BigRedX

Thank you. I've tried to glean as much information from the manual as possible but something it's not always clear especially without the actual device in front of me, so there are a few things I wanted to get confirmed before I decide whether or not to buy one. To that end I have a couple of final questions before I add it to my Christmas list: 1. Will the editor work with the latest versions of Mac OS? Compatibility is currently listed as OSX 10.6 and higher which worries me that it will get left behind in the next year or so. For what I want to do I suspect that without the computer editor I'll be completely stuck. Is an Apple Silicon native version being worked on? 2. As it appears that no PSU is applied with the device, can someone recommend a suitable small and reliable PSU to use with it? My only other pedal is the Helix Floor which has its own mains supply so I don't need or want anything big and complex with multiple outputs. Something simple with a mains plug at one end and a 9v plug of the correct polarity (that cannot be changed by mistake) at the other would be exactly what I want.

I've played in bands with non-human percussion for most of my musical career from when my first band bought one of the original Boss Dr Rhythms in 1981 to today where our drums are supplied by a MacBook running Logic. There are definite advantages. My current 3-piece band without a drummer or backline are able to travel to gigs with everyone, our gear, and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. We can be set up on stage ready to sound/line check in less than 15 minutes from load in. We have a small on-stage footprint which often gets us good support gigs where there is no room on stage for a conventional band's gear. How appropriate it is may depend on the genre of the music. I play in a goth/post-punk band and there are plenty of other bands on the scene using programmed drums as opposed to having a drummer and drum kit on stage. I probably wouldn't want to be using programmed drums with a more traditional rock band and almost definitely not with a covers band. There are however a number of things that you need to consider before deciding if it's going to be suitable for you. The main one is: how good is your drum programming? IME a replacing a drummer with a drum machine isn't about the quality of the sounds, it's about the quality of the programming. Crap programming will never make even the most authentic of drum sounds sound like they have been played by a drummer, whereas good programming can do wonders for less than realistic sounds. I've had over 40 years practice programming drums so I'm reasonably good it now. Also my current band has an overall electronic sound, so trying to be just like a human drummer isn't always important when it comes to writing rhythm parts. So if you've got your drum programming sorted out how are you going to do it live? Back in the 80s when I started using drum machines none of them had sufficient memory to hold a set's worth of drum patterns and songs. We got away with the simple Dr Rhythm with some creative programming to fit enough single patterns for 10-12 songs into the memory and the fact that we also had a human percussionist. The Roland 808 we had in my next band had enough memory (just) to hold all the patterns required for a single song, but only had a single song memory that had to be programmed in real time, so we recorded all the rhythm tracks onto cassette and used that when we gigged. Remember that for a typical song you are probably going to at least one pattern for each of the intro, verse, chorus, middle 8 and end and one or more fills for each, That's a minimum of 10 patterns for each song. I'm sure that modern drum machines are much better with memory than they were back when I was using them, all my programmed drums have been done on a computer since the mid 90s, but if you intend to use it live, check that you can fit everything in it. I used to own a Yamaha drum machine that claimed to hold up to 99 patterns and 99 songs, but the reality was that the memory allocation was dynamic, and complex/busy patterns with fast hi-hats in them ate up the memory. If I was lucky and used simple patterns I could probably get three songs in the drum machine at any one time. And now you've got all the drums for your whole set programmed how are you going to preform it? If it turns out that your choice of drum machine doesn't have sufficient memory to hold all the patterns required for all the songs you want to play, then you'll have no option but to record it and use that. Recording them will also allow you put some extra studio processing on the sounds which may well be an advantage. From the audience's PoV they won't notice whether the drums are being played back from a recording or performed "live" by a drum machine or computer, so it really down to what is most practical for you. Which ever method you choose make sure that you have a backup. The other important thing to consider is how you go from one song to the next. IMO unless you are a hardcore electronic band the technology being used to replace live musicians should be as invisible as possible. If you are using an actual drum machine selecting the program for the next song should be as simple as possible, ideally a single button press, or a turn of a dial. Anything that requires menu diving and peering at tiny LCD screens on stage is a non-starter in my view. If you use a continuous recording for the drums have some easy way of being able to pause it between songs to allow for guitarists to tune up and if the singer rambles on too long. One other thing is that now you have a machine of some sort doing your drums there will be a temptation to start adding other things to the backing track just because you can. If possible don't! My current band have made a conscious decision that apart from the drums the only other things that go on the backing are sound effects, traditional style sequencer parts and the occasional bass for when I am playing melody lines on my Bass VI. Our philosophy is that if there is an important melody in the song then we play it live. I see more a few bands with so much on the backing that it is impossible to tell what the live musicians are actually playing. Big sounding synth/keys parts are my number one complaint. If the synth line is an essential part of the song, have someone on stage doing it, rather than a bassist who is only doubling up the synth bass or a guitarist playing fuzzy power chords which add little to the arrangement. My previous band used to try and replicate the complete studio arrangement on the backing which had a tendency to make us sound cluttered, so being in charge of backing playback, I would gradually turn down the volume of any parts that I thought weren't adding anything to the live sound until they were either off or someone asked why they could hear it any more. Finally, monitoring. Without an actual drummer hitting things behind you, you are entirely dependant upon being able to hear the programmed drums for staying in time. Also as has been said the drum machine doesn't make mistakes, so you need to be as perfect with arrangements as the drum machine is or at least be able to tell where in the song it is so you can get back in sync. Even the sound of the sticks hitting pads on electronic kit will produce enough sound for you to be able to keep in time even if you can't hear the actual drum sounds. With a drum machine if you can't hear it clearly you can't play in time to it. Sorry for the long post, but there are lots of things to think about especially if you have never used programmed drums before. I'm sure there's lots of important points I've left out because I've been doing this for so long. Ask and I'll do my best to fill in any gaps.

