BigRedX

Pretty certain that the Rock City floor is stickier!

We've recently ditched PoD T-shirts in favour of getting 100 screen printed front and back with the band logo on the front and one of two different designs on the back (so 50 of each design). Overall cost was just under £700 and they have been selling steadily since we got them 2 months ago. If we'd gone for 100 shirts with just a single design printed on the front it would have been less than £600. We expect to make our money back easily within 12 months. IME print on demand T-Shirts suffer form the same problem as bands who don't have CDs and/or vinyl for sale at gigs but instead point you towards a web page where you can stream or download the music, in that the take up is considerably less than sales of actual product punters can buy there and then. I speak from experience as a punter when having seen a band that I liked enough to want to buy their CD I discovered that they didn't have any for sale, but they were giving out cards with a QR code and URL for their Bandcamp site. The following day when the enthusiasm of the gig and the the couple of beers I'd had, had worn off the music didn't seem as exciting and consequently I didn't buy anything. I wouldn't even have bothered getting a card for a PoD T-shirt but I might have bought one at the gig if the design was good enough. Even when we were doing PoD T-shirts we had to have some of each design on the merch table so that punters could actually see what they were going to get and we sold way more of these "samples" than we have for people who ordered them on-line after the gig. If sales of the new T-shirts go as well at the next two gigs as they have been, we'll have sold more of these in under three months than we have in almost 3 years of selling PoD. TL;DR PoD might have no set up cost but you won't sell many T-shirts either.

My thinking is that devices like the one you linked to are designed to replace all your pedals, at least for live use, and in effect become a pedal board in their own right. They are usually designed with a smaller footprint than you typical medium sized pedal set-up, so then to have to get a pedal board to accommodate it and the PSU in order to protect the low voltage cabling and connectors is, IMO, defeating the object of it being self-contained in the first place. I speak from experience - I play in a band with two guitarists who use multi-effects pedals in a floor mounted format with external PSUs. In the past six years both of them have had to repair or replace the PSU due to failures with the low voltage side cabling and connectors on more than one occasion. This is because they don't have everything mounted on a pedalboard, and why should they when the device itself is the pedalboard? Luckily the failures were spotted at rehearsal and fixed before the next gig, but they could just as easily have happened in the 15 minutes we typically have to set up on a darkened stage between bands at a gig. Often at gigs like this floor space on stage is limited. I recently found myself wedged between the floor monitor and the headlining band's kick drum with just enough room to fit the Helix floor and my feet. I can understand why manufacturers do it. Having an external PSU makes international sales and electrical compliance easier and cheaper. Instead of having to make a separate device for each region with different electrical requirements and having each of them certified as being safe for that region (which costs not an inconsiderable amount of money), they can use a 3rd party external PSU that has already been certified and produce a single device with a low-voltage input. The down-side is that the connectors and low voltage cabling are not as secure or robust as IEC mains cables and connectors. This makes them less than reliable in a gigging situation.

$1k is a lot of money for this, and neither of PSU inputs are gig-proof IMO without mounting the device and PSU on a pedal board which defeats the object as this is supposed to be the "pedal board" itself. A good idea but flawed execution.

Here's the set up I have for laptop and interfaces etc: It's a 3U rack case with removable top and ends. Only the top and front are removed for gigging and all the connections are made on the patch panel in the bottom 1U using XLRs or Jacks if we encounter a PA engineer that insists on using his own DI boxes. Power in is on the right using a Neutrik Powercon. The set up shown break my rule about USB connectors on stage is it has one to connect the Elgato StreamDeck Pedal which controls the playback of our backing, but due to an occasional hardware conflict between the pedal and the Focusrite interface it has been replaced by a AirTurn pedal which connects by Bluetooth and has proved to be surprisingly reliable despite my nervousness about using Bluetooth in a live situation. Hidden inside the rack is the PSU for the MacBook, mains distribution for everything and an ART DTI box which buffers the interface from any nasties form the PA audio connection. Everything is securely cable-tied and hot glued into place. After about 5 years of using this set up I think I have managed to eliminate all the potential points of failure, the most recent being getting a locking IEC mains cable for the Focusrite interface. However, all of this makes it bigger and heavier than the Helix Floor which is already big and heavy.

I've looked at it. We run a laptop (MacBook Pro) that is also our drummer and second synth player, so it seemed like a logical step. However we found that the additional loading time for Helix Native which would replace the Helix Floor that I am currently using, made the gaps between songs potentially too long for me to be comfortable with i.e. more than 5 seconds. I don't want to be waiting on stage for the next song to load. It's not a good look. If you're not also running sequenced parts then it might be workable with a few caveats. 1. I wouldn't consider anything other than a computer that runs Mac OS for this. You need it to be 100% reliable all the time. For home practice and recording the occasional glitch is OK. Live it's not and AFAIK only Mac OS has audio and MIDI priority built-in at OS level. 2. I also would want to use a computer that is only used for this purpose and doesn't double as the family internet machine. Mine is occasionally used for remote working for my business, but that and the music side are run as two completely separate log-ins so they interfere as little as possible. 3. You'll probably have to check that all your plug-ins will respond to MIDI program changes that will at the very least allow them to be turned off and on. Personally I would want to be able to load user settings too, as most of the advantages of this sort of system will be lost if you can't. You may find that you'll need you'll need a proper MIDI interface rather than a USB dongle to make it work properly. 4. Also check that 8ms latency is for a round-trip and not just one way. The reason you see some many people using systems like this for keyboards, is that the latency for MIDI and audio output is significantly lower than for live-stream audio processing. Remember also that each plug-in in your audio path will probably add a little additional latency on top of the round-trip AD/DA conversion. 5. Make sure that none of your software needs to "phone home" for authorisation or other requirements. No matter how careful you are it will happen at the most inconvenient time. One of the reasons why I'm still doing everything from Logic and not the supposedly superior Show Page of PreSonus Studio One is exactly this. The app wanted to connect to the internet in a location where we had no mobile phone signal let alone an internet connection. Luckily all it meant was a delay to the rehearsal start for about 45 minutes while we found a location in the building where we had a mobile signal and could tether the laptop for long enough to get the required authorisation. 6. Make sure that you can turn off automatic software updates, prompts and notifications for everything. See points 1, 2 and 5. The last thing you want to do is to be dismissing half a dozen dialog boxes before you can use your computer for its intended application, or even worse have them pop up in the middle of a performance. Also turn off WiFi and Bluetooth unless you specifically need them for your live set up (and personally I would look at other solutions first). 7. make sure that everything is gig-proof. Ideally that means no exposed consumer grade connections like USB/Thunderbolt etc. Our laptop is permanently housed in a flight case along with everything required to allow it to connect to the outside world which is done with gig worthy connections like XLRs. By the time you've done all this you find that's it's cheaper and more convenient to use a dedicated multi-effects pedal.

