SumOne

I'm eyeing up the MPC Keys 61, haven't quite convinced myself that it's worth the extra ££ from using the MPC One with a midi keyboard....nearly there though! MPC One £630 + Midi Keyboard £200 + MPC instrument collection plugins £350 = £1,180 MPC Key 61 = £1,480 The Key 61 also gets a few things like more internal storage (32GB vs 4GB), more ins/outs, more hardware knobs and buttons and touch strip control, some in-built extras to map the keys. I'm not sure if that justifies the £300 extra between MC One + Midi keyboard + Pugins, but a quick, enjoyable, tactile, reliable workflow is certainly worth ££ to me (it's basically why I'm using hardware rather a Laptop). .......although as far as this thread goes, this is straying quite a long way from what would usually be classed as a drum machine!

New album 'UK Grim' from Sleaford Mods.

Behringer are cloning the Moogerfooger MF-102. https://www.musicradar.com/news/behringer-mooger-fooger-clone I've been waiting for them to do a MF-101, fingers crossed they do the whole range (although they showed pictures of their MF 104 clone a year ago and it's not available yet - possibly due to chip shortages)

Does anyone know a cure for this: Playing a note on the Bass and then playing a note quite a lot lower (like an octave lower) the lower note does a quick 'warble' doing a higher pitch note before settling into the correct lower note. It happens with a lot of the FI preset programs and a lot that I have downloaded or made myself so I don't think it's a preset specific thing. I thought it might be a portemento thing but that seems to make no difference. On the same preset playing notes on the keyboard octaves apart it doesn't do it so I guess that means it must be related to the Bass tracking rather than the synth effect. But playing on the Bass and playing through a scale of consecutive notes (e.g. playing gradually down the scale a whole octave) is a all good, it's just those big jumps down seem to confuse it and make it quickly warble up (I guess momentarily reading the harmonic an octave up?) then down to the note played, odd it doesn't do that unless you are doing a big jump down though. And the second time you play that low note it doesn't do it, just after that first jump down. I've tried with two different Basses and being very careful with technique and reducing overtones and it still does it so I'm concluding it is something with the FI tracking (changing the input level doesn't seem to stop it), or perhaps something that can be changed in the editor?

Bought a pedal from Bas (that I'd sold to him a year or so ago!) the buying back went as well as the selling did! All good, fast postage and all working as expected. Thanks!

@Al Krow the mothership has landed! Going all out digital. It'll keep me busy for a while - especially when I start using midi. I don't think there are many sounds this lot can't make.

Has anyone found any good ways of doing synths and envelope filters? For synthy stuff an Octaver/Pitch shifter into Fuzz and using things like the swell and delays and modulation can do decent enough sounds. Or lots of delays and swells for pad type sounds. I think the Zoom B1 four beats the Core and Stomp for synth bass sounds. What I'm really after are all the main ones like 808 kick/boom, Reese, Stabs, FM Bass, Plucked. The auto wah isn't great, I find the humanizer better and keeping the vowels the same does a fixed wah sound that can sound good going into a phaser. I'm not sure why multi fx are always bad at synth and envelope filters. It was expected though - anyone selling a Future Impact give me a shout!

I might be wrong, but a hopefully simple enough thing that I think you could do with the Gecko is use it basically like three extra footswitches e.g. preset up, preset down (using Program Change (PC) messages), and Tap Tempo (using CC messages) that it sends to the Core. That would mean you you'd still have the Core 'ctrl 1, 2, Exp 1' and 'ctrl 3, 4, Exp 2' outputs to add up to two extra dual footswitches, (or two expression pedals, or one of each). So you could have up to 10 footswitches vs 3.

Yeah, but the Bass Gallery has a webite too. And is 15% commission rather than 20%. And personally, is a shorter journey for me to go and drop off the Bass. But yeah, I'm sure Bass Bros and Bass Direct are probably fine to use too, not a huge amount in it.

I sold through the Bass Gallery on 15% comission. I think it's a good deal as you can charge a bit more selling through them rather than privately so you don't really lose much money as a seller and it takes hassle out of it. I set the price myself and the Gallery didn't question it so I guess when you see very expensive basses on there it is sellers taking a chance. There is a 2 week 'cooling off' period for buyers to be able to return basses so you need to wait until after that before you get paid. It seems the best deal being that it is in a London shop that can probably sell for a bit more than a shop in a Leamington Spa industrial estate, and it's a lower % comission than competitors. I'd use them again. If I was selling a Bass I'd put it up on Basschat first, if it doesn't go for what I'd think it's worth I'd put it up for sale at 10-15% more via the Gallery. If I was doing part-ex then Bass Direct has given me the best deals. I'd avoid eBay and Reverb. Too many chacers and time wasters and too much risk, and they take their % (I think ebay is 12.8%) when all the effort and risk is on the seller.

