adamg67

I suppose if you bought one you could, without lying, ask someone if they wanted to see your winged snake battle staff.

Yes, he has rather muscly legs as well. I suspect what we have is the bizarre conjunction of Gene Simmon's head on a superhero's body. I'm also curious about what some of the other "accessories" are... dare I ask what those things above his head are?

I was thinking of getting a Gene Simmons "Ax Bass" like the one in the photo, but I don't know which strings would be best for it? Are curved strings harder to find than straight ones?

Had a chance to listen to everyone's tracks properly now... nice work people!! ( <-- Worth noting that for me two exclamation marks is very rare indeed)

If sightly negative (from your point of view) reviews help, I use Shotcut for editing in car video from track days and other bits and pieces. It's free and it will do everything you need and more but I wouldn't say it's easy or intuitive. It's not terrible in that respect but it's not the best either. So maybe not the one for the top of your list.

I was hoping to do a few more of these this year, but a crappy few months in the middle got in the way. I've finally got a bit of time again and Douglas's picture felt like I nice change from pushing myself out of my comfort zone - that's an image that left me right in the middle of it so I could barely see the edges :). Like many I've gone with what I felt was being played, and having listened to the others now I'm not the only one that thinks Aliens sound like rock guitar through an envelope filter! For anyone interested: Steven Slate Drums, I started off with Groove Monkee midi but the original is only there in the "chorus" now, I re-did the rest. Bass is Stingray 5HH through an Idiotbox Blower Box and a Hotone Omni IR loader. Guitar is a PRS Custom 24 through Amplitube's MESA amp sim and their excellent Nu-Tron III envelope filter. Not loads of FX as it might sound, but their is a little trick in the playing to make the filter freak out for the Alien vibe. Synths are all NI, there's a Form preset in there sort of backing up the bass and filling in the middle a bit (that one gave me a headache as it won't go to Mono without losing loads of volume, but it sounds good) and FM8 for the "breaks". There were things that I played live on the keyboard that became these parts, but they got hacked around a lot. Mixing and mastering... hmmm. Still mostly done by guessworks, some light use of a few of Waves CLA series plugins and then the Infected Mushroom Pusher at the end, because it seemed to suit the style. Having a listen on an Amazon Echo was a bit of a revelation, it sounded rubbish in Mono until I fixed a few things. All good learning anyway. I enjoyed it anyway

Got to be worth a try, I'll give it a go tomorrow.

True, but they won't look at it for free.

I've got a Darkglass Vintage Ultra V2 with a minor issue, it all works properly but sometimes there's a crackle when you adjust the blend with the distortion on. It's not one of those horribly loud crackles that feels like it will damage anything and obviously you don't adjust the blend while you're playing but it's annoying. Apart from anything else I might want to sell it and I'd rather it was working properly first (I would advertise in whatever state it's in anyway either way, but will get less for it with a known issue). It was bought used on here so I can't just send it back. I'm thinking it's maybe worth trying to spray the pot with some contact cleaner, but it's not easy to get at. I think I need to take all the knobs off, take the nuts off all the pots, nuts off the jack screws, unscrew the DI etc and then take the circuit boards out to do it, and there's no telling if there will be anywhere to spray the stuff once I do that. I don't suppose anyone knows if it's worth all the dissassembly effort (and small risk of breaking something) ie is there a chance I'll be able to actually get any contact cleaner into the pot anyway on a pedal like that?

What colour is it? I've used nail varnish for colour with a top coat of superglue on gloss black body before and it worked a treat. Fill the holes very nearly to the top with the usual sawdust + wood glue, colour with nail polish and finish with superglue. It's a bit time consuming but it works.

+1 for Sennheisers HD serie, hard to beat. My HD 650s are freaking awesome.

I'm another that's switched from a single "fly rig" style pedal back to separates recently. I've got an IR loader with DI on the end for cab sims, and for me that's the killer pedal for recording or straight in to PA, super flexible as I can stick any IRs on it that I want. DG Hyper Luminal as that's my favourite compressor, DG harmonic booster preamp and then I swap in things like overdrives for what I need. I do have other things as well though, but those 4 pedals work as a pretty decent little rig.

This is more what I thought the trend was, multi band distortion so you can choose which bands to apply the distortion to. My Darkglass Vintage Ultra does this in a fairly basic way and it makes it very flexible, and I think that's what the "growl" and "bite" buttons on the Alpha Omega does as well? So maybe things have already moved on from applying the effect to the highs and more gear can now apply the effect to the bands you want to apply it to.

😂 this happens to me every time I have a clear out! It is such a tough balance between “might come in handy” and “oh **** I’m officially a hoarder”.

Bought an Xotic Booster from AJ, exactly as described, all quick and easy - perfect. Deal with confidence.

So it has one pickup, looks like that's in series which is what the red and white wires are soldered together for? Then it looks like it has two tone pots? Both have caps on them anyway. Is it a kind of fake 2 band eq with different capacitor values? It wouldn't quite work as they would both be high cut but at different frequencies and they would overlap but I've seen crazier things.

If the neck's a bit slim you could do a Bass V

I bought an MXR overdrive pedal from Paul, all good and exactly as described, good comms, even got his other half to post it as he was working away which i call very good service! Thank you Mr & Mrs Shepster, another excellent BC deal.

Blend is nice and common on bass effects now and really works, so you don't even need to do anything fancy with how the effects are hooked up, just blend wet and dry on the pedal. That's one reason they can sound a lot better then guitar effects in "normal use", so if you blend a guitar effect you can get the same effect - or you can let the pedal manufacturers take care of it for you. There are also more multiband effects now, where the effect is applied by different amounts to different frequencies. Distortion is an obvious example with more bass distortion pedals coming with some kind of separate control on how much the highs and lows get distorted.

This pedal was one of those "wish I hadn't sold it" things. After I bought my Multiamp I had a complete pedal clearout, with the plan being that since the multiamp had everything in one box I wouldn't need anything else. Nice idea, but I've already gone back to having a small pedal board as well and the Blower Box was always my favrourite full on distortion pedal. It still stands up even with the latest multi band distortion pedals I think. I should have kept the one I had, it was nice limited edition one as well. It's not like I can even use it for much that I do, I just want one for fun - every now and then it's nice to make a noise like the world is ending . It came from a place called "Joe's Pedals" that I hadn't heard of before, but I was impressed that they had this one in stock. I may do some sound clips when I'm feeling iditoic.

TNT, who I used in the end, were definitely the full insured amount if they lose it, £100 for damage. I don't think that was related to the insured amount (it was a £4000 guitar, not a £1000s one), I think it was standard Ts & Cs. I can't find the topic I read on BC about the other carrier that was the same, from memory it was Parcelforce but there are too many threads about parcels (none good either). I'm pretty sure UPS was the other one I checked before I sent the guitar, and that it was the same as TNT, but I'd have to check again to be sure. I assumed it was a move across the industry and that's why they were the same. It was fairly recently. EDIT I'm happy if I'm wrong about it as it did seem crazy.

I shipped a guitar recently in an old hard case, which was wrapped in bubble wrap, then a piece of hardboard one side and some thin ply the other, all in a cardboard box. Why? Because if you read the Ts&Cs (for TNT and UPS for sure and I'm sure others are the same) you can pay for insurance for as much as you like but the most they will pay for damage is £100. There have been topics on here about it I'm sure where people have find that out after something was damaged. How they get to even sell it as insurance I've no idea.