mcnach

I know this is often a standard response but I really mean it: go out and try as many as you can. This is just my personal journey, so it may not the same for you, but I had a bunch of 5 string basses over the years. On and off. Never really gelling with any. From a cheap Crafter something or another to Lakland. It wasn't until I had a particular instrument that 5-strings 'made sense' to me. It's a combination of how that bass felt, the neck profile, the sound. While on 4 strings I have a pretty good idea of what my preferences are, I really didn't know for 5-strings. Once I had that particular bass I found myself really enjoying it, and that was key because I felt I needed a certain period of playing (near) exclusively the 5-string, just getting used to the dimensions, where the notes are etc. Not long, it was probably just over a month before I started feeling comfortable enough to gig with it, and only a bit longer until I was just happy with whatever. Now I swap around, no issues. I like the 4 for some things and the 5s for others. I say '5s' because inevitably finding a 5 string bass that I really liked led to getting another two or three but that's just me The instrument that made me 'get' 5 string basses was... a Harley Benton MB-5 SBK, the 'stealth black' one. Super cheap, and needed some attention to the fretwork and nut, but it had a few things going for it: Being primarily a Stingray player, the 'Stingrayesque' design felt very much at home. It's a passive bass, but the pickup is at the right location and it's got that punch I love. It was also pretty light. I would have never thought that this bass would be the one that opened the door for me. Hence my: try everything you can, until you find one that feels 'right'. The transition from 4 to 5 can be a bit confusing at times, but having the right instrument for you will make the process a lot easier. edit: I don't mean the Harley Benton is my recommendation or that a cheap one will do. Just mentioning it because while it was not the greatest instrument, it seemed to have the right 'physical attributes' for me, and it allowed me to be comfortable with 5-string basses in general. Now I have other better ones, and now I understand my preferences for 5 strings.

edit: best ignored

I'd get a second opinion.

That was room 10, by the way. Hopefully ok by now (this was 2 weeks ago).

I went to our local Pirate Studios rehearsal rooms, and this is how I found the amplifier's controls: Maxed output, maxed bass EQ and maxed drive, and the 'shape' button engaged. I would like to tell you all how that sounded, but the amp was dead and needed to get a replacement. The 410 sounded pretty anemic with the replacement amp head, I wonder if some speakers were blown and if that led to the damage on the first head... I told them what I found, what they do with the info is up to them.

