cheddatom

Try the echohead, seriously. I know it's a cheap pedal, but that doesn't mean it'll sound cheap. It'll save you money, and it's dead easy to get a foot switch for tap tempo, and much easier to use than any pedal with one footswitch that you have to hold down or whatever to turn on the tap tempo.

Spot on cant do. I should have pointed out that I took the OP to relate to tone and not "sound" as in "sound in general".

I don't think the jaco analogy is very valid. He had a playing style that was distinctive. You would recognise his playing style, but think he had sh*t tone. Your fingers control the long of the notes you play, when you play them, how fast etc. Although you might be pedantic and say "you need your fingers to use EQ", it's quite obvious to me that TONE comes from the amplification used. This includes everything from the electronics in your bass, to your pedals, to your amp. YES, it is often easy to replicate a certain sound on an unknown rig. However, it's certainly not always going to happen. Either way, I think this point demonstrates how important your pedals/amp/bass EQ are in sculpting your sound. It all depends on the sound you like. If you like a tone that is basically made up of a bit of EQ and compression, and the sound of your bass, then it's always going to be easy for you to get a tone you like, or to infact replicate your tone on an unknown rig. For me personally (and i'm sure lots of BCers) it's pretty damn difficult to get my sound out of any other rig. If I didn't have my pedal board at a gig, I would still be playing with my style, but I wouldn't have my tone and more importantly the band wouldn't sound the same. If I have my pedal board, but I am asked to use someones ashdown stack, i'm a bit f*cked. This is because the ashdowns I have used don't have enough flexibility in their EQ for me to be able to "sculpt" my sound. It's not as simple as "fingers". Some people are confusing style with tone. EDIT: That Clapton example up there is another instance of this. The guy had Clapton's tone, but he couldn't play like Clapton, so of course he didn't sound like Clapton! He still had Clapton's tone though.

Marshall echohead! It has tap tempo if you plug in a momentary footswitch. EDIT: And is generally a great pedal all round, works great with bass, has several modes all of which are useful, it's made of metal etc.

I don't know what the multi-comp is like, but if you can set the attack time a little later, that might help. Also, blending is a good suggestion, but I don't think it would make it ok to have the bass drive on the whole time. You could have a few different pedals in the blended loop though. I would suggest buying a good low gain OD pedal, boss ODB-3 or Marshal jackhammer or something similar, and put this in a blend loop at about 50%. Put a compressor with slow attack on your "clean" signal that you're blending with. Put a limiter after the the whole thing. You could leave the overdrive on the whole time, just adding a bit of "bite" rather than "dirt", and then you could use the bass drive in conjuntion with your new overdrive for when you want more dirt. A Bi-amp setup would be useful, but obviously not essential - if you have a full range amp, you should be able to get the tone you're looking for.

My sound comes from my bi-amp rig with sh*t load of EQ, my 25 pedals, and my technique (swapping from finger to slap to pick to all kind of nonsense). My basses sound very different, but I can use my rig to make them sound the same.

I see, that's understandable. A general question to all of those who gig with more than one bass: Do you leave your basses plugged in all of the time, and use a channel switcher to switch between basses? I can see the need for a switchable volume control, so that the volume for each bass can be levelled out and set, and switched. However, I don't understand why you would leave basses plugged into an A/B switch all the time, it would really annoy me! I have always used a mute switch and just swapped the jack cable going into my bass. Do you think this looks unproffessional?

Instead of plugging into return A and return B, plug into the input jack, and set the mode to A/B. Then you can use the LS-2's footswitch as an A/B switch with adjustable levels, and get rid of your AB-2

Yes, but I don't see why you can't plug the wireless straight into the LS-2 instead of using the AB2?

I said in PM to OG but thought it would be helpful here: You can switch up by 10 patches with the B2.1U if you have an external footswitch. If you set A2 and B2 and C2 all the same, you can seamlessley switch between banks of 3 effects - i.e. you want to move from A2 to B1 seamlessley? Change to B2 first, and then down one. If you want to be able to switch up AND down with the B2.1U you have to mod it. The mod is easy - basically attach a couple of momentary footswitches to the "finger buttons" that go up and down 10.

I don't fully understand this, but..... I heard that "star grounded" connectors are better than fully isolated, especially for getting rid of ground loops. I don't know which way it works, but I have a godlyke powerall that I run at least 18 pedals off, and it's noise free!

It looks like you're using the AB switch and LS-2 to create two footswitchable volume channels? The LS-2 can do this on it's own you know!

It's only the MEs that do this and only in "patch mode" as far as I know.

I used to take a spare but then stopped because of space in the car. I have snapped strings at a couple of gigs, but I just keep on playing. If it's before the last song, i'll leave it, otherwise I will put another string on quick snap!

What about a Zoom b9.1ut? I don't know if they're out yet though.

[quote name='Oscar South' post='227512' date='Jun 26 2008, 04:58 PM']I didn't know Carlton Banks had a band. Didn't like the bass playing though, at all. Or the rest of the band.[/quote] Is that a fresh prince of bel air joke?

A buffer can compensate for any "tone sucking" that arises from feeding your signal through lots of pedals and consequently pedal connectors and patch leads etc. It can also compensate for any signal degredation caused by using long leads. I'm not sure if it matters where abouts in the chain it should go. I doubt you will notice a difference either way, unless any of your true bypass pedals are effect by impedance.