BigRedX

In the days when I was still using a conventional bass rig I found that using the Gramma Pad actually made the bass stack more unstable on some stages especially one where the ideal location for the drum kit and bass speakers meant that the kick drum pedal and the bass rig were mechanically connected via some loose boards under the carpeting and resulted in some terrifying looking movements of the bass rig!

I don't think you'd need the computer for gigging. It's just for creating the sounds in the first place. If you did find yourself needing to tweak the oscillators and envelope generators as part of the performance you'd need to make sure that the switches were set to the right ones for each patch (which would need to be done manually) before you started playing. It's one of these things you'd won't know is a problem or not until you've spent some time with the synth. Personally I'd be more worried about the limitations of the two octave keyboard. At you price point there is very little in the way of alternative especially if you want a full compliment of sound editing controls on the front panel. Off the top of my head only the Korg Monologue comes close...

On both of my 3-pickup Bass VIs (Squier and Burns) I found that the middle pickup was best for "bass" sounds although neither suffer from the noise problems you describe despite having single coil pickups, so I'd investigate the the shielding and grounding on your bass before committing to the hassle and expense of a pickup change.

They appear to be aimed a guitar players rather than pick players per se. Having said that I found the string spacing on my Squier Bass VI tight even by guitar standards, and borderline unplayable with the thicker Bass VI strings.

IME as soon as you fit sensibly heavy strings in order to get decent sounding and feeling E and A string, the vibrato mechanism becomes completely inoperable to people with normal arm muscles.

I think having multiple sounds is of more about being able to please a larger number of potential users rather than supplying lots of different sounds to a single player. Certainly when I have owned guitars and basses that were capable of producing lots of different sounds from the on-board controls, I would only use more than one, if the alternatives were only a single switch push away. Even then I'd probably stick with the one overall sound that worked best with the band and use a programmable multi-effects to alter it as required.

In which case so long as you are OK with only being able to play a single note at a time, you should be OK. However don't under-estimate the desirability of having a dedicated front-panel control for every parameter. I used to own a Waldorf Microwave XT which has an impressive number of knobs and switched on the front panel (the XT rack version is an additional 3U bigger than the standard version to accommodate all of these). However, as soon as you needed to access any of the more interesting modulation functions including the additional envelope generators and LFOs, you were back to parameter access and a relatively small display. I know that the switch selection for the Oscillators and EGs would very quickly get on my nerves as I'd be forever adjusting the wrong one. I'd be looking for a computer-based editor that shows all the controls on a single screen for any serious programming.

In my first band (late 70s early 80s) all of us played everything (guitar/bass/keyboards/percussion/any other instruments we could get hold of), and who played what on any particular song was down to a mixture of who wrote the music and who could play which part the best. By the end of the band we had become more settled into individual rolls with me playing bass most of the time. Since then my musical "career" by band has gone as follows: 2. Bass 3. Synth 4. Guitar & Synth 5. Bass 6. Synth 7. Bass eventually swapping to guitar 8. Bass 9. Bass 10. Bass 11 & 12 Bass and synth

What do you want to do with it? A few things to be aware of. It's a mono synth - only one note at a time so no chords. The two octave keyboard could be a limiting factor for playability. Some of the more interesting sound shaping functions do not have a dedicated front panel control which includes the fact that both the oscillators and both envelope generators share a single set of controls with switches to chose which one you are adjusting; so you can't just look at the controls and know what everything is doing in a quick glance. If you can live with all of those then it's a pretty good introduction to hardware synthesis.

Thanks. Unfortunately that's too narrow at the nut for me. I'm looking for a distance of at least 40mm from the centre of the lower sting to that of the highest. 35mm is the same as my Squier Bass VI which I find borderline unplayable. I'll most likely end up with a second Eastwood Hooky.

IIRC after a certain point (well below £70k) the fees are capped.