I'll take the opportunity to add my thoughts here about this LFSys Monaco cab, which I had a chance to try recenty (thank you @stevie and @funkle ) At the moment I am mostly using a Mesa D800+ with one/twoBarefaced Two10. Those are very coloured cabs by design, so not really useful to compare them in any way, except to say that one thing I loved about the Two10 cabs were the low end: it felt tight, fat, but always very manageable. I felt the same way about the Monaco. It can produce a lot of lows, but I found it very easy to tweak my amp to get exactly what I wanted. My first impressions, at home, were very good. I'm not a huge fan of the Tuffcab style finish in general, but it's an easy to maintain finish and when applied well it can look very good, as in this case. It's light and easy to carry. I really liked that kind of recessed handle, and being at the top given the shape/dimensions. At home it sounded very good very easily. I found my amp controls felt a bit more responsive towards the high mids and treble, no doubt because my usual cabs roll off treble at around 6-7 kHz. It was the low end and low mids that made me nod with a smile. Between the tight low end of the cab and my using the HPF and bass boost on the amp together it just sounded really nice. But in general I find it easy to make things sound nice at home, at lower volumes and in a room that absorbs a lot of the sound reflections. Then I had a chance to take it with me to a rehearsal with an old Rage Against The Machine cover/tribute band, so not particularly quiet, clean and dirty sounds, various FX, fingerstyle, some slap... We were in a prety good sized rehearsal room, as I wanted to walk around a bit and hear differences with position etc. They have an Ashdown RB800 with a 410. I brought the Mesa D800+ paired with the Monaco for comparison. This thing can get pretty loud! I can't tell exactly how loud because I didn't feel comfortable pushing things to extremes when the cab doesn't belong to me, but I was appropriately loud for a rehearsal with this kind of band. The 410 has more apparent low end, call it 'heft' if you like, but you can turn up the bass knob a bit and the cab responds well. I don't expect a single 112 to 'compete' in that sense with a 410. I used to use a pair of Barefaced BB2 years ago, similar story there (although I did have trouble controlling the low end on those sometimes): one cab is a good portable solution but I'd want a pair for playing in a bar without PA support, for example. Getting the right sounds was just as easy as it was at home. The volume was more than adequate for a rehearsal room. The thing that was outstanding, especially when being able to compare side by side against the 410, was the dispersion. At first I was standing close to it, a bit to the side and in front. I walked around and it was pretty uniform, with some variations as expected but I had to get nearly to the side of the speaker before the all important midrange dropped too much. This was with the cab on the floor as well. The 410, by comparison, is a nightmare: get the right balance at around 30 degrees, and you're sounding too middy in front and lacking lows. That's how 410s tend to be, some better some worse, I didnt think the Ashdown was particularly bad in that respect, very average. The Monaco would be a great stage monitor where others on stage can also get a very decent bass sound, and very good too in a rehearsal room. Another thing I did was play with modellers a little bit. I had recently bought a Zoom B6, as I often play with different people and need different effects and I don't want to be reassembling my main pedalboard every time. It worked well. I don't know how close various models are to the originals, but I got good sounds. However I don't like speaker emulations for bass unless I'm having some seriously overdriven sounds, in fact, even when recording I really like the sounds I get pretty much direct to desk with some compression and perhaps EQ/LPF/HPF. Where I find modellers a lot more useful is for guitar, and there's this new project I'm taking part in where I play a bit of guitar too. So, how will the Monaco work with guitar modelling? My needs for guitar are not very sophisticated, generally. I had a few valve amps over the years, including beasts like a Laney VC50, or sweet little nothings like a Fender VibroChamp from the 70s... and I'm not going back. Having a single solution for bass and guitar looks very attractive to me, especially if this project takes off. I started with my old trusty Behringer V-Amp2 that I bought in 2001. Those days I was heavily into guitar and finally these units started to appear that allowed you to get a decent overdriven guitar sound on tape at home. I checked the POD, the J-Station, some VOX thingy, I even had a Boss GX-700, but the Behringer just did what I wanted more easily. Things have moved since. The V-Amp sounded ok, but just ok. But that's just how the V-Amp sounds So I went and fished out my little NUX Amplug thingy, which has some really good on-the-verge-of-breakup type of sounds with a Telecaster. That was already so much better. I've ended up buying a Valeton GP-200 for guitar. It's a 'budget-conscious' unit, but it still sounds a lot better than the V-Amp and I found it to be the most logically designed (or at least with the interface designer that thought most like me!) and the sounds were more than good enough, especially the amp/speaker models. The Valeton GP-200 into the aux input of the D800+ (so used just as a power amp), and through the Monaco cab sounded pretty good. I don't think I would say it compares favourably to a very nice guitar amp, but the emulations sound good enough as they are through the Monaco. A little time tweaking things further would definitely get me much closer. I had a friend coming over one evening for a bit with his Fender Blues Jr. I like the cleans on that amp in particular. My 'interpretation' on the Valeton was good, but felt lacking something when compared to the real thing, but a little tweaking the EQ got me much better results. I think with these units you get used to their ultra processed presets and you end up creating patches that lack the raw punch I'm wanting. But it's there, you just need to play with the controls. And the Monaco sounded very good. This was just done quickly, we probably spent about an hour in total checking a lot of things out. My friend also uses a Line6 Helix, from which he gets amazing sounds directly into studio monitors. He also said he spent a lot of time until he got the sounds he wanted, and that initially it also felt a bit lacking. I'm not saying this to imply my lowly GP-200 is as good as a Helix, just saying that tweaking is probably necessary to get the best out of these units, with your own specific equipment, and that if the GP-200 gives me sounds I'd happily use live with the Monaco, a better modeller/user combination probably will be even happier I really liked the Monaco. It's very light, nice shape/size factor, well positioned recessed handle... it's got a very bassist-friendly tone, in that the 'default' low end is very present but tight... but it's definitely closer to the response of a good studio monitor than a typical coloured bass cab, which is a nice thing if you'd like to use it with other sources, like keys or guitar. Much like Pete, I find that I would be very happy with a pair of these as 'my cabs'. However, I'm also very happy with what I'm currently using so I don't plan to change, but if I did I would definitely consider one or two of these. I loved how it worked with guitar, but a 600W capable speaker is probably overkill for my needs... however, hearing about a possible 10" speaker in the future of LFSys, I'll definitely be watching with interest. If it sounds anything like the Monaco, in a smaller more portable package, it could be the perfect cab for those who want something they can play anything through. @stevie Thank you for letting me try this cab and apologies for taking so long before I put my thoughts in writing. @funkle Great to meet you in person and all the chat

