Happy Jack

+1 I've only ever used Hot Wires on my Status Streamline and I've never yet regretted it.

My signal chain is unaffected. Previously I ran the signal from the DB pickup into an AI Clarus, using the amp both to drive my cab (stage) and as a DI to the PA (for FoH). That's exactly what I will do tomorrow, except that the signal from the DB will pass through the ToneDexter to get a mic'd up sound.

Yeh, but can you play Brown Sugar on it?

I bought it from Mark at https://gollihurmusic.com/

That was the whole point of using it with the AliKat. I was using the WaveMaps from the Zeller and the Kolstein to modify the sound of the AliKat.

Can you powder-coat chrome?

That would be it then, for that recording I had nothing plugged in. More importantly, that means I can only hear it when playing acoustically. As soon as I amplify the bass, it disappears. I'll be gigging this bass on Sunday afternoon (at The Nag's Head in Sunningdale) and I'll post a video from that gig as soon as I can. I doubt any rattle will be audible. 😎

By the way, Mark Gollihur has read this review and emailed me to say Did you not get our "quickstart" sheet that I wrote up? We include it with every TD we ship out, and it "bullet points" the process of creating and testing a Wavemap, using layman's language.

Hi Alain, used to love my TB10, only sold it when I had Safran Bass make me a custom 5-string Iris. When my recordings mention 'Bypass', I'm playing the bass with the signal from the pickup passing through the ToneDexter pedal but NOT affected by it. I could have routed the signal straight to the amp but I wanted the most direct A/B comparison I could get. I should also have stated that, wherever I am using the ToneDexter in a recording, it is always a 100% blend ... i.e. there is NO uneffected signal there at all.

Why Douglas, I'm touched ... that's quite the nicest thing anyone has said to me this year! Not get back to yer tom-toms. 😂

How to irritate a new user The manual is colourful and glossy, but poorly worded and badly thought out. As an exercise in communication it is really quite frustrating. The box says "for Piezo pickups", page #1 of the Introduction says that "Magnetic pickups are not recommended ... but may sometimes yield usable results", page #5 states that "ToneDexter only works with piezo pickups". The trickiest part is the initial set-up. The process is fraught with pitfalls for the first-time user which could easily have been avoided. Example #1: The manual emphasises that it's best to use headphones to ensure that you can hear what you're doing clearly, and goes on to suggest that you set the level from the mic input by playing in a certain way. So, position the mic, on with the headphones and start playing ... the correct lights are flashing, it's obviously receiving a signal, but the headphones are dead. Play with the settings, check the connections, replace the leads, adjust the headphone volume level, exchange the headphones for another set, nothing, nada, not a sausage, bugger all. To hell with it, let's go forward anyway. Plug in the instrument lead from the DB pickup and instantly everything springs into life. It was all working all along. Turns out that you're not actually supposed to hear the feed from the microphone in the headphones. A single sentence of a dozen words would have saved 30 minutes of frustration. Example #2: Having created a first pass at a WaveMap (their jargon), obviously it's time to listen back. There's no difference, none at all, whether the pedal is engaged or disengaged. More checking of cables, connections, settings before realising that the Character control is actually a Blend control with a really silly label. If Character is rolled right off, then all that feeds through to the amp is the uneffected signal. Another short sentence opportunity comprehensively missed. For a section entitled 'Getting Started' this is a very poor performance. Incidentally, on a much closer reading of the manual, the Character knob turns out to be even more complex, having three different functions depending on where in the range of the knob you are operating. The first half of the travel (from 8 o'c to 12 o'c) does one thing, the next quarter (to 2 o'c) does something else entirely, and the final quarter (to 4 o'c) does something slightly different.

Live band rehearsal With the first post-Covid gigs coming up, my Rockabilly band was well overdue for some rehearsal time. We routinely rehearse amplified but low-volume, with the singer's mic NOT plugged in; that way we have to play at the volume level set by unamplified lead vocals. I chose to use the setup heard in recording #08 and it just sounded wonderful. To my ears, and in the mix, it sounded exactly like the bass played acoustically and amplified through Nadine. Unlike me, the other two guys in the band are Rockabilly afficianados with a wealth of knowledge and experience plus very strong opinions on what is acceptable. They both liked it. Result.

