BigRedX

It's not a particularly fast process, and would be a serious inconvenience if it did it after switching on at some gigs I play, which is why I mentioned it.

Just tried my Helix again without HX Edit active. The Preset select switches on the top row (I have mine sent up with 4 Snapshots on the bottom row and 4 Presets on the top) are now instantaneous but the Preset Up/Down switches still seem a little slow, although not as bad as yesterday when connected to the HX Edit application. What was somewhat worrying is that when I switched the Helix on this time it insisted on rebuilding all my user programs again - even though it did this already yesterday after the firmware update. I have a feeling this happened after that last big firmware update as well. Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?

So why do you do it? Is a significant source of your income? I work in another creative area - print graphics - for my day job, and AFAIAC there, the client is king (or queen). But that's because they pay me. I will offer my opinions if asked, and if I really think the design route they want me to take is wrong, I'll politely suggest what I think is a better alternative. However unlike some of the designers I used to work with (before I went self-employed) I won't get upset if they ignore my advice. I'll happily take their money produce whatever they want. This is the closest I'll get to having moan about it. However when it comes to music I only do what I want. Audiences/listeners can take it or leave it. Luckily I don't need to make a living out of playing or composing and most of the time enough people seem to like the music I write and perform for my bands to get gigs and sell CDs/records etc., but I have done gigs in the past where almost no-one turned up, and I do have a number of copies of CDs etc from old bands that are unlikely ever to sell, but none of that stops me from continuing to produce music irrespective of its popularity.

No. Most of my good friends are musicians with similar tastes to me, or at least enough crossover for us to like a significant amount of what the others like. I've nearly always gone to gigs on my own. That way I don't have to feel bad if I want to leave early because the last band on turn out to be rubbish, and I can make sure I'm at the venue in time to catch all the support bands, unless I know already that I won't like them. It's always amazed me that some people deliberately don't go and see support bands simply because they only want to see the main band and haven't even bothered to find out what the other bands are like (something that is easier than ever to do these days). I'm happy to listen to anything once, but equally there's a lot of music that I won't want to listen to a second time. Which leads me on to my main bugbear - lots of people who meet me for the first time on discovering that play in a band seem to automatically assume that I must like any old crap when it comes to music - especially anything that is musical complex or requires technical virtuosity. They always seem quite non-plussed when I explain that I'm a composer first and a musician second, and I write mostly because I don't like a lot of music, and therefore the more I write the more music that I do like will exist.

I have 4 basses that I use regularly and all have different strings on them. Gus G3 5-string passive - Warwick Black Label 45-135 Gus G3 5-string active - Warwick Black Label 40-130 Eastwood Hooky Bass 6 PRO - GHS Eastwood Hooky Strings 30-105 Burns Barracuda - Newtone Axion Custom Works Fender VI set 24-100 These are the ones that give me the best combination of playing feel and sound with each particular bass.

Finally got around to doing the 3.5 firmware update yesterday evening. Failed twice before it finally installed which was a bit nerve-wracking. I did notice that post-update the patch selection on the Helix seemed a bit sluggish when connected to my Mac with HX Edit open to the point where a couple of times I thought I hadn't pressed to relevant foot swtich properly. As I was refining the patches for a couple of new songs I needed to have the program open, but I've never noticed this previously. Hopefully I'll have a chance to see how it behaves on it own later today.

Not sure about the form factor/performance interface, with what appears to be just on/off and then patch up and patch down footswitches. For serious live use you'd need to use it with a MIDI patch select pedal which means it would be better as rack mount unit, rather than a large pedal.

Good luck with the restoration. But consider that having it tweaked for bass might affect its resale value (if that's important to you) as IME the majority of users these days are guitarists.

It's a new bass with a fault. Send it back and get one that is right.

These days the size of the driver(s) is about the least important factor in determining how a cab will sound. Remember you get plenty of bass out of your headphones and HiFi speakers.

At the moment the average is 5-6

How much memory did you have in your old Mac? And were you running any 3rd party plug-in with massive sample libraries? A new M1 MacBook Air is way ahead in terms of performance, so it should be fine, also the way the memory architecture works on the M! and M2 chips means that you may get away with half the amount of RAM you had previously and not see a performance hit. However I'd still order one with 16GB rather than 8GB RAM. Yes a MacBook Pro will be even better, but if you were still reasonably happy with your old Mac then any Apple Silicon Mac will be a massive improvement. I currently have a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM for live use and for me a MacBook Air would be more than adequate. There's some threads about this on Sound On Sound forums in the Mac Music section. Have a read through them if you are still worried, but ignore anything by Howdy Doody Time as he lives in a country with a computer unfriendly environment.