This bit from the manual looks as though it will do what I want: Looking at the screen shot of the editor page it looks as though I can turn off the volume of the synth section without affecting the volume to the audio input through the VCF. Can @Quatschmacher confirm? Also can I use one of those DIN to USB MIDI leads to access the editor software? Or do I need a proper MIDI interface? The low profile MIDI and jack plugs look as though they will allow me to fit the device in the space on my Helix. The only sticking point is the PSU. Does that mean that no PSU is supplied with the device? The Helix provides phantom power via its Mic input but I don't think there's sufficient current even when dropped to 9v. At the moment my Helix is my pedalboard. So I don't have any external PSUs and IME they are most common source of failure (usually on the low voltage cable and connector side) when used in gigging situations. The whole point of looking at the FI VIP is that it won't make my on-stage pedal footprint any bigger.

Having been taken to task on a couple of other threads about synth bass pedals, I'm have a serious look at the Future Impact. It looks as though the VIP version might be small enough to fit in the 150mm x 95mm space on the top of my Helix Floor between the page right button, the expression pedal the volume control and the top set of foot switches. However the location of the input and output sockets, the MIDI in socket and the power in socket might scupper this plan as they all need to feed past the Helix output volume and phone volume knobs. can anyone provide measurement for the locations of these? Also the web page doesn't provide any information about the PSU supplied. Is it a wall wart or does it have a separate 13amp plug? It looks as thought it is possible to trigger the filter using MIDI note information without also feeding the MIDI synth into it. Can someone confirm this is the case? What I want to do is to just process my bass via the filter but have the ADSR which controls the filter respond to MIDI note information for attack and release rather than the envelope of the input signal. Can I do this?

Using pitch detection to drive a synth engine is almost always going to be a complete non-starter for bass guitarists. The laws of physics just won't allow it. The very best detection systems require at least one and a half wave cycles of clean waveform to detect the pitch, which means every note below open D is going to have noticeable latency. And remember this is the best case scenario. Any imperfections in your playing technique or signal processing before the pitch detection is going to make that detection time longer which is going to result in more latency, glitches and pitch instability. That's why to me it makes more sense to dispense with pitch detection and to instead apply Filter and VCA processing to the actual signal instead. Of course in order to do this properly your are going to need full ADSR control over both the filter and volume which will mean attack and release threshold controls and side chaining so that the clean signal can be used for the triggers and an signal with whatever effects you want to run before the filter can be processed. Also you'll limit cross mod to amplitude only and you won't be able to do oscillator sync which limits how close you are going to get to some synth sounds.

@Al Krow but a bigger pedal board may not be an option. My Helix which is probably smaller than a lot of people's pedal boards is at the limit of what can be comfortably fitted on a lot a stages I play. Others have already stated that there is insufficient stage space for a keyboard synth. For them a bigger pedal board may well also be out of the question. The tracking speed is worrying. Almost all the synth bass clips I have seen using processed bass guitar are slow to medium paced songs, or ones with a lot of space between the notes in the bass part. Most of what my band play is over 130bpm and the bass lines are mostly 1/8 notes or faster. That's going to be a problem. The other thing I have spotted is that if you are using synth sounds for rhythmic parts everyone will expect the timing to be absolutely spot on because these are usually handled by a sequencer of some sort. Your audience will be able to hear that something is wrong even if they can't pin point exactly what it is. For me the ideal solution which doesn't involve using a keyboard would be to put the bass through a MIDI triggered Filter and VCA device, but I only know of one and that's a relatively large rack-mount unit which is no longer being produced.