Impressed with mine, and fun to hear some sounds I remember dreaming of when I was younger and poorer Add a little reverb, and it goes a long way. Really good clean/low gain/crunch sounds especially. It's funny comparing it to a modern digital unit. The digital one sounds great, but the PSA really sounds like a combo amplifier mic'd closely... It's not a better/worse situation, just a different thing. I need to experiment with it and using an external cab sim, but I have no real complaints. And it's tiny! Love it. I haven't experimented a lot with it on bass, but what I have sounded very nice. Put a compressor on the front, direct to desk, sounds great. I'm (slowly) building a IEM solution with bass, based around a Zoom B6 and a BackBeat unit... but I don't use much in terms of FX in most of the gigs I play, so teh PSA might be a great substitute and make the whole thing much more portable. I could fit the PSA, the minimixer, tuner and compressor on a small board, and probably have room for an additional pedal. No real noise issues here, either.

Their little pedals were quite cool, and they're all discontinued! 😲 The Katfish envelope filter was quite good too.

The Helix may be a little old, but it's still better sounding than most other things out there. It's just that the cheaper units are getting better and better, so it requires a bit more of a chat with yourself to decide whether the difference in quality is worth the cost. I was ready to buy a Helix, just could not decide on the LT or the Floor version... then the GP-200 came along and I thought "this will do". The basic guitar sounds are very good, and the FX are on the whole decent enough, with a few very good ones. I can live with it, and in fact I love it... but it's not without some limitations, which should not be surprising considering the price. What I don't get is why they didn't put something like their OC-10 in there! Zoom... I like the B6, but I can't help feeling that they didn't quite get it right. With some extra processing power it would become even more flexible. Add parallel routing (and probably a couple hundred £ more ) and the next unit could be really special.

I'd say pitch-shifting in general is not a strength on the GP-200. Better on guitar than bass, but octave and synth effects are prime candidates for an external unit in the FX loop of the GP-200. I haven't used a Zoom B1-4, I can only speak about the B6. I find the B6 much much better in that respect. The Helix/HX range is better sounding in general. I like the GP-200, mostly for guitar, because the amp/cab modelling and drives etc work really well and I would not pay >2x to get better FX, the GP-200 is good enough for my purposes, but in general it doesn't have the best effects, certainly not compared to a Helix. Just dipping in and out now, I'll see if I have time this weekend and record a few of examples. I actually want to spend time with the octave FX on the B6 to see how close I can get to that "OC-2 synth type sound", which is one of the sounds I'd like to use in the UB40 tribute band, so I can plug in the GP-200 as well and record a few clips. But I'd say if pitch shifting FX are very important to you, look elsewhere unless you are happy with adding an external pedal to it. The octave is very usable on guitar, and it can be ok on bass, it'll do teh job live... but this is something I feel a bit picky about and I don't love them. Delays, reverb, chorus, phaser, flangers... I can always find some good stuff. Overdrives, some very tasty ones! But the octaver seems almost like an afterthought, bundled among the 'preamp' models, which is weird as the Valeton OC-10 was very decent (I have one too). One thing I love on the GP-200 is teh dedicated switches for each FX block. One of my hates with multiFX is the navigation, menus, submenus... The GP-200 is extremely easy to use even for someone with my phobias Everything I want to access is very easily accessible. The Boss units, for example, sound great and can do so much, but they're definitely a RTFM type of thing.

