BigRedX

There was a video of some author playing one in the unexpected bassists thread.

Do you mean the Bass MuRF? Have you followed the setup procedure in the manual?

What is your amp for? Home practice or are you intending to play some gigs? If it's for gigs what is the line-up of the band?

The Vintage Hofner site is the place to look. Examples of both of these basses appear on this page towards the end.

Thanks! We've also done an animated lyric video to go with it:

Yes they are ridiculously expensive, but my bass version was second hand and a fraction of the price a new one costs. If it wan't for the fact I don't have enough use for a bass with only 4 strings I'd probably still have it. The only thing I didn't like about mine was the bridge which was obviously designed and built by an engineer rather than a musician. The guitar version has a standard Tune-o-matic bridge and doesn't suffer from this problem.

It's made from expensive tone aluminium instead. Actually there are two wooden inserts in the back of the "neck" which look like they were salvaged from a wooden pallet and then painted silver to match the rest of the instrument. As for sound. I've been told it sounds like a P-Bass. It does have the right pickup in the right place which apparently is the main prerequisite for the P-Bass sound. However as I have never actually played a P-Bass myself I couldn't really comment.

Born To Rock F4B. In name, material and overall appearance... ... and it's essentially a P-Bass.

I spent over 2 years from when I first started using by Squier Bass VI seriously until I received my Eastwood Hooky from the first batch they made trying every Bass VI style instrument I could get my hands on, and none of them came even remotely close to the playability of the Hooky for what I wanted to do with the instrument. There's a whole thread documenting my search here. What I found, was that most Bass VIs are essentially guitars with 30" necks and occasionally (but by no mean always) pickups positioned in suitable places for getting bass-type sounds out of them. The Squier had a very uncomfortably narrow neck - the guitars I use have wider necks by comparison - and while most alternatives were better none were a massive improvement. I used a Burns Barracuda for a while which was easier to play but I still found myself plucking the wrong strings especially when I was swaping between sections that involved up and down plucking of multiple strings to all down strokes on a single string and back again. Until Eastwood announced the Hooky, I was seriously considering getting something custom-made using classical guitar string spacing (which was still just a guess), but now I know that the significantly wider string spacing of the Hooky is just right for what I want, and if I was still to go custom, I'd be getting them the copy the dimensions of the Hooky neck.

That looks very similar to the ones I bought directly from Van Damme (I'm sure it was the same Cat5 cable). They were fine for about 6 months use, and then become less and less able to coil neatly before finally failing. Are yours still properly coilable?

This. There's no point in being younger if you are just going to make the same mistakes all over again.

For those of you using Ultranet, where are you getting your gig-proof properly coilable Cat5 cables from? In the days when I was running a BassPod and Floorboard which are connected by Cat5 I was getting through a cable every other month. I ended up buying a couple of very expensive Van Damme Cat5 leads which were a lot more robust, but even they were never as easy to coil up as a standard mic lead and eventually after a couple of years these failed as well.

Why? I do all my Helix programming either on headphones or via my HiFi system, and then do the fine-tuning in the rehearsal room where I go direct into the PA and where I can properly hear how my sounds fit in with those of the other instruments. Any conventional bass or guitar amp will add too much colouration to the sound for me to be able to make any meaningful decisions unless I was to always use that amp and cab in every single situation.

Running iOS on a non-M series Mac is a bit of a faff and doesn't always work reliably and then the Mac will still want to communicate with the device using Bluetooth because that's what a phone would do. For me having to program a footswitch designed to be able to control a computer from a completely separate device seems completely unintuitive and a backward step.

Having the signal conductors twisted as a twisted pair is better for noise rejection and the removal of RF interference. In today's phone heavy gig environment that has probably become more important than ever.

That does look interesting and a couple of extra footswitches are always useful, as I've been thinking of adding loop on/off functionality to our set up to allow longer intros etc. The only thing that puts me off is that it looks as though set-up/editing is done via your phone. Hopefully there's also an option to to use a proper computer. Please let me know how you get on with this.

This kind of phrase come up quite a bit and wonder just how much truth there is to it? Not withstanding the fact that the last time I wore trousers that were actually capable of "flapping" was some time in the late 70s, I don't think I have ever needed to be so loud that I could feel sound pressure waves emanating from my cabs. I suspect if I had, I'd be even deafer than I am now...

