51m0n

You're on! BTW at 25lbs for the rack mount version giving you 600w @ 4 ohms vs 6.2lbs and something around 1Kw @ 4 ohms you can keep the M6 I will happily A/B the tone though, because it seriously blew away the D800 for tone for me, by far the best preamp in a bass head I have heard yet...

Oh yeah, I am nit picking here, all these amps are seriously capable, but if I am putting up serious cash, I want the tone to be absolutely the best I can get for my cash as far as my ears are concerned

Mate, the M6 doesn't come close to my requirements list (the eq is way to restrictive, I am a sound engineer first, bassist second after all). Plus I tried a Mesa alongside Glockenklang and Trickfish together and the Trickfish tone was way way way better. The big claim is that its a really flat preamp, which it may be, but if it is then all the others I tried were boosted in the mids/upper mids and significantly shy in the deep bass in comparison. I couldn't swear as to which is truly flatter when set flat, but the Trickfish was far nicer than everything else I have tried (including Darkglass and Aguilar now). With my sa450 I have to use quite a bit of eq, and some compression cleverness to get a truly exceptional tone. Now, fo rthe first time in 25 years of playing I am considering not using a compressor because I might not need one all the time to get the sound I want and the playing feel I want. First time. Ever. Its not that the Trickfish compresses (at all) its just such a truly phenominal tone that I may well get away without the compressor at last.

Still waiting for a trickfish 1k to get to bassdirect to try it out, glad I didn't hold my breath ... Had to gig with a Quilter BB800 last Saturday - loud as nuts with a BF Big Twin II, but not as clean a tone intrinsically from that amp as I would like - definitely not a hardship to play but not quite my ideal. Got some comments on the bass tone being massive and superb, but still not quite what I am really after as my base tone.

Errr, interesting one on Saturday night... Private Party, supposed to be us headlining, one other band and a few people having a bit of a busk/jam earlier in the evening. That's what was arranged. Week before the gig our trumpet player realises she is double booked, luckily just round the corner so as long as we go on at our allotted 11:00pm start all is good. Everyone is there for the soundcheck, no sign of the geezer that booked us, sound guy already very stressed, venue owner is at least as stressed and already talking about shutting the evening down - he has been waiting for about 3 hours for some comms with the booker. Meanwhile every ten minutes another couple of chaps turn up with guitars or drum kits or what have you. All the signs are there, the wheels have well and truly come off this one! We get on stage to do our soundcheck and lo and behold the PA has a desk with 9 functioning channels!! We are a 7 piece band FFS, we run 18 channels into our mixer for a pub gig (IEMs require this kind of thing for everyone to be happy, but its worth it in our experience). There will need to be compromises, sure, but really! I choose to forego the PA - with a Big Twin II and a Quilter, I am very confident that I have got enough grunt for the quite large venue. This is absolutely the only thing I am confident about at this point. At this point a couple more full bands turn up with a ton of gear each - the sound guy looks about ready to quit... An hour after this our man turns up, with a full entourage of party goers. He is in no fit state to really organise taking a leak, and can't cope with the immediate barrage of questions. I hang back, two groups leave with their kit. I pin him for the fee, and he pays half up front. He then explains that he is charging £5 on the door - for his own party (?!?!?!?!) - to recoupe, we will be paid the rest of our fee when its been made. Hmmmmmmm.... Really? I explain we will be going on at 11:00, because that's what we agreed with him, and that none of our gear is to be used by anyone else (because we haven't agreed to that at all and this is well out of hand and there is no way I am going to let a bunch of unknowns have a crack on my gear - the amp is borrowed anyway, its not mine to lend). He then proceeds to play a set of terribly performed covers of Beatles songs with some of the aforementioned busker types. Dear God. I am not keen on the Beatles' efforts on their own songs, but this is some new and truly awful Hell. The single worst effort at Hey Jude I have ever heard. No amount of money is worth this! Whilst this is going on two more groups of buskers and another band walk. Thinning the heard is a very good thing, so ta-taaa! So there is a lot of people milling around with assorted gear, this makes me nervous, we ensure we have a watcher over the kit in the green room and another over the kit on the stage for the entire evening, how tedious, and rotate going for food. But at least things are moving now. And we can see the people turning up and turning away when they find out they aren't coming to a party, but instead coming to a gig played by a bunch of buskers having a dodgy jam. Another band storms out, the herd is fully thinned down now Finally a band proper goes on, they are a glam rock covers band, and have all the gear on to make that very obvious, lots of Sweet, T-Rex, Bowie, good singers, great rhythm section, its not my all time favourite set, but they are very good at what they do, and people start actually coming in to the venue, handing over cash, even having a boogie for a bit of the set. Things may be looking up. When they come off its clear they have had a great time too, really nice bunch too. Birthday boy has another crack after them, couple of bluesy tracks, way better than the earlier effort, then it our turn. He hands over the remainder of our fee just as I am setting up my pedal board. Result! After all this utter chaos and uncertainty (we would have walked too to be honest, but to be fair it was a long drive to not end up playing), we ended up starting our set at 11:02pm! Good God! Our set is completely redesigned and re-organised for this gig, we only have an hour and half rather than the usual 2 and a quarter hours to fill, so anything that isn't a funk monster track has been binned, the transitions are great fun and a nice change. We don't know quite how this is going to work but we have a decent idea it should really work. And, it really really does, we get a bunch of people dancing from the get go really enjoy the entire set, couple of squeaky moments mainly because the onstage sound is pretty much garbage (two monitors, and nothing for the drummer so he can't hear a damn thing properly). Come the end of the set we sell a few CDs have a chat to the revellers, and for the first time I can remember 3 people come over and talk to me specifically about the bass sound, which they reckon was immense, and superb. Kinda make up for a lot of the grief! Like I say, a really weird one, and we have decided we aren't going to do another party again without some very specific conditions, and if that means we never do another party again, I will be fine with that!!!!

