Steve Lawson

approx 10ms, including the interface. Easily manageable

Absolutely. It's the *perfect* device for me, because after 20 odd years of pushing every effects unit I had to its limits, I finally found something that did all the things I previously couldn't, but having an Anagram-style interface that turned on and off would really help people get started with it

Yeah, the anagram is an interesting project - VASTLY superior hardware (for bass) to the MOD stuff, and a much easier version of the software for people who want to build copies of analog boards that are largely linear, rather than exploiting the parallel processing stuff that the Dwarf/DuoX will do. If you're finding the drives tricky on the Dwarf, try pairing them with specific cabinet sims, and instead of assigning them to a pedal to turn on and off, leave them on and use an A/B switch to turn on the whole chain at once. That way you can stack multiple drives, or use a tube emulator before or after the drive as well as a cab sim (or two) to create a really bespoke drive - you can even use a crossover to have the clean sound of your bass below, say, 100hz, and everything above that go through the drive so you don't lose thump... It took me a while to get the hang of that!

The Dwarf is capable of a lot, but the 8 core processing in the DuoX makes the parallel stuff possible to this level ☺️

The majority of the music I release is subscriber-only on Bandcamp (huge thankstto those of you who are subscribers ☺️), but a couple of times a year I make things public and my most recent one has been out just over a month. Called Amsterdam, it was recorded there (all except the opening track), and as with everything of mine is all one take, unedited improvised tunes. Enjoy! https://stevelawson.bandcamp.com/album/amsterdam

It's built up over time, using successive versions of the same platform (The MOD Duo, then the first version of the DuoX, then the more powerful version - I've got a MOD Dwarf as well that I really need to dig into further, but it wouldn't run all of this!) - so the development has been near-daily tweaking of it for close to a decade! I've saved some of the iterations of it, but not enough of them! Every now and again I hear a thing I recorded a few years ago and have literally no idea how I got that sound 😆

here's the latest version of my pedalboard, all inside the MOD DuoX Every purple line is an audio path, and every blue one is MIDI. It's one in (though it could be stereo) 6 out (three stereo pairs). The parallel audio paths include an ambient path that's all reverb/delay, one that's all pitch-to-MIDI, and one that's glitchy weird sh*t. it's all controlled via a Keith McMillen Softstep and Quneo, the MOD Footswitch and two Dunlop mini expression pedals. The only additional outboard at the moment is a Dunlop volume pedal, a Dunlop Wah (alternate between the mini bass wah and the Justin Chancellor), and a Nordstrand Starlifter.

I went from 35 to 33 to 32 and my most recent bass is a Nordstrand Cat bass which I think is 30... 32 is current favourite - Mk II of my Elrick signature is 32" and headless, so super comfortable to play, and fits in a guitar bag so easier to carry on a bike, and to fly with Steve

ahh, I'll be back there soon, though I imagine you'll be gigging again - I'm not sure I know anyone who gigs as much as you But let's meet soon! Steve

Hi all, not been around here for many, many years, mostly thanks to spending the last 10 years doing a PhD - tends to soak up all of one's discretionary time A huge thank you to everyone who's ever shared news here about my music and gigs in the interim, and I'm especially grateful for the thread regarding my 2022 Cancer diagnosis (still cancer free three years after being told I was in 'complete metabolic response'). Life these days is still making large amount of music, released exclusively through Bandcamp, most of it subscriber only, alongside teaching on Zoom (message me for info, or check out my website ) and lecturing at BIMM in Birmingham, on the degree and MA courses. Plus other visiting masterclasses and whatnot. Hopefully I'll be able to drop in more often now that I'm not freaking out about PhD deadlines cheers! Dr Steve

Sorry to be late to this - there was some confusion over this vid - it wasn't the MXR that I was demoing with the HPF, it was a patch I'd built in the MOD Duo - the MXR has a HPF built in to some patches via the Tone knob, which just sweeps through a range of different filter parameters depending on the Reverb you've got selected, but you can't control the frequency... Right at the start of the clip chosen there you can see me choosing the patch in the MOD Duo... Scott just missed that bit

Perfect comparison - I love the sound of the TRBs (or at least, some of the iterations over the years) and John Patitucci was the first 6 string bassist I was properly aware of, but when I tried a TRB it just felt like it was designed for some kind of giant...! I was SO happy when I found the Modulus basses with their narrower spacing. Feels like they were designed for my hands. ...and then the Elricks actually WERE designed for my hands

...it's also worth noting that the ergonomics of a 6 string bass mean that the experience of playing them fails or succeeds within much tighter parameters. I can't remember the last time I played a four string where anything other than string height felt like an impediment to playing - scale length, neck width, string spacing, on a four string are all workable within fairly wide parameters. With a 6, despite it being my chosen instrument, there are LOADS that I just can't play at all - the additional strings means that the effect of spacing differences are amplified, and the size ratio between finger length, arm reach and neck width makes that a far more critical measurement too... All of my 6s have the same string spacing (17mm) and the same nut/bridge width. The Modulus' are 35" and the Elricks are 33", which makes the Elricks pretty much exactly one fret shorter - when I pick up 6s with 18 or 19mm spacing, you might as well hand me a Harp... So, if you're interested in playing a 6, but find the ones you've tried uncomfortable, it may be worth investigating others with different spacing/scale length.

