Al Krow

The guy has clearly slapped his mark all over this bass-Kingdom and got a lot of Status.

IMO MB's best current EQ, including semi para mids, is to be found on their new Marcus Limited range, which @fretmeisteris about to get. If I was in the market for another MB head, the Marcus Limited 800 or 1000 would get my vote. They look excellent.

Ok cool. Is the toggle switch the little switch between the four knobs? If so, that's going to be a "stop playing and tweak" thing mid set, but no worse (or better) than the Boss SY-1 methinks, for live use. Personally, I'd much prefer to use midi to get the most out of this pedal eg so I could easily scroll through with just a footswitch, and then the benefit of presets over the SY-1 would come into its own, particularly for live use.

Not sure you can access even six with the Stomp button. But if you're only using for home use and not for live this is a non point. You can take your time and use a phone app to access.

Yup agreed that would have been helpful. I ended up initially reviewing a video by another hairy guitarist (which wasn't a bad review either). Please bear in mind, for future reference, that most guitar blokes on YouTube are hairy.

I know where you're coming from! However I'd regard this as being 'semi-preset' rather than 'zero preset' which would indeed be a pain if it was! You can select variation and type precisely i.e. 121 presets to pin down which of the sounds you want e.g. Variation 3 + Bass 'Effect' and 'direct' are just volume controls for your effect and clean, I believe, - that's just quite a neat feature. For me: set the balance and leave and likely to be something like 1/4 clean 3/4 effect overall. So the only real variables are in the second knob's two controls of tone/rate and depth - and I think it won't be too bad to remember your settings for those to go with your favourite variation and type and take a pic = you're only ever likely to need a small number for a given live gig I suspect. But yup, presets would have put this into another league up!

Fixed

And how do you propose to access even the 6 presets mid set as you're changing between songs? There is no ability to scroll through presets using the Stomp button. Yup... you'll need midi.

C4 and Spectrum are pretty much the same pedal (same core engine). If you're not into midi, the C4 (or Spectrum variant) won't be for you, certainly not for live use anyway.

I thought you'd already got rid of your Manta a couple of years' back (to me)? 😁 Are you currently using midi on your pedal board?

If I was on the fence before this seeing this, I'm absolutely not after hearing what it can do! This one is guitar but he's promised a bass review to follow.

Yeah agree with a lot of the points on here. Let's put them into practice...

That is such a good presentation of your clips, Stew! I presume that the settings on the pedals correspond to the ones you used for the recordings?

But would you agree that if you played 3 different basses with 3 different dirt pedals, the dominant / overriding impact on the sound / bass tone would be which particular drive pedal & setting on that pedal you were using, and not which particular bass you were using?

Q from me. HX Stomp doesn't have poly and struggles to match something like the Digitech Mosaic for poly octave up. Wondering whether the SY-1 will be able to get there on this (and means I can finally move on that very capable but one trick pony pedal?!)

Fair. Although I have the ability to do all that on the FI... The SY-1 is poly, £75 cheaper than the C4 and is 'good to go' without needing midi etc. Downside is lack of presets. I think for me it would be FI OR C4, I can't see me needing them both on a live set.

Interesting point Dave. Won't any dirt pedal pretty much overpower the tone of the bass so that you end up with a tone that's dominated by the drive pedal? And then the 'tone' or 'flavour' of the pedal becomes the key driver (excuse my pun) of tone / sound whilst the pedal is engaged?

Ignore me Mr Hunt, I was just being facetious! I guess my experience of selling and buying has been the opposite to what a few folk on this thread have been implying, but that is all I have to go on. I've sold and bought a LOT of bass gear over the the past couple of years, and frankly I can't be positive enough about my fellow BC'ers who have been a pleasure to deal with and hugely trustworthy. But I appreciate that's not what this thread is about, so I'd probably best take my positive slant elsewhere!

The lack of presets is definitely the BIG shortcoming (see my earlier post which you quoted), I agree. But yet another pedal requiring deep menu diving / PC editing and needing to use midi is more off putting for me!