radiophonic

@Al Krow Thanks for the update.  I think the dirt options on the Emma are a bit undersold though. The gated fuzz has a sub-harmonic blend too - very meaty even without the octaver engaged and the gating gives a very different sound to a standard fuzz. I have this and a Pork Loin and a Bitcrusher/SRR and use all three for different things. Something like an Aftershock would be the only way I'd replace it simply.  I sort of agree about the PS6, but I'm keeping mine for the +3 octave and the 3 voice harmoniser. I tend to use this stuff with some delay anyway, so the latency is less of an issue.  The other one i have lurking around is a Digitech Bass Synth Wah and TBH, the straight octave down isn't bad - in any sense - and I tend to use it at home quite a bit when I'm working things out. For £45 it was well worth the effort. Ironically, I find it to be useless as an envelope filter though!

1 hour ago, ped said:

You can simulate the effect of a fat finger by putting the headstock against a wall when playing. See if that helps first. 

I wondered about a g-clamp and some foam. It's just about increasing the effective mass of the headstock to shift the resonance, right?

Has anyone tried the fatfinger? The fail I'm getting seems to be textbook Fender behaviour. It would be an easy fix if it works. 

10 minutes ago, lee650 said:

Every bass and every octaver I've owned warbles out on the C/C# on the G string incl fenders/musicman/warwick/spector/yamaha/Ken smith. Even with a compressor in front. Wasn't there a device you clip onto the headstock (fatfinger) which moved the dead spot?

It may well be just me,but yeah playing those notes higher up on the D doesn't do it

Looks like the FatFinger is still available - I remember it now.  Although I assume the description on amazon is a translation....

"I give mass to the neck by attaching to the head base, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, FENDER FATFINGER BASS fat finger fat fingers, gives the rich sustain. You do not need any special tools to install the fat finger. In addition, a portion sandwich because it is covered with felt cloth, do not hurt the instrument unnecessarily"

I'm having some tracking issues with my octaver and I'm trying to pin down the source of the problem before spending any money. Signal chain is usually Stingray -> Boss BC1X Comp -> Okto Nojs. They make a big deal out of the tracking, so this is pretty frustrating. Tracking is OK down to at least open A. However it glitches like crazy around the 5th - 7th fret on the G string. It simply will not lock at all on the 6th fret C#.  I'm wondering if this is the fabled weak G on the Stingray coming into play (I don't notice it playing clean), dead spot (ditto), roundwounds producing too many harmonics (it's fine at 12th fret though and even open), active electronics coupled with the pickup position, something else or combination of all of these. Removing the multiband comp doesn't seem to make a difference - I did wonder whether I was popping the harmonics a bit, but that seems to be a dead end. So do I just buy a P-bass and stick some flats on it?  Answers on a postcard please...

I've skipped it every year since abut 2008, but thanks to my wife leaving her computer power cable at work, I was able to volunteer to collect it (so generous), take our daughter out for a couple of hours (more dad points) and just maybe pop into Rough Trade on the way back. It was very busy but the ticketing seemed to work. There was the usual DJ / Coffee bar set up upstairs and they let us into the store in batches of 20. The awesome weather sure helped the mood. The major backup was the queue to pay, which was almost out the door. No sign of a high street recession or a lack of interest in music. Decent age spread too. I picked up the mono Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the Kevin Shields/Eno 12" and I look forward to blasting them this evening. There's band from 12 but I have recording session.

Well this isn't exactly a surprise after the recent official video about the old 2290, but I think the DAW integration is interesting in that it might be showing us something about the soon-to-be-released updated Toneprint software. Hard to believe that they aren't joining up their thinking about multiple instances for example... I've been disappointed before but fingers crossed. Interesting that even a company like TC didn't have a lot of the original code and weren't aware that the 2290 was significantly analogue either.  Digital was just a buzzword (cough, True Bypass...).

BAD. But we got paid. We were invited to play a folk club. These kind of gigs can go either way if you play non traditional but folk based material. Some audiences are boozy and enthusiastic and others are dead from the neck up and consider electricity to be the devils work. I wouldn't mind if they were actual folk purists - at least there would be some logic to it - but invariably they just want to hear singer-songwriter material from the early 70s played insipidly on an acoustic guitar.   Unfortunately, this was closer to the latter, especially the guy that ran the night, who told us we were too loud (before he'd heard us); had  'too much PA' (he meant backline, we didn't have a PA - which gives you an idea how loud we were) for 'their room' (which we've played in many times before and used to use a practice room). We were also taking up too much space. I offered to go home and leave him to it. We did play, but the whole thing was so compromised sonically that it wasn't worth the effort. A sizeable part of the audience were specifically there to see us, based on previous gigs and word of mouth and all this guy's constraints served to do was to make us sound bad and annoy the hell out of us. 

TC Pipeline? I'm not sure how hard it will cut but it's flexible (toneprint) and has tap tempo. It's on my list at any rate. 

2 hours ago, Al Krow said:

I used to have a PS6 but...

...so I sold it to a professional guitarist who clearly wasn't fussed that it was a bit flakey.

Flakey on bass. Better on guitar - which is what it's designed for.

1 hour ago, uk_lefty said:

I would have loved one of them but couldn't justify the cost. Suppose if I think the cheapo Chinese one I'm using now is worth it I might upgrade to the boss in future.

If it's pure harmoniser function you're after, I think the TC looks like a better solution. Also quite pricey and not likely to be found S/h.  I got the PS6 for 75 quid off ebay. I just need a few weird additional things that only the PS6 does. 

