BigRedX

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.

I'm assuming that the Fralin J5 pickups which you like are smaller than the soap bars which you don't like? Could you not just buy another set of Fralins and make wooden or plastic surrounds to fill the extra space?

For me the fact that's a single unit was the main selling feature. Replacing mine with individual pedals plus a board/case, PSU(s), and all the leads to wire it up would probably be in the same ballpark cost-wise. And that's just assuming I can get away with just one pedal for each effect type that I use (I can't), don't need instantly recallable user programs with the ability to change settings and effect order for different songs (I do), and some of the time based effects won't have tap tempo let alone MIDI clock synchronisation (a must for both my bands).

There are no hard and fast rules about what bass sounds will work with any given band. It will depend very much on the line-up of the band and the arrangement of the songs. Generally the mids are your friend if you want to be heard among the other instruments, but even that isn't 100% true. I used to play in a band where my usual driving pick attack bass sound disappeared almost completely the moment one of the guitarists switched to a clean Stratocaster. Use your ears listen to what the other band members are doing both in terms of note choices and sounds and adjust your sound and note choices accordingly.

Just out of interest, for my Bass VI patches on the Helix where I am using an amp/cab sim it's for guitar amp rather than a bass amp.

To the OP - have you had your refund yet?

Really? IMO in real terms it's never been cheaper. My first multi-effects was a Roland GP8 plus the foot controller and expression pedal which I picked up for a few hundred pounds in the early 90s. However I'm pretty sure that original new price when it was originally released was closer to £1k. That's for a unit which was essentially 8 Boss pedals in a pre-set order fitted into a 1U rack with a terrible parameter access user interface. By comparison the Helix Floor which when released was about the same price of around £1k is streets ahead in terms of sounds, configuration, and user friendliness and overall versatility.

Or any verse again. Mr Venom was terrible at remembering the words to his own songs. I doubt anyone ever noticed including most the band. I only spotted these mistakes once the songs had been properly recorded and finally knew what he was supposed to be singing and when.

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Just a thought. Some aggregation services place restrictions on how your tracks are named. I think this is in order to make sure that there is a consistency to capitalisation etc. If your band uses non-alpha-numeric characters in your song titles or weird capitalisations (The Terrortones had a lot of song titles with run-on words that had capital letters in the middle of them) you may find that the aggregator doesn't allow you to render the titles as you want them. CD Baby were particularly bad/strict for this last time I looked. That may influence your choice of service.

Because I use my Bass VIs to play both "bass" and "guitar" parts I discovered that having the Helix and FRFR absolutely essential in getting a balanced sound between the two. When I first switched from playing my "normal" bass after the guitarist left one of the bands I'm in and we decided not to replace him, I was using the rehearsal room's bass rig as before, in order to save on the amount of gear I took to practice, and found myself turning up all the Helix patches to compensate for the loss of top end on the "guitar" parts. However at the first few gigs with this band when I was using the FRFR for monitoring they were now all too loud. Now I always use the FRFR and I have been able to achieve a balanced sound for all the strings.

These days yes (5): Gus G3 5-string passive (black) Gus G3 5-string active (red) Eastwood Hooky 6-string bass Burns Baracuda Squier Bass VI Soon it will probably be four when I get around to selling the Squier and Burns and replacing them with a second Eastwood Hooky. I also have 4 guitars. At one time (around 2014) I had almost 50 guitars and basses, as well as a number of synths, samplers and other high-tech musical instruments.

Ned's Atomic Dustbin Some line-ups of Talking Heads from the early 80s have both Busta Jones and Tina Weymouth on bass.

That's interesting. Can you follow where the different wires go in the amp - especially those connected to the mains side?

Any aggregation service will offer this, and most will let you pick and choose which services your music is then available on, although I really can't see any advantage for independent artists to deliberately opt out of any. Aggregators tend to work in one of two ways, and most will require an initial payment to "release" your recordings. After that they either take a relatively large percentage of your earnings, but your recordings will be continually available for no additional cost; or they take a smaller percentage but charge you a yearly fee to ensure that your recording continue to be available. Stop paying and your music will disappear from all the services. Other than that they are pretty much all the same. If you have a sizeable following who will all be downloading and/or streaming your music (or you only want the music to be available for a limited time) then a yearly subscription service may well be best. Otherwise pick whichever has the the lowest setup cost and takes the smallest percentage of your earnings. Bands I have been involved with have used CD Baby, Catapult and Distrokid.

Is anyone still making cassette decks? IME the most important thing any cassette deck can have is for it to be solidly built, especially around the tape transport area. I still have an Aiwa F660 deck that is close on 40 years old new and has performed pretty much flawlessly throughout this time (it did need to have the "rubber" parts replaced about 15 years ago). The whole area around where the cassette goes is full of clunky metalwork and built like a tank. It was used for playing back the backing tape of my synth band, and also an essential pat of my home studio for most of the 80s, so it has had a lot of use and some abuse. The top of the range Sony deck I bought in the late 90s to replace it failed within about 10 years, and unsurprisingly it appears to be mostly made of weedy plastic. It has also outlasted 2 Nakamichi decks (owned by musician friends) which cost a lot more but to me didn't sound any better and were considerably less reliable.

What amp/cabs are you running this through? All of my Bass VIs were slightly quiet on the higher strings when used with a typical bass amp. As soon as I dispensed with this and went for a Helix and FRFR cab, it immediately sounded much more balanced. It may be that you need a different rig for this instrument, not different pickups.

They are. The unit top right in the photo is the power amp and is totally self-contained. Everything else in the case is for the pre-amp valves and controls.