BigRedX

Behringer P1 has two inputs with a balance control and master volume. Will that work?

I'm probably the wrong person to give advice since I haven't had an all-analogue signal path for my bass rig since 1989, but... IMO the most important thing is not the try and chase the sound of your current rig, but work on something that still sounds great with the context of whatever band(s) you are playing with. Over the years I've been through 5 significantly different bass effects rigs and each of them has required me to start from scratch building the patches I need for my various musical projects. It has helped that in most cases changing rig has generally corresponded with joining a new band that had different sonic requirements for the bass guitar part.

If you can get the required tone from your Helix, can you not hide it somewhere in the backline? After all it's not like your going to need to change patches throughout the set.

But you never know what results Google (or other search engines) might throw up. Everywhere on Basschat (apart form Off Topic, eBay and those sections only visible to Supporting Members) is indexed and will be discoverable.

IMO, if you've reached the point where you feel the need to air this on a publicly accessible part of the internet, then either you or the vocalist needs to go.

And the outer strings are a long way from the fingerboard edges by the time the neck meets the body.

Thanks for buying a CD I've been involved with. I couldn't interest you in a vinyl album by The Terrortones? I've only another 300 or so to sell... 😉 Looking back (I'm in my 60s now) I've made some lifestyle choices that many on here would find completely unpalatable simply so I could put writing and performing music first (or at least a very good second after whatever has been my main source of income). As I implied in my first post in this thread, I'm particular about the music I want to be involved with both as a musician and as a consumer, and having had a go at being in a typical covers band, I can now say that its not for me.

Wouldn't you like to take chance playing some music you really like instead? If you like it other people might too... I played in a typical classic rock covers band for a while. One of the guitarists was a good friend of mine and their set most comprised songs that I had enjoyed when I was first getting into music in the 70s. I ended up leaving because it simply wasn't enough fun and it actually sucked all the enjoyment out even listening to some of the songs we played. It also didn't help that the originals band that was in at the same time was doing more gigs, having more fun and even getting better paid.

A keytar is not a piano. The user interface is fine if (like any other instrument) you learn how it to its best advantage. Mine allowed me to do all sorts of things that would have been much harder to play on a conventional synthesiser and IMO it looked a lot better on stage too.

These days I don't bother with a bass rig any more and go straight into the PA. Before that I've had rigs with all different sizes of drivers from 6" to 18", but I've always been able to get a sound I liked out of them irrespective of the cone size.

Exactly. A larger cone will vibrate more air, but it won't automatically give a cab a particular tone.

It's not a particularly fast process, and would be a serious inconvenience if it did it after switching on at some gigs I play, which is why I mentioned it.

Just tried my Helix again without HX Edit active. The Preset select switches on the top row (I have mine sent up with 4 Snapshots on the bottom row and 4 Presets on the top) are now instantaneous but the Preset Up/Down switches still seem a little slow, although not as bad as yesterday when connected to the HX Edit application. What was somewhat worrying is that when I switched the Helix on this time it insisted on rebuilding all my user programs again - even though it did this already yesterday after the firmware update. I have a feeling this happened after that last big firmware update as well. Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?

So why do you do it? Is a significant source of your income? I work in another creative area - print graphics - for my day job, and AFAIAC there, the client is king (or queen). But that's because they pay me. I will offer my opinions if asked, and if I really think the design route they want me to take is wrong, I'll politely suggest what I think is a better alternative. However unlike some of the designers I used to work with (before I went self-employed) I won't get upset if they ignore my advice. I'll happily take their money produce whatever they want. This is the closest I'll get to having moan about it. However when it comes to music I only do what I want. Audiences/listeners can take it or leave it. Luckily I don't need to make a living out of playing or composing and most of the time enough people seem to like the music I write and perform for my bands to get gigs and sell CDs/records etc., but I have done gigs in the past where almost no-one turned up, and I do have a number of copies of CDs etc from old bands that are unlikely ever to sell, but none of that stops me from continuing to produce music irrespective of its popularity.