I've gone with no amp. All my sound shaping is done by my Line6 Helix and AFAIAC the amp and cab models are just more sound shaping devices, so sometimes the tone I want needs one and sometimes it doesn't - bout half the patches that I use at the moment don't have any amp or cab models in the signal path and most of the ones that have use a guitar combo model because I like the sound. Because of this my actual amp and cab(s) would simply be something to make the bass guitar louder, so most of the time I go straight into the PA. I have a PA-style FRFR cab for rehearsals and the very occasional gig I do where the PA is strictly vocals only.

That option on paper seems to offer the greatest amount of treble cut. I take it you have the treble control set to cut in order to try and get the top end to your taste? However it might be that you really want the upper-mids taming, in which case one of the first two options might suit you better. Personally. I'd just try each one a see which (if any) you like the best. The worst that can happen is you won't like any...

Which setting is it currently on?

IME if you worry about this, then it will happen and you will be upset. for all of the 90s I used an Overwater original bass, which I picked up second hand at a bargain price, but which I subsequently discovered would have been very expensive and time-consuming to replace as a new one would have had to be a custom order and would probably not have come with the original filter-based pre-amp. I can't recall this bass picking up any additional dents to the few almost invisible ones it already had when I bought it. Interestingly the much cheaper bass I had as a spare but luckily never needed to use at any gigs turned out to be covered in bashes and bumps when I came to sell it, despite the fact that it had spent most of it's life in its case or on a stand at the back of the stage. Since then I have been playing Gus G3s live including 6 years of almost weekly gigs with The Terrortones where we were on the bill with Punks and Psychobillies. IMO if I don't play these expensive basses at gigs there would be no point in having them. Also just because an instrument is relatively cheap doesn't mean it's going to be easy to replace. In my other band I play the relatively cheaper Eastwood Hooky. As this has become my main bass with this band and there is no suitable alternative, I've been looking at getting a spare. I think I've seen two come up for sale second hand in the last 18 months and both went almost instantly. For a new one you have to pre-order and then wait 6 months. IME the lack of an easily obtained suitable replacement is more of a worry than getting a bump or scrape on an expensive instrument, so I've stopped worrying about it altogether.

I suspect that one of the things making the interface box expensive, is that not only is it an interface box, but it also has to act as a MIDI Thru and MIDI Merge. When you start looking at the prices for these devices £100 doesn't seem quite so bad.

It's probably possible to have two opto-isolators running in opposite directions, but you still need to completely decouple the screen from the earth, and ultimately it would almost definitely be cheaper just to fit standard MIDI sockets and a single opto-isolator like most other manufacturers do. I suppose Meris assume that a lot of their users will never need to MIDI facilities, so there is little need to fit conventional sockets and circuitry, and those that do will be willing to pay for the additional interface box. To the OP can you check that the correct (or even any) MIDI data is being transmitted from the QC MIDI out? I have found that some devices are very poor at re-transmitting MIDI over USB to the actual DIN MIDI sockets with either no MIDI or very garbled messages being output.

Unfortunately for me I'm still not impressed. There's been quite a discussion this week on another forum where images of the device had been prematurely leaked. When the video was finally posted I found myself completely underwhelmed. Run the video but don't watch it. Can you hear a single instance which makes you think that sound was played from a guitar rather than a keyboard? For me there was one and that wasn't the GM-800 but actual guitar being played over a loop. And while the demo is impressive in terms of what you can do with a guitar and a GM-800 in terms of sounding like a keyboard or synth player, and the person doing the playing has obviously spent time on their guitar technique to get the best out of the device, to me it just come over as a party trick. All those things are so much easier to do from an actual keyboard, and for a lot of us, learning some rudimentary keyboard technique will actually be quicker than modifying your guitar playing style to get the best out of any guitar synth. I know because I have been there. It's also very telling that the only fast, rhythmic playing being done in the whole demo is performed solo without any backing, which seems to suggest to me there are still latency issues. I'm surprised and disappointed that Roland appear to have gone back to pitch detection rather than stuck with the wave shaping and modelling of the V-series devices. To me this seems like a step backwards.

I've had a bit more of a think about this, and while there are a decent number of albums where I like ever single song, I'm not sure I would want to see any of them performed live in there entirety, and especially not with the songs in the order they appear on the recording. For me there is a significant difference between a recording and a gig, and most bands IMO shouldn't try and make the two the same. There are also compromises in the running order for any album originally released on vinyl that would compromise the atmosphere of a live performance. So I'll keep my albums for listening at home, and enjoy those bands that are still playing live mixing it up one stage.