Russ

Have you had many returns? Curious because their predecessors, the Portaflex series and the SVT-7, were plagued by reliability issues, and I'm really hoping the Ventures have moved past that.

It'd be nice to be able to easily copy and paste patches if you have some basic settings you use on everything (for me, it's a preamp and compressor) and using a desktop app would seem like the obvious place to implement that functionality.

That's pretty much where I'm coming from with it. Nice bit of kit, but not right for me. If I spent more time recording on my computer and tweaking sounds for recording purposes, and wanting to do it on a physical unit rather than using plugins, I'd probably get a lot more out of it. It's interesting though, I was reading the FB Darkglass Anagram group, looking for answers about my expression pedal issue, and a lot of people have been complaining that there's been something wrong with this current batch that have just been sent out to dealers. Darkglass are denying it, but there does seem to be issues - the noise thing is one, the DI output being inconsistent and noisy is another, and lots of complaints about the performance of the compressors and various other things. Wouldn't be surprised if the current batch end up being recalled.

I saw that. But I'm not going to be using MIDI with it. The only use for MIDI that I could foresee myself using is for an external controller, and that's one more thing to pack and bring to a gig, one more cable, and one more thing to have to set up. Trying to avoid that.

So I've come to the conclusion that the Anagram is not for me. It's good, but I'm a little underwhelmed by the range of effects and I foresee issues with its usability in a live situation. Anyone know how to do a factory reset so I can send it back?

I’m in the US right now (sadly) - I got mine from Sweetwater. Although I’ve been burned in that sort of situation before so I feel your pain!

Been playing with it a bit more. Found some quite nice sounds on it, but still having a few issues. My Zoom expression pedal doesn't seem to work with it - I've got it plugged into the FX return, like you're supposed to, and it's not being recognised. It's a standard expression pedal with a TRS cable - any ideas?

So it's here. First impressions - smaller than I thought it'd be. Solid construction. Nice packaging and cool carry case. Not many default presets to play with. Not sure I like the Darkglass Suite software - maybe I haven't got to grips with it yet, but I haven't found a way to just visually build patches by dragging and dropping blocks. Honestly, a little underwhelmed so far. But I'll persevere.

So you can't do it all directly on the Anagram? That's disappointing. I thought you could just connect up, say, a pedal to a send, then the output of the pedal to a return, and capture it that way, all directly on the Anagram itself. Here's a question... if you set up a patch with an amp and IR, is it possible to route a signal with them to the XLR out, and a signal without them to the 1/4" output jack, so you can go into an amp without the amp emulation?

Foderas rank among the best-playing basses I've ever put my hands on. The necks, the setup... absolutely sublime. They practically play themselves. But you're right. They're tame-sounding. They're very clear and detailed, but are lacking in heft, for want of a better word. The lows and low mids just aren't thick enough to work in a heavy-sounding band. I'm sure they'll make you one with thicker-sounding pickups, but I've yet to play one.

I'm going to audition one. Sweetwater got them back in stock, so I snagged one. If I like it, I keep it and sell some other stuff, if I don't, I send it back. Does it have instructions about how to do neural captures?

Over in the thread about acrimonious band splits, I was talking about the band I was in where the guitarist just upped and left after a gig. Here's a pic of that band, and it's the oldest pic I have of me onstage (there's probably a few more that I have as actual photos, but this is the oldest one I have on the computer ) - this is from around 1997, and that's me on the left. ...and this is a more recent one from a year or so back, playing my trusty Sei.

Can't remember who it was, some famous-ish bass player, but he had no mobility in his middle finger due to a similar injury, and he picked using his index and ring fingers. He reckoned that it was more consistent because your index and ring fingers are closer to being the same length. Maybe something that's worth a try? There's also Dann Glenn, who plays with his thumb and one finger in an alternate-picking manner due to an injury that caused the other fingers on his right hand to curl up towards his palm. Interesting technique, it's worth looking him up on YT.

I'd love one. I'd like to wait until they add some more preamp models though - I'm quite dependent on the MXR Bass DI+ model in my Zoom pedals and I'd like to be able to reproduce that. I suppose I could attempt a Neural Capture of it, but I'm not sure I'd know where to begin. My sound is basically that, into the model of the MXR Dynacomp - the Luminal model will take care of compression duties nicely, but I need that Bass DI+ sound!