I use a Boss PS6. It's a bit flakey (latency, tracking) but it can do a combination of things that I can't get out of another single compact pedal. The settings i use most are 3 voice harmony (usually R, 3, 5) with delay and a volume pedal. The Pitchfork will do this, but doesn't have a m3 for some reason, whereas - provided you are in key - the Boss will adjust the minor and major intervals as you shift the root. The Quintessence is more flexible in this respect but doesn't offer multi octave up/down. I use the +3 octave option combined with a sample rate reduce to get a wind instrument sound. Unfortunately +3 is only available in S-bend mode so you have to keep your foot on the pedal, which is a pain if you are using a volume pedal too. There is also a detune chorus mode, which I like, but the pedal is early in the chain, so I don't tend to use this much. 

Not really tbh.  I'm mostly interested in the P-Bass trade option rather than the cash, which is why I've not dropped the price. I've never actually owned one (I know- ban me immediately!) and I'm playing in band where it would be a good option. I work in Coventry but live near Nottingham so Leicester isn't that far either - and I drive past it most days. I'd deliver to either. 

Just now, cheddatom said:

Yeh, I was telling Paul, once the headline band had an inaudible bass. Our guitarist asked the soundman to turn it up and he shouted F OFF at him

I've has to deal with him running the drum monitor at full blast, despite us not having a drum kit. Life's too short and I'd never book anything there. I'd rather play the Chameleon - the sound in there can be excellent.

50 minutes ago, cheddatom said:

On Friday we played at The Maze in Nottingham. I got very annoyed with the soundman who wouldn't listen to me resulting in quiet and distorted lead vocals. Despite that it was loads of fun and we played really well. The other bands were great too! I met @PaulWarning who's got a brilliant sound for Verbal Warning! 

Getting annoyed at the sound-man at The Maze is definitely 'a thing'. If its the guy I think it is, he's an asshat of the first order. It's a shame because the venue itself is an asset.

Bump - Mostly interested in a trade at this point. I need a decent P-Bass for a gig. 

19 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

I wonder if this is more to do with the overtone frequencies present. The glitchier pedals happen to be the ones which have stronger mid presence. (Doesn’t the T-16 sound glitchier when its filter is open? It did for me.) When the sub octave signal has the low pass filter applied it’s much less noticeable when it drops out when mistracking.

Is the filter the same one used to control the input? I's always assumed that input filtering was something separate - to clean up the input ahead of square waving it - and the external filter controls worked on the output. If I'm wrong then your idea seems likely. I've definitely noticed that my Octo Nojs glitches more low down on the A string than the same notes played on the E string - particularly when trying to sustain. I'm guessing it's loosing the fundamental earlier and that the pickup location on a stingray exacerbates this. Not a deal breaker, it just requires a bit of thought when playing sustained lines. 

The Okto Nojs is turning out to be a win. It definitely took some finessing to stop the tracking glitching, but provided I avoid open strings and don't pluck to hard, it seems pretty stable. The tone is exactly what I want and the latency really is night and day compared to the digital octavers I'd tried. Our singer was so enamoured with it that she demanded we re-write a song to foreground the sub bass. 

OK I'll have a play. I think the Octave > Filter then gets complicated with compression though, because you don't want compression ahead of a filter (duh!) but you do want compression ahead of the octave. I'm thinking about getting a cheap P-bass for this kind of stuff anyway. S/H mexican one or even a Squier. Not this month though...

1 hour ago, Quatschmacher said:

Told you so. Get it running through an envelope-controlled filter for some real fun and kill the dry signal completely for synthy goodness. Sounds great on really low-gain settings.

Tracking is better on a neck pickup. The best I got was on a Jazz bass with a rotosound steels on it. I prefer the sound using flats though as it takes the edge off the really high sizzle. 

My only fretted bass is a stingray, so I'll just have to work around it! Do you run a filter after it or before? I'd assumed before. I've just picked up a DigiTech Synth Wah off the classifieds here but I'm starting to wish I hadn't sold my MXR BEF - I figured I'd never need it again, but now I'm starting to wonder. 

Okto Nojs is a monster. I've been combining it with a Scrutator and a chorus for some massive synth sweeps. The bit crusher makes the gating super tight when you damp but with near infinite sustain when you don't. The only downside I can find is that it's a bit fiddly balancing the output so the pedal doesn't swamp the rest of the band as soon as you engage it. The gated fuzz is proper nasty and the octave is definitely in the right ballpark. Tracking requires some care - I suspect this is down to my technique or dead-spots though since it glitches in the same fret positions that the Sub N Up did. 

PM'd

A lot of folks use pedal train boards with a PSU bolted or velcro-ed to the base. This is fine for all but the smallest PT boards and even then there are solutions that fit the Nano / Nano+. I have a Novo 18 with a One Spot CS7 and I can easily power 9 pedals with current to spare. You probably need to consider the balance of analog and digital pedals before deciding too. Daisy chaining analog is usually fine - so you can have a fairly small/simple PSU - but a lot of digital pedals need an isolated supply or they get noisy, hence the plethora of 6 - 10 channel supplies with  higher voltage and current options.

An extra foot-switch would be pretty cramped and it's chained in between two pedals with side sockets, so I can live with that too. There are no perfect pedals*

* Except for the MT2 obviously

13 minutes ago, davepb24 said:

On the subject of mismatches I often wonder how Motley Crue's tour with Killing Joke as support went some years back

Dunno - but I saw Hanoi Rocks open for Wishbone Ash in 1981. That didn't go well.