BigRedX

Thee is no such thing a "A SET UP". There is your preferred setup which will be slightly (or even very) different for every single one of us here, so other than making sure the action isn't ridiculously high or low and the intonation is set correctly for that action there is little a shop/distributor/manufacturer can do in this regard. IME trying in a shop is fairly pointless as you will never be able to tell what the instrument sounds like through your exact rig in a band context, which is probably the most important factor after how it looks. Also how many of you here try a bass out on a strap in the shop before purchasing? Unless you only play sitting down how it hangs on your preferred length of strap can make a massive difference to the playability.

If you are going to have to play octave/unison riffs along with the guitars and they require lots of open strings then you'll probably need to match the tuning. Otherwise tune to what you like. You may find you come up with something more interesting that way.

Ideally I'd have my preferred luthier (Simon at Gus Guitars) build all of mine to my specifications. Failing that, because my tastes are decidedly not mainstream, I'll buy on line from any place that can offer the best combination of price, service and availability.

And how much does it look like a Reverend bass in real life?

And once you can play it at the right speed try playing it slower (about 75-80% of the correct speed) and see if you can still keep the timing as tight.

Not so much changed as broadened, in that I still like most of what I liked previously but there is always new music to discover. However I do find that I go through phases of being less interested in music I used to like a lot. Currently I'm nowhere near as enthusiastic about 90s house and trip hop as I was at the time. We'd be pretty boring (and especially as musicians) if we never changed our musical tastes.

But an Alembic is not an ACG. IMO once you step outside of the Fender and Fender copy (and I include high-end as well as cheap copies in that description) market, you're not simply buying a musical instrument for playing bass lines - there's a whole other range of factors at play some of which might seem completely irrational to the average bassist who is completely happy with their factory made mass-produced bass.

It's the Eastwood copy based on one of Peter Hook's Shergold Marathon six string basses. Having had a go on an original Shergold back in the early 80s as far as I can remember it's pretty accurate too.

The most I have spent so far on a bass was just under £3k on a Sei Offset Flamboyant 5-string fretless, custom made for me about 15 years ago. On the other hand the cheapest bass I have ever bought was £60 including the hard case and free strap (in 1981), which in terms of disposable income at the time was a lot more of a struggle financially - I had to live VERY frugally for the next month. So really it's down to what you can afford at the time and how important certain features are to you. Right now I could do with a second Eastwood Hooky so I have a decent backup bass for gigs, but the price is now over £1400 and I have other things I need to spend my money on first. Ideally I'd get Simon Farmer at Gus to make me a Bass VI, but last time I enquired the price for one made to my spec was around the £6.5k mark, so that's unlikely to happen any time soon, but if I had the disposable cash I'd be ordering two today. Does that answer your question?

Gotoh, Graphtec, Hipshot and Schaller all make machine heads worth considering. Which you chose will depend on features are important to you. Gotoh used to be the most versatile because they offered a service where you could assemble a set of machine heads from all the various options they had. This unfortunately no longer appears to be available, so you have to make do with the preset options instead.

AsI mentioned earlier in the thread, one of my bands has been playing our cover of "I Believe In Father Christmas" and this year we've released it as a single. The video has just been released too:

And here's the video:

Hurtsfall played on Sunday in Sheffield on the final day of the "In The Black Midwint2r" festival. We were on first in the evening after a short break from the afternoon bands, which mean that we got a proper sound check which definitely helped with getting the mix right. Second outing for our new and improved backing control which allows me to run everything from a foot pedal which is used to start each song and then run a macro which closes the current song and loads the next one in the set. Now I'm satisfied that it works as intended we'll probably shift the computer to a less obtrusive place on stage for subsequent gigs. Also I've now got all my Helix Preset and Snapshot changes controlled by the backing track which means I can concentrate on playing without needing to worry about hitting the correct footswitch at the correct time in order to change sounds, which has resulted in a significant improvement in my on-stage performance. There was a proper photographer in attendance so there should be some decent photos up later on, but in the mean time here's something taken by an audience member...

Here's mine for Hurtsfall from Sunday night's gig at the "In The Black Midwint2r" festival: Apologies for the crap low-light phone photo. Eastwood Hooky into Line6 Helix and then straight into the PA via an EMO passive DI box. For this that are interested, the foot switch to the left controls the sequencer - middle pedal for stop/pause and right hand pedal to run a macro which closes the current song and opens the next one in the set list. The yellow cable going into the Helix is MIDI to select the correct Preset for each song (on load) and also send Snapshot commands mid-song to change the sounds without me needing to worry about hitting the correct switch as well as playing the right notes. I've used this twice now anomy live performance has improved considerably.

