BigRedX

When I bought my Mono M80 gig bag it was the lightest of all the semi-rigid bags. Some of the "competition" were heavier than a Hiscox Liteflite hard case. At the time, all the serious contenders had the case weights included in the specs on their web sites.

In retrospect, I think I was lucky when I switched to playing 5-string basses. Previously I had played lots of different stringed instruments with different tunings, numbers of strings, scale lengths and neck widths, so 5-string bass was just one more of many options to get used to. Also I had just come from 7 years of mostly playing synths, and even my not brilliant 5-string bass was a superior instrument to the 4-string I had been using before that. That combined with the fact that I decided I liked the idea of 5-string bass, then my next one was a truly excellent instrument in every respect.

How fast does this set up load a new selection of effects? Given how slow Logic is at changing patches on a single native plug-in, I suspect that you'll need to use something similar to the "snapshot" facility on the Helix where all you are doing is turning individual effects on and off and changing the values of a handful of parameters. Especially if you need to change sounds mid-song. Good luck!

First photo from Saturday's gig. Probably be from early on when we were struggling to hear the backing on stage, hence all the concentration...

IME Rotosound are incapable of consistently making good bass strings that aren't standard gauge for 34" 4-string basses. I had a number of sets where the B string was completely dead. Luckily a friend recommended Newtone who are more than capable of making suitable strings for less conventional basses.

Two gigs for Hurtsfall at the weekend. First on Saturday playing "In The Bl4ck Midwinter" festival in Sheffield. The venue (upstairs at Shakespeare's) is small but there was a near-capacity crowd for the Saturday when we played. Some niggles with the on-stage foldback (at least there was some this time) where a request for the backing to be slightly louder resulted in it being so loud we could barely hear anything else. I don't like asking for monitor changes during the set as I think it can look un-professional and diva-ish, but despite the fact that everything had been fine during the soundcheck, it was far too quiet during the first few songs resulting in us struggling to stay in time. It sounded like there was a problem with one of the pots on the mixer for the foldback send as adjustments seemed to vary between almost inaudible and deafeningly loud. Eventually the engineer managed to find a sweet spot that worked for us for the last 3 songs, but it did make playing some of the set more nerve-wracking than it should have. Thankfully it appeared to sound fine FoH and everyone we spoke to afterwards said they really enjoyed our performance. It certainly didn't stop a good half of the room from dancing and singing along with our better-known songs. Didn't sell much merch, but I think that's because all those who would have wanted a CD or T-shirt already had one. There were a few T-shirts on display in the crowd. Sunday was completely different. We were playing at Saltbox in Nottingham as part of a Rock Against Racism weekend event. A much bigger venue with a decent sized stage and massively loud PA. However when we played at 3 in the afternoon it wasn't particularly full and it definitely wasn't an audience composed of people who mostly knew and already liked us. Still we seemed to go down well even if the response was a bit polite compared with the previous night. Once again there were foldback problems, during the soundcheck the wedge in front of me was farting out whenever our singer hit any loud/high notes and when we actually played it appeared to be completely dead. Luckily there were plenty of other wedges on stage that I could hear. Lots of professional-looking video and photography going on so hopefully I'll have something to post later on when it surfaces on social media. We had a proper dressing room (complete with kitchen and bathroom facilities) for ourselves - it was supposed to be for all the performers but we seemed to be only ones who wanted to make use of it. Unless we get offered something good at the last minute, that's it for Hurtsfall for 2024. We'll be spending the next few months working on our album and hopefully have it ready for early 2025. We already have a load of great gigs lined up for next year, unfortunately I can't announce any if them yet. My next gig is In Isolation's farewell concert at The Salutation in Nottingham on December 14th.

I got my first 5-string in 1989 and haven't looked back. Apart for a few years where I alternated between 4-string fretless (only because I hadn't been able to find a 5-string fretless I liked) and 5-string fretted, I haven't played a 4-string bass since then. At the moment I play 5-string with one band and Bass VI with the other. I can't see myself ever buying or playing a 4-string bass ever again. TBH a lot of what I've played on the 5-string could be done on a two string bass, and I once took my Atlansia Solitaire 1-string fretless bass to a rehearsal for the Dad Rock Covers band I was in, where the fact that it was fretless was a greater hinderance than the fact that it only had one string! Some general observations. IME cheap 5-string basses aren't worth the bother. I see lots of people buy something cheap to try it out and unsurprisingly they don't get on with it. I was lucky because although my first 5-string was cheap and not that good, my second one bought a few months later was a second-hand Overwater and payed and sounded fantastic. Also IME scale length on its own makes little difference to sound and feel of the low-B. Too many budget manufacturers add the extra inch to their 5-string versions when what they should be doing is making the neck stiffer and the neck joint better (or ideally make it a through neck). Yes there are decent 35" scale 5-string basses, but anyone making one should be capable of making an equally good 34" scale 5-string. The best 5-string basses I have owned have all been well-made 34" scale and worst have been cheap 35" scale. Also the choice of strings makes a massive difference. Don't just slap on the 5-string version of your favourite 4-string set and expect it to work. It took a lot of trial and error before I found the strings that work best with each 5-string I have owned.

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.