Jack

It's wild the different approaches to this. I play in two covers band and whilst I'm never anal about being 100% on anything I do try to make an effort with my helix to match tones a bit and do some of the wibbly synth parts. I switch between pick and fingers and I'm also mostly ampless. However, the very nice guy who deps for me plays a Sire V7 (100% fingerstyle) into a Markbass with no effects of any kind and doesn't touch the eq all night. His stage volume means he's not in the pa much. I'm not sure anyone in the audience has ever noticed that the bass player is different, never mind the difference in tones.

I used a 712 as backline once and it was lackluster. The 732 or the 735 is where its at. Having said that I went qsc for the superior DSP (which I never use) Oh well.

Change the problem. If you put the looper after the Zoom instead, then you don't need an aux in pedal, you need a headphone amp.

Sorry the first I've heard of the retrovibe was googling it just now. I can't comment on better, worse or comparative value but I can tell you that the MMSR is superb. It's in my number one gigging bass and it's just wonderful.

Don't sell your first bass!

I've gigged with wireless systems for about 20 years and only had 3-5 issues. That's probably less reliable than a cable, but not by much. The pros outweigh the cons for sure.

The Electric Blue stuff from Ashdown was bottom rung for its time, can you maybe stretch to an Ashdown MAG combo? Old, heavy, covered in carpet. But you can get a 2x10, 1x15 or even a 4x10 combo that will provide around 180W internally and about 300W if you add a cabinet later. The 4x10 would pretty much cover any gig I've ever done and sound great doing it.

Truly god-tier routers there, guys If the mixer connects fine using a lan cable, why don't you use that method to add your home network wifi details to the xair, then you can flip it to client mode whenever you're at home and hopefully stop those issues with various devices not connecting? Mine is on client mode at home, because I don't want the hassle of changing any control device over to a different wifi, I just want to be able to fire up the app on say my desktop pc and not have to choose between mixer or internet access. Live it's a non-issue because it will presumably be wired to your router.

Weird gig at The Gunner's Club in Sunderland. Turns out it's not just a name and they take the 'gunners' bit very seriously. This was not the place for a stray acab joke, that's for sure. The pictures were all taken during either set up or soundcheck, it absolutely filled up as soon as we started the first song and everyone came upstairs from the bar below. All in all a good gig, and when the free pint was drunk the next one was £2.90, ahhhhhh social clubs.

I'll buy a good bass regardless of the name on the headstock.I would never buy a bass because I like the player. Back in the day when you could get a pristine used one for £250 the Ibanez K5 was the best B string pretty much under £1000 despite the Fieldy connection.

Not the bestest Everything went great first set, started the second and I though "I'm really quiet" and I realised that my stage wedge, a QSC K12.2, had the power light flashing rather than steady on. When we got a minute between songs during some singer/crowd banter I flipped it back over to see an error message on the screen. On dear. I put some of myself in the singer's wedge and got on with the gig just fine. However, the QSC has a problem. If you turn it on it says "Speaker damage, can you hear the 100Hz test tone clear and undistorted?" Well, I can't even hear anything. It's as if the speaker is completely disconnected. Now the question is: authorised QSC service centre (London) or local repair? Balls.

Even then though, they're using amps for the sound. Not for the volume. And they're off stage, being monitored via IEMs. It's sounds like a weird thing to say, but for the purposes of this thread they are actually 'ampless'.

I will just say that if you have a lot of stuff going on there are free apps for your phone that measure wi-fi congestion. Even the stuff that uses non standard frequencies usually has a conversation chart in the manual, so you can do a scan of a venue and then place your stuff (both in terms of what channel it's set to and physical place) accordingly. I'm not at a gig right now but I fired up the app on my phone and you can see our two access points at home (the green ones) out of the way of our neighbors, various red and purple. You can see how congested channel one is, as most cheap home routers are set there by default and not many people can be bothered or know that they should move them. My stuff is on channel 8 (and blasting most of 5 to 10 by proxy) so the best channels to place a new device would be 3, 4, 13 or 14. If you're having trouble at a venue is a great thing to be able to visualise what's going on.

It's just so variable. I've been in a hard rock band with 3x guitar/bass wireless units and a wireless mic, plus the router and had totally trouble free gigs so it's not like we have internal conflicts, but if you go into a busy RF environment then something like one of the venue wifi routers can cause a domino effect. There are plenty of things that you do to mitigate this though, off the top of my head - Install a really powerful router to work for the mixer, I'm a bit of a pc nerd and I can thoroughly recommend Mikrotik for this. - Move some things into 5.8Ghz if you can, although this is not the silver bullet that it's often made out to be or once might have been. - Have self scanning and adjusting stuff, the Shure GLX stuff is great for this because if it detects that a channel is busy it just moves on to the next one. I know this can cause a merry go round of changes, but it's never happened to anyone I know. - If you think it's going to be a busy wifi environment then plan ahead. If we do a function in a hotel or an office I'll take a laptop and ethernet cable for the mixer just in case. I don't for bars. - Learn a little about how digital wireless works. Did you know that most wifi router anntenna actually produce a doughnut shape with very little power and coverage going above and below? Also, the squishy human body (especially mine!) is a perfect absorber for wifi (just like foam soundproofing in studios) and so if, for instance, you have a wireless unit in your back pocket and a receiver in front of you on the floor, your own backside might be blocking it enough that just moving to a holster on the strap can fix everything. - Above all else, sometimes you could fix something, but you won't have the time or ability to troubleshoot in a busy gig. Make sure you've packed a guitar lead just in case! I've had two wireless failures in 10 years and one of those was actually just a loose power connection, so that's only one time ever where my wireless bass has dropped out a few times and forced me on to a lead. But when it happened I was pleased to have a cable.