I haven't modded any of my instruments since the mid 90s. I still have a 70s Ibanez Firebird copy in bits because I just haven't had the time to sort it out. These days there are so many variations for guitars and basses that it should be possible to find exactly what you want without need to go changing things. Last time I looked at buying something for the express purpose of altering to exactly my spec, once I worked out how long it would take me at my freelance rate it would have been cheaper to get something custom made.

Hopefully on 2nd December Vision Video at The Bodega in Nottingham. It looks as though the gig is still going ahead despite having parted ways with their synth player recently.

The best advise is to never by anything music-orientated for a musician, because unless you know them extremely well you are likely to get it wrong. I've been given no end of useless musically related tat by family members because I play "guitar".

I've never found the need to fiddle with EQ at a gig, but for the last 30 years I've been using programmable multi-effects where each song has it own set of patches that have been carefully crafted to produce the right sound and sit the bass in the right pace in the mix of other instruments. If that sound needs some additional EQ FoH to compensate for the room (although there are limits as to how useful this is as room problems are both frequency and time based and trying to apply a frequency-only fix only works in certain areas and can actually make the sound worse in others) that is the domain of the PA engineer. On stage it would be nice to have a perfect sound, but until my band move to in-ears, I'll settle for being able to tell that I am in time and in tune with the rest of the band and not be so precious about it. I'm also of the opinion that over all the whole band performance is better, if I play the song with slightly the wrong sound, than if I stop playing to fiddle with the EQ.

The sponge isn't under the G string which is responsible for the trebly parts of the solo.

Not for me. I sold all my amps, cabs and other effects when I bought my Helix so I've got nothing to "capture", and the things that do the same job on the Helix sound loads better already. The added facilities I'd want - MIDI triggered filters and gates should be achievable with a firmware upgrade.

But not for a massive amount. I suspect that they typical Basschat member would still need to take out extra insurance just cover the equipment they use at gigs.

Passive. For me there is little point to active basses: I have superior tone-shaping facilities elsewhere in my signal chain. I use a wireless system so I already have something that does buffering of the signal from the bass. I have a set and forget attitude to on-board controls. Most of the time it's everything full on and let my Helix produce the sound(s) I want. The only active circuits I have ever found useful are those that either allow individual tone shaping for each pickup or do something that can't be done better elsewhere in the signal chain such as the the ACG filter pre-amp.

IME the amps (and cabs) that weren't designed for bass sound great because there's no real world constraints on having to cope with low frequencies at gig volumes with a modelled version. I rarely use any amp or cab models in my Helix sounds but when I do nearly all of them are ones that were designed primarily for guitar.

No you don't. Just sing. IME singing puts the least number of barriers between "intent" and "performance". And when you have sung something that you like, play it on the bass.

More information about the two Hurtsfall gigs this weekend: 1. In The Bl4ck Midwinter Festival, Saturday 23rd November at Shakespeare's in Sheffield; Hurtsfall will be on at 8.15pm 2. Rock Against Racism Weekend, Sunday 24th November at Saltbox in Nottingham; Hurtsfall will be on at 3.00pm

The last time I saw Squeeze live, Jools Holland was still their keyboard player. I was in the tech crew for the university and helped load the gear in for the gig. His rig included all the heavy keyboards of the time - Yamaha CS80 synth and Yamaha CP80 electric grand piano.

It's all subjective.

The neck would have to be 50mm or 2" shorter than a conventional 34" neck for this to work without needing to move the bridge. Since the photos show the neck to one fret less than a standard Fender P-Bass neck that won't be the case.

Your typical Basschat poster has largely outgrown the typical bricks and mortar music store.

Best practice would be to bring the PSU onto the pedal board so all the low-voltage cables can be firmly fixed in place where there is much less chance of the being damaged and then run a nice chunky mains lead to the board.

What's wrong with altering the EQ elsewhere in your signal chain?

It also depends what sort of a low B sound you want. Some down-tuned styles seem to require a loose floppy string, others don't. IME If you want a nice balanced feeling and sounding low B you need the right strings coupled with a stiff neck and a tight well-made neck/body joint (or through neck construction). Also look at lowering the pickups slightly from what is usual with a standard 4-string bass. The fatter the string the more likely it is to be influenced by the deadening effects of the pick up magnets. Finally I always go for a slightly heavier than standard string for low B. 130 would be a minimum for me - ideally 135.

And maybe a slight slackening of the truss rod as the low B is quite a bit lower in tension than the G.