SumOne

To confuse things ideally I would like to be able to use the Amp and Cabs not just to play Reggae via the Bass, but to also use with my Decks and DJ mixer (and perhaps combined with my current PA Poweramp and speakers) when I DJ Reggae. The DJ mixer has separate main output and monitor outputs so could possibly run the PA Poweramp and speakers via one output and the Bass Amp and Cabs via the other. Or possibly something like the Barefaced Big Baby covers the whole spectrum better and it could replace the PA gear, but them I assume a Bass specific Amp isn't going to be ideal for that.

21 minutes ago, chris_b said:

Wasn’t there one in the classifieds awhile ago? Might not have sold. A Super Twin would work well. They are sensitive cabs so your watts sound louder. A500 watt amp would probably be ok.

No sign of a Dubster 2, but there is a Barefaced Big One which I've just enquired about - looks good.

Almost anything would be an improvement on my current setup of PA Poweramp and speakers (saved slightly as it's fed via tube DI and a Cab sim pedals).

6 hours ago, jazzyvee said:

Have you considered a separate preamp and a class D power Amp as an option as that would give you more options with different cabs. I play reggae too and I use one with my barefaced cabs and having a Dubster II (18"sub), on one side of the power amp and a BBII 12" + tweeter on the other gives a heck of a lot of chest rattling bass and I can control what I deliver to each cab. 

 

Nice one, I've got my eye out for a Dubster 2, they seem pretty rare though.

36 minutes ago, BassmanPaul said:

Just as an aside, the pairing of a 1x15 and a 4X10 is horrible. The 1x15 has no chance of keeping up with a 4x10. If you're thinking that the 1x15 will add lows you couldn't be more wrong as the typical 4x10 will put out more! 

Cheers, that was my long term plan so am considering a bit of future proofing for the amp to handle it - my understanding was that they would combine okay but it looks like I'll have to give this more thought. (GAK's upselling pitch for the  Orange 115 is "Combine with one of the AD200B heads and a OBC410 cab and you'll have a completely Orange, 100% floor-punishing bass rig!") 

.....I might not go for Orange at all though. I mostly play reggae/dub so eventually want to build up to something that can push out a lot of sub and rattle chests and assumed 15" were best for that. 

I just got this from an audio blog:

"Many sound engineers will say that “underpowering”, or using amplifiers that are too small for the speakers, is worse than “overpowering” them. Although they have good reasons to say such a thing and in practice speakers do tend to break mostly when the amp is being driven beyond its operating range, the truth is a bit less straightforward than that; basically, overdriving a small amp can actually release as much power to the speaker as a big amp, and it isn’t the distortion per se that breaks the speakers but rather the increased power of the signal at different frequencies............It’s usually a good call to err on the side of caution by choosing a bigger amplifier than strictly required; it will happily output the correct power cleanly, and if it eventually runs loud enough to break the speaker, that’s a good sign that the speaker needs to be replaced with something bigger. A smaller amp would have been clipping at that point, and most likely would have eventually broken the speaker anyway." https://proaudioblog.co.uk/power-ratings-2-why-speakers-break/

So I guess although something less powerful than 1000W would be probably plenty, it's not necessarily a bad thing to get the 1000W and  just keep it turned low. (this one I've got my eye on is a fair bit cheaper 2nd hand than the 500W brand new).

25 minutes ago, Lozz196 said:

Yes that’s right, if plugging in two cabs each will get the same amount of power, however, in the case of a 1000 watt amp and a 410 & 115, each cab will get 500 watts but in the case of the 410 each speaker gets 125 watts whereas the 115 speaker gets all 500 (if running on full power of course). So it’s possible to overpower the 115, especially as in most cases that’s the cab on the floor whereas the 410 on top of it is more audible. 

Given how loud the Terrors are it’s unlikely you’d ever be anywhere near full power but it’s something to be mindful of. The theory is two of the same cab works the best rather than mixing speaker sizes.

Nice one, cheers. Yeah I wasn't considering the Watts per speaker rather than per cab but that makes sense.

There's a 1000 Watt Terror for sale at what seems an alright price (£400) which I'm considering as long as it's not overkill that's going to blow any speakers I get in future.

Do I understanding correctly for this example:

• 4x10 600W 8 Ohms + 1x15  400W 8 Ohms = Two 8 Ohm cabs wired in parallel have a total impedance of 4 Ohms.
• Orange Terror Bass 500W  is 250 Watts into 8 Ohms or 500 Watts into an 4 Ohms (but that is split 250W per cab).
• So that Amp only ever actually powers each cab up to 250W, meaning the 4x10 will only ever be powered to less than half of it's capacity and the 1x15 at less that two thirds. 

