BigRedX

To the OP: how doe the audience hear your bass sound? From the rig or from the PA?

There was a venue we used to play in my Dad Rock band and the biggest improvement we could make to the FoH sound would be to draw the curtains that covered the floor the ceiling windows all the way down one side of the room. Just playing with EQ, you are going to have to accept the fact that no matter what you do you are making the sound worse in some other part of the room.

But you can't fix a poor acoustic space with EQ. If you could, studios wouldn't expensive acoustic treatment to the ceilings and walls and could get away with simply slapping a 31 band graphic across the monitor feeds. Room acoustics are a mixture of time and frequency domain issues and EQ is just a frequency domain solution. Sure you can use EQ to fix a problem at a given listening position, but your are just as likely to make the sound much worse in other parts of the room. EQ is a compromise solution only, and at some point you will have to live with the fact that it can only do so much towards fixing a poor acoustic space. You may get just as good results by repositioning the speakers to change the location of the sum and difference nodes caused by sound being reflected from the various surfaces in the room.

Every festival I've played in the last 15 years - especially those where good quality backline has been supplied, the monitors have been more than up to the job. Most of the time as soon as I've stepped away from being directly in front of the bass rig I've been able to hear more of "me" in the monitors than from the rig. Unless you play at levels where the backline is seriously interfering with the FoH sound, it's for show only.

I wouldn't bother with the backline at all. Bass into the Helix. Helix DI'd into the PA. Bass sound from the Helix in the FoH and Monitors. Job done.

If you want a custom graphite neck, I'd talk to Simon Farmer at Gus Guitars. IIRC he does all the graphite necks for the Enfield basses.

The other thing to consider is what the rest of the band are expecting in terms of bass parts. If there's lots of octave/unison riffing using open strings then you are going to need to match the tuning of the guitars. However having a standard tuned bass with the down-tuned guitars may allow you to come up with some more interesting/less conventional ideas if you don't have to slavishly follow the guitar riffs. On the few occasions I've played with down/drop tuned bands I've stuck in standard tuning on my 5-string with out any problems.

Firstly what exactly is "drop C#"? On the guitar "drop D" is standard tuning with the low E string retuned down to D. So do you mean: 1. Standard tuning with just the E string down to C#? (C# A D G) 2. All strings tuned down a tone and the E string down to C#? (C# G C F) 3. Everything tuned down 3 semi-tones? (C# F# B E) Then what sort of a feel do you want for the strings? And what sort of sound are you after? A lot of the time with down-tuned bands that slack feel of loose strings is exactly what is needed to give the right sound. Other times you just want lower notes than standard tuning but still the standard feel to the strings. All these things will influence what is the right advice for the OP.

Depends on the bass. However the neck and body must match. Plain necks with painted bodies just look cheap to me.

From a business PoV telephone conversations are terrible because unless you record every call (and if you do you also need the consent of the whoever is on the other end of the line) there is no permanent record of what was said. Having been stung in the past by "agreements" made during phone calls I no longer do any business solely on the basis of a telephone conversation.

IIRC he only had the Eccleshalls because he liked the look and wanted something that could be made to feedback on certain songs. Otherwise he's have played the Yamahas all the time. As for the Shergolds, they've been pretty much replaced with the Eastwood copies. Having played an original Shergold and owning one of the Eastwoods, I'd say the differences between the two are insignificant, and if someone is stupid enough to bid £3.5k (last time I looked) for a Shergold when they could have a brand new Eastwood for a fraction of the cost, then you'd be an idiot not to offer it up for sale.

I've said it a couple of times in this thread, but it's probably worth repeating now that my contributions are pages and pages back in history. I too was inspired by the earlier posts to investigate the FRFR route, especially since almost every single gig I have done in the last 20 years have had the PA as the main FOH source for the bass, and also since I played a number of gigs where I was asked to turn down on stage in order to prevent my rig from interfering with the FOH sound, to the point where I could hear myself louder in the wedge supplied for the guitarist on the other side of the stage then I could from my cabs immediately behind me. I went all out and bought a Helix Floor and RCF745 speaker and I haven't looked back. It may seen expensive to some, but the bass rig it replaced had cost me more than I paid for these new, and that had all been bought second hand! Also after selling all the gear the Helix and RCF had replaced I actually came away with a small profit! As well as bass guitar I also play Bass VI and synth in another band so being able to use a single two-component rig for processing and monitoring cuts down massively on the amount of gear I need to take to gigs and consequently set up and sound-checking time. It also makes life much easier for the PA engineer. I can't ever seen myself going back to a traditional rig.

