BigRedX

I have the Line6 Helix gig bag which is prefect for my needs. All the associated leads, and my passive EMO DI box, go in the front pocket so everything I need apart form my bass is contained within this one case. Also by doing it this way it doesn't matter which bass I'm using I won't have left anything at home. If I had a device like the QC, with it's external power supply and separate expression pedal they would all need to be mounted on a pedal board for reliability and suddenly the smaller form factor is no longer an advantage. I have found that depending on the size of the device having it mounted on a board or in case base, can make the foot switches too high to be comfortable. Because of this, with one of my bands I now have all my Preset and Snapshot changes automated as part of the backing track, which is our drummer and second synth player. All I need the pedals for is to access the tuner and as an automated set list using the Preset names. I'm aiming to do the same with the other main band I play with. I do the bulk of my programming at home using the HX Edit application. The front panel interface is only used for fine tuning at rehearsals.

For me the larger size of the Helix Floor was one of the main selling points. On the smaller models the foot switches are just a bit too close together to hit accurately in the middle of a performance, and I find that only the front row of switches are useable mid-song, as trying to access anything further up the device will also result in me pressing something I didn't intend to with my heel. I have my Helix set up so that I only need to use the front row of switches while I'm playing.

I found that the Helix could be quite picky about what it shared its USB bus with. For it to work reliably as an audio interface it was best on its own USB bus although before I moved it, I hadn't noticed any slowness with the HX Edit application. However if I was sending it a lot of MIDI data from Logic, HX Edit would loose the connection, and I would have to click the reconnect button before doing further editing. Remember also that on a Mac each USB socket is not necessarily on its own bus and some of them share one of the internal buses for things like WiFi and Bluetooth. The System Profiler Utility is your friend for troubleshooting these situations. Unfortunately I could never consider the QC, it just doesn't look robust enough for some of gigging environments I encounter. Because of the external PSU without a locking connector, and lack of expression pedal it would have to be mounted with those on a pedal board which makes it a lot bulkier and cumbersome. One of the great things about the Helix Floor is that it is effectively its own pedal board. Can the QC be programmed from the "front panel" without using the touch screen? Touch screens do not like my fingers. Often my iPad and phone fail to recognise that I am using them and for me, supermarket self-checkouts are almost useless.

Depending on which model you want it might be worth looking for a second hand MiK model. My MiK StarBass was superior in pretty much every way to all the MiG versions I had tried.

Surely curated streaming playlists have taken over from radio? Not only can they be a lot more focussed but there will be plenty for you even if your taste in music isn't mainstream enough to make it onto radio. Plus you can skip anything you're not enjoying.

For the one time I have had a dead spot on a neck, the Fat Finger worked very well as the dead spot was gone and didn't seem to re-appear anywhere noticeable. You can experiment with different sized G-clamps first to see if it makes a usable difference before shelling out on something more expensive and aesthetically pleasing.

The code button only allows you to display code in your post. In the past it could be used to explain to other forum users how to do things like link to images etc, as it would display the code rather than execute it. Since all coding is done automatically from the formatting bar in the current versions and nothing else is permitted, it has little relevance these days.

There used to be a neat BBCode trick you could do where you could fool the forum software into thinking that a script was a PNG image file. I saw it in action on another forum where one of the members used it to show a different image at random as his avatar every time you loaded a thread in which he had posted. However it also required you to have your own web server to host the back-end code and image files for it to work. I also suspect that the recent versions of forum software will have clamped down on this as it could potentially be used to inject something more nasty into the page code.

IME not being able to "feel it" when playing live, normally means that either the songs aren't very good or that they are simply not to the musicians' tastes. Everything is a lot more exciting when played loud. I found in the past that I have been a lot more forgiving about the material I have been playing in rehearsal and at gigs simply because of the volume it's being played. With the band I played with in the 90s and with one of the bands I play with currently we rehearse at what I would term "slightly louder than normal hifi volume". This way the songs have to feel good/exciting at a bit louder than our audience would listen to them from the CD or record at home. My thinking was always if we can enjoy playing the songs at reduced volume then they are going to sound awesome at a gig. I don't know if that helps or not, but from my experiences of playing covers, I found a lot of the material tedious and the excitement that comes with the band being loud was the only way to keep me interested. Of course once I had realised that, it was became another reason to stop playing covers.

But if you look at the process carefully he's only retaining the base of the pot casing which have the codes on them. The rest of the pot is from the new "donor". If he was just replacing a track that had worn out, I think that would be acceptable. However he's just kept the one part that identifies the "age" of the pot. That to me is fraud.

Surely he's removed all the mojo?

There was also a technique popular in the 90s where guitars with light-coloured woods for the body (top) would have the colour coat carefully removed around the edges before clear-coating to produce a faux-binding effect.

The simple answer is that you can't. AFAIK the Basschat forum software has never supported HTML within posts or signatures, just BBCode. Plus, in order to improve security, all that is currently supported in the forum is a cut-down set of BBCode which means that you can no longer add the tags manually by typing them in, but have to use the forum interface (the line of icons at the top of the "post" dialog box) to do this. Additionally there are limits to what can be placed in signatures as for some reason a lot of members were using multiple huge images.

