C4 and discovered that it may suffer from the same issue that the Moment Machine had.  Two adjacent steps at the same pitch merge into each other and become one step of double length.

I'm hoping (
@Quatschmacher) that there are some settings  around envelopes that I've missed where I can assign an envelope to steps rather than to the whole sequence.

Also, while I was trying to replicate some Stock Aitken Waterman basslines, I was starting to find the ADSR options a little limiting on the C4.  It seems I can only choose from presets rather than set the curve.  It makes dialing in some SAW sounds impossible as they used ADSR to fine tune filter responses.
 

4 hours ago, darkandrew said:

Do you know, I've never ever looked at the MSG line. Having looked now though, they look really good - and just when I thought I was going to have a GAS free 2020 - Damn you!

 

Ha hah!  They're great instruments, highly underrated and very smooth sounding.  They do a very, very convincing LP sound with a nice set of PAFs in.  Whole Lotta Love is an  absolute hoot to play.  I guess you could even throw a set of SD P Rails in and have everything.

I used to have three but one was a little brighter than the others so I sold it.  The only thing that might top them for me would be a PRS Custom 22, but at nearly three times the price it would be hard to justify and possibly wouldn't sound as close.

I've plugged my Yammies and Strats into my GB Shuttle 6 into fEARful 2x10 cabs and it sounded quite nice for cleans - almost JC120 but extra hi-fi.  It was a little harsh for distortion though.  I run a fairly clean and neutral bass rig.

On 22/10/2017 at 05:04, darkandrew said:

I've got a trio of ESP Eclipses but no matter which pickups are in them, they just don't feel right when playing clean, funky rhythm guitar. Instead, I find myself reaching for my cheaper Korean Fender Tele FMT. I can't put my finger on it; they're both mahogany/maple set-neck guitars with twin humbuckers but the Tele just lends itself so much better to that style of playing. The main differences between the Tele and the Eclipses are the scale length (Eclipse, being similar in shape and construction to a Les Paul, is slightly shorter than the Tele) and the body shape - would these really make that much difference?

The tele tends to be fat and sweet with both pickups on and it carries a nice bite.  Prince used one as a main guitar for this reason.  But the strat gets a look in as well, with Nile Rodgers and pretty much anyone playing in the 4th position (Cory Wong, I'm looking at you).

BUT...don't write the LP off.  I'm not a fan of the LP body shape so I have a couple of Yammie MSG's instead and in one I replaced the stock pickups with jazzier/archtop type PAF by Aaron Armstrong.  So on the neck pickup I can get some mellow stuff and on the bridge pickup I can still get some decent chunk with distortion on. 

For clean LP - Long Train Running, Play That Funky Music,  most of the Brothers Johnson stuff, Brick House, a lot of Bobby Womack stuff, Tower of Power stuff, one of James Brown's guitarists used an LP...even the intro to the Theme from Shaft.

You could even swap out the humbuckers for P90's for a fat sound with more single coil bite and be set up for the solo to Another Brick In The Wall (Gilmour played it on a LP with P90's)
 

4 hours ago, Rich said:

It's even better with a horn section 😁

Your band does the choon justice.

3 hours ago, dave moffat said:

aganoooooooooooooo!!

Next you'll suggest the birdy song

The Birdy Song.

Town Like Alice - Jam

Sex On Fire - Kings of Leon

Let Me Entertain You (if there are keyboards) - Robbie Williams

Crocodile Rock - Elton John

Brass In T'Pocket - Pretenders

Anything sung by the Blues Brothers

It kind of does depend on the audience but the middle ground is probably pop hits from the last 10 years plus some blue chip funk standards or blues brothers tracks that mum and dad will recognise.

Spector is selling to Korg.

Sadowsky is licensing construction to Warwick (possible future buyout?)

Smith has licensed construction to Brubaker.

Pedulla has recently retired.

Amptweaker is being sold to Alpha Distribution due to James Browns ill health.

Anything else happening that hasn't been covered above?!

Or Shuker, the finish is basically a rock hard polyeurathane.

All I can say, as an former owner of three Celinders, is thank goodness it isn't a 5 stringer.

Ibanez have consistently put together great designs and well specified instruments on paper. But I've tended to be a bit disappointed by how the through-necked Soundgear range sounded.

