BigRedX

As you are all probably tired of hearing I've gone the FRFR route and I'm completely sold on it. In the majority of my rigs for the last 35 years all my important sound shaping was done at line level using various multi-effects and therefore my amps and cabs were supposedly there just to make the sound loud enough for me, the rest of my band, and very occasionally (when the bass didn't go through the PA) the audience to hear. Most of the time I was using PA amps to drive my cabs and therefore in was only a small step for me from that to an FRFR system. I haven't really wanted my choice of amp and cabs to influence my sound. It's fine if you always use your whole rig every time you play live and if the bass is going to be going through the PA it's done by mic'ing up the cab(s), but in the real world of equipment sharing and DI'ing the bass that simply isn't going to happen, and if your sound is important to you then removing as many variables from the equation as possible has got to be a good thing. The typical PA-type FRFR isn't going to be perfectly flat, but it's a lot less coloured than a standard bass amp and cabs, so if you can sort out your sound at line level using something like a SansAmp or Helix then you're going to get a more consistent sound FoH and in the Foldback. Theses days TBH even my FRFR is mostly redundant when I play live. For one band we've made a conscious decision not to have any amplification on stage and to rely on the foldback of the venue's PA. Even at the one gig we did where the "foldback" was a tiny personal monitor for the vocalist, because we have an otherwise silent stage we could hear everything else perfectly well from the PA speakers. For the other band the FRFR is only used at rehearsals and as a personal monitor for the smaller gigs where the quality of the foldback is unknown. Because of this I'm not particularly bothered about the sound coming out of the FRFR so long as it is sufficient for me to be able to hear that I am in time and time tune with the rest of the band. Because I love the songs that we play, I find that is all I need to give me the right vibe for putting on an excellent performance and I don't need to agonise about the on-stage mix not being perfect. I'll save that for when I've had a couple of million selling albums. Finally since I switched to using an FRFR I have done two gigs where I needed to use it to supply the bass guitar sound FoH. In both cases it did a much better job than my traditional bass rig which on the few occasions I have not the bass in the PA had to be so loud to get decent bass guitar coverage in the venue that I could barely hear the rest of the band on stage. Using the FRFR with its better dispersion and projection means that I am only slightly louder than I would choose for personal monitoring levels.

But having your amp and cabs as part of your sound only works if you always use your amp and cabs every time you gig and either your rig is used to supply the bass guitar sound FoH or the cab(s) are mic'd up and the mic'd sound is one the one the PA system uses to project FoH. Everything else will compromise what your audience hears.

Pitch to voltage or MIDI is a complete non-starter for the bass guitar for exactly the reasons your have described. The very best system when coupled with a suitably clean sound and playing technique could at best detect the pitch from one and half cycles, but that is a best case situation only and a lot of the time it is much, much worse. On top of that delay you need to factor in the additional processing time time required to generate and transmit the MIDI information to whatever synths or samplers you want to use if the sounds (if there are any) built in the converter are not suitable. There are systems that get around this by using fret sensing to deprive pitch information such as the Peavey MIDI Bass and it's most recent incarnation in the Industrial Radio systems, but they all require you to use the bass guitar they are built into, and from recent reports on here Industrial Radio are having problems fulfilling orders. The Roland V-System is, as you have identified the one to be looking at and hopefully @ped who is a long time user will be along shortly to tell you everything you need to know about it. One final point, the Roland pickup needs to be installed right next to the bridge for decent results whether you are using the V-System or attempting pitch to MIDI conversion, so fitting it instead of a conventional bridge pickup won't put it in the optimum location. You may well be better off looking at something like the Graphtec Ghost system which replaces the bridge with a piezo equipped one to drive the V-system.

The problem for me with bass amps (and cabs) is they add too many extra variables into your sound when really all they should be doing is taking your sound and simply making it louder. To this end I have dispensed with my traditional rig and where ever possible I always go from my Helix directly into the PA. I also have an FRFR powered cab which gets used when necessary as additional fold back and on very rare occasions to deliver the bass guitar FoH. I have noticed that the FRFR due it it's significantly better dispersion characteristics compared with the typical bass cab performs these duties far better, and now on the those few occasions when I haven't been able to use the PA for the FoH bass sound, it allows me to be only slightly louder than I would normally need to be on stage, instead of so loud that I could barely hear the rest of the band.

