Al Krow

It's kinda family though, right? I bet it sees itself as the true and worthy descendent of its "illustrious" 1918 forbear.

Wow! What an introduction to your Spector bass journey - congratulations! EMG 40TW pups with the single coil / humbucker options for both? This thread has gotta take the biscuit for the amount of GAS induced spending on a particular brand of basses, right?!

Thanks Luke - I gladly accept your corrections, which all make good sense! The question arises would the K12.2 provide enough low end if they were the main PA speakers? Or are we talking about getting the heavier RCF 735As to deliver this? [Aside - we use RCF 310As which are just the ticket in terms of power and portability for vocals, sax, and acoustic guitar. If we tried putting bass through them, I suspect it would be a non starter, and the advice on this thread seems to be that we'd need something along the lines of the bigger RCFs to deal with bass also. I did some sums right at the start of the thread and going from 310As + quality bass backline to e.g. 735As didn't result in any weight saving although there was potentially a bit of a cost saving].

Darn it, all that was needed on the Fat Tube drive sim was to turn its patch vol down, so that there is no vol spike when it's engaged, and it was a bloomin' good substitute for my favourite dedicated drive pedal which costs a LOT more than the B1-4. Wasn't expecting that! UPDATE - replacing the AG 750 with the SWR 400 amp sim, gives added crunch! Taking the gain down to 30 on the BlueB BOD get's it close to perfection.

Haha - that's exactly where I got stuck two years back! I ended up with a BF SC (or BB2) & D class head for rehearsal / gigging purposes. My back is happy. The real challenge, if the FRFR crew are being honest, is getting a FRFR unit that is not specifically tuned for bass which can deal with bass frequencies as well as a quality dedicated bass cab. From what I have gleaned, you need to be looking at something like an RCF 735A to really deliver similar quality. Obviously there will be plenty of kit that will be "good enough". But, even then, not at the weight of a BF SC cab.

A little trick that I only learned a few months back (from Chris_B as it happens) is that you can slow down the playback speed on YouTube vids to 3/4, 1/2 (or even 1/4) - via the "settings" - without impacting pitch. I've been surprised at how many other folk, besides me, that was news to! Really useful when you're (literally) getting up to speed!

Oh and I guess if you're going to change one thing about a bass (which affects its weight) without affecting its tone, then the tuners would be that thing, right?

+1^^ I'm nearly as bad! Must be an ex-425 owners' thing!😁 More importantly that's now an 8lb bass, which would be down at the bottom of my basses weight wise. And he's shaved off 1/8 of the weight of the bass just by swapping the tuners. That's a very good result! Yamaha if you're listening... You'll have to talk me through why the cheaper Hipshot Ultralites needed you do do that?

Enjoyed that Scary Pockets Hanson cover a lot. Our drummer in our 50s/60s band is incredibly short sighted. When she was a kid she saw Hanson on TV and thought that if the female (or so she thought!) drummer of Hanson could be so good, then so should could she! Great mistake, from her point of view, to have made and started her passion for drums... My mistake was when I went along to mate's 40th when he mentioned that they were after a bass player. Well I'd played all manner of 6 string guitars, so I thought "can't be too hard, can it?" - particularly as my missus had one in the house which she'd managed to do one gig with 15 years back. School-boy error, but 7 years later I couldn't be happier that I made it! I've heard that the bass line to Rhythym Stick is fiendish - looking forward to a challenge! Norman Watt-Roy is one of the unsung heroes of bass.

Actually that doesn't look too bad at all. And, besides, only you will ever see it, or possibly also the drummer! And you can always load the originals back on if you ever decide to sell it on. How much of a weight saving did the new tuners deliver?

Haha - you're welcome. I guess that makes us family! 😁 Out of interest - what does the reverse of the headstock look like with the Hipshot Ultralite / Y-tuners i.e. are the original holes showing?

But does it retain low end?

Hey JB, it's pretty good. Although using the same patch set at - 12 rather than +12, I prefer the octave down on the Helix, probably because the small amount of latency is more noticeable on octave up. It is a little tinny and my Digitech Mosaic is an improvement (it's really very good!), but that's a single effect dedicated box. But if you're after a truly authentic, latency free octave up, then there is only one solution - an 8 string bass!