I was in a band in the late 90s, and we had a "battle of the bands"-type gig lined up. We'd have some trouble getting hold of our guitarist for the previous week or so, and he'd been a bit off at our last rehearal. He showed up at the gig about 10 minutes before showtime, and basically told us this was the last gig, and that he'd decided he didn't like rock music any more. We got up, we did the gig, the guitarist played most of the show with his back to the audience, and then he left immediately afterwards and nobody saw him again for years. It wasn't dramatic or anything, there were no punches or pint glasses thrown, but it felt like a very selfish act on his behalf. He wasn't lying either - a few weeks later I saw his two guitars and his Marshall up for sale in Loot. For what it's worth, we won that heat of the battle of the bands thing, but, of course, we couldn't progress to the next one. I guess time heals though, our old drummer and him recently reconnected and started a new band. He obviously rediscovered his love of rock music sometime in the intervening 20-odd years! Our former singer now curates an art gallery in Germany, and I'm stuck out here in the States, but it might be a nice idea to get the band back together for some kind of one-off thing one day.

Not a fan, personally. They sound very bland to my ears and have no sound of their own. They're functional, and that's probably the best I can say about them. You're seeing more and more Nordstrand Big Singles showing up in lieu of the Mk1s these days, and they're a lot better. They actually have a bit of welly.

It's real mahogany - the mahogany family of trees is pretty extensive. Indonesian mahogany comes from the toona sureni tree and is comparable to most other types. It's not as desirable as Brazilian mahogany, but preferable to Indian mahogany. Basswood gets a bad rap because it's often been used in cheap instruments and has an extremely plain grain pattern. No such thing as "quilted basswood"! All Bongos have solid finishes so the grain doesn't really matter, and it's got the right weight and sonic properties, so why not?

I don't hate them, but they're very "polite". The MMC/MME MM pickups were decent in terms of tone and output, but didn't really have the MM sound. Their cheap Mk1 pickups are ubiquitous on basses from the Far East and are fairly terrible. Low output and not particularly pleasant-sounding.

For me, the best P-bass-with-a-pick sound is: Small boost at about 200Hz Big but narrow cut at 500Hz (that "boxy" frequency) Small boost at about 3kHz Treble and bass shelving flat Not a frequent pick player, but I actually like thin ones best. 0.5mm, ideally. Having a skinnier pick gives you a bit more control of dynamics, I find, and still gets you that pick-y articulation. I also quite like the green Dava Control ones - they're thick-ish but flex like a thin one.

If you're after a particular vintage-y tone, preferably on a short-scale bass, they can be a shortcut to getting that sound. But you can approximate that tone on a full-scale bass with rounds, but not the other way around.

My 2003 CAR Bongo has the full-size tuners (the other ones I owned had the smaller, lightweight tuners). Even compared to that, the Sterling ones look wrong, like the tuner shafts are too long.

It'd get us out of the "tariff trap" - almost all the wood that's used in the construction of the guitars comes from either Canada (spruce, maple) or South America (mahogany, rosewood). We might have to stop making guitars with Brazilian rosewood entirely because of the tariffs (we also use East Indian rosewood on some of the cheaper instruments). The stuff from Canada is partly covered by the existing USMCA deal (the updated NAFTA deal from Tangerine Palpatine's first term) but not entirely. Having another facility in Europe or the Far East would bypass all of this crap for rest-of-the-world sales. We used to have the old Sigma range made in the Far East (various places, mostly Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and Korea), but we sold those off back in 2007 to some German company who now make cheap, Temu-level sh*t using the same brand name, which is a travesty. One of the best acoustic guitars I ever played was a Japanese Sigma DM-5 (basically a D-28) - every bit as good as the US-made instrument.

At the end of the day, all tax and NI ends up in the consolidated fund at the Treasury, where it's disbursed. A small percentage of NHS funding will come from NI contributions since it's all coming from the same bucket at the end of the day, but it's budget and allocations is based on a percentage of income tax, VAT and other tax receipts rather than NI. That's why when you get your tax document from HMRC every year, the NHS is a big slice of the pie on the pie chart. I work for a well-known US manufacturer of acoustic guitars and we're seeing a significant dropoff in overseas sales, to the point where we're considering moving some manufacturing out of North America (we currently have factories in the US and northern Mexico). Not only have our instruments become more expensive, people around the world just don't want to buy American stuff. Or, at least, American versions of American stuff - supposedly Fender Japan have seen a big surge of interest in their stuff this year...

I'd always encourage anyone who's not convinced by the 5-string experience to restring it with a high C and try it again. It becomes an entirely different beast.

I like the supplied gig bag, but, for me, the big oversight is that it doesn't have a shoulder strap, just a handle. For the good ol' one-trip load-in, I want the bass on my back, pedals/FX/head hanging off my shoulders, and I need one hand to drag the cab and the other to open doors! All smaller Class D heads should have a gig bag.