radiophonic

Provided you're happy with the Fender style tone stack, I'd go for it. I run an LH500 (tone 2/10/0) and using a very wide range of cabs have never questioned the basic tone or even come close to running out of headroom in live situation.  I think it does sound better if you run a higher output bass into the passive input though - it' won't distort but it does seem to sparkle a bit more. The limiter is decent but the bright switch sounds horrible IMO. If you're looking for a lot of shaping options, then it may not be for you but a s a basic and very loud rock workhorse I rate it.

Hmm. From the Darglass website : ADAM responds to MIDI messages from all channels, so you do not have to otherwise specify a MIDI channel to use ADAM’s MIDI input functionality.

Doesn't this mean it hears all the MIDI commands sent to all your other pedals and could potentially be a bit of a nightmare in terms of addressing patches?

8 minutes ago, verb said:

I use 55-110 and occasionally tune to C#, they are a little floppy but manageable. If I was recording I would set up the bass to the tuning.

Will it take 115? Its a really tight part and the low tension is really hurting me. It just sounds messy. As a rule I use d'addario nickel 165 specifically to keep the tension high since the band tune to Eb by default. Maybe a higher tension string is the answer? I just have two songs to nail...

What can I get away with? I'm recording and I need to drop to C# and I need to dig in. A 105 flaps and rattles horribly. I don't have a 5 string. Thanks!

Somebody beat me to it. I posted on the Octaver thread. There will be plenty of bass demos along soon I'm sure. Janek Gwizdala is bound to do one for a start. I always use a BC1X in front of an OC2 as a safety valve for the input level anyway and other than it going nasty when I occasionally hit the input too hard without it, I've never noticed any major difference in the tracking. Forget it below ~A basically.  I'm more interested in the poly-mode latency - something that has so far put me off digital octave down options like the Sub N Up. £120 is around what a s/h OC2 goes for these days so if it only does that one thing well, it will be a hit.

No OC2 Waza but now there's an OC5 then. The OC2 full wet sounded close to me. Definitely has that hollowed out sine wave thing going on.

Sounds exactly like a DI to me. Blend with a cab for more life or use a sim if that's not possible. Just watch the phase of the two signals and be prepared to time align. The riff sounded like New Model Army?.

The guitarist in my band has a Sub 5 for demos and while I'm happy for him not to be able to influence the bass parts too early in the process, I do feel sorry for him. His instrument has started making a noise like a very quiet broken bitcrusher - spitty and gated, no top end at all and really quiet. He did send me a wav but it's embedded in a facebook message and unfortunately I can't download it. It's not the battery. All the wiring is intact and there is nothing visibly wrong with the pre-amp board. He's had it from new and never gigged it, so physical damage is unlikely. He needed to max out the gain on his interface even to record a sound, so the output is very weak. My guess is a cap has gone bad - but it didn't slowly deteriorate, it just started doing it from cold one day. Anyone encountered anything similar and know where to start?

I've had one of these on my board for about 4 years. It's a really good and very clean comp with a really usable range. I never notice it unless I turn it off. It really does need an external PSU though - the internal charge pump doubles the operating voltage to 18v and I reckon you'd be lucky to get much more than 3 hours out of it.

15 minutes ago, dannybuoy said:

The red might be discontinued now though, I can only find it in image search. Black ones are still for sale though. But it does have a built in handle and the back panel comes off:

Yeah - it looks like they did them in a bunch of colours but they all come up as unavailable. If they've been available recently though s/h may be worth watching. Those PRO-R ones are silly money though!

23 hours ago, dannybuoy said:

Gator G-PRO-6U-19?

That's pretty close TBH. The one I recall was more of an open frame so you could grab it easily, but that would do the job. I'm planning to rack a channel strip, headphone splitter amp, interface and a mac mini as a sort of mobile recording rig that will also not look terrible stuck on a shelf in my music room. My bass and all my cables are red too.

