dannybuoy

A 105 E string with a 115 B string? 🧐 Should be more like 125/130 surely.

You’d need to use a different foot switch that introduced a secondary master volume control when AGS was on. Probably possible, but like the Vintage Ultra, you’d really want separate EQ settings between clean and dirty, making the whole two channel option less appealing. Both very different pedals... the Darkglass adds a layer of distorted mids onto your clean tone, keeping the low end clean and uncompressed. The EQ is brilliant, 3 selectable bands for both high and low mids. The Tone Hammer on the other hand is more of a full range drive, so your low end can get a bit blurry. Also the mid control is pre-drive, so you can keep it flat or boosted for a Motown vibe or scoop it right back for a Sansamp style drive, two sounds that the Darkglass can struggle to replicate.

If you’re going to try out the one in Wunjos, also check out the Duff McKagan basses and the Yamaha BB734A if they have them! Same boxes ticked!

Even so, do you find that you ever look at the front of the board whilst playing? It would involve arching your neck forward and tilting the bass back, which I'd find pretty difficult. On the bass I have without board inlays, I can't tell the difference when I'm playing it as I can only see the side dots anyway!

I’m sure it has side markers. I prefer the sleeker look of no dots also, you can’t see them when you’re playing anyway! They are useful in a jam though so it’s easier for others to work out what you’re playing.

I like the look of them. Tried one out in Wunjos alongside several other PJ basses though and it was the worst of the bunch. That’s just one opinion of one bass though, so take it with a pinch of salt! Definitely worth paying them a visit though, and try out some of the PJ Jaguar basses to compare, now those I liked!

I've returned a couple of items that were subject to a 'restocking fee'. I brought up that it was against the distance selling regulations to charge such a fee, and they waived it.

Nice clips @Quatschmacher! I'm more interested in the straight envelope filter sounds and I like the MF-101 preset, I'd love to hear the Meatball and Mutron models if you're up for doing more.

Went to Denmark Street to check out some acoustic guitars. Found myself drawn to a fretless acoustic bass, fell in love, walked out with a solid body fretless Yamaha electric bass instead!

I've got MIDI built into my Godin A4 fretless, but I've never tried it!

Yes, it'll likely be analog. The reason I'm sceptical about it removing noise from the actual note is that I know how difficult that would be to achieve from an engineering perspective, and the maker only refers to it being a noise gate. All noise gates work on the same principal of only letting the signal through when it's over a certain level. The better ones are finely tuned in their response time so that your ears don't detect the noise as the note decays. Usually that's the only time you'll hear the noise, so if the Zuul clamps down really quickly and efficiently, it'll seem as if the noise has disappeared entirely. Noise reduction to remove the noise completely though, is a whole other ball game. It usually relies on digital trickery, much like noise cancelling headphones. It's much more advanced and would be a pedal first as far as I know!

My money is still on the fact it’s just a really well engineered regular noise gate. With a cool AF name and design! Filtering noise without tone suck is a tricky business (remember the Dolby button on cassette players?). Also 40mA is quite low for a digital pedal, most are in the 100mA ballpark.

The Darkglass parallel out is just a simple passive splitter. It’ll better than most cheapo jack adapters due to the fact it’ll be better shielded due to being in a metal box. But because it’s not buffered or isolated in any way, your main signal could be affected depending on what kind of pedal you plug into the parallel output. But mostly you’ll be fine and not notice anything!

Ideally you’d use a buffered splitter, otherwise you could get undesired results such as if the split gets sent to 2 devices with wildly different impedances. But in reality you can usually get away perfectly fine without one - Darkglass seem to think it’s OK to hardwire their parallel out to the input and I doubt they get many complaints about it!

Later on in that vid though, I can definitely hear noise in the background whilst playing, it is of course hard to pick out though as the guitar is so loud. To filter noise from the actual signal whilst playing would be on another level above everyone else, and they would surely be shouting about it from the hilltops! The key input is a good addition above simple 2-jack noise gates, but many these days have an effects loop which achieves exactly the same thing but without needing to split your signal separately. BTW you don’t necessarily need a dedicated pedal to split the signal, you could use a double jack adaptor or cable splitter. The parallel out on the X7 is hard wired to the input jack, so no different to using one of those in terms of wiring connections!

You can play fast syncopated lines like that with an analog gated fuzz like the Diabolik, so the Helix might be able to offer something similarly gated without having to rely on a waveform generator?

I thought it was pretty much a regular noise gate, i.e. it shuts off the signal unless it reaches a certain threshold. So it only cuts noise out when you are not playing, and when you are playing, you just don't notice the noise because your instrument masks it?

Pointing to actual differences then - is it true that the FI, C4, etc have actual waveform generators, e,g. square wave, sine, triangle, sawtooth - but the Helix can only do synth effects by combining fuzz/octave/filter?

There's no cab sim on the V1, but it shouldn't sound bad unless you're really cranking the gain and getting an overly fizzy sound through the PA. If you're getting fizzy distortion even at low gain perhaps the volume is overloading the desk input. Can't go wrong with the Tech21 stuff though, the VTDI, DP3X and YYZ are my favourite pedals!

Looks like they've been bought by Fender! https://play.riffstation.com Found a link here to the latest free version before it disappeared, uploaded by a user on the Cakewalk forum: http://forum.cakewalk.com/Riffstation-Pro-for-FREE-m3756955.aspx https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/riffstation-downloads/Riffstation.exe

I've got a copy of 1.6.3 that I bought. I'll see if I can activate it later, and if the company is no more and it was free before they disappeared, no harm in sharing it!

It's on Windows too! I used it when having to learn basslines for a load of original recorded material with no charts or tabs. Telling you what the chords are is a godsend, plus you can slow down and loop any tricky bits.

Try 1:08 in that video!

I use preamp pedals mainly because overdrive is important to me, which I can't get from the EQ on any bass. Yes, many amps have overdrive but I like to chop and change to try different units out, and most amp overdrives are pretty limited compared to what's out there in the pedal landscape. E.g. the Tech21 YYZ I'm fooling around with at the moment has 2 channels blended together - clean with the highs rolled off alongside a dirty channel that has the bass rolled off. Not many amps can offer that. So if you equate a preamp with a clean EQ, then the preamp in your bass + the one in your amp is probably already overkill and there's not much point adding a third! But adding some overdrive can work wonders, you don't need to be in a metal band to appreciate it. Listen to a lot of isolated bass tracks, especially from classic rock or Motown and you'll discover they're mostly pretty dirty. You don't hear it as distorted in the context of the full mix, but those extra harmonics do help the bass to stand out and be heard.