BigRedX

The Cure are very much my kind of band and they have an extensive back catalogue of fantastic, memorable songs; but I've never heard so many bum notes in a performance in a long time (mostly it appears from Robert Smith's guitar playing).

I would get in touch with Disaster Area Designs and check that your DMC.micro isn't faulty. While there will be some latency in the conversion to MIDI it shouldn't be as bad as shown in your video. Otherwise maybe consider getting separate expression pedals to the HX Stomp and the C4, or look at some way of splitting the "signal" from the expression pedal at the analogue stage.

It would be useful to know if the problem is at the MIDI out of the DMC or the MIDI in of the HX Stomp.

Got it. Are you experiencing the same latency with the expression pedal on the C4?

All the time. In the 80s used to follow a great local band called "None So Blind" who were often support to well-known acts playing at Nottingham University. Went to see Fields Of The Nephilim about 5 years ago specifically to catch HIM who were the support act. Also plenty of gigs where I was there for both the support and the headliners - Sunscream supporting Jesus Jones and 23 Jewels supporting Sector 27 spring to mind but there were lots more. Did backfire when I bought tickets to see Blink 182 because the support was going to be Death Cab For Cutie. By the time of the gig Death Cab had pulled out of the tour because Benjamin Gibbard was ill, so I had to endure two second rate "alt-rock" bands and Blink 182 who apart from a couple of singles I wasn't really that keen on...

You need to look at all the photos in the link provided in the OP for this system to make complete sense. I was struggling to see how this worked for both tuning and intonation adjustment, and why the "return" on the string didn't interfere with it until looking at the other photographs I realised that these are just the tail-pieces and there is a completely separate bridge that goes with the system.

To get back OT... When I first started considering making a guitar in the late 70s the only source of information for the enthusiastic amateur like myself was Stephen Delft's series in International Musician magazine. Back then truss rods were not readily available and as a result several articles in the series were dedicated to making your own from scratch. One thing I do remember was that it was suggested that the adjustment nut was made of brass, so if there was a problem the threads on the nut were more likely to fail than the truss rod itself, and the nut could easily be replaced. On the surface this seemed like excellent advice. Is there any reason why it has not been adopted by any truss rod manufacturers? Has technology moved on since 1978 to render this obsolete?

Looks like a combination of poor MIDI implementation on the part of the DMC.micro combined with a the HX Stomp being much better at processing the direct input of the expression pedal. Converting an "analogue" signal to MIDI will always involve some degree of latency, but it shouldn't be as much as you are experiencing in the video. Do you NEED to run the expression pedal through the DMC.micro? It would be useful if you could give a complete (non-video) run down of how all your devices are interconnected and why, so it might be possible to suggest an alternative setup that will work better. I would also suggest getting in touch with Disaster Area Designs to see what they say. It could be that your device is faulty? If you have the facilities record the pedal movements against a click track into a DAW so you have a visual record of the latency to show them.

Same here. Browsing is fine, put posting is very slow and appears to have got slower as the day progresses. Has Basschat run out of server space? Maybe time to prune some of those unnecessary Off-Topic threads?

Just an update on my Belgium parcel situation. It's still stuck in Belgium customs and apparently the current processing time is between 20 and 24 days, so maybe it will be with it's recipient by the end of next week. However, my client has more labels that need printing and delivery to Belgium. I've just spent a very frustrating 30 minutes on a web chat with an InterParcel rep, the outcome of which is while some of the other services they offer such as TNT Express and the more expensive FedEx options are supposedly experiencing shorter delays, none of them will commit to guaranteed delivery date. They sat that TNT delays are generally 48-72 hours extra, but when I ask if a parcel sent on Monday will arrive on Friday of the same week at the latest, they become all evasive. And the site is still offering 4 different timed levels of next day EU delivery from TNT when not one of them can be guaranteed! The upshot of all of this is that my client has found a printer in Belgium to produce their labels. It doesn't affect me too much because I only make a small amount on print jobs and I still get the full amount for my design and artwork services. However it does mean that at very good UK printing company has just lost several £k's worth of work to an unknown quantity in Belgium simply because of the delays currently being caused by the additional customs paperwork. That's it rant over. For the moment...

Generally all the things that make an acoustic instrument have a desirable sound are nightmares when it comes to amplifying the instrument.

Or has been shown already, descend into fish-related puns.