No.

As I've said so many times in the past that you are probably all bored of it, if a company doesn't want to communicate via email they shouldn't publish an email address. These days, a voice call unless backed up with some form of written communication, is a terrible way of doing business, because unless you also record every call you make and receive there is no permanent record of what was said.

Can I ask why? For me it's one of those things I put up with on the internet because until recently the workarounds to get it typographically correct are more trouble then they are worth. Now that it is available it looks a lot better with the glyph in the correct place in relation to the baseline. However I'm sure that because it is automatically generated, it will be possible to “fool” the algorithm in some way to raise up the glyph when it should be on the baseline, much in the same way that it is possible to fool automatic smart quotes with the phrase Rock ’n’ Roll where first apostrophe will be rendered the wrong way around because the algorithm doesn’t know that the the first apostrophe is for a missing “a” and not single quotes around the letter “n”.

Typographically the internet has been terrible for decades, so any attempt to improve it should be applauded, and not met with resistance. The glyph "x" should only sit on the base line when it actually a lower-case letter "X". In all other instances where it either a multiplication symbol of shorthand for "by" it should be centred on the the cap height.

Typographically having the x above the baseline is correct when it is in the context of being 2 x 10.

If your bass goes through the PA then your choice of cab(s) is all but irrelevant as the only one benefiting from them will be you, and not even then if your regularly play venues with decent sized stages and proper monitoring. Certainly IME I could only hear the "sound" my cabs if I was stood directly in front of them, otherwise the bass guitar sound provided for the other band members in the foldback was always much louder. If you rely on your rig to produce an audible bass guitar sound both on stage and FOH then unfortunately there is no substitute for trying out cabs in a gig situation. No matter how loud your local musical instrument shop allows you to play, hearing the bass without the other instruments in your band mix tells you very little about how the cabs will perform with the whole band playing.

Courtesy of The Joy Of Tech:

I'm sorry but IMO that is a truly awful version that loses almost everything that made the original single version so appealing.

Do you have some links for a store where I could either buy one and take it home with me or have them ship it to me before the end of the week? All the ones I found that were listing this synth were still "pre-order"

Unfortunately not. You'll end up sounding like a bad 80s synth preset applied to a voice. My take is to just fix the notes that sound wrong. By all means use the guide to show you whether to sharpen or flatten but I wouldn't go anymore than half way between "perfect" and when it stops sounding out of tune.

It seems a lot of money and it's not even available to own yet. I'm not a fan of this pre-release hype. If I see something I like and I can afford it I would want to buy it now for delivery before the end of the week. Pre-release stuff gets me all excited but if I wanted a synth with that spec RIGHT NOW, I'd have to buy something else, and if I was just vaguely interested, I'm sure that by the time it's available to buy in the shops with immediate shipping there will be something even better and cheaper available on pre-order!

I don't own anything by Behringer and I never have. On the whole they don't really make any products that I am in the market for, so I don't have to wrestle with my conscience about their questionable business practices. Every so often I get a bit of a nostalgia for one of their vintage synth reissues, but then I remember that when I owned the originals back in the day, it was only because I couldn't afford the synths I really wanted and not because they were brilliant musical instruments. However if they ever make a clone of the Oberheim Expander I might be in trouble...

Has it been OK in the past with the same set up? Could it be down to the room where you were playing? If it is, then there is a limited amount of things you can do to make it sound good, because bad acoustics are a mixture of time domain and frequency domain problems, and without using acoustic treatment to fix the time domain problems the best you can do is EQ to make it sound good where you are standing and hope that you haven't made it sound even worse in other parts of the room. If removing the Helix made it sound better, then you have something on the Helix doing something you don't like. Go through the effects blocks one by one turning them on and off and you'll quickly find the culprit and then either remove it or adjust it until the sound is good. I would start by looking at anything that is adding EQ or boosting the signal. IMO, EQ should be done at one place, and one place only, in the signal chain and you should always aim to cut the frequencies you don't want rather than boosting the ones you do. Ultimately it might be that you simply don't have the right bass/amp/cab(s) for the sound that you are after. To a certain extent valve amps are supposed to sound a bit "farty" The whole point of them is to add that nice 2nd harmonic distortion "warmth" to the sound. The other thing to bear in mind is that a certain amount of dirt is very beneficial to binding the sound of the bass together with all the other instruments. Remember what sounds good when playing on your own at home doesn't necessarily work with the rest of the band in the mix. Have listen to any of the isolated bass videos from the "great" players that are available on YouTube and you'll be surprised by just how much distortion is present in the bass sounds!