Back in the late 80s, a guitarist I played with had all his effects in rack format (of course!) and he had a really cool rack for it all. It looked like a red plastic milk crate, but drilled for about 6U of gear. It was really light and the handles were built in to the design. I've never seen another one but I remember it being a product rather than a DIY job. I'm on the lookout for a lightweight and portable rack solution at the moment and something a bit less ugly than the standard black ABS type would be nice. Anyone remember these things?

Recording board with all the options I might need. Clean DI before the board. Amp DI after it. Meatbox after the ES5 sending subs to its own track. Mic on a cab to get everything except the subs. The Gunslinger sometimes swaps out for a Turbo Rat. I’d run both but I’d need more power.

I don't earn an income from music, so despite the frustrations, playing out is off the cards. Everything band related is still socially distanced - writing, recording a lot of new material, some outdoor 'live to video' for a local charity event. I did worry that we'd lose momentum, but since jettisoning our demotivated and negative drummer, we've demoed all the instrumental parts for an 11 song album. We've got a single recorded and ready to go but I'm not eager to be in a confined space  with drunk people at this point.

11 hours ago, Doddy said:

I love the Meatbox, but I never look at it as being an octaver because it doesn't do the traditional octave thing like the OC2 or the the EBS (for example) does. I look at it more as a dedicated sub, that sits under everything and sounds massive through the PA.  I nearly always take both out ( normally the 3 Leaf Octabvre and a Mantic Beefbag) and they both do completely different jobs.

It's definitely its own thing, but on some apps I can use it like a regular octave and in some I can't. I need to dig out my MF101 and see what it makes of it. The TRS output is definitely a win and that's how I'm using it for recording. What I do like about it is the 50/50 blend sound into an amp though. It sounds quite like a digital octave down, except with no latency. You have to wind back the resonant filters a bit and watch your volume, and it's totally unlike an OC2 but I could definitely see that being a usable sound. I've not heard the Beefbag. I've heard conflicting descriptions with some saying it's more or less a Meatbox and some saying that he made a Meatbox clone but this was a bit different. Can you comment?

22 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

Interested in what you thought the Collider design flaws were; I’m about to get one delivered. 

I saw that you'd won one! It was on the SA instagram feed. I will start by saying that it's failings were mostly very specific to how I wanted to use it, so YMMV. I run an ES5 loop switcher, with delay and reverb after the loops, controlled entirely via MIDI PC/CC commands.

First of all, Collider is a dual pedal, so the ability to bypass both sides of a patch via MIDI CC messages seemed like an obvious inclusion. Nope. It will only take a single CC message and there isn't one for 'bypass A + B'. I spoke to them about it and they say that it may be added in the future. The obvious workaround is to have a dummy patch that is loaded in bypass mode. This works but it kills your trails. It also takes around 500ms to load each dual patch - you can't load up each side separately - it's more like a bank in Boss-speak. This is a long while when in mid flow and I kept thinking I'd missed the switch and then flubbing the part. Then there's the switching. To save space, the left foot switch is dual function - covering the usual bypass but also tap tempo. This means it has to know what you are trying to tell it to do - and that means another wait while you exceed the maximum tap interval unfortunately. Again, it just caused me to flub. It's also got far more limited editing than either Nemesis or Ventris. This is deliberate, but I'm used to the Boss style deep dive and had just assumed that Collider would be similar - as Ventris / Nemesis both are.  Finally, the tape delay (my go to) is an Echoplex type, so no multihead options unless you set up one delay on each side of the patch and even then it's only dual head rather than 3 like the Copicat or Space Echo and you've lost the reverb option too. I was very disappointed, being a huge fan of the Manta - which has very simple and reliable MIDI. I was quite mystified by the MIDI problems.

All that said, the plate reverb sounded fantastic.

Boss RV500. It replaced a Source Audio Collider which I sent back due to various unexpected design weaknesses. RV500 is really undersold as a reverb IMO. It includes the RE201 Space Echo delay engine (albeit without the wear controls) and every reverb patch has an additional digital delay you can enable. So that's a 3 head tape sim + every reverb you can imagine + a single head digital delay on any patch. Plus with a bit of trickery you can fully daisy chain the patches albeit on mono only. I'm pretty impressed. The only slight annoyance is that even if I get rid of my DD500, it's still a few cm too wide to fit on my smaller board.