No. Most of my good friends are musicians with similar tastes to me, or at least enough crossover for us to like a significant amount of what the others like. I've nearly always gone to gigs on my own. That way I don't have to feel bad if I want to leave early because the last band on turn out to be rubbish, and I can make sure I'm at the venue in time to catch all the support bands, unless I know already that I won't like them. It's always amazed me that some people deliberately don't go and see support bands simply because they only want to see the main band and haven't even bothered to find out what the other bands are like (something that is easier than ever to do these days). I'm happy to listen to anything once, but equally there's a lot of music that I won't want to listen to a second time. Which leads me on to my main bugbear - lots of people who meet me for the first time on discovering that play in a band seem to automatically assume that I must like any old crap when it comes to music - especially anything that is musical complex or requires technical virtuosity. They always seem quite non-plussed when I explain that I'm a composer first and a musician second, and I write mostly because I don't like a lot of music, and therefore the more I write the more music that I do like will exist.

I have 4 basses that I use regularly and all have different strings on them. Gus G3 5-string passive - Warwick Black Label 45-135 Gus G3 5-string active - Warwick Black Label 40-130 Eastwood Hooky Bass 6 PRO - GHS Eastwood Hooky Strings 30-105 Burns Barracuda - Newtone Axion Custom Works Fender VI set 24-100 These are the ones that give me the best combination of playing feel and sound with each particular bass.

Finally got around to doing the 3.5 firmware update yesterday evening. Failed twice before it finally installed which was a bit nerve-wracking. I did notice that post-update the patch selection on the Helix seemed a bit sluggish when connected to my Mac with HX Edit open to the point where a couple of times I thought I hadn't pressed to relevant foot swtich properly. As I was refining the patches for a couple of new songs I needed to have the program open, but I've never noticed this previously. Hopefully I'll have a chance to see how it behaves on it own later today.

Not sure about the form factor/performance interface, with what appears to be just on/off and then patch up and patch down footswitches. For serious live use you'd need to use it with a MIDI patch select pedal which means it would be better as rack mount unit, rather than a large pedal.

Good luck with the restoration. But consider that having it tweaked for bass might affect its resale value (if that's important to you) as IME the majority of users these days are guitarists.

It's a new bass with a fault. Send it back and get one that is right.

These days the size of the driver(s) is about the least important factor in determining how a cab will sound. Remember you get plenty of bass out of your headphones and HiFi speakers.

At the moment the average is 5-6

How much memory did you have in your old Mac? And were you running any 3rd party plug-in with massive sample libraries? A new M1 MacBook Air is way ahead in terms of performance, so it should be fine, also the way the memory architecture works on the M! and M2 chips means that you may get away with half the amount of RAM you had previously and not see a performance hit. However I'd still order one with 16GB rather than 8GB RAM. Yes a MacBook Pro will be even better, but if you were still reasonably happy with your old Mac then any Apple Silicon Mac will be a massive improvement. I currently have a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM for live use and for me a MacBook Air would be more than adequate. There's some threads about this on Sound On Sound forums in the Mac Music section. Have a read through them if you are still worried, but ignore anything by Howdy Doody Time as he lives in a country with a computer unfriendly environment.

Surely that only works if you stand in the same spot facing in the same direction for the whole gig. The moment you turn around to face the drummer all your sound sources will be back to front. I would have though stereo was more useful for separating out similar sounding instruments.

TBH the "accuracy" of the models and the fact that I can add Impulse Responses of my own are, for me, the least interesting aspects of the Helix. For a start I'm not sufficiently familiar with any of the devices being modelled to be able to say how close they are. All I'm interested in is whether they can make a sound that I like, in which case they'll have a place in my patch. The way I see it is the Helix has several different examples of each type of effect that I am interested in, and at least one of them will produce a suitable sound. Also I hardly use any of the amp or cab sims. Most of the time I think they make my basses sound worse. I have one amp sim that I use on a few bass patches because it has a useful drive sound that can't be replicated by any of the distortion pedals, and for some of my Bass VI patches I use the Roland Jazz Chorus Combo sim because the EQ suits the Bass VI, but otherwise I just have an EQ module instead. This might be because I've never owned a "normal" bass amp. In the 80s I had a cheap generic 100W transistor amp and then went straight to multi-effects with a power amp for all my subsequent bass rigs.