One other suggestion: have you tried ALL the USB ports on your computer? They will not be all the same and different ports may well be on different buses internally and sharing the bus with various other "hidden" USB peripherals such as the wifi and bluetooth as well as the more obvious ones like your keyboard and mouse. Also depending on where they are on the casing the earthing may be different. So reconnect your speakers direct to the interface and then try each USB socket on the computer in turn to see if it makes any difference to the noises. Edit: I've just looked at the computer in question on the HP web site and there appear to be 6 USB ports and since 4 of the them are UCB3 and 2 are USB2 there should be at least 2 separate USB busses, but try them all anyway. Does anyone know if there is a Windows equivalent for the System Profiler on Mac OSX? This is a very handy tool as it will let you see exactly what devices are on each USB bus and which physical ports are connected to which bus. The other thing you could try after this is if you have a POWERED USB hub to see if running the interface from this makes any difference. USB can be quite "eccentric". I fixed a USB problem with my Novation controller keyboard not working reliably simply by using a different USB socket on the computer.

If the problem started when you switched computer I suspect it is the culprit regarding earthing. Can you post a link to the EXACT model. Many desktop PCs these days are essentially laptops in a desktop box with the PSU built in and this may well be causing your earthing issue. I see that you are running TS jacks from the interface so you are not getting the benefits of the balanced connection between it and the speakers. It is also my experience with Focusrite interfaces (I've owned two different ones) that they work best when all the connections are balanced. I would start by taking your mate's (and @Jack's) suggestion and buying a pair of decent quality TRS jack to XLR leads to connect your interface direct to the speakers. Be prepared to have to cut the earth (screen) at one end of the cable if the static noise comes back. If that doesn't work have a look at replacing the Palmer DI box with an ART DTI Box which does the same thing as the DI box but maintains same signal the level either side. However this is a very last resort solution.

The problem may well be that your are using standard cables when your particular configuration will require custom ones, but we'll worry about that later if all the other solutions fail. Is this the DI box you have? If not could you post a link to yours? If it is does it make any difference to absence/presence of the static noise if you change the ground lift settings? Also what's your PC - a desktop or laptop?

If you want an Oberheim being used "back in the day" in a non-rock setting have a listen to "Heaven Is Waiting" by The Danse Society from 1983. Some great atmospheric synth sounds and nearly all generated by the Oberheim OBXa

I see a C&D letter from Reverend winging Ashdown's way....

IIRC I asked some questions about the set up when you originally posted this problem, and I don't think you ever answered. As I said previously, to me this sounds like an earthing problem. How are all the devices in your signal chain powered? Built-in or external PSUs? Is the interface powered via USB? Check the mains plugs on all the devices, I suspect that one or more of them will have a plastic earth prong which is where the problem lies. The Palmer DI box gets around the earth problem but at the expense of lowering the signal level and therefore is introducing a new problem while bypassing (rather than fixing) the old one. What leads are you using the connect the outputs of the interface to your speakers? IIRC all the inputs and outputs on Focusrite interfaces are balanced. It may also be possible to fix the problem by using special leads to connect the speakers that have the +ve and -ve signal connections but not the earth (that's pins 2 and 3 on an XLR and TR but not S on a TRS jack). HTH.

Strange that you lump the Junos in with the Jupiters because IMO they were completely different synths. Back in the early 80s absolutely no-one I knew bought a Juno out of choice, they bought one because it was the cheapest polysynth available. Unfortunately it's cost cutting single oscillator and EG per voice showed, and if hadn't been for the built-in chorus it would have been close to impossible to get any usable sounds from it. To a certain extent the JP4 suffered from the same problem with only a single VCO and not even a sub oscillator to fatten the sounds up which was certainly needed with only 4-voice polyphony. The JP8 was a huge leap forward in design, features and sound and IMO up there with the other classic polysynths of the era from Sequential and Oberheim - they were all about equal on features so you picked what you wanted for overall sound.

If you don't sign up it will be more money for those that do.

Generally used by guitarists with multi-effects unit(s) and all-valve amps to allow them to route some of the effects to the input of the amp and others in the amp's effects loop so that delays, reverb and other delay-derived effects come after all the distortion/compression generating ones including that produced by the pre-amp section of the amp. Requires 4 leads hence the name. Can't see the value on a stand-alone pre-amp as you can simply place it in the correct location of your effects signal chain.

I don't drive and therefore don't own a car. Besides, in the days when I was buying a lot of musical instruments on eBay a significant proportion of them came from mainland Europe, the US or Japan- hardly within driving distance!

In that case you don't want to know what a working JP8 sells for these days... My JP6 cost £400 plus train fare to Birmingham The person I bought it off had a bedroom that looked like Roland section of the mid-80s music shop (and was selling it all at bargain prices). I could have had a JP8 for about £100 more but I wanted MIDI...