BigRedX

To keep the action correct for both fretted and fretless playing the fingerboard between the frets would need to be raised...

This situation is exactly why I ended up ditching my amp and cabs. With one of the bands I play with most of our gigs are supports for reasonably well-known bands who still use a traditional backline and therefore I just set up in front of the bass rig and no-one in the audience is any the wiser. With my other band the line up is vocals, synths and myself playing Bass VI with programmed drums and additional sequenced synths supplied by the computer. In this case the empty stage really suits the overall band image.

Can you please zoom right in on one of those clicks so that it fills the whole window and take another screen shot?

BTW can you zoom in on a "crackling" waveform in Reaper and send a screen shot of it? That might help work out what the problem is. The lack of clock sync that I initially suggested manifests as pulse waves one or two samples long on the positive part of the axis.

Using a Mac makes troubleshooting much easier since OSX has a couple of handy utilities in theOS that can tell you about how the system is configured and where and why potential problems may be occurring. So check the clocking in the Audio MIDI Setup, which can be found in your utilities folder. With the XR18 inputs selected it should say Clock Source: Default. This means that you have a working synchronised clock source between the Mac and the XR18. If it doesn't let us know what it does say. Then double-check that RecAll isn't over-riding this setting somewhere in its preferences. If there's an option have the XR18 supply the clock Next, how full is your system drive? It is recommended that you always keep 10% free. On top of that you'll need enough space to record your audio. For a monophonic track each minute recorded at 44.1kHz 16bit is 5MB so a 45 minute set with 9 tracks being recorded will require 2GB free on top of that. If you are recording at 24bit that adds 50% to the figure, and obviously longer sets require more space. To be safe I'd want a quarter of the system drive free for recording a gig. If you have a good USB2 external drive it might be worth trying that and seeing if it makes any difference (see the advice about USB buses below, though). I'd also suggest that 8GB is little low for Catalina (the OS will use nearly all of that before you run any thing else) so, if you can, upgrade to 16GB. I have a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro and adding the additional RAM is simple if you have the correct size Philips and Torx screwdrivers. The less storage access the OS is doing for house-keeping purposes the more reliable the audio recording will be. Then if you are still having problems check what else is on the USB bus that you have the XR18 connected to. As I said before laptops have all sorts of additional devices that you won't necessarily know about potentially sharing the bus, such as the keyboard, trackpad, memory card reader, web-cam, WiFi, Bluetooth, (which is why all wireless communications should be turned off) etc. To see what else is on the bus have a look at USB in the System Information (Alt-Apple Menu>System Information). Check all the USB sockets on the Mac to see which one has the fewest other devices, and that's the one to use. Unfortunately the only way to see is to plug the XR18 into each, quitting a reloading the System Information program each time (it doesn't have live refresh). Also, unfortunately USB socket ≠ USB bus, so several USB sockets may all be on the same USB bus. HTH

If the clock settings are all OK, can you let us know the following: 1. What make and EXACT model of laptop are you recording on to? 2. Where is this recorded audio being saved to? The system drive or somewhere else? If somewhere else how is this device connected to the laptop? 3. How many tracks of audio are you trying to record simultaneously and are they mono or stereo? 4. Are you running any other programs on the laptop while you are recording? If so what? and why? The buffer size shouldn't have any impact on the recording process if you're not monitoring the recordings in real time (you shouldn't be doing this in this situation), so, it may be that you are getting a data bottleneck somewhere. While USB2 (or 3) are pretty good, laptops tend to have an number of "invisible" peripherals which can have the potential to disrupt the USB bus. For a start if you don't do it already I would disable both WiFi and Bluetooth while you are recording.

Have a look in the preferences settings for RecAll. Also if you are on a Mac open the Audio MIDI Setup and check the clock source for the XR18 input.

This normally occurs because the sample clocks for each digital device have not been synchronised. What connection are you using between the XR18 and your computer? The best method is to use the device with the most accurate clock to control the other(s). However, the most practical way is for the recording device to be synchronised to the one supplying the digital audio as it can usually be done using the same connection for both the clock and the audio. I once spent a week removing all these clicks from 20 minutes of 8 channel audio, because I'd forgotten turn on clock synchronisation when we digitally transferred the audio from ProTools to Logic using an ADAT connection, and it wasn't possible to do the transfer again properly. Because of the way the clicks are generated they were in a different place on every track, so the only solution was to listen to each track solo'd and use the pencil editing tool to manually draw over them wherever they occurred. It's a mistake you only ever make once!

IIRC Lull make (or made) a "P-Bass" with (their) Thunderbird pickups in and I'm pretty sure @Happy Jack has both one of those and a Lull "Thunderbird" so he might be well placed to comment?

From my recollection sh!t brown stopped being a fashionable 70s colour by 1977 at the very latest, so these Fenders didn't even have dodgy 70s fashion going for them.

Thanks for updating us. When the cab was mic'd, did anyone take the time to listen to each driver in turn to find out which one was closest to delivering the "sound of the cab", and if so did you ensure that this was the driver that was mic'd each time?

The OP needs to check their particular combo. Not all of them have a spare speaker socket for an extension cab.