4 hours ago, wildebassman said:

One amp repair dude serviced one serviced here in the Netherlands. He was pretty impressed. The measured output was max. 141 watts rms.

 

 

That's an interesting guts shot. It seems to have 2 transformers, but only one of them is toroidal. The other one is about the same size as the ones in my 4 x 6550 HiFi amp.  Do you know what the story is there? Max needs to raise his website game I think.

I mailed Max Weber to get a quote. Definitely seriously pondering my options.  However, 141W seems quite a bit down on the 200 claimed. I'm not doubting it's loud though and of course out of context numbers don't really tell you anything anyway and speaker sensitivity will play a huge role. I'm in the fortunate position of having triple glazing, no connecting neighbours and a cellar big enough to use as a recording space for amps - last time my band recorded guitars we ran 2 valve heads into a 4x12 and 2x12 at stage volume and it was inaudible from the street. I also discovered just how loud a 40W Fender valve combo is on 10 (very, it turns out). Not being able to gig is frustrating, but I can still crank it up so now actually seems like quite a good time to buy.

15 minutes ago, bertbass said:

It was the 200.  It was pretty loud and the 400 would only be 3db louder which would be hardly noticeable.  Back in the 60s / 70s I never had a problem being heard with a 100w tube amp and 2 x 4X12s.  Mind you, when I had 2, Marshall Superbass heads and 4, 4x12s, that was a different level!  Wouldn't want to move it all now though and it would be bigger than some of the stages we're supposed to set up on.

I'm not bothered about heavy heads, but speaker cabs are another matter. I definitely don't miss lugging those old Celestion loaded 4x12s and 4x10s around. I'm figuring 200 into my Barefaced Compact 15 would be a super punchy and loud combo. I have a 2x10 to add some extra displacement.

Just now, bertbass said:

I had a Mywatt 200 from new and it was just like a Hiwatt.  Superb amp.  I can't remember the make of the transformer but they were pretty big toroidal transformers which made it a bit lighter.

Did you have the 200 or 400? The 200W HiWatt is 'the thing' I always wanted but having played through 70s SVT heads, I did wonder if the extra power might be handy. Back in the day, multiple guitar and bass heads was a pretty common sight and I've always assumed 200 was a little on the low side for headroom.

I've always really fancied a HiWatt 200 and I continue to cruise Reverb in the unlikely hope of finding one at a price I can afford. I recently saw something called a MyWatt advertised. It appears  to be a German HiWatt clone and is 6550 / KT88 based but the price tag is a fraction of the cost of either a vintage or reissue. I'm interested but a bit sceptical. Does anyone have any experience with these? How do the transformer specs compare - the old HiWatts had huge Partridge ones, more like a massive HiFi amp. Are these worth a look?

1 minute ago, Al Krow said:

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 either need a rig with massive headroom or the opportunity to route it through FOH (which would kind of take the fun out of it). I understand that Juan Alderete ran it into his old Ampeg night after night and never blew anything, but it has that rep as a cone toaster. I've been playing around running it into a Manta in place of an OC2 and it does some really terrifying things with the filter sweep.

14 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

NIce. Fancy sharing some of your recordings?

Album demos, so a bit sensitive. Not the material, just my sloppy playing. I'll have a dig around though - do you have one? It's an odd pedal. It almost sounds like a digital octaver on 50/50 blend,  but with no latency. Plus the whole 30 Hz thing.

Returning to octavers, I recently picked up a mint DOD Meatbox reissue at a non-insane price. Oh boy, this is the first time I've worried about my speakers. It doesn't have the hollow resonance of an OC2 but it goes really - insanely - low. Thanks to the TRS out, I've been using it mostly for recording, bypassing the amp and just sticking a layer underneath via DI - the same way the original DBX 120 was used back in the day. Soloing the tracks, reveals a really synthy, subby analog thing going on under higher notes and rock solid tracking with no detectable latency. It won't be my only octave down, but it's a usable beast I'd recommend one if you can get one for a reasonable price.