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!

Over the years, I've video reviewed or tried out pretty much the entire EBS range, sadly not a Fafner! I think in terms of clean tone, they may be quite similar, but the Fafner II does have a separate drive preamp' section wheras the 802 does not. The EBS MicroBass III takes those elements from the 2 channel Fafner and squeezes those in to a pedal, so I would assume that having an 802 and MicroBass III would do just the right amount of damage. I do really rate the MB3 too. {edit} then I scrolled back up to the top of the post and reminded myself you have the Fafner I, so, in that case, I'd ponder that the 802 can "get" the Fafner tone along with all the other extras on board. I have to say, I love the two semi-parametrics in the pre, rather than just the one on many amplifers. (My favourite amplifer has 4 making it happy with every bass a throw at it)

For IEMs, I prefer to have a limiter in the chain somewhere before noise hits my ears too, especially useful for those bands that get louder and louder as the night goes on! Your ears will thank you!

If its just your voice you need to hear for pitching purposes, but you don't need the rest of the band in In-Ears, I used a clever little trick which ended up getting compliments from my band mates at the time as to how my voice had improved. I had some moulded ear-plugs made (it was a company like ACS who used the larger Etymotic Research ER filters) and I bought three sets of filters. They were something like -9dB -15dB, -25dB attenuation). I loved those ear plugs, the sound was really balanced and clear, as opposed to many that are peaky or muffled. The trick was to pick a filter that attenuated the sound outside my head just enough that when I sang I could hear the voice inside my head just over the top. It worked really, really well and did rely on the ear plug filter passing a clear sound. For the band I was playing in generally the -15dB was about right. To be honest, a really good moulded ear plug should be used all the time anyway, so, it's not much of an investment, very cheap compared to the rigmarole of going to In-Ears if it isn't strictly necessary at this point. It didn't really help the other voices inside my head or the ringing, but my voice improved ha ha ha!

The new headstock is a vast improvement. I tend to keep my opinions on headstocks to myself as its how brands identify their products and to a lesser degree to do with the playability or tone of the instrument, however, eeeeeesh there's some munter headstocks out there lol..

Back in 2011, I went to a Hartke masterclass with David Ellefson and Frank Bello, I ended up doing my first ever interview with both of them (Frank live on stage, so, no pressure) for a worldwide guitar magazine video and that's pretty much where it all started for me! So, you never quite know what you'll get! I've been to a good few masterclasses/clinics over the years. Some, you sit, listen and enjoy, others there's more participation offered. The inevitable Q&A session is in there and there might be a break out time to look at the gear and talk directly to the players. (This is especially important if a brand is supporting the masterclass and have a whole pile of products out for all to look at as well). Of those, tehre's never been an expectation to take your instrument, unless it has been specifcally billed as such. My favourite clinics have included Paul Gilbert, Doug Wimbish (another interview I've done), Andy James, my ole guitarist who now plays for Five Finger Death Punch, Brian May and, for nostalgia Geoff Whitehorn and the late, great Keith More, both flanking a wall of stacks in the Marshall Roadshows. Oh and Dave n' Frank, legends.

Yeah frustratingly, I can't even find the picture of the J4 or P4 22 fret models.. only the 20 fret is pictured. The 24fret obviously wouldn;t have an overhang and, with the lack of decent pictures, I'd assume that the 22 fret doesn't have an overhang and is a deal breaker, given the additional costs required to rout the body on top of the neck price. That said, the necks are adjusted, PLEK'd and the nut doesn't "need" cutting, so that coud offset costs. I'd love to try one out on a bass.

I've been a bit overwhelmed of late and, whilst trying to bring a little bit of regulation back to my life I thought I'd ask what you're all using to manage your installed plug-ins, of which I have over 1600 apparently! Brands use different installation methods and, whilst I am appreciative of those who have automated install managers, many (including open source) that I find very useful do not. Whilst pondering, I went on a bit of a web search and found this brilliant application called PlugInfo by ThinkerSnacks, that not only lists my installed plugins and their versions but also, unlike Logic's own plugin manager allows for some basic exporting of the data. Although it does a great job of listing plugins and their paths, it can't tell you if the installed items are the current versions. So, I wrote a basic A.I prompt to do the work for me (Nyerrrrrgh!! A.I!! It will take our jobs!!) to use in conjuction with PluginInfo to hopefully make my life a bit easier. TLDR: To create a colour-coded spreadsheet that lists the plugin Name, Publisher, Version, Type, Architecture, Date, Size and Path marking which are up to date, out of date, discontinued or of an unknown status requiring a manual search. Cooking instructions: * Install PluginInfo * Go to the PluginInfo window, CTRL-A to Select All and then either Right-Click and "Copy Full Details" or Edit > Copy Full Details * Then Paste the output in to an excel spreadsheet document (you can use Numbers or your spreadsheet app of choice) and export as a .xlx * Save the file with any name, maybe "Installed Plugins" and the current date for safe keeping. * Go to ChatGPT and Paste the following prompt, upload the new text file at the same time and hit go.. I have a spreadsheet file containing a list of all audio plugins installed on my Mac, including their names, versions, formats (AU, VST, VST3, AAX), manufacturers, and installation paths. Please create a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet with the following structure: Columns for: Name, Publisher, Version, Type, Architectures, Dated, Size and Path to match the existing upload, add a Status column. Formatting and rules: Each plugin entry should be on a new row. The "Status" column should indicate whether the plugin is: ✅ Up to Date (background color: green #00FF00) 🟧 Out of Date (background color: orange #FFA500) 🟥 Discontinued or No Longer Available (background color: red #FF0000) 🟪 Unknown Status (background color: dark purple #6C3483) Use known latest plugin versions and availability to determine the status. If a plugin isn’t in your known reference list, mark it as Unknown Status (🟪, dark purple #6C3483). Each status should use the corresponding emoji and background color in the "Status" column. Output the result as a downloadable .xlsx spreadsheet. I've tried this out on ChatGPT and I got a fairly good colour-coded document back, though I've since updated the prompt and will need to double-check it. I asked Perplexity and I'm still waiting for an answer, Claude.ai doesn't like the file type for upload, so your results may vary - if I actually fancy putting more time in to it, I'll write a details prompt in a file rather than copying this one. Fun times!

I think that as a user, I'd also be inclined to use a MIDI FS to extend the three buttons. Maybe something like the MVAVE Chocolate, though the QC has 8 buttons and I often have many of them assigned per 'pedal board'. For volume and expression, I'd like to try a smaller pedal like those from Paint Audio, but not the tiny versions as I'm a size 13 in ma slippers!

It's been a busy week here at Dood Towers, but I did get to power up Anagram last night albeit somewhat briefly. My initial reaction is that the UI is really simple to navigate and I managed most actions without the need for a manual, which is always good for those with RTFMaphobia. Looking forward to getting my basses connected and then I will collate these questions to include in my video review.

My first "big cab"was a 1970's Traynor (Yorkville Sound, made in Canada I understand) 2x15 loaded with two Celestion 15's I was given. From memory the cabinet didn't reach seismic lows, although it was plenty meaty for the bands I were playing in, but the upper mid range frequencies were really smooth and present - sublime P bass tone. I ran it with the Marshall Intergated Bass System 200W head, a great lil lead sled, but I would love to own a Marshall 7400, it's a bucket list amplifer for sure!