I use a Line6 Helix Floor with my Bass VI where I am often playing "bass" and "guitar" parts in the same song, and the alternative would be some complicated and unwieldy switchable dual amp and cab rig. TBH most of the time I'm not using any amp or cab models as IMO a bass amp is just an EQ section and maybe drive if it has some valves in it and bass cabs are essentially LPFs, so the right EQ and drive models are far more useful to me as I pick and mix and be tied to a particular EQ and drive sound from an amp. When I do use an amp model it has been picked mostly because I like the drive sound, and I'll try and set the EQ on it flat and use a separate EQ module to fit the sound into the band mix. I've found that the trick with all modern multi-effects is to program with your ears and not your eyes. Ignore what the various modules are supposed to emulations of, and just decide whether you like the sound they produce or not.

AFAIK the same editor works with all of the Helix range, so I find this a bit strange, as on my 14 year old MacPro there is nothing slow about it when programming my Helix Floor. What other devices do you have on the same USB bus?

The Newtone Axion Bass VI set is just a touch heavier and considerably cheaper than the LaBellas.

As recommended, I shimmed the neck which increases the break angle over the bridge and this combined with the increased tension of LaBella round wound Bass VI strings was enough to render the vibrato mechanism inoperable.

As everyone is sick of hearing me say now. Line6 Helix Floor. As my core sounds I'm using the 10 band graphic EQ, Teemah! Distortion and 70s Chorus for one band; and Obsidian 7000 Distortion/EQ, 70s Chorus and Elephant Man Delay for the other. No Amp or Cab models, except where I'm using an amp specifically for the drive sound on a couple of Presets.

As some who plays Bass VIs exclusively with one of my bands, these are my thoughts: The neck is narrow. In fact of all the Bass VIs I have played or obtained specifications for (and it's a lot of them) the Squier has the narrowest neck of them all. Mine was one one of the first batch, bought almost 8 years ago, and I believe the more recent examples have a slightly wider neck by a couple of mm. However it is still very narrow and consequently the string spacing is very tight at the nut, and the thicker bass strings don't help. Think 70s Stratocaster, but with thicker strings and you'll get an idea of how narrow the neck is. Like a lot of people my Squier Bass VI was bought on a whim and when it was very cheap, and it was largely unused for several years until the guitarist left one of the bands I play with and we decided to continue with no guitar player and me using the Bass VI instead. As a consequence of this I embarked on the mission to find something with a wider neck and therefore more playable for me. There's a multi-page thread about this which I can have a look for if you think it might be useful. The upshot of this is that the Squier was initially replaced with a Burns Barracuda, and more recently an Eastwood Hooky. Since it isn't even my back-up bass now I've been thinking of selling mine, but haven't got my act together to list it. The other main issue is that the supplied strings are bit on the light side for bass players, which means unless you play with a very light touch you'll find the E and A strings far too compliant and floppy. The good news is that there are at least two manufacturers making heavier strings that are more bassist-friendly - LaBella and Newtone. However I found that fitting the heavier strings while improving the feel of the E and A, the increased tension rendered the vibrato mechanism almost useless. Some users have also reported intonation problems after fitting a heavier low E string. On the plus side it looks and sounds great. If you can get on with the tight string spacing at the nut and the supplied light strings, then it's a great instrument. For me the compromises with the strings and the vibrato bridge plus the tight spacing meant that I've had to look elsewhere for a suitable Bass VI, but it did get me started and realised that the Bass VI concept would work for me and my band. Just not the Squier model.

"Real" is entirely subjective, as is what constitutes a "powerful, low, fat bass sound". I'm a Helix user, but either device should be capable of producing a suitable sound so long as you program with your ears and not with your eyes. Despite having ditched my traditional bass rig for just the Helix going direct into the PA, I very rarely use any amp or cab models. Remember that the important elements of your sound that the amp gives are the EQ section and, if it has valves, the drive sound. The cab is just essentially a LPF. I found that using a good EQ module and a distortion module is far more flexible, as you can mix and match to find a combination that you like, and the two elements are not tied together in a single amp sim. If you do decide to use amp sims don't forget to try all of them - not just the ones that are supposed to be for bass. Remember that many vintage bass amps are simply guitar amps with a different name and occasionally the EQ frequencies adjusted for the lower notes. And unlike the real thing there is no possibility or damaging anything by using the "wrong" amp model. The worst that can happen is that you won't like the sound, in which case you can move on and try another.

The problem is actually the other way around in that Gmail, Hotmail and the other free email providers have started rejecting email from other email hosts that don't have the very latest authentication features. This has mainly affected small business who are paying for their own email addresses as part of their hosting services. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are no error or rejection messages received by the sending service. The emails simply never reach their intended recipients. It's a simple fix for the owner of the host that involves changing a couple of settings. Unfortunately if your are on one of the bigger hosting providers like Fasthosts, they have so many accounts that it is taking time for the hosting service themselves to update them all. I ended up doing the one I administer myself after a week of no-one with a Gmail address receiving any email from us, but it's a process that looks daunting for the non-tech-savvy, so they may leave it until the setting are updated automatically by the hosting provider.

Marketing emails will have been sent using a bulk email service like Mail Chimp, and although it will have a Bass Direct "return" email on them, they won't have actually come from that address.

If bass direct have a domain name associated email host and they haven't recently updated their security certificates, then a lot of free emails services like Gmail etc. will be blocking what they send, as part of their attempted clamp-down on spam. If Bass Direct's email host is any good they will eventually be doing this for them, but if they are with someone popular it may take a couple of weeks to implement. Bass Direct could do it themselves (it's fairly easy so long as they follow the instructions to the letter, I've had to do it recently for an email service I administer), but until enough people complain I suspect it won't be high on their list of priorities.

I have very little talent when it comes to playing the bass but the additional strings actually make a lot of what I play much easier.

In a couple of years time everything made in the Twentieth Century will be at least 25 years old.