Al Krow

Pic of your new rig please! Remind me what it's going up against in the black Wood household - CTM 100 and TC RH 750?

So any black Friday purchases that are likely to make it into your best (hopefully not worst!) of the year?

Actually in defence of Hermes, it may have been UPS in my case, I can't exactly remember now - I've looked back through my emails but have only kept the refund confirmation. I've not had any issues with UPS when I've used them myself. ^^ This, except mine was 12 months back. They were apologetic for going around in circles for a couple of months, blaming staff cuts.

That's pretty much my story, too, albeit a much smaller item (a pedal). Hermes or UPS also very much in the frame.

Oh you had a two months wasted life experience with them too?

Zoom B1-4 is IMO the best value bass pedal available from any manufacturer, full stop! Multifx, tuner, drum machine, headphone amp (and a pants looper). I like mine so much, I've got one on my board and a spare for my gig bag.

Wow Lee!! That is SUCH an improved / more usable layout. Brilliant. Just thought it would fun to show what the previous incarnation of your board looked like right next to it!

Just picking up on the excellent post above which appeared right at right at the start of this thread from Mr Gisser. The cool thing that I hadn't spotted that is available post update 2.90 is that we now can also split the signal by playing dynamics / how hard you're striking a note [5.45 of the YT clip below] as well as frequency crossover. That could have a lot of interesting applications and seems to me to be a very cool feature. @PatrickJ has recently introduced me to this guy - I really like the clarity of his tutorials and they're not too long either.

A half price mint condition amp is not a bad result!

Apologies if someone has already posted and I missed, but Line 6 have provided an updated set of manuals to bring them up to date for release 3.0 I've attached the one I've downloaded for HX Effects: HX Effects - Manual (3.0).pdf

Here you go: Black Friday expected to beat UK online sales records | Business | The Guardian Not exactly answering your question, but may serve to idle away a little of your curiosity 😊

Most tempting thing I've seen so far is a Boss LS2 pedal at Dawsons (yes I know!) on at £63 posted, which Mr Lee650 spotted. But as I've just sold mine on the grounds I wasn't using...

Alex you could do far worse than using your own description or some tweaked variation of it: "because you're thinking this is a fuzz pedal - you can get a Jamerson Motown sound from the overdrive section, or Roger Glover with Deep Purple, or Geezer in Sabbath, or Krist in Nirvana, etc etc. And the fuzz pedal can do all the worlds of fuzz, like the synth thing, or the Larry Graham double-tracked thing, or the Ben Folds Five thing, or Geezer again, etc etc." Nothing like making reference to the sound of real world bass players to make the potential of a piece of kit come alive!

Lee continues to deplete my stock of bass gear. He gets some very nice kit at a decent price, often before I've even thought about selling it (a minty fresh Boss LS2 being the most recent case in point, although the postman liked it so much he was holding onto it for what seemed like ages). He also bought a massive Pedaltrain board and Mono case before that to put all the pedals he's bought from me on (finished pics to follow soon I am assured). I get less clutter and a timely topping up of my bass gear account. We both seem to be reasonably happy with the arrangement 😁

Yes it was a big kerfuffle. From TC's perspective they may well not have achieved anything like the sales they did if they had come clean about what the true power rating was. No one likes being blatantly lied to and there was clearly a bit of compressing of the truth going on.

It's points like that have got well and truly lost in some of the earlier discussion on this thread, so thanks for bringing that back to the fore!

In answer to that question, I couldn't have put it better than what you just said: A decent digital multifx can replace much of an entire board. My used Helix HFX costs about 1/5 of the board it's replaced. The only thing I need to add are a couple of filter and synth pedals. My used Barefaced BB2, however? Well that's going to take some beating!

What band mates and audiences are primarily interested from us bassists is playing with groove and flair and being "in the pocket". It really is in the fingers! Nuances of bass tone is something of particular interest and passion for us bassplayers. Obviously "in your face" bass sounds e.g. dirt, filter, synth etc will likely get much more attention from bandmates and audiences simply cos they "register". Back on topic: what tracks are folk on this thread using fuzz on?

Not that it's hugely relevant to the wider discussion - but personally I have no issues with PC editing multifxs, as the pay-off in terms of time invested can be large, as a decent multifx can cover off a heck of a lot of the pedal board and do it very well. The Helix HX Effects offers me a plethora of dirt and fuzz options. My particular "luddite" issue is having to PC edit every tom, Richard dic* and harry individual pedal, particularly those that don't have a decent visual user-interface display, and for that reason I took the decision to move on my Source Audio pedals. I totally appreciate where @Gareth Hughes is coming from too - we all have our different "luddite bars". And some of us don't use pedals at all in the mix and just go bass --> amp & cab and yet somehow still manage to have happy band mates and audiences! 😁

Where this fuzz pedal could have stolen a march would have been with the addition of a gated element available to dial in. Unless I've not spotted, that's an opportunity missed. I think it was @EBS_freak who gave us a really good overview earlier in this thread of the direction of travel of pedal tech and it's unambiguously towards to digital and modelling. At £249, this isn't just going into bat against just about every dirt pedal out there, but also into used Helix territory which has a ton of dirt / drive / fuzz options. And for all the nearly 200 posts on this thread I've not seen anyone actually reaching for their wallet to get this, which is a telling contrast compared to the launch of Helix HX Effects and Stomp. At the end of the day for all the words that are spilled by us and others, that's going to be key proof of the pudding. We've seen it before as other brands have sought to stray from what they are "famous for" and do really well. Alex makes some of the best cabs on the planet. The dirt pedal market is a massively crowded one.

Hey - it's all good. There have been strong views expressed, mostly with a great deal of decorum. BC'ers are passionate about gear, it's who we are. And there are plenty of us who admire, and own, Alex's cabs. I get Stew's sentiment. But if no dared express a view on whether they were even excited or not about a new product until they had owned it and put it through a lengthy workout, well this might as well be Bass Player Magazine, rather than a fun forum where we can spend far too much time enjoying the company of our fellow BC'ers. I wish Alex every success with his new pedal venture.

There is no amp.

That's worth a "like" just for the time, thought and effort that went into writing that post! Although having said that, I normally find such lengthy posts to be mostly baloney balderdash. But not that one.