I played 4 exclusively for my first 12-13 years of bassing, then got a fretless 5 and 6 in the space of about 6 months in '99. Took the 6 out on tour as my main bass with Howard Jones about 5 weeks after I got it... that was a trial by fire! It took me 3 or 4 years before 6 felt as comfortable to play at 4, and about 8 or 9 years before I could read as fluently on it as on 4. 6 is now definitely my main instrument. I still play 4 regularly for teaching and sessions, and I enjoy the fact that it feels like a toy alongside the 6s, but my instrument is definitely 6 string bass... But anyway, don't feel bad about 5 or 6 (or 7+!) taking a while to get comfortable - if the music you hear in your head sounds like it needs the extra range and possibilities of the 6, stick at it, but there's obviously nothing superior about any number of strings on a bass. It's all about the right tool for the music you're trying to make, and the thing that inspires you to play... No-one else's opinion on your chosen instrument matters 1/10th as much as how you feel about it

My observation - from teaching and talking to an awful lot of bassists - is that the role that magazines played in terms of filling in historical knowledge isn't one that people are using the web for... It's weird, because YouTube is the greatest learning resource that humanity has ever come up with - whether you want to fix the screen on your phone, or work out what Allan Holdsworth was doing with symmetrical scales, there are SO many amazing lessons on there, but because the focus is on 'info that will benefit me right now' rather than the contained, delineated authoritative experience of reading an episodic magazine, it seems that relatively few people are spending time online digging into the history of the instrument. Reading BP cover to cover in the 90s (and reading every bass-related thing in Guitarist in the late 80s) was as much my school as the two years I did at music college. I have things I use every day in my playing that I learned from Rich Appleman's theory column in the 90s. I know about players because instead of, as has been indicated here, worrying that I didn't know who the players were, I read more voraciously when they were musicians I hadn't heard of than when it was ones I knew... So magazines were a way of accumulating knowledge... That was, in many ways, a problem, in that it meant that the writers and editors were the gatekeepers of knowledge, and as they were almost exclusively dudes (in the case of BP editors, all of them ever were men), women got WAY WAY worse coverage, and were often written about in a really shitty way. Likewise, the coverage was overwhelmingly US and Europe-centric. YouTube has its filters which provide similar levels of myopia if you use their algorithms to decide what to watch, but the capacity for learning is huge (I recently went on a Soca binge, and discovered a ton of amazing music and bass playing). ...So, I'm still a fan of magazines - the economics of running a mag is way more perilous than a website, you can get away with more auto-generated content on a website and have zero print costs (hosting doesn't even come close in terms of monthly outgoing per reader), even though mags have a cover price - there's obviously no granularity to the reader spend. You don't get people who give you 5p a month for reading a page or two and some who pay the full price. It's all or nothing... I greatly appreciate what No Treble are doing - particularly their attempts to fill that knowledge gap I suggested above - Ryan Madora's column on players to know is a really useful one, and the video tuition stuff is great - but the factors that drive virality, and therefor ad money, are far more damaging to so much web video content than perceived bias in reviews (there's SO much to say about reviewing, but my one observation would be that there is, objectively VERY little 'bad' gear out there now, above the rebadged absurdly cheap garbage on eBay from no-name manufacturers - the big players can't afford to make bad gear, and CNC means that consistency across instruments is lightyears beyond where it was 20 years ago when I was reviewing stuff for Bassist - I was regularly sent really bogus stuff, gave things mediocre reviews, and even refused to write about some stuff... It was way more useful to fill the pages with reviews of good stuff that I was to write a hit piece on some crappy gear. Ignore it, and it'll go away - at that point, magazines were the lifeblood of companies' ad strategy, so a bad review was actually more coverage than their rubbish gear deserved... But that's a whole other discussion) Anyway, decent journalism is expensive, so expensive that it makes a lot of magazines impossible to fund, and no commercial publisher is going to run a mag at a loss in order to meet readers' desires. The economics are a total mess right now. I'm really glad that we still have any print mags for bass at all, and I hope the people involved find a way to keep them going - my rate for writing in a UK bass mag is lower now than it was 20 years ago. They've cut everything back as far as it'll go, so we'll see if that's enough. I don't know the specifics of what was happening at BP, but I do know they ditched all their offices a while back and went to a remote working model to try and cut costs. I guess it wasn't enough.