SimonK

If you are looking into chordal and solo style playing I would wait a couple months until Schecter brings out the five string version of their Charles Berthoud signature bass ( https://www.schecterguitars.com/product/17232 ). As he is probably the most talented bass soloist alive at the moment I imagine the spec will work just fine, and he has mentioned in a number of videos that five, and maybe even six, string versions are on their way. If they are too expensive looking for something of similar spec (in terms of string spacing, pickups & neck dimensions) might be a good place to start.

I was going to say the same thing - although I do use my pedal board through an Aguilar 350 and into whichever cab is easiest to get to if I need to work something out prior to a gig/practice. Mind you my home "guitar" rig is the opposite extreme - possibly compensation for never gigging on guitar!

I think, as was mentioned earlier in the thread, what is interesting about the return of Mesa is that it has been very much tied into the Gibson Garage launch, which marks a distinct shift in marketing strategy by positioning both Gibson and Mesa as explicit high end "lifestyle" brands. Now granted this isn't entirely new - PRS has been accused of creating "doctor & dentist" guitars for years - but this does seem to be an explicit attempt by two more brands to gain in-roads into a specific retail sector which, as many have commented here, is not necessarily gigging musicians. To be fair there's no reason why they shouldn't do this - but it is interesting to see. Also it doesn't mean these amps aren't good - I'm sure they are wonderful - but I do hope they come with a duster and advice as to which furniture polish may stain the finish!

Updated the preamp on my board as I keep getting threatened about going IEM and not being able to bring my amp. Went for the Genzler because I always liked the old Genz-Benz tone from my sadly dead Shuttle 3.0. Only irritation is that it had a on/mute button rather than on/bypass.

Yes - too many preamps and not enough switching! Slight shame the Magellan pre has on/mute rather on/off - being able to choose between the two would be a lovely feature (perhaps using a button) for next time the pedal get an update! RE the HPF - I liked the video above showing how it works with the spectrum - I'm guessing if I set it any higher than 40Hz I lose some of the fundamental E string frequencies, and for a five string no higher than 30Hz? Or because it is a roll off does it not cut quite so savagely so in fact it is OK to set it a bit higher - maybe 100Hz or so just to protect the PA a bit?

That arrived quickly - initial play and I quite like contour A. I'm also running the pedal at 18v although not sure what difference that makes. It does, however, seem quite powerful so I had to keep the master volume at 1/4 to avoid overloading my amp. I get to try it in anger next week.

Not yet - @mowf let me play his 1978 Jazz bass a few times but then we lost touch and I only recently found out he sold it on this forum a few years back - otherwise I would have made an offer for it - but if anyone else has a '78 Jazz or P bass, or maybe a MM Stingray (4 or 5 strings) going please let me know!

...you need to go to B&Q and buy a drill and some pieces of electrical wire... and if you're lucky you won't die from the consequences...

I certainly learned the hard way about shielded instrument vs speaker cables, although yes have used old bits of house electrical wiring with banana plugs on the end as emergency speaker cables before!

Just pulled the trigger on the pre-amp pedal from bass direct when I realised it also has an HPF on it - don't tell the wife...

Yes don't confuse a shielded instrument cable with a speaker cable. Get it wrong one way and it will be noisy, the other and it might melt! For shielded instrument cables I've used Whirlwind cables for years. Yes they are £50 but at least two of mine are twenty years old and still going strong.

So to answer the question - I have everything worth more than £2000 explictly itemised on home insurance, and it also covers it out of the house (but not if left unattended or in a vehicle). For nostalgic purposes - sad to hear you've stopped playing of late - do you still have the fur lined pedal board? I think the most fun I had doing sound was the one or two occasions that you had no one except me to run the desk for you!

Hmm - can't be many bassplayers called Mowf in this world - did you used to play for Powerbulge in Southampton?

Thanks @JohnR - good to hear that the DI is still good, and thanks @agedhorse for confirming the architecture. RE my Shuttle 3, @agedhorse may recall that I contacted him on TalkBass about sending it to him when I come to the States in June. However, as I am only there for two weeks I am a bit nervous about getting it to you, and then back again, before I fly home. While it can sit with a relative I really do not know when I will be in the States again and the postage back to the UK is not worth thinking about. So Surrey Amps sounds like an alternative - would you recommend me contacting Stan Lawrence as an alternative to trying to get it to you this summer?

Lend them to someone trustworthy who will gig them? I've got a couple, mostly guitars and amps, out on longish term loans with people who can't afford to buy their own. Choose the right person and they will take care of it better than you would!

