Quatschmacher

I sold Dan my Octamizer and it was all sorted very quickly. He even paid me a few extra quid to cover the PayPal fees when he’d accidentally forgotten to send payment as “friends and family”. Many thanks.

Thanks for all the good thoughts, people; I appreciate it. @roman_sub, yes, I figured it might be a useful opportunity to work on right hand stuff. It’s not the worst mishap I’ve heard of. A pro jazz pianist I know snapped the tendon in his right hand middle finger by putting on his socks! Was out of action for six weeks. He wrote a piece for left hand every day so all was not lost. Actually, some of the stuff he wrote and played during this time was incredible and he came away with enhanced technique and a body of new music. Silver lining indeed.

Thanks. Struggling to stay awake and waiting for an X-ray now.

Thanks, Bas. I’m still here and imagine that by the end of it they’ll just stick a plaster on it and send me on my way. I’m so tired now and still have the broken glass to clean up when I finally get home.

John Scofield. Saw him break a string on a gig at the 2009 North Sea Jazz festival and he had to scrounge one of Bill Frisell who was in the same band.

Looks like I’ll be out of action for a bit. Managed to slice my hand open by breaking a jug while washing up. Long night in A&E awaits. @CameronJ, @Al Krow

Not sure yet as I just browsed through each sound without tweaking them too much. There’s enough to keep me busy for a long time. To be honest, distortion is something I’m not familiar with.

That’s probably true; I haven’t used the toneprint editor so haven’t seen how tweakable it is. There are only 4 toneprints available so far.

As a side note, the Neuro app is great. I like the fact that you can edit from your phone (as opposed to having to use a laptop like with the TC toneprint editor).

It might have just rendered the noise gate I bought superfluous.

Thanks. To be honest it’s blowing my not-so-tiny mind.

Thanks. To be honest it’s blowing my not-so-tiny mind.

Holy crap, the Aftershock is so versatile. As one of the distortion models you can have “clean (no distortion)”, this means you can set it to just take advantage of the EQ and/or noise and filter gates! You could even have the tone rolled off the (actual) clean signal so that using the mix knob morphs between (actual) clean with tone rolled off to (processed) EQd clean! @CameronJ, did you know this? You can also use it as a low pass filter! @Al Krow, you might want to note that I can now get all the tight tracking goodness from my MXR BOD but use the lowpass filter to get it to sound like the clean subby tone of other octave pedals such as the T-16 and Octamizer! Down side is that I haven’t (yet) figures out how to avoid putting low pass onto the clean bass tone whilst making sure the octave voice has it fully applied. LS-2 maybe? Also need to explore the aftershock’s loop function. @lee650

I finally got a reply from WMD devices about the availability of the Protostar. Apparently they are waiting for some components for the next build run. Should be available early in the new year. Got a few answers to my questions too: The FX loop is like others on filters in that the FX comes after the instrument input but before the filter stage such that the instrument’s input signal controls the sweep, which is applied to any effects in the loop. Stackable CV cables exist, so it is possible to route one modulation source to multiple parameters.

Given they are sold out at the moment I thought it was worth flagging up. And we know it’s new as it’s only just come out.

Someone selling an FMeron on TB. Says USA only but sometimes people can be persuaded otherwise once shown that it makes no practical difference to ship to the UK. https://www.talkbass.com/threads/iron-ether-fmeron.1316215/ @CameronJ, @Al Krow, @tonyxtiger, @GisserD

I’ll get to try out the Aftershock properly tonight. Just updated to the latest firmware and done a factory reset. I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the Darkglass emulation not because I think it sounds authentic (I’ve never played the original), more because I never thought I’d find that kind of distortion pleasing. I just hope I’m not opening yet another can of worms for myself.

Thanks, Bas. I needed to put the brakes on a bit. There are still things I’d like to try out and potentially get but I need to be more critical and strict about it. I really did feel like I was losing it. I’ll feel much better once both my refunds have come in. The Moogerfoogers sounded fantastic but the lowpass filter isn’t responsive enough to the envelope of a passive bass for me (which is what I’d be using it for). Also, no down sweep without buying a further piece of kit was a turn-off. The Glou-Glou Avant Garde is also a great pedal but there were really only two sounds (of the available many) that I would’ve been getting it for (admittedly they are fantastic sounds). It’s a lot of cash just for two sounds. I didn’t find that having the second envelope brought much (except being able to have 2 envelope-based presets, one filter, one phaser). In fact, one of the routing options (the one to assign the envelopes to the opposite effects) was a bit pointless as you’d need to change the other parameters to get it to work anyway. I couldn’t find any combination of running two parallel envelopes that yielded usable sounds (for me). The LFO in the AVG was pretty good as it was nice to be able to add LFO to the envelope but it didn’t go slowly enough to use for “normal” phaser sweeping. I still feel that the Rendez Vous would be the one to go for. However, I’m going to sit back and see what Olivier comes up with in his new, smaller and cheaper pedal.