09a AliKat Unplugged normal volume.wav 09b AliKat Unplugged enhanced volume.wav 10 AliKat ByPass Clarus.wav 11a AliKat ToneDexter Clarus Ch.13.wav 11b AliKat ToneDexter Clarus Ch.14.wav 11c AliKat ToneDexter Clarus Ch.15 reduced volume.wav

AliKat / piezo So this is where I came in. My original interest was in using the ToneDexter to make the AliKat sound more like a wooden bass. Then I convinced myself that this wouldn't work. Then I heard what the ToneDexter could do when 'misused' by pairing with a mag pickup. At this point I had four WaveMaps stored in the pedal, two each for the Zeller and the Kolstein. Well it would be rude not to try them. The natural acoustic sound of this bass is at recording #09a in the next post, but the f-hole plugs (anti-feedback) reduce the volume so much that I also saved recording #09b with a 6dB increase to make comparison easier. Yes, I could have removed them, but do that often enough and they will break ... they're only foam rubber, after all. Recording #10 is the AliKat being played through the ToneDexter but on Bypass, then we have: · recording #11a - the AliKat through the ToneDexter using the Zeller/LA320 map, · recording #11b - the AliKat through the ToneDexter using the Kolstein/LA320 map, and · recording #11c - the AliKat through the ToneDexter using the Kolstein/Nadine map. Are any of those an improvement? Depends on what you hear and what you like, I suppose. I'm comfortable that none of them make the AliKat sound worse, and in a real world gigging situation I rather like the idea of having four slightly different outputs available at the twist of a knob in order to make the sound 'fit' the gig.

05 Kolstein Unplugged.wav 06 Kolstein Nadine PA.wav 07 Kolstein ByPass Clarus.wav 08 Kolstein ToneDexter Clarus.wav

Kolstein / magnetic The natural acoustic sound of this bass is at recording #05 in the next post. The bass has had some issues recently; it is louder acoustically than the small body size would have you expect, but there's something of a rattle there and we haven't managed to work out what it is yet! Given our success with the LA320 it seemed sensible to simply repeat the process with the Kolstein and see whether anything would work at all (see grumbling about the Manual). Well it worked, yes, but in truth the sound wasn't that great, and I considered it no great improvement on the basic sound of the Schaller magnetic pickup, which drifts into Precision territory. As it happens, I had the Ear Trumpet 'Nadine' (another large-diaphragm condenser) mounted on the Kolstein already so I thought we might as well give that a try. The result was little short of spectacular, with the ToneDexter using the mag pickup to successfully reproduce the acoustic sound picked up by Nadine, and at the first attempt. To hear Nadine played through the PA, check recording #06. Recording #07 is the Kolstein being played through the ToneDexter but on Bypass, and recording #08 is the sound of the Kolstein as modified by the ToneDexter.

01 Zeller Unplugged.wav 02 Zeller LA320 PA.wav 03 Zeller ByPass Clarus.wav 03a Zeller ByPass Comparison.wav 04 Zeller ToneDexter Clarus.wav

Zeller / piezo The natural acoustic sound of this bass is at recording #01 in the next post. For our first pass we mic'd up the Zeller with a Samson C01 as being pretty much the vanilla flavour of condenser mics. The results were OK but nothing special, and what was most obvious was the loss of volume ... what we got out was noticeably quieter than what went in. We were also concerned that the pedal was over-emphasising the higher frequencies, although we could easily solve that by rolling off the treble knob on the pedal to about 10 o'clock. Apart from that, by and large we were trying to keep most of the knobs in a central position. [Incidentally, you can't compensate for things like this through rolling off the treble before setting up the recording. The tone controls only affect the output from the WaveMap (their jargon) - the initial creation of that WaveMap excludes the player from messing about with the input.] So we tried again, this time using the rather nifty LA320 large-diaphragm condenser by Lauten Audio which is a significant step up from the (perfectly decent) Samson. The LA320 is very much a studio mic - you wouldn't want to take this on a gig - and this showed in the immediate improvement in the sound quality. To hear the LA320 played through the PA, check recording #02. Again the output through the pedal was much quieter, leading us to wonder if the frequency shaping done by the ToneDexter is always about subtracting things rather than boosting. To hear this loss of volume, check recording #03a. For the remainder of this review, bear in mind that I was constantly adjusting volume levels between recordings to compensate for this. I won't mention it again. But at this run the important thing was that the piezo pickup was sounding very substantially like the acoustic sound of the bass, i.e. the pedal was working. Note that this pedal costs (as of today) £419. That is one helluva lot of money for a pedal and it would be a massive disappointment if it did anything other than work! Recording #03 is the Zeller being played through the ToneDexter but on Bypass, and recording #04 is - at last - the sound of the Zeller as modified by the ToneDexter. This is what I paid for.