I currently play in two goth bands...

Brilliant! We've missed your builds on here.

If you like the sound of the bass you have already why did you get a different one? If you need a second spare bass then sell the Precision and buy another Jazz.

When I first started playing I managed to avoid all those "difficult" chords like F Eb Bb C# etc. by simply transposing the song up or down a semi-tone.

As I said in a previous post, if your band image requires it, there's nothing wrong with having fake amps on stage, if not having actual backline makes you sound better both FoH and your IEMs. Before silent stages and IEMs became a thing for anything but big touring bands, The Terrortones used to regularly gig with a band that had the typical "rock band" image. That included a full stack for both guitarists and the bass player no matter how big or small the venue was (it was fairly hilarious watching them trying to get this setup into Nottingham's tiny Jam Café venue). Their reasoning was that the full stack had the same stage footprint as a single cab (and TBH they took up the same space as a typical 30W combo on a tilt-back stand), the top cabs placed the drivers closer to their ears and the bottom cabs didn't have to be plugged in if the venue/stage didn't require it, plus each rig was run through a Marshall PowerBrake and so could be as loud or quiet as needed while still providing the right sound. Once you have the right mentality, it's only a small step from this to fake cabs, modelling pedals and IEMs...

And let them know why you are going direct to them, because IME they'll try and direct you back to their UK retailer/distributer.

Then it depends how important music is in relation to the other things in your life; and you either move to where to opportunities are less limited, suck it up and make the most of your current band situation, or pack in being in bands until one that you find comfortable being in comes along.

But then no records should anything go wrong.

If you can hear them surely it negates the point of having a silent stage? Also I looked at the sizes the biggest platform is 4' by just over 2.5'. For me that's a very cramped area. Even for the small gigs my band currently do I would be using more stage then that. I can see the attraction of the stools/seats for drummers and other sit down players but for those of us who move about, it's always going to be a bit of a compromise.

I never recognise "famous" people out of context (i.e. if they are not on stage performing - I was at a gig in a tiny venue where Nick Beggs and The Manic Street Preachers were also in the audience and didn't notice any of them), and so I'd probably treat something like this happening in the same way as any other stage invasion.

Fine if you never move. Do they have one that covers the entire stage? However, IME if you need to "feel" the sound to get the right vibe then there is something wrong with the songs.

If you want to change anything about your band and you are not either the Band Leader (for want of a better term) or the main songwriter - or you are being paid a stinky poo-ton of money to be in the band, then it is time to leave and find another one where there isn't anything you want to change.

Has the earth side of that jack socket been soldered directly to a contact on the volume pot? That looks like a recipe for disaster.

I'm planning on having all my possessions interred with me in my pyramid.

@Ed_S Do you have a lot of equipment failures? I think in over 40 years of gigging I've only had a handful that were more serious than breaking a string and all of them were fixable in a way that allowed the gig to carry on; and just one of those fixes was noticeable to the audience. One of the many reasons I've ditched my backline is that it cuts down on the number of spares I need to consider whether or not to bother with.

As I said previously, I don't yet use IEMs with either of my bands, but the one that is most likely to be using them soon recently did a gig where the fold back for the house PA consisted of one tiny wedge monitor. Not a problem because we don't use any amps or cabs on stage we could hear what was coming out of the main PA speakers perfectly well in order to be able to play in time and in tune. You'd surprised by exactly how effective the PA is for hearing yourself when it doesn't have to fight for clarity over on-stage amplification - as has been pointed out by another poster above.

As I have said before, I came away with a small profit after selling my old bass and guitar rigs and replacing them with a new Line6 Helix Floor and RCF745 FRFR and would have made even more profit if I had realised how little use the FRFR was going to get and gone for a cheaper model.

You do what you do for all "mission-critical" equipment - carry a spare. It doesn't have to be another pair of expensive custom moulds, a set of ZS10s (£45 from Amazon - even cheaper if you want to take a chance with AliExpress) will get you to the end of the gig. Cheaper than a spare amp or wedge and more than small enough to live permanently in your bag of gig essentials and unlikely to be left out because your couldn't be bothered to load them in or didn't have room in the band transport for a particular gig.

Strange how these amps get so much stick, yet my recollection of them is down entirely to the bass player in a Nottingham band in the early 80s who had the most phenomenal bass tone using one of these to amplify his Aria Pro II SB1000.

