BigRedX

Unfortunately the only nice thing I can say about Elites is that they were more consistent than Rotosound if you needed 5-string and alternative scale-length sets. I haven't looked back since I switched to Newtone strings is the early 90s.

BTW if you have the right phone you don't even need the SumUp card reader anymore as you can use your phone instead.

To the OP: there are IMO two ways you can go. 1. Buy a cheap Zoom (ideally second hand). It will get you started and you can work out what you like and what you don't like that will inform any future upgrade purchases. If you have little experience with effects pedals and none with programmable multi-effects you really won't know what is going to be essential and what features you can easily live without. 2. Alternatively buy the top of the range Helix, Kemper or Neural on the assumption that once you've got your head around the interface it will do everything that you are ever likely to need. I'm a Helix user and although I've been using programmable multi-effects for over 35 years now (and was a synth player before that) I bought the top of the range Helix on the assumption that if I bought a less-featured model I would discover things that I needed that my chosen device couldn't do. I was right although the features that I have come to see as indispensable weren't ones that I would have thought were important at the time of purchase.

I spent most of the 80s playing synths. I have owned a couple of 80s made Overwaters since then.

My direct experience is that if you don't accept card payments it will significantly affect your sales. Last year I was in two bands. One has a SumUp reader and although we still do cash sales the vast majority of our merch at gigs is paid for by card. The other band, despite me continually telling them that we need a card reader, was cash sales only and over the past 12 months our merch sales have been next to nothing. All the people I know using SumUp got them 3 or 4 years ago when the readers were cheap and there were various promotions where if you got a recommendation from existing user you got the reader for next to nothing and person who recommended you got a payment in return. Now that they are well established I don't know if that's still the case. Certainly back then it was the cheapest card reader and the smallest percentage on sales. It's also worth being able to accept PayPal, although IME it is often too much hassle. IME not everyone who uses PayPal has it on their phone. Also remember that if you are accepting cash you will need a healthy float for change as you can almost guarantee that first 5 sales will all be made with a £20 note payment. Regarding payments on card sales and PayPal, everyone takes a cut per transaction, so you will need to factor it in to your pricing, but since you ought to be making 100% mark up on each T-shirt sold, in the grand scheme of things the additional cost of card and PayPal payments should be close to negligible.

They've probably been at the NAMM exhibition so it may take a couple more days for normal service to be resumed.

Peter Hook has a whole range of "signature" instruments from Eastwood derived from his Shergold Marathon 6-string bass. Bootsy seems to have basically the same thing over and over again but from different manufacturers (although IIRC there was a Bootsy Warwick that wasn't star shaped).

Bootsy Peter Hook

On the other hand, in the pre-internet days when retailers only had manufacturers' price lists to go on my synth band were to do a straight swap with our very expensive, but also very crap Yamaha CS15D synthesiser for a second hand Korg MS20, simply because the list retail price of the Yamaha was about double that of the Korg in 1983 and the shop knew next to nothing about synths and their relative features. The Yamaha synth was still sitting unsold in the shop at the beginning of the 90s.

A P-bass wouldn't have looked as interesting.

On any of these devices with touch screens can they be used and edited without needing to actually have to touch the screen? I'm one of these people for whom touch screens often don't respond at all.

Music shops have rarely offered anything close to second hand market value (unless it's something very rare AND desirable) for PX instruments and equipment. I was able to buy an Overwater Original bass for £350 in the early 90s from Carlsbro in Nottingham. I dread to think how little they must have given for it in the first place, in order to sell it to me so cheaply.

Why would anyone buy strings from eBay? As far as I am concerned eBay is for buying second hand items only, and I wouldn't want to buy used strings.

I've had a quick look at a few of my most recent PMs and I can't edit any of my contributions. However as the most recent one is 3 months old there may be a point earlier in time when this is possible. I know another forum I use has a time limit on being able to edit anything. If it's a mistake you have made, it's probably simpler to send a new corrected message. If you are worried about some sending you a message and then editing it, the simplest thing to do is the quote their message in your reply as this can't be subsequently edited by them.

Even before the UK left the EU I found this to be the case. No mater when in the week I placed the order or what it was for, I wouldn't get a shipping notification until the Friday. Item(s) would be delivered on the Wednesday of the following week. The only difference now is that delivery/customs adds an extra day or two onto the delivery time.

Great stuff, but re-enforces the fact that once you stick any stringed instrument through a distortion pedal or overdriven amp it just sounds like an electric guitar.

Will the orchestral versions include brass instruments? If so the weird keys/tunings are probably to accommodate them. Brass instruments often struggle with standard "rock" keys.

I would agree. The fewer cables and the fewer joins in cables in a gigging situation to better. I've gone one further and now have a Mac that is only used for live playback of our backing track. It lives permanently in a 3U rack case and the only connections using consumer-grade cables and connectors are made within the case. Connections to the outside world are on XLRs and Powercon. Even then 6 months of humping the case in an out of venues and rehearsal rooms caused the IEC mains cable to work loose from the audio/MIDI interface. That has now been replaced with a cable with a locking IEC connector - I never realised such a thing existed or it would have been fitted from day one.

Yes

If the sound the audience get is from your rig then they should be mic'ing it up and not bother with DI.

Which is why I have asked the OP how long it has been since the problem first occurred and what the actual symptoms are. Given also that Mooer should be receiving OS updates for testing their products in advance of them being released for the public there is no excuse IMO for an update to take more than a week to be made available after the problem is discovered. The usual reason why what appears to be a minor OS update has caused an app to fail is because it wasn't written with 100% compliance in the first place probably because the developers think they know better. Spoiler: most of the time they don't. The lack of a timely update to me suggests that the product has already been abandoned. It is also in the retailer's interests to at least be seen to be doing something about this, as otherwise they have potentially unsellable stock or unhappy new customers whose guitar won't work properly from day one of getting it.

It appears that the current solution is to buy another device with the appropriate OS soles for the purposes of using it with the guitar, which IMO is very poor. The way I see it, is that the app is an integral part of this particular guitar, and since it only works on mobile devices it is unreasonable to expect users not to update the OS on these due to security concerns. Without a functioning app the OP could have bought a better guitar for the same price or something cheaper if they just wanted a guitar. The additional functionality is part of the USP of this particular guitar.

How long has it been since the app stopped functioning properly? Does it fail in that it won't even load, will load but won't connect to the guitar, or that just some functions not longer work? A detailed look through the tech specs of the guitar on those websites selling it and looking at the manuals available on the GTRS website, there is absolutely no mention of which versions of Android (or iOS) are required for app compatibility. Therefore IMO it is not unreasonable to assume that the device OS version doesn't matter for the app to work. Also given that most people's mobile devices are used for lots of far more security conscious apps which often rely on the OS being updated, it is (again IMO) unreasonable to expect people not to update the OS on their device, especially since for security reasons most have their set to install automatic updates.

This is the problem with using a phone which normally has several other more important uses which require it to be kept up to date for running other software. Does the guitar support control form a proper computer perhaps using a web browser interface?

Both the Fractal and Valeton fail the BRX gig worthiness test by having horrible mini-jacks for MIDI (unforgivable on the Valeton where there appears to be plenty of room for DIN sockets) and a non-locking connector for the external PSU. I would also hope that both come with a decent computer-based editor as the displays look very small.