Yeah I meant setting up the sensors on the bass.

6 hours ago, Quatschmacher said:

I’ll see how it is when it arrives and if needs be take it to Jon Shuker to change the setup.  

John is one of the best in the biz and he has a background in electrical engineering.  I just hope IR are willing to part with the information needed to set the bass up properly.  If they are, he'll figure out how it all works I'm sure.

Well done, how are you going to manage the setting up of the bass to cater for your own technique and preferences?

On 28/12/2019 at 06:33, musicbassman said:

If you're doing a West End gig then you really must have a dedicated driver with a ULEZ compliant van who can drop you off, disappear for the duration of the gig and then pick you up again at the end.

Trying to drive yourself to a West End gig, unload and then somehow park up somewhere is impossible these days and you'll likely end up being late for the gig AND get a parking ticket AND a suspected heart attack due to extreme stress....

I had a gig at the Cafe de Paris one time and miraculously found a parking spot on Lisle Street close to the Hippodrome.  Came back after the gig and found my car had been broken into.  All the scrotes took was my GPS suction cup stand - they'd tried to jimmy out the radio but unsuccessfully.  I took the detachable head with me when locking up. The screwdriver scratches in the dash were permanent though.  The car was otherwise undamaged as they got access by popping the driver's side window out of the frame and when I filed the police report, I discovered the parking bay was in a CCTV blindspot, suggesting the thieves knew exactly what they were doing. 

I'm really fond of my Series 1.  Really wish it was a 5 string but the only one I'm aware of with the same spec as mine is Jimmy Haslips.  His sounds phenomenal.

My family had a succession of siamese and oriental cats from when I was 11 through to 3 years ago.  They're fantastic cats, very quirky and interesting, but a bit prone to health issues.

This is precisely why I like them.  Very comfortable for my 194cm frame.

I agree about the price though and it looks like a weird Supernatural Calibas love mutant.

We once had a gig at the top of the Gherkin (aka St Mary's Axe) in the City of London. The load in consisted of driving into the basement and lugging the PA and other stuff into the service elevator and it took multiple lift journeys to get everything to the top. Half way up we had to change lifts as for building code reasons, lifts aren't supposed to go higher than a certain number of floors. So we had to lug everything out of the first lift and into the second, which as a walk around the other side of the central lift cluster. THAT lift then only reached one floor lower than the place we were actually playing in. So everything had to be hauled up one more flight of stairs to the roof space. And the acoustics were terrible. An all glass dome meant frequencies were bouncing around like demented chimpanzees.  Nice views though.

Then, at the end of the gig, we had to do it all again but this time in reverse.

I have found most pedals track better if a few criteria are met in the bass.  The FI and SB1 both track single pickup basses with limited amounts of high frequencies and lots of mids better than other basses.  So that vintage P bass or stingray are just the ticket.  That Status Empathy with lots of fret noise probably won't be.

Brief update - Mimmotronics eventually replied to my FB message and apologised for not seeing it sooner.  An EHX Freeze with the wet only mod and soft arcade style button has been ordered - it's a cheaper alternative to the Gamechanger Audio pedal and I avoid paying for features I'm unlikely to use.

13 hours ago, AlphaK said:

If one thing doesn't come up to scratch, surely it just means you need to get one extra pedal rather than 6 extra?

I think what you are suggesting might be true with two conditions:

1) That the starting point was having an SY1000, which is different to where I am as I had already invested in half the pedals in the signal chain anyway, particularly the FI. 

2) That there were alternatives to the SY1000, which as far as I can tell there aren't.

7 hours ago, AlphaK said:

Could you potentially replace your 7 pedals: 

 

With this?

Check this out and goes into detail from 2.10 in...(although I think he may be using a GK midi pup?). The sequencer is unbelievable! That's probably 'cos it's actually: "two 16-part step sequencers for evolving control of pitch, filter, and amplitude"

 

I'm a bit wary of all in one units at the moment.  All it takes is for it to do one thing less than expected and the whole unit ends up redundant.  Seven pedals is a lot but, as you have probably read, if one doesn't do the job as expected then I can swap it and leave the rest of the pedal board as is.