BigRedX

Why do you want a gig bag? To save a bit of space in the car, or to actually carry your basses any significant distance (i.e. more than the trip from the car to the venue).

A drummer I worked with in the late 90s had a home brew version of this, with a small conventional kit that had been fitted with triggers and comprehensively damped inside the shells. It worked nicely for the band because even the significantly reduced acoustic sound of the drums was loud enough for us to hear on stage without needing the samples and synthesised sounds loud in the monitors. It also worked well for those members of the audience who listened with their eyes rather than their ears (usually other musicians) who consistently commented on how much better this drummer sounded even though he was triggering exactly the same sounds as his predecessor who used a more obviously electronic kit, as well as the sequencer we employed before that!

And that's why I have ditched my traditional amp and cabs in favour of a wedge-shaped FRFR as a personal monitor and PA does the bass (and all the other instruments) for FoH.

Speakon plugs/sockets are a properly engineered solution for the currents and voltages present in amp to speaker connections for anything other than low wattage (under 50W) combos.

Do the drums function of useable acoustic drums too or are they damped in some way to reduce the noise?

IIRC the maximum cable length for USB was originally quoted as 5m. I've also successfully used a USB extender system which employed Cat5e cable and allowed me to control a computer several rooms away via the standard network cabling system. I don't know how good this system would be with timing critical USB data though.

In that case unless getting RecAll working is still a priority, just continue using Reaper. On the basis of that update my suspicion that it is a clocking problem that is being caused by RecAll is the favourite. If you still want to resolve this then please post the zoomed in screen shot of one of the clicks and point me in the direction of the manual for RecAll.

Female backing vocalist/keyboard player is Shirley Manson

That's Karl and Rick who are now Underworld.

If this works for you good. Just remember that £700 is still a lot of money when Reaper is essentially free and nearly everyone already has a computer for other tasks. The age of the technology means that when part of this system dies it will probably be unrepairable (or if it is still fixable it won't be worth the cost). No support for plug-in instruments, which means if you want synths and samplers you'll need to buy more hardware and if you want to sequence them via MIDI you'll still need a computer to do that. Personally I'd not want to rely on anything that requires floppy disks in this day and age, more out-of-date technology that is becoming increasingly hard to fix should it go wrong.

If the HF is there simply to remove any unwanted subsonics from your signal, then it should go last in the chain - ideally in the (series) effects loop of your amp so the amp's EQ isn't boosting them back up again. That leaves you with just two pedals that could go in either order, so experiment and see which way around you prefer.

You're probably thinking of Mikey Guitar. Unfortunately they now appear to be out of business. The domain name is up for sale and there are just a couple of low-quality video left on YouTube.

To keep the action correct for both fretted and fretless playing the fingerboard between the frets would need to be raised...

This situation is exactly why I ended up ditching my amp and cabs. With one of the bands I play with most of our gigs are supports for reasonably well-known bands who still use a traditional backline and therefore I just set up in front of the bass rig and no-one in the audience is any the wiser. With my other band the line up is vocals, synths and myself playing Bass VI with programmed drums and additional sequenced synths supplied by the computer. In this case the empty stage really suits the overall band image.

Can you please zoom right in on one of those clicks so that it fills the whole window and take another screen shot?

BTW can you zoom in on a "crackling" waveform in Reaper and send a screen shot of it? That might help work out what the problem is. The lack of clock sync that I initially suggested manifests as pulse waves one or two samples long on the positive part of the axis.