This. Having a spare is not the same as having a backup plan. When I used an amp I never once brought a spare amp, I brought a DI box. I always, always, always carry a spare bass because I would need one if my bass broke in some way, but I don't bother carrying a spare microphone or mic stand. The contingency is to just not sing backing vocals. We'll manage with only 3 vocals rather than 4 and I'm the worst singer anyway. On the super rare chance the mixer goes down then just grab the lead vocalist's microphone, plug it straight into a pa main speaker and carry on. It's not the Albert Hall.

My guitarist hated them until he started setting up an ambient mic. It's a Behringer LDC that just goes on a stand facing the audience, gets him as much of the room vibe and crowd as he wants. The fact that he already does that each gig is one of the reasons I'm considering making the switch.

Chances are that anything mission critical is going to put a 'dent in your performance'. Can't have your amp fail without losing sound as well. I don't even use IEMs but just off the top of my head I would put my bass in my singer's monitor wedge, which could be done whilst playing, and then sort it out at a set break.

Good morning all, a specific question but I'm wondering if you could help me. In both of my bands I currently play what is technically ampless but I still need to bring a wedge because the stages aren't silent they're just quiet and without any monitoring I'd be relying on PA subwoofer rumble, not ideal. I'm slowly passing soundman duties in one band to our guitarist, so the ability to go to IEMs is opening up. However, I'm largely deaf (down about 20dB) in my right ear. This isn't due to noise exposure, it was originally thought to be otosclerosis but that turned out to be a misdiagnosis and now I just have hearing loss and chronic pain. Oh well! Due to this I can find wearing headphones quite discomforting and disorienting unless I use a pan to go some way to balancing out the sound volume discrepancy. I don't do this often and essentially just can't wear headphones. This leads to two problems with IEMs. 1. I assume that with a stereo system there'd be nothing stopping me from setting the LR channel levels differently, are there any mono systems with a pan/balance control or similar that I can just use to dip my toes in? I love the simplicity of the Xvive system, but it's mono and no pan. It's not so much the money of the stereo system, it's the having to go with another rack bag, plug, everything. If I could spend £150 on the easy system just to see if I can like IEMs then I have no qualms about going all in afterwards, but I really, really hate headphones. Would one IEM and one normal earplug work? 2. If I do this, I'm paradoxically worried about IEMs damaging my hearing. Because of the volume 'averaging' that your ears do, and because I think it's 20dB quieter than it actually is, I'm worried about having a comfortable volume in my left ear and blasting my (already damaged) right ear to bits with a signal that's 20dB hotter than that. Is there any kind of way to measure actual IEM volume? I know I could get one of those million pound face simulating mics but, well. Thanks in advance. And if anyone know an audiologist who wants to make a career out of treating Jack's Syndrome then do please let me know.

Indeed, different compromises for everyone. It took me and the drummer years to get buy in in my hard rock band. We went almost silent (it's bouncy on stage but you wouldn't need earplugs) a few years ago and it's been great but I know not everyone in every band would think that. My other (indie rock) band see the benefit of a quiet stage, but we have a 19yo studies-music-at-uni guitarist who's still very much in the 'massive amps are cool' stage of his life and we've all agreed that, to appeal to our rather traditional audience, we're not moving to artificial drums or using a shield. As such we've got me (all helix, all the time), the singer/rhythm guitarist who uses a boss katana that has no stage volume, the lead guitarist uses the world's quietest vox ac30 and a proper, but small and quietly played, drum kit. Is it a silent stage? Not by a long shot, but it's still way out of the way of the pa and allows a decent mix up front. People saying "my gigs are too small for this kind of approach" don't seem to understand that the smaller your gigs are the more this approach helps. If I was playing large festival stages every gig I'd be back on big amps, they're fun and they don't get in the way of a pa on that size stage. In fact I'm waiting on good deals on a few pieces of kit so that I can have an amp again for our summer bike rally circuit.

Proper moulds will make them not fall out, I'm the same with anything short of customer earplugs, headphones etc fall out. As for preferences, fair enough.

I think they were meaning the distance selling regulations that let you return a new product if it doesn't meet your satisfaction.

I don't know of any clones (though I'm sure they exist) but if you bought a used one and then sold it later you might come out having only lost postage costs. I know that still requires a higher initial investment, but it's an option. if you're anywhere near Newcastle you're welcome to try mine, similar BCers might make you other offers if for some crazy reason you don't live in Northumberland.

There's a difference I think between shifting your sound to pedalboards/preamps/modellers and being truly 'ampless' as in not bringing any of your own stage volume. I'm ampless in that I don't use and amp, I use a Helix straight into the PA, but I'm not ampless in that I bring a QSC wedge, which provides as much stage volume as we need. My bands are not switching to IEMs any time soon (one guitarist is out of the lot of us across two bands) but even if everybody else did then I'm the soundman so I need to hear the room. There are also, and this is shocking, people who aren't me. Plenty of people play as full-time deps or in weird situations, I can see why bringing an amp that can blow the doors off any venue could be reassuring if you don't know what you're walking in to.

I have never played or interacted in any way with a T-40 as I'm just uninterested, but I like that Retrovibe. Maybe that makes it a bad copy but I think it looks like an interesting bass.