Surely that only works if you stand in the same spot facing in the same direction for the whole gig. The moment you turn around to face the drummer all your sound sources will be back to front. I would have though stereo was more useful for separating out similar sounding instruments.

TBH the "accuracy" of the models and the fact that I can add Impulse Responses of my own are, for me, the least interesting aspects of the Helix. For a start I'm not sufficiently familiar with any of the devices being modelled to be able to say how close they are. All I'm interested in is whether they can make a sound that I like, in which case they'll have a place in my patch. The way I see it is the Helix has several different examples of each type of effect that I am interested in, and at least one of them will produce a suitable sound. Also I hardly use any of the amp or cab sims. Most of the time I think they make my basses sound worse. I have one amp sim that I use on a few bass patches because it has a useful drive sound that can't be replicated by any of the distortion pedals, and for some of my Bass VI patches I use the Roland Jazz Chorus Combo sim because the EQ suits the Bass VI, but otherwise I just have an EQ module instead. This might be because I've never owned a "normal" bass amp. In the 80s I had a cheap generic 100W transistor amp and then went straight to multi-effects with a power amp for all my subsequent bass rigs.

I'm assuming that the Fralin J5 pickups which you like are smaller than the soap bars which you don't like? Could you not just buy another set of Fralins and make wooden or plastic surrounds to fill the extra space?

For me the fact that's a single unit was the main selling feature. Replacing mine with individual pedals plus a board/case, PSU(s), and all the leads to wire it up would probably be in the same ballpark cost-wise. And that's just assuming I can get away with just one pedal for each effect type that I use (I can't), don't need instantly recallable user programs with the ability to change settings and effect order for different songs (I do), and some of the time based effects won't have tap tempo let alone MIDI clock synchronisation (a must for both my bands).

There are no hard and fast rules about what bass sounds will work with any given band. It will depend very much on the line-up of the band and the arrangement of the songs. Generally the mids are your friend if you want to be heard among the other instruments, but even that isn't 100% true. I used to play in a band where my usual driving pick attack bass sound disappeared almost completely the moment one of the guitarists switched to a clean Stratocaster. Use your ears listen to what the other band members are doing both in terms of note choices and sounds and adjust your sound and note choices accordingly.

Just out of interest, for my Bass VI patches on the Helix where I am using an amp/cab sim it's for guitar amp rather than a bass amp.

To the OP - have you had your refund yet?

Really? IMO in real terms it's never been cheaper. My first multi-effects was a Roland GP8 plus the foot controller and expression pedal which I picked up for a few hundred pounds in the early 90s. However I'm pretty sure that original new price when it was originally released was closer to £1k. That's for a unit which was essentially 8 Boss pedals in a pre-set order fitted into a 1U rack with a terrible parameter access user interface. By comparison the Helix Floor which when released was about the same price of around £1k is streets ahead in terms of sounds, configuration, and user friendliness and overall versatility.

Or any verse again. Mr Venom was terrible at remembering the words to his own songs. I doubt anyone ever noticed including most the band. I only spotted these mistakes once the songs had been properly recorded and finally knew what he was supposed to be singing and when.

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Just a thought. Some aggregation services place restrictions on how your tracks are named. I think this is in order to make sure that there is a consistency to capitalisation etc. If your band uses non-alpha-numeric characters in your song titles or weird capitalisations (The Terrortones had a lot of song titles with run-on words that had capital letters in the middle of them) you may find that the aggregator doesn't allow you to render the titles as you want them. CD Baby were particularly bad/strict for this last time I looked. That may influence your choice of service.

Because I use my Bass VIs to play both "bass" and "guitar" parts I discovered that having the Helix and FRFR absolutely essential in getting a balanced sound between the two. When I first switched from playing my "normal" bass after the guitarist left one of the bands I'm in and we decided not to replace him, I was using the rehearsal room's bass rig as before, in order to save on the amount of gear I took to practice, and found myself turning up all the Helix patches to compensate for the loss of top end on the "guitar" parts. However at the first few gigs with this band when I was using the FRFR for monitoring they were now all too loud. Now I always use the FRFR and I have been able to achieve a balanced sound for all the strings.

These days yes (5): Gus G3 5-string passive (black) Gus G3 5-string active (red) Eastwood Hooky 6-string bass Burns Baracuda Squier Bass VI Soon it will probably be four when I get around to selling the Squier and Burns and replacing them with a second Eastwood Hooky. I also have 4 guitars. At one time (around 2014) I had almost 50 guitars and basses, as well as a number of synths, samplers and other high-tech musical instruments.