Dood

Gosh, what a horrible time to be a top quality bass gear reviewer! Neural DSP, Darkglass and now Line 6 all bringing out new toys! Mwah ha ha ha!!

Although I didn't end up ordering in the end, I also contacted RightOn about making a custom strap for me. They answered back and asked questions then offered solutions along with a price and how to order. The only reason I didn't go through with the order is that I received a lovely welcome gift from Bass Gear Magazine,a care package that included a big branded strap! That said, I might still treat myself given that they could make the strap I had in mind.

First one spotted for sale on FB https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AUpTNPC9q/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Whilst you're at it, arrange with the band to have a member (at least) join the ISM or Musicians Union. You'll have access to their advice, legal department, PLI, gear insurance and most importantly template contracts to create your own, so that you don't get stuffed by unscrupulous "venues". when they skirt around accepted booking practices.

https://greasygroove.com isn't a UK based company, though they have a great selection of products and looks like they ship internationally. However, to help you order, I did stumble on this page with PDF templates of a wide range of well known brand PDF templates to download for free. Handy if you wanna create your own I guess. https://greasygroove.com/will-it-fit *I've made a decent post about the company (I don't know them) so I'm not just leaching their templates off the website for nowt.

I'm yet to dig in to fin dout more, but I have found another two plugin management applications for your perusal: https://owlplug.com https://sonisto.com/access-manager The latter seems to be able to manage updates too, but both websites lack descriptive detail!

Oh Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!! I'd hope you'd be able to get an immediate swap out, but nevertheless it's a massive ballache having to go back / ship the item to where it was bought from. Hope it gets sorted quickly!!!

I have to admit that I started off as being a plug-in hoarder. I'm like a magpie for shiny shiny things ha ha! There's plenty that could be uninstalled now after 5-6 years with the same machine. The next application I need is one that will help me organise the handful of plugins that are really useful and the ohers can either be moved to a separate folder or removed swiftly! I just haven't gotten around to doing something about it. I guess that means I'm busy, which isn't a bad thing.

Incidentally, the bottom image was an hour battling with ChatGPT and an image of my bass!!

I do have some small squares of material that would kind of work; I suppose I’m already not that enamoured with pickups being little black rectangles, so I was thinking of something that would be a bit more in keeping with the curves of the instrument. It wouldn’t be the end of the world from a utility standpoint .. especially given my skills with a saw ha ha!!

Hey all! I am drawing (pun intended) upon the artist talents - and maybe those who can create diagrams that CNC cutters can use to help me create a pickguard for my ‘kinda P bass’ body. But, you just know that where I’m involved it’s not going to be an easy task, is it?! Fussy pants Dood. Doody Pants. The bass, or what could end up being basses in question are my lovely Fender Power Jazz Bass Specials. The ones with the carbon fibre headstocks I’ve realised that I really like having a certain amount of height between the body and the strings for certain playing styles which I can improve by having a thick pickguard on these basses. We have issues though - firstly, the controls on the body are not in a good position for a standard P bass plate - even though the body isn’t too removed from a P shape! Which leads me to the next issue. As the body has extra scooped out cutaways on the upper and lower horns, extending a normal P plate down the lower horn just doesn’t look right at all. I’ve included someone else’s design that really isn’t for me at all. So, I have a few ideas to try out. The first is a design that would be similar to the one that I made and submitted to Sheldon Dingwall for Dingwall AB1 basses and, I had it on my flip paint model, a one of a kind. I love how there’s a curve that circles around the controls and want the same. Also look at the way this Dingwall bass does the same. My AB1, I really like this half-guard design, inspired by thunderbirds and Les Pauls (incidentally before the D-Roc came out). As for the lower horn, I can only find a few scratch plates that do the sort of thing I would like, but none of them look quite right, but hopefully you get the idea. I need to find a way to round off the lower horns part! I’m pretty sure carbon fibre will be the plate of choice to match the headstock, what do you think?

Absolutely! As a young upstart, learning my way in bass, it was all new to me, I hadn’t even heard of Billy Sheehan and the likes at that point, aged 10, 11 or so. Wow, I remember when James Brown and Peavey brought out the 5150 (No not THAT James Brown lol) - Speaking of guitar tones, that’s a model I use very often! Doug Pinnick at the point should get a mention!

You've just reminded me! When I was a wee whipper snapper, I'd read that Duff McKagan from Guns n Roses recorded his bass split between his bass rig and a guitar amp. At the time I had a little Marshall Bass 12 combo and my friend had the Lead 12 guitar version. Well, it wasn't long before we had the two stacked on top of each other with my bass plugged in to both. Honestly, even at that point as an impressionable oik, I was smitten with blending the mids of a guitar amp tone in to my bass sound. - And to think we can do all of that and more for free without leaving the house these days, crazy!

Great pictures and review Machines! Nice bass!

The free Neural Amp Modeller is absolutely incredible, nearly as incredible as Steve Atkinson, the designer who as far as I know is still giving away the code as "open source". Darkglass' brand new Anagram processor has the NAM player embedded and, Steve makes available the profiling side of the software for free so that you can capture your own gear!! The actually quality of the captures tested against the original is comparable if not better than some modellers out there, the internet says. I think there's a few other brands that are starting to integrate NAM in their processors too such as Valeton (GP-5) and Sonicake (Pocket Master). Its an exciting time to be alive! I do have rather too many amp sims, IR's and captures on my desktop, I can suffer from option peralysis at times but as @Beedster says, it's a whole lot easier these days - and cheaper! There's a few groups / pages I follow that offer up cheap and free plugin deals; the quality of these are just brilliant. Even the "bad ones" are still infinitely better than my old Zoom 2020, 4040, 8080 or 9050S I owned 'back in the day'! Bonkers!! Check out sites such as The Bedroom Producer's Blog, Anmer Hunter's YouTube channel, Plugin Boutique, Plugin Alliance umm... definitely United Plugins! I love United Plugins!! They have a birthday deal on, I would highly recommend anyone doing recording to buy everything by FireSonic from their deals. There's loads of resources out there. I grabbed STL's AmpHub LE the other day for free from Focusrite to try it out. I'd bought an 8 Pre interface last year. I use the Neural DSP amp plugins the most, especially the Cory Wong X. You'll hear the SSL desk emulation on pretty much everything I record, it sounds SO good! I could go on, but those at the back have fallen asleep already!