dannybuoy

Source Audio can manage to cram 128 presets into their pedals that sell for around the £150 mark. Tech21 have a programmable Bass Driver that's under £200. Those extra presets do not justify the cost. The Darkglass Ultras are already pushing the limits of what people will pay for a pedal, but at least they have clean blend, headphone out, aux in, DI out, and an IR loader. I hope they sell well, and for anyone that's a massive fan of the PSA-1 but wants it in pedal form no matter the price, they will be over the moon. As for me:

I'm not sure if it's a mistake, or just some shops taking advantage of supply and demand. If they only managed to get a handful of units, it's likely there are enough Steve Harris fans out there to buy them at £399! £299 sound like the right price, it's about what it costs from the US if you add on shipping and customs, plus the dUg pedal is around £249 and there's nothing there to justify the massive hike over that one.

That line of TC pedals are rehoused Behringer circuits, the Forcefield is apparently the CL9!

Maybe master vol/tone and a 3-way selector switch? Never tried a double P, but on a Jazz I found I only ever used either pickup soloed or both up full!

I used to think I didn't need a compressor either due to always using a Sansamp or similar. But overdrive simply squashes/limits the overall volume, it doesn't have a delayed reaction like a compressor. Like I was describing with my experience of multi-band compression and the DP3X, a compressor can reshape the volume 'envelope' of each incoming note so that rather than squash the attack, it can accentuate it. This graph shows what I mean:

I never got on with compressors until I tried multi-band ones. Now I treat it as an essential! The trouble is you need fast attack time to catch the high-mid peaks of an agressive pluck/pop/slap. But that neuters the thump of the lows. Release/ratio/knee/etc settings would probably have different ideal parameters for highs and lows also for someone who knows what they're doing. The Cali Compact Bass has a HPF side chain so that you can filter out the lows from the signal detection, but that doesn't go far enough IMHO. The compressor built into the Tech21 DP3X only affects the low end when running in mix mode. Rather than squash the life out of the signal, it enhances the pop you hear/feel by shaping the volume of each note to let the initial peak through before it clamps down. It's quite an audible effect, but those settings only work well on the low end! The TC Spectracomp has a similar thing going on, but with additional bands to handle separate compression settings for the mids and highs. It only has one knob but an insane number of parameters to tweak under the hood via the app.

B3n £117 for Black Friday here: https://www.muziker.co.uk/zoom-b3n

The new MXR Vintage Bass Octave might be an option too, I hear it's pretty close to the OC-2. With any luck they might have cloned the tone but not the volume drop!

I obviously haven't tried them all, but most PJ's are all pretty similar in terms of sound, using traditional alnico pickups in largely the same positions. I tried every single PJ available in Wunjos at one time and found a surprising variation in tone, but nothing with the grunt of the BB. There's something about the output and positioning of the BB pickups that makes the combination work - having a stupidly loud J pickup probably helps!

I prefer a real P when it comes to the solo'd front pickup, the mids have more character. But no Fender on Earth can touch the P+J setting on the BB!

You guys are probably talking about different Q-Trons perhaps? The Micro is the newer one and not held in as high regard. The Mini sounds amazing, if it didn't have an annoying volume boost and the sweep was set to start at a lower frequency, it'd be up there with the vintage Mutrons!

It's a great pedal, I just prefer my DP3X and VTDI!

I have put mine up for sale if anyone following this thread is interested:

There probably wasn't until you just mentioned it! I'd swap it for a B3n!

If you're looking at it from a web developer's point of view, I'd say it's more to do with the content and community rather than the site design and features. The design is great of course, but it would still succeed if you stripped all those bells and whistles away. So I guess if you want to make a site succeed, you need to fill it with bassists!

They look pretty nifty! https://www.schmidtarray.com/custom

The VT Bass already has a HPF built in, so I'd say you can do without!

Depends on your needs I guess. The SH1 is a lot cheaper, has a blend, tuner and DI going for it, which would make me lean towards picking that from the two!

Wilson make a mini Freaker now?! You shouldn't have shown me that! Had the full size one, also the Chicago Iron Parachute many years ago. I miss it, probably the best wah I ever had.

No audio interface on the newer B3n though, only the B3.

Any interface with an XLR input, ideally one with a direct monitoring switch, and an XLR cable is all you need. Flick the +48V phantom power on, and you can power the Sansamp via the XLR cable too! What I do is just play my music player app then flick the switch on my Focusrite interface to direct monitoring - then I can hear my bass overlaid on top of the music without having to faff around in software to reroute the input to the output and adjust the latency. Then only pull Audacity or the like out to actually record. If not using direct monitoring, you'll want to select ASIO drivers and find the settings to pull the latency / number of samples down as low as you can get away with. This is the size of the buffer used to temporarily store incoming audio before it's processed and pumped back out, so obviously you want that delay as low as possible or it'll affect your timing!

Price is very good IMHO - parts usually won't cost much if it's something replaceable like a pot/jack/capacitor. Modern compact pedals are such a pain to disassemble/reassemble, I'd charge more if it were me!

Doesn't the III have an internal control for the attack time? The 3X does, which I only discovered after selling mine! It was too slow for my liking, which was a contributing factor for me moving it on.