......so potentially something like the the Orange Terror Bass 1000 Watt version wouldn't be complete overkill (as long as not turning up beyond about 3/4) because it actually gives a maximum of 500W power to each 8 Ohm Cab? 

11 hours ago, FarFromTheTrees said:

How does the reverse thing work? What does it do exactly?

Thanks!

It has a footswitch to change the order of the loops - so one loop could have chorus and octaver (that you can click both on/off with one footswitch) and the other loop could have distortion,  you can either have chorus and/or octaver feed into distortion or click to reverse it and have distortion feed into into chorus and/or octaver....as you can have several pedals in each loop it opens up a lot of combinations, it took me a while to work out what pedals always sounds good in front or behind each other to put in one loop and which ones sound good either way around and need to go in separate loops.  

Or if you don't think the reverse thing is that useful for you and you just want to turn on/off several pedals in a loop with one click it's probably worth considering what loops you would like your pedals to be in (I guess the compressor and tuner probably won't be going into loops). Bright Onion do everything from 1 up to 12.

Or perhaps you'll want to blend in your clean signal to loops. There are pedals for that by Bright Onion, or the Boss LS-2 or the EHX Switchblade or tri-parallel mixer, or Old Blood Noise Endeavors Signal Blender. 

I went through all this about a month ago, my conclusion was the dual reverse was mot useful to me but if I had the ££ and pedal board space I would have gone for the Boss ES-5.

4 minutes ago, FarFromTheTrees said:

Hi

So what would be the benefit of your dual reverse looper over say, a larger 6 switch looper? 

I would absolutely love one of those but I can't quite afford one at the moment and i'm unable to save further right now because of reasons. I'd be buying the loop switcher with some christmas money I was gifted

Not many loop switchers do the reverse loop thing so it depends if that's something you think would be useful. Personally I thought 2 loops with the reverse was more useful to me than 5 loops with no reverse. As far as I know the ES-5 is the cheapest option for 5 loops and being able to reverse loop ordering but its cost and size are disadvantages. 

A loop switcher is indeed what you need to turn on/off 2 or more pedals at the same time with one footswitch. Bright Onion pedals are good for this.

I got to a similar situation about a month ago (9 pedals) and I got something slightly different from them worth considering: The Bright Onion dual reverse looper  https://www.brightonion.co.uk/dual-reverse-looper/ for £65. It was handmade and sent to me within a few days (you get to customise your LED colours). It's good.

I have octave, chorus, envelope filter in one loop and distortion pedals in another: can get a couple of pedals in  a loop ready to be switched on/off with one footswitch rather than tap dancing, and cuts pedals out of the signal chain when the loops aren't activated. Plus you can reverse the order of the loops with a footswitch - that opens up a lop of options. 

I heard good things about the Boss ES-5 which can do all that with 5 loops, but that costs £330 and I didn't feel I had enough pedals to justify it.

Latent Lemon https://www.latentlemon.co.uk/ (within that link it says '........also stock pedals from my most excellent fellow UK builders Tate FX, Zander Circuitry, Raygun FX, Bad Penny FX, Hylight')

Bright Onion do switchers  https://www.brightonion.co.uk/ 

Edit: SOLD

Bearfoot Blueberry Bass 'Queen Bee' Overdrive Pedal. Bought new a month ago for a total of about £180 (£128+ £18 shipping + £26 VAT + £8 UK postage), if you're after one in the UK then importing seems the only way to get them unless you can find one 2nd hand (which I tried and gave up on). And here it is! Brand new 2nd hand for £130.

Here's some well deserved hype on a rival forum about how good this pedal is (including my happy posts about getting it) https://www.talkbass.com/threads/bearfoot-blueberry-fans-unite-enter-the-queen-bee.1472050/ 

Only ever used at home, works perfectly. Selling as I recently got a Dave Hall VT1 EQ tube preamp (bought from the sales section of this forum last week) which sounds similar enough that I don't think also need the Queen Bee. 

Collection from Twickenham, or I can post for £5.

Nice work.

I've just bought one from @dodge_bass and am happy with it but I was already mucking about to do this same thing but in a much more basic mechanical way with technics lego so if I click 'colour' it also clicks 'boost'..... I failed and gave up after about an hour though so I'm not sure I've got the skills/patience to do what you've done! 

I was also considering just changing the switches for more heavy duty things that I can do more easily by foot without damaging them- breaker switch type things. 