Yes but there worse it is, the more the "vintage" tag will be pushed as essentially that is all it has going for it. Back in the late 70s I had a part-time job working for my local musical instrument retailer which was in the process of moving on from being somewhere that sold home organs and cheap beginners violins as well a few budget Japanese copy guitars and basses (think Columbus and Grant) to a shop that catered for the "rock roll" instrument market, and to this end had become dealers for Fender, Ibanez and Aria guitars. When the Fender guitars and basses arrived pretty much every single one had serious build problems, as well as the fact that many of them were finished in seriously unattractive colours - predominantly sh!t brown and a unfinished looking see-through white. If it had been up to me the whole lot would have gone straight back to Fender with a demand that they send us some properly made and attractively finished instruments by immediate return. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and the only person who was happy was the free-lance guitar tech who saw lots of additional income from trying to make them playable.

When you are trying to sell some otherwise terribly put together piece of crap.

Thanks for the correction Bill. I ran a bi-amped system in the 90s with a 1x15 bass cab and a home made 2x8 cab based on the speaker housing from my favourite guitar combo, but that was mainly so I could have extreme chorus, flange and delay effects on my bass without sacrificing any of the bottom end clarity. It worked very well and wasn't any real hassle apart from having to educate every PA engineer that they shouldn't run both channels of bass DI at the same volume to get the correct bass sound. Eventually we got our own sound engineer and even that problem went away. Because of this I'd always assumed that putting the crossover for anything other than tweeters before the power amps was a more efficient way of doing things.

As someone who runs their own one-person business, I simply don't get this. No matter how busy I am with actual work, every new enquiry gets an answer with 24 hours, even if I have to apologise that I am too busy to take on any new work at the moment. An unanswered request will most likely result in my potential customer never bothering to get in touch again, whereas those I let know I can't accommodate them right now may well come back with a new request at a time when I need the work.

And the amount of power that you'll lose as heat in the process.

I have to admit that the old Schaller design required the correct tools to be able to tighten them up properly - a pair of mole grips to hold the locking part of the mechanism in the correct orientation while using the correct fixed size spanner to turn the nut. Hoping to get everything tight enough by gripping the lock part in your hand and using an adjustable wrench on the nut would never result in a suitably secure fit. You did also need to enlarge the holes in the strap where the locks went or the strap material would exert extra outwards pressure on the nut making it difficult to do up tight enough. It's quite a bit of faff and IME most people don't bother, with the result that eventually (and normally at the worst possible moment) their strap locks come away from the strap. However if you have the correct tools and know what to do then your locks will stay attached to the strap without loosening forever - I have straps whose Schaller locks are still securely in place from when they were originally fitted 35+ years ago.

For a 1kW+ system you'll need to run your crossover for the bass and mid-range drivers before the power amps.

But that only matters if you, your band and most importantly of all the audience can hear it. What I'm saying is that most of the time only the bass player can, and only if they stand in front of the rig, never move away from that spot and aren't using IEMs. What everyone else will hear, at best, is the sound of the pre-amp valves being delivered by the Class D amps of the FoH and monitors.

The thing is that these big impressive looking rigs are doing pretty much nothing on stage other than looking big and impressive. From personal experience with my own big impressive rig, is that the moment I stepped away from being directly in front of it I could hear more bass guitar from the PA foldback than I could from my own rig. The PA feed at best was taken from the line out/DI on the amp so it gets no benefit of the power amp valves or the "sound" of the cab(s) and that's where all the big heavy components are needed. I sold mine, upgraded my effects to a Line6 Helix and bought an FRFR powered cab to use at rehearsals and the smaller gigs where the foldback might struggle to give a decent bass sound (although TBH so long as I can hear I'm in time and tune with the rest of the band I don't care what it sounds like on stage and I'll trust the FoH engineer to deliver an appropriate bass sound to the audience). The result is that my bands don't have a huge bass rig taking up valuable space on stage, in the van and in the rehearsal room. By all means if your band image calls for it have a big impressive backline, although if I was going to be in a band like that I'd have a "prop rig" that was empty. lightweight and folded up for transit.

The guitar version great. I have an Eggle-era custom model. I've also tried the original bass version which IIRC had an EB3-style pickup arrangement. That was ridiculously large and horribly unbalanced. It didn't sound brilliant either.

When I was in the first year at secondary school (in the early 70s), we were asked if anyone would like to learn a musical instrument, and if so what? For some reason I decided I'd like to learn the trombone. I had a single "try-out" lesson where the teacher tested to see if I could get a note out of the mouth piece (after a bit a trial and error, I could) and then to see if I could reach the full extension of the slide. I couldn't. That was that. I was told I was too small to play the trombone. Nothing else was suggested like a different instrument that I would be able to play, or a suggestion to come back in a year's time and try again.

What exactly do you want to do? Use the external cab instead of the built-in speaker? If so why? Use the combo with an additional cab? In which case you need a cab with the same size and number (and ideally type) of speakers as in the combo for the best results. However, you'll need to look on the back of your actual amp as there are several different versions of the GP7 combo and by looking at photos available not all of them have additional speaker outputs. If they do the impedance information for the extension cab should be marked next to the socket.

For me with a lined fretless it would depend on how "visible" the lines are under stage playing conditions. If they can be easily seen (or as easily as actual frets) then the markers will be fine between the lines as they are on a fretted bass. If the lines are going to be subtle then it would be worth moving the dots to be where the lines are.