MoominGiant

I bought a Hartke amp from Raggy this morning. Everything was as he'd described and was in immaculate condition. He was really helpful, very hospitable and great to deal with. Would be very happy to deal with him again - a genuinely nice guy!

Thanks for all the advice so far... Regarding the setup, I've not done anything with the wiring yet... but I have already adjusted the action and truss rod to address the fret buzz. It's much better than it was, but still not great. I'll definitely have a go at fixing the wiring - I've held off so far because everytime I pick up soldering iron I tend to end up burning my fingers! :-) I guess a new set of strings and some contact cleaner wouldn't hurt either!

The bass I've got is a Hohner Rockbass. It's got quite a bit of fretbuzz on a couple of the strings, the tone control doesn't work and fiddling with the volume control normally causes the signal to cut out completely - so it's fairly crappy, but playable and doing an OK job. My personal preference would be to get a new bass (maybe a Warwick Rockbass Streamer or Yamaha RBX 375) but I want to make sure I do what's best for the band's overall sound. If the band ever gets some gigs then I'll be able to justify shelling out for some more kit, so I think I'd rather spend the full budget I've allocated on one item than spread it across both a cheaper bass and amp which I'll want to replace later. Not much support for the DI to PA option so far though, which I guess points me towards focusing on the amp.

Hi all, For my sins, I used to be a guitarist for many years. After the band I was playing in packed up a couple of years ago I decided I wanted a new challenge so got myself a V-Drum kit, spent a year learning and got myself into another band as the drummer. The bassist was very unreliable (wasn't learning his parts and then stopped turning up) so he got kicked out and it turned out that finding another bassist was very hard to do. I had an old crappy bass that I'd had bought years ago from a second hand store for the purposes of home recording and when my old Marshall guitar amp had packed up I'd bought a keyboard amp for my a Boss GT-8 FX processor (so it wouldn't colour the sound) which I'd also used for monitoring the V-Drums with the DI going to the PA. So I'm playing with a fairly crappy setup... knackered bass, crappy amp used as a DI box to PA. Clearly I need to improve this situation but have a limited budget (about £400). I've done a bit of research but with my non-bass background I'm floundering somewhat (I'd never even heard of Ampeg until I started reading this forum!) So what should I buy? There's a sticky that says a good bass into a rubbish amp will never sound as good as a rubbish bass into a good amp. But then there's another sticky talking about DI straight to PA. So it seems like I've got 3 options... 1) Buy a decent bass and continue DI-ing to the PA 2) Buy a decent amp and keep the crappy bass 3) Keep both bass and amp but buy some kind of modeller (ie. Boss ME-50) and optimistically hope that makes an improvement All advice (particularly about brands and models!) would be greatly appreciated !! Many thanks in advance!!