For anyone getting into programming Reggae drums I think this video by DM Kahn is one of the best (he also does a lot of sample packs and other tutorials and production)

The S-Bend sums up a lot of my impressions with the Core: It is a great feature that I don’t remember seeing on any other pedal or multi-fx, but labelling the clean to new pitch transition time control ‘rise’ and the return ‘fall’ is not well thought out, it is in-fact the opposite if the shifted pitch is a lower octave. Labelling those controls something like ‘shift’ and ‘return’ would make more sense. Also, it shifts into a poly octave/pitch shifter tone but when staying in that new tone it has no control for clean blend like it does when using those effects – could dive bomb down into Octave playing (with clean blend, and ideally with the Mono octaver sound) and then rise back up to clean. Then it'd go from quite a cool but slight novelty effect to something that is potentially better than owning an OC5. Like most things with the Core though I expect there are workarounds, I guess once the S Bend dive down is complete a mono octaver with clean blend could be activated if it was on a parallel path, then the reverse of that when un-triggering the S Bend to rise back up to clean. A bit of a faff though for something that seems could've been added as a S Bend control easy enough. Likewise for the Freeze effect. It is a great feature other than the fact that turning it on does a volume jump and turing it off does a sudden stop so isn't as good as owning an EHX Freeze. If it had the swell and decay option (like an EHX Freeze) and adding more complex swell/decay/modulation then then it could potentially be better than owning a Freeze though - clearly those are things the Core is capable of which is why it is a bit frustrating the effect doesn't have those controls. Again though, there are probably workarounds by adding a swell effect and trailing delay to the Freeze effect and adding a clean parallel path for playing over the top of it – another faff though that seems it could've been avoided if the stand-alone effect was a bit more thought out.

I'm not sure what's going wrong for you as it works for me. Perhaps double check your 'Rise' isn't set to zero? 'Rise' is how long it takes to transition from clean to the pitch you select, 'fall' is the time back to clean, so that is confusing if the pitch you select is lower.

@Kiwianother one worth considering is the Elektron Samples. Not as good as the MPC One but half the price. It's pretty good and has some quite decent ways of adding 'randomness' to quantized beats.

^^^ Isn't going onto a Drum Machine thread and saying why you don't use drum machines and why other shouldn't the equivilant of going onto the Effects forum and saying why Effects pedals aren't needed (a hangable trolling offence on Talkbass!) . 😉 I get where you're coming from, but there continues to be quite a big market from hardware drum machines. There are pros and cons to either method. I guess all those people using hardware could be wrong, or perhaps they are in different situations and people like doing things in differernt ways. As far as backup, the MPC One comes with a DAW so I do have finished tunes saved on the Laptop. And all samples are on the Laptop. If the MPC dies I would lose quite a bit of work in progress though. But then again, I had a Macbook just die on me once, I had an external hard drive but couldn't ever get things to work properly on the next Macbook which cost me over £1k (I'm not in a situation where work will pay) and I had to buy a newer £200 version of Logic to go with it as the old one was pretty much obsolete and on CD. So that was about £1,200 of hardware failure.

It depends on how people like to work, lots of people just use software, lots of people like to just use hardware. Personally, I find something in-between is ideal, the MPC is much more fun and intuative for me to do finger-drumming and altering parameters via knobs and touchscreen and live dubbing and DJ effects sort of stuff. It feels more like DJing or playing an instrument than programming. But it ocasionally is best if combined with a computer to download/ organise samples and finish tunes. I've found Computers and software to become redundant just as fast - if not faster than hardware. My friend still has an MC 505 from the mid 90s that works fine, turn it on and it still does what it did 25 years ago. I doubt very much that is the case with many people with a Computer and DAW from then, they seem to last me about 3 years before trouble starts and the faff of just getting everything working takes the fun out of it., there always seems to be some new OS update or DAW update that messes with stuff and needs a faff to get things like midi controls re-mapped. And a decent enough Computer + DAW isn't exactly cheap, iMac or Macbook (approx £1300+) + Logic Pro (£200) + some sort of hardware interface (£200) is about 3x the cost of an MPC one. I tried to sell my 10 year old Macbook Pro with Logic a while ago and the shop didn't want to offer anything, it wasn't worth their while to even bother as it's worth so little now whereas a things like 20+ year old MPC 2000 still goes for at least £650 second hand.

I've been looking into it and downloaded the midi implementation manual from Boss https://www.boss.info/uk/support/by_product/gt-1000core/ , here is a screenshot of the first page, it carries on like this for 41 pages, a real page turner! So, immediately giving up on that I turned to Youtube. Morningstar have a video: I think I'll do the opposite though and will use the Core as the controller for a FI (or perhaps a C4, but that needs their Hub or Midi adapter). Basically I want so when I go onto a Core preset it automatically changes the FI preset as assigned e.g. Set Core preset 1 to include an FX loop being turned on with the FI in it and sending a PC midi message for the FI to change to a certain preset, as far as I can tell that is fairly straight forward. I imagine that the synth and filters of the FI/C4 could sound great with some additional stuff like drive, modulation and delays added by the Core.

I've been to two festivals where Barrington Levy didn't show up though!

Massive lineup for Reggae land festival: https://reggaeland.co.uk/

I'd second the motion for getting an MPC. I got an MPC One last year and think it's the best music thing I've got in a long time. I've spent about 25 years of production via PC & Laptops and keyboards and external drum machines/grooveboxes, the MPC is a lot more fun to use. You can record live finger drumming so that has all the 'humanised' bits of being un-quantized (or that can be quantized and then shift certain parts around). Or you can program via a grid view, or step sequencer and add randomized events (via an automatic 'humanizer' feature), or nudge everything or certain parts by however much you want. As well as being a good drum machine, it's a good sampler, sequencer, DAW, multi fx for bass, and has plugin synths etc. There's lots to it, it makes guitar/bass digital multi-fx pedals (from companies like Line 6 and Boss) look very under-powered, under featured and over-priced.