I'm pretty sure the Xvive U4 accepts at least up to 4 receivers per transmitter. Might work? https://xvive.com/audio/product/u4-in-ear-monitor-wireless-system/

That's crazy and very timely, thank you! Just ordered one.

A £400 Fender is not going to be a lot better made than that Harley Benton just because of the logo they lsapped on the headstock. If you were talking a higher end Fender, sure, but not this.

If you have the files yourself (i.e: not streaming) you could use the free RiffStation. It allows you to alter speed, loop sections, change key, and save the result if you want to. And a lot more. https://riffstation.software.informer.com/

I don't think there's any synth, it's one of the prime candidates to add into the FX loop, that and an octave. For guitar I find the two octave FX are just ok, and I don't like them on bass. The 11 blocks is cool, but then they bundled up together into the "pre" block all kinds of preamps... and the octave/pitch-shifting, ring modulator, autowah, acoustic simulation and tape saturation emulation. So that can limit things a bit, but 'fortunately' the best is to get an external octave pedal The tape saturation thingy is quite nice 'though. I haven't yet explored a lot with the various wahs (separate section, pedal controlled), but the impressions on guitar are good enough. A couple of the presets for bass use an envelope filter and it was pretty decent. You do need to make sure the sensitivity control is set right for your bass, it makes a big difference. The bass amp/cab models are quite nice sounding. You don't get a lot of choice on the GP-200 for bass, but what you get sounds good. I bought this for guitar primarily, but I think it's going to be on guitar and bass duty for my little home recordings, and the Zoom B6 for live (I don't gig on guitar these days). The drum machine is basic as you could expect, but it sounds ok (much better than the one on the Zoom B6) and there's tons of rhythms, which makes capturing an idea really easy. It does have a few limitations compared to the more expensive competition, but when you start looking at the POD Go, GX-100, HX LT etc, it seems it's a matter of finding which functions you must have and which ones you don't care so much about: one unit offers you A and B but not C, another gives you B and C... etc. In my case, apart from liking what I heard online, having dedicated physical knobs for the amplifier model was that feature that I wanted and could compromise in other places. What I like teh best about it is the basic amp/cab modelling. My Telecaster hasn't sounded so good in ages! I may not get the sweet clean-on-the-verge-of-breakup that I loved from my old VibroChamp, but I'm getting something really tasty along the same lines from the "Tweedy" simulation, and the overdrives... there's quite a lot of them and most are great. The whole amp/OD/guitar volume interaction feels extremely realistic to me, I'm quite happy with it. The presets are very RAWK, with huge reverb and delays... but build something from scratch as you would with physical gear and it works really well. Navigation is very easy, which is usually one of my bugs with multiFX over the years. The display is not tactile, but they've used the physical controls cleverly. I haven't yet tried to record via USB. I think it offers 4-outs and you could record the effected and the dry signal simultaneously, so you can 're-amp/FX' later too.

I've recently got a GP-200. I already had a Zoom B6 but of course, now I'm getting more into guitar again and my ancient Behringer V-Amp is pretty dated (although it has some decent sounds, that thing). I was looking into Boss GT-1000 and the Line6 Helix Floor/LT... but the Valeton GP-200 was getting some great reviews, and although not covering nearly as much ground as the other units, this was under £300... so I figured I'd give it a try, and if no good I'd return it and get a better unit. No need. Yes, it's limited compared to the others in routing capabilities and a few other things, but quite honestly, I quite like it. The amp/cab modelling sounds very good! The FX are decent enough in general, and with a user-positioned FX loop I can easily add a couple additional pedals to supplement the built-in FX if I decide I need something extra. One reason that made me want to try the GP-200 was the dedicated amplifier controls on the face of the unit. The interface seems really well thought out: everything is easily accessible without having to get lost in menus and submenus. I use it on my desktop mostly, playing through monitors, using it to record demos and share stuff with the band. Really impressed by this little thing.