Yet another hangover from thinking that solid electric instruments have tonal properties in common with acoustic instruments. They don't. As other have said for a solid electric instrument it's all about construction. There's nothing wrong with using plywood so long as it has the required strength for the job. Here are two contemporary plywood instruments: That's by Jens Ritter. I doubt anyone would disagree that he knows more than a thing or two about making a decent sounding and playing instrument. And this one is by Bas Extravaganza. Apparently made from of-the-shelf plywood from his local DIY superstore for the purposes of showing that plywood is just as acceptable a material for making solid electric basses as any other "tone wood".

Sounds like a U2 B-side. Bono would have sung it better too.

Serious question. Does anyone know of a courier service that is currently able to ship to Europe within the standard 3-5 working days including customs clearance? I've tried asking the companies themselves but no-one will commit to a definite schedule which makes a mockery of the various services they are offering. I'm happy to pay more for a guaranteed service.

Definitely not. I have a largish parcel going to a client in Brussels. It spent a week in UK customs and is now in it's 3 week in Belgium customs (who are currently quoting a 20-24 day processing time). My GF's business isn't doing any better having parcels going to The Netherlands taking 4+ weeks to arrive.

Currently Interparcel items sent to Europe are experiencing 4 week customs delays even with all the correct paperwork. I don't know if anyone else is doing any better at the moment in this regard.

IME the amp is the virtually the only area where weight saving can be achieved. Even the difference between a traditional plywood/aluminium and a modern moulded plastic flight case isn't that big and all the serious professional multi-effects are still built like tanks and weigh almost as much. Obviously if you are going from an Amp SVT to something like a TecAmp Puma you'll notice the difference, but I went from a solid-state 2x300W power amp to a 1kW valve/class D hybrid and the overall rack weight difference was a slight reduction in the difficulty of the rack case for a one person lift, a slight overall better balance of the case (the solid state power amp made the rack case very noticeably front-end heavy).

My point was that as soon as you start racking up your gear, IME the weight of everything combined with the rack case adds up very quickly. Also while amps have got progressively smaller and lighter, very little else has (rack mounted multi-effects, external PSUs mains distributors, cables etc.), so all the other contents of the rack are still pretty heavy, and the overall weigh savings get more negligible the more you have in your rack. It ends being a compromise between speed of setting up and weight.

While there's a lot to be said for the setting up convenience of a rack-mounted rig - in the days when I had mine it took less than 5 minutes to have everything plugged in and ready to play, the proliferation of light-weight gear tends to negate the advantages. What's the point of having a 500W amp that you can lift with your little finger if the case it's going to be put in weighs almost twice as much? I have been a rack user for my various bass and guitar rigs since the mid 80s and until recently I used to have 2 racks systems - A big one with 6U of space that was ideally a two-person carry and lift onto the stack, and a little one with 3U of space which was more manageable but I still wouldn't want to carry it any great distance. The actual gear itself that went into the little rack didn't weigh much, but the metalwork to hold it in place, the PSUs, and all the cabling to wire it up very quickly made the complete rack pretty heavy for its size. When I decided to ditch my conventional rigs and go for an FRFR system I thought long and hard about what I was going to do about the non-amp contents of my racks, and eventually settled on a Helix Floor, rather than rack unit. Even if I was in a band with a road crew I couldn't see myself going back to a rack-based system.

Actually the "reboot" of Hawaii Five-0 only ended it's 10 year run last year...

In theory it's a smart idea, but then you can't replace them with locking strap buttons because the button with the strap attached to it will be taller/longer than the other, and your instrument is no longer stable when resting on them.

I've finally made up my mind how to vote on this. I put two. 1. Keyboards (although it's really just synthesiser - don't expect me to be able to provide full song accompaniment on the piano) and 2. Any plucked stringed fretted instrument. The mental attitude to what I need to play will vary depending on the instrument in question, but the playing techniques remain basically the same - one hand for fretting the other for plucking.

But the bass is all but useless without the rest of the band.

Like @AndyTravis if it has frets and strings I will be able to get something musical out of it. As well as bass guitars, I've also owned guitars, Balalaikas (including a solid electric one I built my self as a try out to see if my woodworking skills were good enough to make an electric guitar) and a Mandolin I also play keyboards well enough to have been a synth player in a band for 6 years in the 80s.