24 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

I don’t think they anticipated just how successful it was going to be. They deliberately didn’t put it in the bigger housing as that would’ve been really expensive. To be honest, the small footprint is probably what helped shift it too.

I know it’s more, but I’d really recommend getting the Hub and a Morningstar controller to really open it all up. They do a tiny MC3 now.

They used pretty much all the code space in the C4 so there is only room for bug fixes and a few minor feature updates.

Yeah, I guess it's been designed so other hardware can be added so that's fine....have added some things to my shopping list!

I am really liking the C4, I just wish it had a bit more hardware control as there's so much going on, at a minimum to be able to use the 'alt' for control 1 and 2. Feels like this size pedal and controls works for the Aftershock, and perhaps the Spectrum, but the C4 needs more hardware control if you don't want to keep hooking up your phone/laptop or buying additional controllers. 

Ideally for me it would be the same size as something like the Collider (6 knobs, 2 footswitches,  2 toggle switches),  and include a patch number indicator or a small screen like on the small Zoom pedals. In fact, Zoom pedals like the MS60B manage to give a lot of control and information for low cost in a small enclosure.

I guess there's the option to add something like the disaster area footswitch and a midi controller with knobs - but doing both of those doubles the cost and uses more space than if the C4 had a bit more hardware control and information.  I think I'll be in the market at least for a Disaster Area micro midi in a few months.

5 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

You could tweak the patch. This was written on Spectrum which has four parameters accessible on the two control knobs. For C4 you could simply change the two knobs in the editor so that they control filter 1 Q and filter 1 frequency. That would give you the Q and the Decay parameters of the BEF (decay is a misnomer as it actually sets the resting frequency in that pedal). You could then mute voice 2 (dry) and just use the hard-wired mix and volume knobs to regulate the voice balance and overall output. 

Excellent, thanks. I have just started mucking about editing so will get onto that. I'm pretty sure that with a bit of time doing things like that the C4 will cover everything the M82 and Octamizer did, plus all the additional synth stuff makes for a great pedal.

It's a great synth pedal. The only other synth pedal I've owned is the Boss SYB-5 - the C4 does all those sounds and countless more with very low latency and good tracking.

Using it to replace an Octamizer and MXR M82 is a slightly more tricky choice:

• Octaver:  I'd gone through a lot of octave pedals to get to the Aguilar Octamizer which I think has the most usable and natural (least synthy) octave down tones, also can be ran clean to use as a tone control. I haven't found a C4 preset (yet) that replicates the Octamizer, some things very close though. This isn't a deal breaker as I usually use an Octaver with something like distortion or filter after it so the subtleties get lost anyway.
• Envelope filter: It does loads of envelope filter very well. Thanks to Quatschmacher for the 'Purple 2' which is the best I've found at replicating the M82 and is very very close. There's possibly a slight bit of M82's mojo that gets lost-  perhaps that's down to the limited hands on control, or is me being sentimental and I'll just need more time to get used to it.

The main issue I can see is that to fully replace my Octave and filter pedals like-for-like would need the ability to click with my foot for either/or both - I'd need an extra footswitch (like disaster area micro midi), a workaround is I have 3 separate toggle switch presets assigned (filter, octaver, octaver + filter), it's not quite the same as clicking by foot though. And to get all their knob controls to hand I'd also need some type of midi controller.....price creeps up and any pedal board space saving gets lost.

Also has:

• Distortion: Good range of distortion, probably won't be replacing any of my distortion pedals but is decent enough.
• Tremolo: Can work well as a tremolo pedal, I'd like time-based effects like echo but they don't seem to be an option.
• Quatschmacher's Upright sounds.
• ....and probably loads of other things I haven't found yet.

The C4 is a certainly a keeper, a great synth pedal. It doesn't fully replace all the hands-on control of separate Octaver and Filter pedals but adding some additional control pedals could mostly solve that. I guess in my ideal world the C4 would have some extra mappable knobs, and an extra footswitch or two go through presets - obviously that would make it bigger and more expensive though and can buy those controllers separately so can't really complain.

15 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

The search function on the Neuro app/website is your friend. Flashlight by me.

https://neuro.sourceaudio.net/preset/EfvI5JLFWa

Perfect!

17 minutes ago, Quatschmacher said:

Yes, I remember chatting to you on TB last week about this. I hope you’re enjoying it. Hopefully you’ll have no regrets; it’s a brilliant pedal. 
 

Source Audio have been pretty good to me, thanks. My shared presets netted me their inaugural “featured artist of the month” accolade back in July, for which I won a Collider. 