You haven't quite given enough information in the question. Nevertheless I would almost always go bass to pedals (if you use them) and then into a good DI with the balanced out going to the desk. You can then choose to either get an aux feed back from the desk to hear both yourself and the rest of the mix (and plug that into IEMs, a powered wedge like the Behringer you mentioned etc.), or you can take the the thru from the DI box and plug that into a bass amp, or indeed a powered monitor, to only monitor the bass signal in addition to any other foldback you are receiving.

Sorry for the thread resurrect (but showed I did search before creating my own!). I'm after a preamp to go on the top left of my pedal board (picture below). Many years ago I bought the Hartke Bass Attack, but only because it was all I could afford at the time. It has the requisite DI out, but the tone shaping options - both the pre-shape and the valve emulator - are not really to my taste in that I can't find a way of making them useful. Given the increasing likelihood of IEM becoming omnipresent in the not too distant future, I'm thinking of getting a decent preamp that will ensure I always send a good sound to the desk. Given the Genz-Benz Shuttle 3 is my all time favourite amp (although sadly it has died on me and I can't get it fixed on this side of the Atlantic!), would the Genzler Magellan pre get pretty close in a preamp pedal? Also what's the onboard DI like - the Shuttle 3's DI was excellent and my go to recording DI as well.

Unpaid gig mindset - playing in churches can be a funny thing. I grew up in a super-charismatic/pentacostal setting and even went full time playing bass with a worship band for a couple of years after leaving school (before realising that University was a better life-option!). Problem is that when you get used to playing in a semi-pro church music setting it makes it much harder when you subsequently (due to work & family) move to a much smaller church with all the challenges of random instrumentation, dodgy equipment and no training. So I pretty much stopped playing in church for about fifteen years, focusing on an originals/covers band in the meantime. Then my church got a new vicar who is a really talented mult-instrumentalist, as are his two teenage children, and now we have a band that is fun again - two or three other musicians including myself have since re-emerged so we now can manage a couple different band combinations. I've often mused as to whether I "should" have taken a fifteen year haitus from church music due, essentially, to the band being crap and it not being fun to play in that setting anymore...

...this is fun - some great trips down memory lane! We did "My Redeemer Lives" last week but the bass riff isn't too hard, just a bit of chromatic walking around the normal 1-V-octave pentatonic box - great fun - unlike mourning into dancing which I haven't played for years and now need to work out again! ...edit... ten minutes later and I've more or less got it but the last six or seven notes are syncopated which is tricky - not sure I would get it right at full speed every time!

If we are doing Christian songs with signature bass lines we must remember this one (need headphones - I've linked to just the right place!):

Live action shot from Easter morning church service - Bass pedals on left, acoustic guitar on right, which would have been great if I hadn't accidentally plugged the acoustic into the bass pedals at one point when switching instruments - although did notice before playing anything thankfully!

Happy Easter - long old service this morning but twelve pedals on the floor which was great until I plugged my acoustic guitar into the wrong board right as communion started which made the whole church jump!

It's almost alway a combination of sound engineers not knowing what they are doing, and then trying to find a reasonable mix by keeping the stage volume as low as possible in odd shaped buildings, that causes problems in churches. You can take a half step there as a musician by making sure a reasonable signal is being sent to the desk while ensuring that any amp on stage is very definitely being used/thought of as a low-volume personal monitor - hence my comment to the OP. It's also not beyond the realms of possibility for there only to be one channel available for a multi-instrumentalist, and the person on desk not realising that a bass has been swapped for an acoustic guitar or vice versa - I imagine if this is the situation for the OP they can help by using their Caline preamp and turning the bass knob to the minimum when they use the acoustic guitar. But if two channels are available I would use a clean DI (and a smidge of compression if you have some) before the amp for both instruments.

I'm playing both bass and acoustic guitar (on different songs) on Easter Sunday. I run two channels to the desk - one is my acoustic guitar that normally goes compressor into a DI then to the desk, and then my bass rig which is a pedal board (lots of stuff but also a compressor) into a Trace Amp and then pre-EQ DI out from the amp to the desk. But everything is DI to the desk with as little EQ as possible - leaving it to the sound guys to EQ the FOH mix. Mind you one FOH EQing tip with an acoustic guitar is to set it up in such a way that on its own you think it sounds a bit trebly - once the rest of the band starts it will then sit in the mix fine - certainly in church type music the acoustic guitar is as much there for rhythm as chords, especially so if you have keys as well.

I just had a look at the Rumble 100 manual and it seem that the DI out on the back is post pre-amp with no option to make it pre - probably hence the comment of not being great with an acoustic guitar. If this is the case I would definitely run a DI in front of the amp to give a less-coloured feed to the desk for both bass and acoustic. The Caline CP 60 will do the job, but I would go simpler than that and use a passive DI box without EQ - a radial stage-bug is my goto, but if playing in church the DI box is seldom the weakest link in the system so most any DI box will do.