Using a Mac makes troubleshooting much easier since OSX has a couple of handy utilities in theOS that can tell you about how the system is configured and where and why potential problems may be occurring. So check the clocking in the Audio MIDI Setup, which can be found in your utilities folder. With the XR18 inputs selected it should say Clock Source: Default. This means that you have a working synchronised clock source between the Mac and the XR18. If it doesn't let us know what it does say. Then double-check that RecAll isn't over-riding this setting somewhere in its preferences. If there's an option have the XR18 supply the clock Next, how full is your system drive? It is recommended that you always keep 10% free. On top of that you'll need enough space to record your audio. For a monophonic track each minute recorded at 44.1kHz 16bit is 5MB so a 45 minute set with 9 tracks being recorded will require 2GB free on top of that. If you are recording at 24bit that adds 50% to the figure, and obviously longer sets require more space. To be safe I'd want a quarter of the system drive free for recording a gig. If you have a good USB2 external drive it might be worth trying that and seeing if it makes any difference (see the advice about USB buses below, though). I'd also suggest that 8GB is little low for Catalina (the OS will use nearly all of that before you run any thing else) so, if you can, upgrade to 16GB. I have a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro and adding the additional RAM is simple if you have the correct size Philips and Torx screwdrivers. The less storage access the OS is doing for house-keeping purposes the more reliable the audio recording will be. Then if you are still having problems check what else is on the USB bus that you have the XR18 connected to. As I said before laptops have all sorts of additional devices that you won't necessarily know about potentially sharing the bus, such as the keyboard, trackpad, memory card reader, web-cam, WiFi, Bluetooth, (which is why all wireless communications should be turned off) etc. To see what else is on the bus have a look at USB in the System Information (Alt-Apple Menu>System Information). Check all the USB sockets on the Mac to see which one has the fewest other devices, and that's the one to use. Unfortunately the only way to see is to plug the XR18 into each, quitting a reloading the System Information program each time (it doesn't have live refresh). Also, unfortunately USB socket ≠ USB bus, so several USB sockets may all be on the same USB bus. HTH

If the clock settings are all OK, can you let us know the following: 1. What make and EXACT model of laptop are you recording on to? 2. Where is this recorded audio being saved to? The system drive or somewhere else? If somewhere else how is this device connected to the laptop? 3. How many tracks of audio are you trying to record simultaneously and are they mono or stereo? 4. Are you running any other programs on the laptop while you are recording? If so what? and why? The buffer size shouldn't have any impact on the recording process if you're not monitoring the recordings in real time (you shouldn't be doing this in this situation), so, it may be that you are getting a data bottleneck somewhere. While USB2 (or 3) are pretty good, laptops tend to have an number of "invisible" peripherals which can have the potential to disrupt the USB bus. For a start if you don't do it already I would disable both WiFi and Bluetooth while you are recording.

Have a look in the preferences settings for RecAll. Also if you are on a Mac open the Audio MIDI Setup and check the clock source for the XR18 input.

This normally occurs because the sample clocks for each digital device have not been synchronised. What connection are you using between the XR18 and your computer? The best method is to use the device with the most accurate clock to control the other(s). However, the most practical way is for the recording device to be synchronised to the one supplying the digital audio as it can usually be done using the same connection for both the clock and the audio. I once spent a week removing all these clicks from 20 minutes of 8 channel audio, because I'd forgotten turn on clock synchronisation when we digitally transferred the audio from ProTools to Logic using an ADAT connection, and it wasn't possible to do the transfer again properly. Because of the way the clicks are generated they were in a different place on every track, so the only solution was to listen to each track solo'd and use the pencil editing tool to manually draw over them wherever they occurred. It's a mistake you only ever make once!

IIRC Lull make (or made) a "P-Bass" with (their) Thunderbird pickups in and I'm pretty sure @Happy Jack has both one of those and a Lull "Thunderbird" so he might be well placed to comment?

From my recollection sh!t brown stopped being a fashionable 70s colour by 1977 at the very latest, so these Fenders didn't even have dodgy 70s fashion going for them.

Thanks for updating us. When the cab was mic'd, did anyone take the time to listen to each driver in turn to find out which one was closest to delivering the "sound of the cab", and if so did you ensure that this was the driver that was mic'd each time?

The OP needs to check their particular combo. Not all of them have a spare speaker socket for an extension cab.

Yes but there worse it is, the more the "vintage" tag will be pushed as essentially that is all it has going for it. Back in the late 70s I had a part-time job working for my local musical instrument retailer which was in the process of moving on from being somewhere that sold home organs and cheap beginners violins as well a few budget Japanese copy guitars and basses (think Columbus and Grant) to a shop that catered for the "rock roll" instrument market, and to this end had become dealers for Fender, Ibanez and Aria guitars. When the Fender guitars and basses arrived pretty much every single one had serious build problems, as well as the fact that many of them were finished in seriously unattractive colours - predominantly sh!t brown and a unfinished looking see-through white. If it had been up to me the whole lot would have gone straight back to Fender with a demand that they send us some properly made and attractively finished instruments by immediate return. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and the only person who was happy was the free-lance guitar tech who saw lots of additional income from trying to make them playable.