dannybuoy

I’m sure it has side markers. I prefer the sleeker look of no dots also, you can’t see them when you’re playing anyway! They are useful in a jam though so it’s easier for others to work out what you’re playing.

I like the look of them. Tried one out in Wunjos alongside several other PJ basses though and it was the worst of the bunch. That’s just one opinion of one bass though, so take it with a pinch of salt! Definitely worth paying them a visit though, and try out some of the PJ Jaguar basses to compare, now those I liked!

I've returned a couple of items that were subject to a 'restocking fee'. I brought up that it was against the distance selling regulations to charge such a fee, and they waived it.

Nice clips @Quatschmacher! I'm more interested in the straight envelope filter sounds and I like the MF-101 preset, I'd love to hear the Meatball and Mutron models if you're up for doing more.

Went to Denmark Street to check out some acoustic guitars. Found myself drawn to a fretless acoustic bass, fell in love, walked out with a solid body fretless Yamaha electric bass instead!

I've got MIDI built into my Godin A4 fretless, but I've never tried it!

Yes, it'll likely be analog. The reason I'm sceptical about it removing noise from the actual note is that I know how difficult that would be to achieve from an engineering perspective, and the maker only refers to it being a noise gate. All noise gates work on the same principal of only letting the signal through when it's over a certain level. The better ones are finely tuned in their response time so that your ears don't detect the noise as the note decays. Usually that's the only time you'll hear the noise, so if the Zuul clamps down really quickly and efficiently, it'll seem as if the noise has disappeared entirely. Noise reduction to remove the noise completely though, is a whole other ball game. It usually relies on digital trickery, much like noise cancelling headphones. It's much more advanced and would be a pedal first as far as I know!

My money is still on the fact it’s just a really well engineered regular noise gate. With a cool AF name and design! Filtering noise without tone suck is a tricky business (remember the Dolby button on cassette players?). Also 40mA is quite low for a digital pedal, most are in the 100mA ballpark.

The Darkglass parallel out is just a simple passive splitter. It’ll better than most cheapo jack adapters due to the fact it’ll be better shielded due to being in a metal box. But because it’s not buffered or isolated in any way, your main signal could be affected depending on what kind of pedal you plug into the parallel output. But mostly you’ll be fine and not notice anything!

Ideally you’d use a buffered splitter, otherwise you could get undesired results such as if the split gets sent to 2 devices with wildly different impedances. But in reality you can usually get away perfectly fine without one - Darkglass seem to think it’s OK to hardwire their parallel out to the input and I doubt they get many complaints about it!

Later on in that vid though, I can definitely hear noise in the background whilst playing, it is of course hard to pick out though as the guitar is so loud. To filter noise from the actual signal whilst playing would be on another level above everyone else, and they would surely be shouting about it from the hilltops! The key input is a good addition above simple 2-jack noise gates, but many these days have an effects loop which achieves exactly the same thing but without needing to split your signal separately. BTW you don’t necessarily need a dedicated pedal to split the signal, you could use a double jack adaptor or cable splitter. The parallel out on the X7 is hard wired to the input jack, so no different to using one of those in terms of wiring connections!

You can play fast syncopated lines like that with an analog gated fuzz like the Diabolik, so the Helix might be able to offer something similarly gated without having to rely on a waveform generator?

I thought it was pretty much a regular noise gate, i.e. it shuts off the signal unless it reaches a certain threshold. So it only cuts noise out when you are not playing, and when you are playing, you just don't notice the noise because your instrument masks it?

Pointing to actual differences then - is it true that the FI, C4, etc have actual waveform generators, e,g. square wave, sine, triangle, sawtooth - but the Helix can only do synth effects by combining fuzz/octave/filter?