My eldest has one and a BB2, great portable rig, but I find it a little harsh in the highs and upper mids. Not terribly so, but more than I would prefer...

I really don't like Ampeg. Especially the SVT. There you go 😀 Love marmite though 🤩🤩🤩

Other than the form factor, which personally makes me very uncomfortable? It seems to be too good to be true, so I did a bit of searching into any issues people are finding with it, quite a lot of noise about compressors and power amp clipping and lots of requests for a schematic. That puts me right off my pie personally... Obviously I am an ancient and wizened old grumpy bastard and it might all be a lot of smoke with no fire, but I wont risk my cash on anything with a lot of noise about it. Trickfish offer a 5 year warranty on their kit as standard. Suits me!

Cheers! Now you see that's a nice amp that is. I highly recommend it 😁

Way back in the day when the 800w Markbass amps first came out there were a lot of comparisons between them and the LMII. Invariably the common thread in those reviews was how the extra headroom was great, but the inherent special part of the LMII tone wasn't there in the same way. Now with the Trickfish there is a similar comparison between the .5k and 1k heads, and I am not sure whether I will go for the 1k for that exact reason.

This is the measure of 'enough' power for me too

Bergantino gear is pretty good, but my one argument against his amps are the way they are heavily targeted at his cabs, which I no longer use, since the Big Twin works far better for me than my old Berg rigs did. Plus all that DSP gubbins is just asking to go wrong 🤣

This is all great, and then you play without your pa and have to rely on a house pa incapable of projecting sound below 1KHz run by Norman whose been doing this job 60 years man and boy and is subsequently as deaf as a post, and his culpable assistant keV who can't quite work out how to tie his shoe laces or keep his trousers from descending beneath his derrière. At which point you need a big bastard bass rig in order for the band to actually hear you, since Norman is convinced you can catch IEMs from kissing someone funny, and won't have any truck with that funny stuff on his 'stage'....

Bwahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa! Brilliant 😁

Mate, that's called sarcasm. It's quite different from aggression, and was actually aimed at the other reports not yours. Chill out!

Fascinating, there's a lot of mentions of the uprated capacitors out there. Surely it can't be smoke and mirrors 🤣

It's not just a standard Pascal power amp, it has uprated caps to better cope with very large peaks apparently....

To be precise it's 1000w peak AT 8 OHMS. So maybe 500w RMS or thereabouts at 8 OHMS which could be 700w RMS at 4ohms. Well the .5k uses the ICE power section apparently. I did feel it was not as loud as the other amps, but here is an interesting point, to get them to sound even somewhere close required a lot of EQ work, removing an inherent nasal quality and pushing the low end a lot. Now that requires more power and the volume difference becomes less obvious once you start getting those amps closer to the inherent tone of the Trickfish. But I definitely want more headroom than my sa450 had and that's why I didn't walk away with a .5k there and then

So I went up to Bass Direct on Sunday. Tried out the Glockenklang Steamhammer, Mesa-Boogie d800 and the Trickfish .5k side by side through a Barefaced Big Baby II. I had tried the Darkglass m900 in GAK on Friday. To cut a long story short the Trickfish makes the rest of them just utterly redundant to my ear. Just a way better tonal starting point. I don't think this amp is flat with everything set to noon by any means. But whatever, it just sounds brilliant. All the bells and whistles on those other amps don't mean a thing, because at the end of the day the core Trickfish tone is just better. So it has a 700w ICE power section and I think that may be enough, but to be sure I am going back a week tomorrow to test a 1k they are getting in with my Big Twin. If the .5k is enough I will get that, if I think I need the extra power reserve to be able to leave the amp idling and achieve war volume, I'll go for the 1k.

Well, I would like a bit more headroom than 500w ideally, I don't need 2 channels, I don't really dig modelling amps particularly, and that is a lot of extra stuff in a box to go wrong, if you know what I mean! But it was an interesting thought!

That's a lovely offer, we'll see how things go, I might just take you up on it, you're right though I would be needing much more oomph, but the tone is probably not a million miles away from its big brother.

Like I said before, we quite often don't get to chose our pa or sound people. In those cases a decent bass rig is still the best solution imo.

Not quite, the m900 is the only thing I can find nearby to give me an idea about its core tone, IE there is one around the corner to listen to. I am prepared to go to Bass Direct to have a proper play if I have to! I know I loved the sa450, nothing else I've heard of or read reviews of seems to suggest a similar core tone with that feature set, the semi parametric EQ and separate line out level control are really useful. Given that appears to be the case I am willing to see if I can get anywhere with other offerings. My son has a Quilter, in the time I've had with it, a couple of rehearsals, I concluded it was a great amp but too bright and a little harsher than I'd like, something the eq doesn't really dial out. I'm interested in seeing if any of the current crop of lightweight heads can be made to sound like what I want to hear. On top of which if I had one thing to moan about with the sa450 it would be a slight lack of headroom. The newer 700+ watt heads should mean I can truly gig with an amp on tick over, which means longer life and less issues. Shiny is nice though 😍

Seriously mate, you can't have ever been in there, you would be lucky to find a practice amp in there, and even then it would be a sodding Peavey 🤣

The Warwick is too daft, I don't need two independent channels. Trickfish is interesting, as is Glockenklang, and the Darkglass m900 v1. GAK have an m900 so I'll have a crack at that. But it's not easily rack mounted, and I probably don't have a use for the overdrives. I didn't say money was no object quite, I said quality costs 🙂, but there is a point where the premium unicorn poop is not quite worth double the money. If I really didn't care how much it was I'd have a Glock Blue Rock, and it may be what I end up with, however if I can get close enough to it to not care for less then I'd be being a little daft wasting money I don't need to. Does anyone know if the Steamhammer is close to the Blue Rock in core tone? For a serious company Glockenklang's web presence is woeful!