It will, if you put it at the other end to where it would usually go as the OP intends. IME a single thickness of good quality business card filling no more than one quarter of the neck pocket is usually sufficient. It has a bigger impact on the neck angle than you would think.

There are two separate issues at play here: Firstly the importance or not of having amps and speakers for the individual instruments on stage. IME if everything is going through the PA then at best your amplification rig is a personal monitor and at worst a stage prop that could be messing up the on-stage sound. As soon as you have multiple single instrument sources on stage trying to arrange them on a typical stage, so that all the musicians are able to hear what is coming out of them is nigh on impossible anything but the smallest of venues, and if you look at the typical band setup most don't even bother. If they did, the amps would be placed at the sides of the stage pointing across, but when was the last time you saw that? Once you start having to put anything with its own amp into the foldback, you might as well dispense with on-stage instrument amps and give each musician their own wedge monitor and their own personal monitor mix. Instrument amps only contribute to the sound of the instruments due to a historical accident, because amplified music became popular while the cheapest way of producing amps was using valves. Let's face it electrical engineers would never have purposely designed an amp to distort no matter how musically "pleasing" that sound may be. Their original intent was always to make the instrument sound louder without adding any additional colouration. This has also lead to the problem that both the amp and cabs become part of the instrument's sound which is a particular issue for bass players because the PA rarely mic's up the bass cabs and even if they do, they will also take a DI and you have no way of knowing which source is actually being used for the FoH sound. If you want the sort of colouration that ancient amplification operating outside of its intended parameter produces, then it makes far more sense to dispense with the on-stage amps and speakers and use signal processing instead to replicate the sound. These days IME in a band mix it is indistinguishable from the "real" thing. And. if you play in a band where having a large and impressive looking backline is still part of the image then get some light-weight, low-profile empty ones to use as stage props that take up less floor space on stage and can be folded away to save space for transport. As you can probably tell, I've dispensed with a dedicated bass rig. I found that I was playing two types of venue - small ones where I was being asked to turn down so much so as not to overpower the FoH sound that I could barely hear myself from my rig compared with the bass sound coming out of the guitarist's wedge on the other side of the stage; or the large ones where even my big and impressive-looking rig couldn't even begin to cover the whole stage and once again I was mostly reliant on the foldback to be able to hear myself. I was asking myself what was the point of taking this rig to gigs (3 items that were all ideally a two-person carry) when most of it made no contribution to what myself or my audience were hearing? I now use a Helix for my sound and an FRFR cab for rehearsals and the very occasional gig where the PA is strictly vocals only. I've done only a handful of these types of gig with any of my originals bands in the last 25 years, and the FRFR has been a massive improvement in terms of dispersion (and consequently on-stage balance) compared with my much more expensive traditional bass rig. I've gone from having to be so loud on stage that I could barely hear the other instruments in order for the bass guitar to project into the audience, to being just slightly louder than I would normally choose. So really the only bass players who need a traditional amplification rig are those who only play small-ish gigs with vocal-only PA systems, or those who play in bands where the majority of the other instruments don't require amplification (like big bands). It seems ironic then that much of the advertising for amplification relies on "big-name" endorsees for whom the equipment they are promoting has little real-world benefit. The other issue is that of IEMs: Neither of the two bands I currently play in have made the switch to IEMs even though I think both would benefit from it. One of the bands is definitely more open to the idea than the other, and I suspect that finances allowing, this one will be be using IEMs within the next 12 months. The biggest problem I see with IEMs is that the band really need to be doing their own foldback mix to get the best out of them. Quite a few of the bands that I have shared the bill with over the last few years use IEMs and all of them take much longer to soundcheck and suffer form numerous problems integrating their system with the house PA at the venue. This becomes even more complicated if you are also using the IEMs for things such as click tracks which are not wanted in the FoH. When I make the change it will be because the band will have also added the equipment required to do our own on-stage monitor mix that can be kept completely separate from the FoH and include things like click tracks, count ins and other band-only cues. TL:DR pretty much everyone who isn't playing in a small pub covers band with a vocal only PA would benefit from ditching the traditional backline and using IEMs. Ultimately it's going to produce a better sound on stage and FoH and overall there will be less equipment to carry and set up. It's early days yet but I suspect in 10 years time we'll be wondering why it was even necessary to discuss this.