You're clearly making subliminal reference to @ped's favourite fetish of limiters I take it? Very good at dealing with unwanted peaks...

Saw someone mention in the FS that a new Zoom B3n was selling for nearly £200 and I've just checked and seen that some of the other Zoom multi pedals have sky-rocketed too. Is that just Zoom? Is there a supply / demand issue all of a sudden?

Ah yes. Just checked back and I bought that new in Sept 2017 (page 7 of this thread including a long and gushing review!). It's the only bass I've had serious sellers regret moving on, so much so that I got another 425 which is now a "keeper" bass for Mr Bass_5. The 425 has more punch in its pups than your average kicking mule!

I've had the 5 string versions. I found that the BBP35 was a little sweeter tonally than my 1025, the flip side being the 1025 particularly the J pup had more of an edge. So I probably just preferred the P35 overall and on PJ setting and the 1025 on solo J. The other feature on the newer series 3 models is the ability to blend in as much P+J as you want whereas it's all, 50-50, or nil with the series 2 models, but with a very easy to access selector switch. I actually preferred my P35 over my 735A; it just had a better overall feel to it and of the two I was finding I would reach for the P35 every time. The 735A's big selling point other than being a fair bit cheaper than the P35, is obviously its active circuit. Having had all three, I would summarise by saying in passive mode the similarities between the basses far outweigh the differences. The P35 just felt like the classiest of the three. However I've only held onto my 1025, partly 'cos I'm a sucker for a vintage white finish but mainly 'cos it was a little bit lighter than the P35 and therefore more comfortable over a 2 hour gig.

Haha - totally knew I was going to be very late to this particular party! Obviously it's really cool that you can set up your virtual boards - I'm gonna definitely nick that phrase from PJ-B(!) - with some pedals in parallel paths as and when you want. That is for one of the biggest plusses of Helix over my budget (but tbf amazingly good value) Zoom multi. My "Board 1" is actually based around an attempt at pulling together a 'Fishman Power Chord board' using a combination of Simple Pitch octave down and Dual Pitch set on +7 and +12 intervals, which I decided to try out in parallel; and with a couple of drives, tremolo and delay. Definitely not going to be "core" pedal board but was a fun starter for 10! My previous attempts at getting a Fishman Power Chord on both Helix and Zoom have been an unedifying mush, but this one was actually pretty good!

I've kinda been thinking that the way we use our pedal-boards is to kick in certain pedals for certain songs. It's great that with Helix we can set up to 128 separate songs (on the HX Effects and Stomp and I presume even more on the higher end models?) with the combination of effects we want for each song, but conceptually it's easier for me to get my head around the fact that there are actually only a few effects that I want to regularly use including the obvious ones e.g. drive, filter. Having the ability to set up a few "boards" of 6 pedals in stomp mode on the HX FX which can give me a set of core pedals seems to be just the ticket for this. Had a bit of fun setting up "Board 1" this evening and will no doubt get onto a few more over the coming weeks. That still leaves plenty of banks for particular set list songs alongside. I'm guessing a lot the Helix users on this thread have already gone for this approach way before of me - if so be interesting to hear what your different "boards" comprise. Having the scribble strips and ability to engage up to 6 pedals at a time does make the HX FX very well suited for this, so maybe going for the HX FX in place of the HX Stomp was the right decision for me after all!

Haha - we need @Stub Mandrel to add in "aka the Gary Willis book thread" into the title. Who would have guessed? 😁 Although that won't be keeping things quiet... My copy has arrived, I'd best at least open it given the peer pressure on this thread that's already been applied

I did, for a short while, but I kinda felt it needed a BF Dubster 2 and a whole bunch of wattage to be properly usable (or the LF1400). I very briefly toyed with the idea of heading down that route, but fortunately for the street where I live Alex ceased production of the said monster machines!

You know you've won this already, You've had yours 15 years 😂

Gents you've missed out... It's ten! 😁

NIce. Fancy sharing some of your recordings?