https://audiosprockets.com/tonedexter/ I have three double basses, each very different from the others, each presenting very different challenges at live gigs - and yes, I gig all three. #1 is my trusty old Andreas Zeller 3/4 bass with a piezo pickup in the bridge wings; #2 is a Kolstein Busetto bass with a mag pickup on the end of the fingerboard; #3 is an AliKat 3/4 aluminium bass with twin piezos - one for the string sound (in the wings) and one for the body (under the bridge). #3 is very showy and a real head-turner, but the native sound is best described as a cross between a double bass and a steel drum. It can be tamed by someone who is either very good at what they do or is very familiar with that bass, but I normally use it at the big festival-type gigs where who you get as sound engineer is just pot luck. At these gigs, people tend to listen with their eyes. When I stumbled across the ToneDexter by Audio Sprockets, my interest was piqued by the idea of using it to persuade the pickup signal from my AliKat to emulate the acoustic sound of one of my other DBs. I soon realised that this was never going to work, but by that point I had become interested in using the ToneDexter 'properly' with the Zeller and the Kolstein, down-playing the sound of the pickups and trying to reproduce through both bass rig and PA the sound of the acoustic instrument as amplified by a really nice microphone. So I ordered a ToneDexter from Gollihur and sat back to wait. The packaging was simple but effective, and the pedal came with a multi-country adaptor plug, which was helpful. The manual and set-up process were so unnecessarily frustrating that I've given that issue a post all of its own a bit later. All of which said, from a standing start and in the course of a few hours, we were still able to get very useable settings for both the Zeller (easy enough) and the Kolstein (rather more surprisingly), and of course the issues described above are the sort of things you only encounter when using a complex product for the first time. And you can ignore any tosh online about the pedal only working with Piezo pickups. Very few people want to wade through a mass of very similar recordings so, for each of the three basses, there's a post describing what I did and what I found, followed by another post (which you can skip over if you wish) containing the recordings.

I have no doubt that these sound different to someone with superb hearing, but to me they all sound pretty much the same. Seriously. I'm listening through decent studio monitors at sensible volume levels, and I suppose there's a very slight tonal variation, but nowhere near enough to make me prefer one of these basses to another. I have reasonably bad tinnitus which interferes with my hearing of high frequencies, but not the mids and lows. Put that guy playing those basses in a band situation and I doubt if anyone could possibly hear a difference between them. As always with these demos, they've chosen an immensely talented bass player who thinks that he's there to show how quickly he can play lots of notes. There's no actual law that says you can't demo basses by playing a simple walking bassline that allows the listener to concentrate on what the video is supposed to be about.

More totally reliable dealings with Owen ... dead easy and all good.

A Google image search did turn up a few 'custom' colours, including this:

Your description of the smell is actually quite re-assuring ... when I had mine that smell was one of the most distinctive things about it! Just ask @Clarky. This was mine (nine years ago), and this finish was the one I used to see the most:

Does the bass smell? That's a serious question. The material used to build an Ampeg BabyBass is a type of plastic that - after time - emits a pungent and really quite unpleasant aroma, especially after the bass has spent a period in a case or gigbag. I have to say that the finish on that bass doesn't look like anything that would have left the Ampeg factory.