But I don't. I have a Helix Floor which is essentially its own pedal board. Any additional pedals would either be free-floating which bring their own unreliability or would require me to have a board big enough to hold the Helix, whatever synth pedal I decide to use and its PSU (and main power distributer for both units). That makes it bigger on stage and bigger in the band transport. One of the reasons my band gets and does as many gigs as we do as because we can have a relatively small on-stage footprint and economical transport. Even so it's sometimes pushed to the limit. I've done a couple of gigs where I have been sandwiched between the headliner's equipment and the front of stage wedge monitors with just enough room for my feet and the Helix. Anything more and I would have been out of space. Also by limiting the amount of gear we take to gigs we are able to get the whole band, our equipment and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. At the moment everything fits in when packed in a specific way. If my pedal board case was larger than it is currently, there's a good chance we may not longer get everything in quite as comfortably. Also who is to say that someone with a more conventional pedalboard set up already has both room and PSU capacity for an additional synth pedal. Based on my reasoning above if I'm going to bring additional gear I might as well bring the right gear, and not extra stuff that is still a compromise. Many of my bass synth sounds use cross-mod and AFAIK none of the pedals offer this facility. As I said, if I we start to get regular gigs on big stages and more time to set up and sound check then I'll start bringing keyboard synths for me to play. As an aside one of my all-time favourite bands, Polysics, made the decision that when they played outside of Japan there were a number of their more popular songs that they would not perform because they felt they couldn't do them justice with the stripped down equipment rig they used on international tours from both a cost and logistics PoV. This was somewhat disappointing for me as an audience member.

If the screws are working loose then I would suggest the plugs are either poorly made or the screws haven't been sufficiently tightened. I don't think I've ever come across screws working loose. Even if they did, due to the construction of a standard UK mains plug it should make any difference if the cable is properly clamped in place there is nowhere for the conductors to go even if a terminal screw were to work loose. As for moulded plugs has anyone cut one apart to see what's inside? I doubt that they are soldered. AFAIK the moulding process holds everything together so there wouldn't be any need for it and besides the heat of the moulding process would probably affect the integrity of any solder joints.

Then you might want to question whether you actually need a synth pedal at all? There are a few songs in my band's repertoire that would benefit from me playing synth on them at gigs rather than Bass VI, but until we are regularly playing on bigger stages and have more than 20 minutes to set up and sound check, bringing another instrument simply isn't an option. Using a pedal isn't really an option either. Unless it has the full set of facilities as the keyboard synth it is replacing, I'm unlikely to be able to get the sounds I want out of it, also from the PoV of space on stage I don't really have room for yet another pedal and one that would require an external PSU with the all the complications and unreliability that would entail. If I did I'd probably have room for an actual keyboard synth. So until we are playing suitably sized stages with enough time to sound check an additional instrument I will continue to use my Bass VI with a few standard effects on it. I can guarantee that the majority of the audience don't notice the difference and the few that do are would rather we play the song with a slightly different bass sound as opposed to not at all.

I'd done a cursory search, but hadn't yet tried various Reddit and Gearspace threads that might have been more promising. I suspected that it might be possible to recreate some things manually, but TBH that's more messing about than I am prepared to undertake for the sake of a few interesting looking Kontakt-based instruments. It a pity because the Logic Sampler instrument is great, but could do with some updated conversion utilities like the Akai sampler library one that would even allow the Mac to read Akai formatted discs to make them available for the conversion process.

Due to the bridge placement and the headstock size, the Eastwood Hooky, despite being a short scale, is actually a couple of cm longer than my 34" scale Gus G3s.

It looks as though there is a similar guitar handing up next to it...

You shouldn't because the screws on the terminals don't clamp down as efficiently onto soldered wire as they do onto stranded. If you are talking about actually soldering the wires in the mains cable to the contacts in the plug, then the heat required to do this would most likely also melt the conductor insulation on the mains cable.

Has anyone come up with a way of automatically converting Kontakt Player instruments to work with Logic's ES24/Sampler? Having had a poor experience with NI in the past and also having made a decision not to have any 3rd-party plug-ins that require me to install anything other than the plug-in itself, I'm not going to install Kontakt Player, which means that I've missed out on a couple of interesting instruments that have come up recently that I might have wanted to explore.

Mine: 1. A month in the studio with Trevor Horn producing. 2. A small tour bus complete with driver and road crew.