But for pitch to CV or MIDI you don't want to extract all the harmonic frequencies in the signal. You need to identify the fundamental as quickly as possible and in this case zero crossings are actually useful.

You don't need one on programmable effects. You simply change the output level on the last effect in the chain and save it as a new patch or snapshot.

Unfortunately the only way the OP will find out will be if they do it to their bass. All basses and all players are different. Just because it works for one (or more) player(s) on their bass(es) doesn't mean it will work for the OP on their particular bass.

50 years ago due to the grain pattern, that piece of wood would never have been considered for making into a guitar or bass neck.

It's a lot more complicated then that because the waveform of a plucked string is unlikely to be symmetrical about the zero point. There are plenty of standard waveforms that display asymmetry - consider the pulse wave on a synth which is a square wave where the mid zero crossing is not equidistant between the two either side. For that you would definitely need 3 zero crossings to get a stable pitch and more if the pulse width changed over time. Real-life waveforms are even more complex than electronically generated ones, and that's before you take into account other variables like the fact that simply plucking the string will cause the first few cycles to be sharp. Of course you can get around some of this by using pitch quantisation, but then you also lose a lot of the expressiveness that comes from a playing a guitar or bass.

IME the best hardware fix for recording latency when using a DAW is to use a small multi-bus mixer. You only need 2 more channels on it then the number of sources you intend to record in a single pass. Run each source you are recording through it's own channel and output on a separate bus going to your interface, at the same time also routing them to the main stereo bus on the mixer. Then have two channels (not routed to any bus other than main stereo mixer outputs) taking the main stereo output from your DAW. Then turn off software monitoring, so that only the channels being played back by the DAW are going to the stereo output (and not any that you are recording). You monitor from the mixer. You here a stereo mix of the tracks already recorded on the DAW plus the instruments you are recording just through the mixer. As the new sources you are recording don't have to do the round trip from interface to DAW and back to the interface there is no latency at all.

That looks interesting but the scale length and pickup placement say more "Bass VI" than Baritone to me. What tuning have you been using on this? I might be interested. Can you let me know the following measurements: 1. Width of the neck at the nut 2. Distance between the highest and lowest strings at the nut 3. Distance between the highest and lowest strings at the bridge Thanks!

One of the bands I play with recently did a couple of "acoustic" gigs. We were going to play sitting down until both the singer/guitarist and myself realised that it was going to require a lot more practicing to cope with different instrument position (on top of the fact that we all had to learn playing different parts to what we do when we play the songs in a normal band setting).

But for most people who don't know the city, NYC = Manhattan. From a UK perspective it's a bit like saying you make your instruments in London when the reality is that you're not based in the West End but on an industrial estate in Croydon. Still the business model is obviously working for them, so none of us here can really knock it.

I've never needed to adjust my bass sound to cope with poor venue acoustics in over 40 years of gigging. The one place I have played where the acoustics were noticeably terrible plus the bass wasn't in the PA, simply closing the curtains over the large expanse of windows/glass doors down one wall made way more improvement to the overall FoH band sound than any amount of EQ fiddling could have done.

There is no "magic bullet". A good bass tone is one that works with the other instruments in the band/mix and that will depend entirely on what those other instruments are, what tone they have, and what role the bass is supposed to play in that particular set up. All of those variable can only bee known when you are actually playing with the other instruments. Have a listen to any of the isolated bass tracks from recordings or gigs that are available on YouTube. Most of the time the bass sound on its own is not that impressive and often has a lot more "drive" then you would expect. However once in its proper place in the mix it sounds perfect.

They play up the NY bit as though they were in Manhattan. But they're not. They're in Brooklyn, and not even in the trendy (expensive) part.

Yes. I play at home to practice or writing songs for playing with the band. Therefore I use the same bass that I'm going to be using with the band. I also play at home standing up as that's how I play when I'm playing with the band.

IME a requirement for volume or being able to "feel" the music generally means that either the songwriting or the arrangements aren't good enough...