Nice! Well deserved.

So far so good but I've only spent a couple of hours on it. I'll be happy if I get a decent sounding envelope filter, octaver, octaver+envelope filter,  and the upright sound - and your presets seem to cover that! Bonus if I can get some Parliament 'Flashlight'  synth (which I expect is possible), and using it just for time based effects seems like a good possibility too.  

On 15/11/2020 at 14:40, Quatschmacher said:

Check this out, I've managed a pretty cool FM-based upright bass sound. You can track the patch's development by studying the series of patches I just posted to Neuro. (If you want the finished sounds, try 6, 6a, 7 and 7a). I might also post a version with better knob assignments as depending on your dry bass volume and passive tone controls, you may need to adjust the dry input into voice 4.

 

I was on the fence about trading my octave pedal and envelope filter to cover the cost of a C4 (or perhaps Spectrum) as I thought they're the things I'd mostly use it for rather than other synth sounds, then I heard what you'd done with this Upright sound and was definitely sold- my C4 arrived a few hours ago and within about 10 minutes I was trying some of your presets: Good work, I hope you get some sort of commission!

Cheers for the input everyone.

I went for something I wasn't considering this morning:  the MXR Brown Acid Fuzz - I'm a fan of MXR pedals and as it's new rather than 2nd hand or imported/custom built it's not really a hassle to just return it if it's not right...I'm fussy  so might well return it. Realised the other day that I return about three quarters of all the pedals I buy and have sold quite a few others after owning them for a year or so. Currently have 6 pedals and have owned about 30, so only about 1 in 5 stick around long-term.

 I'm expecting I might need to get a 2nd hand LS2 at some point. 

1 minute ago, Stofferson said:

Apologies! But it's the price of tone.

I ran that setup for years, it works great, that's the only thing holding these pedals back is a good clean blend and more cut through EQ. But you can potentially get all 2nd hand for a great price.

Yeah, I think this is the way forward. Anyone selling EHX Green Russian (or perhaps the Way Huge Russian Pickle, or possibly Orange Fur Coat) , LS2, multiband EQ, give me a shout.  

Or perhaps Cog will be able to somehow magic this into one pedal for me, but I imagine it will be more cost and less flexible than getting 3 separate pedals.

Cheers. Yeah I'm now thinking a mixture of pedals is probably my best option: Start with something fairly cheap like the EHX Green Russian which has a great tone for just Bass then perhaps add an LS2 for some clean mixed in to help definition and thump, and EQ pedal for the mids when it needs to cut through the mix. 

This does man my shopping list is now 3 pedals rather than one! But it's about the same price as getting the Hoof, and has the added flexibility of potentially being able to use the LS2 and EQ for other pedals.

^^^^

Thanks for that, very helpful.

The issue of the EHX Green Russian working in the mix is what I was worried about. I think the tone is pretty much exactly what I'd want if just listening to Bass,  but would want to also be able to enhance the mids to cut through in a mix. It's a shame the deluxe doesn't have the same tone.

It's good to hear that the Way Huge is decent, that possibly makes the £125 price tag vs EHX £75 justified. I couldn't make out much difference via Youtube between the two but it's difficult to compare without playing them yourself.   

I've sent a message to Cog to see about Tarkin availability, at £130 it's probably worth it at £5 more than the Way Huge to have mid switches. Possibly they could do something custom like add a sweepable mid (but that probably starts getting too expensive).

The Hoof seems decent but at £160  I'm not sure that's justified.  For that price I could get the EHX and an EQ pedal after it to boost mids.

The Orange Fur Coat (£110) also seems interesting, but loses low end when the Octave (up) is used.

13 minutes ago, Jus Lukin said:

If I didn't already have five Big Muffs, I'd be looking at the EHX Deluxe Sovtek.

The Fredric Effects Green Russian is great, too. More mids and lows than most Muff variants, with a grittier breakup, a touch of overdrive to the fuzz! I'm currently working through selling some pedals, but I'm obviously a bit of a Muff nerd, so they're further down the list, along with any compressors. Let me know if you might be interested though. Sometimes I need a kick to make a decision! 😄

Nice one. I think I might be overthinking it a bit, obsessing over fuzz while I should be working from home during lockdown!  But yeah, the EHX deluxe Sovtek might be what I need for my slightly OCD pickyness about fuzz (also ideally trying to keep pedals small to have as many as possible on my board though!). I'm interested in 2nd hand so give me a shout if you sell any, I'm considering anything in the list above, or possibly others.