dannybuoy

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.

There are a few variants of those white nylon strings too btw, white being the brightest, copper the warmest, and gold in between. Confusingly they're all called 'white nylon' though! I have a copper set unopened that I bought to try on fretless.

The pickups in the 1025 and 2025 are most likely the same - but they do have different product codes and the 2025 ones cost more if you were to order them as spares. You’d have to ask Yamaha for clarification! As well as the heat/vibration treatment, the 2025 neck has a rubbed oil finish in the back of the neck and smoother edges around the headstock and fretboard, it feels more like a premium MusicMan in the hand. It also uses maple & mahogany (notice the darker brown) rather than maple & nato in the neck construction. The body contours are supposedly altered too, but I haven’t compared them side by side. I’d still like a 2025X but I can’t really justify the extra £ over my 1025X. If you have plenty of £ burning a hole in your pocket though, go for it!

The fly rig is only about an inch longer! And my wife assures me that shouldn't make much difference. Thing about the DP3X is at first you think "holy plop, where's my mids, everybody says I need mids to be heard". But then it make sense when you play it alongside a full mix. You still have mids, but they are high mids, above most guitars and vocals (I find boosting the mids and pressing in the shift works best in a busy mix, but prefer the shift off when you have more room sonically - I'd love that on a foot switch). So you're not battling other instruments over the same frequency range, you're wrapping above and below them, giving the overall wall of sound more depth and presence. And the compressor is pretty aggressive and gives the low end a big pop with each note, even if you're playing up high. Play softly and you're all like James Jamerson, with bugger all above 250Hz, but dig in a bit and it's like Billy Sheehan just popped in to play a few notes before promptly buggering off again.

Re the speaker sim on the VT, IMHO Tech21 dropped the ball when they first implemented it on the VT Bass and Deluxe v2 and almost fixed it with the VTDI! Why would you want a defeatable speaker sim? For me, it's because I already have vintage tweeterless cabs rolling off the top end. If the pedal has a speaker sim rolling off treble as well, I'm getting twice as much treble reduction, which might make me boost the treble and send an overly bright sound to the desk. So disabling the cab sim in theory should result in a brighter sound. But when you disable the cab sim on the VT/Deluxe v2, you get a darker sound because they added an extra treble filter. Their reasoning for this being that if you're feeding an amp instead of a desk, amps have a big treble boost that needed to be compensated for. The VTDI went some way to redress this by separating that additional treble filter into the bite switch (which is great for making it more vintage, Ste!). So if you disable the cab sim on that it opens up the top end instead of sounding darker. However there's still no way to have the cab sim apply to the XLR only, which is why I say it's only partially fixed! Still a great pedal regardless. Tech21 rule, I shall be hanging onto my VTDI, YYZ and DP3X for the foreseeable future!

Not seen you round these parts for some time! With mix mode off, it's basically a clean preamp and compressor. No Sansamp style voicing whatsoever, but you do get some mild cab-like treble rolloff on the XLR output. You'd be better off with the Bass Fly Rig if you want vintage sounds, it has a tweaked VT Bass circuit in it. However it does not have the bite/speaker sim/blend controls, and the other effects are pants including the compressor!

Same. They feel equivalent to rounds to me, perhaps a bit tighter. They are looser than most flats, but that's because most of them are like suspension bridge cables. They still feel taught and I can play hard with a low action with no issues. Dunlop Super Bright rounds though - now there's a floppy string - like playing spaghetti!

Sounds like electrical interference. Are you using a daisy chain power supply, if so what else is connected? Try the Muff by itself - being the only pedal connected to the power supply as well as being the only thing in the signal chain.

I've not heard a shimmer done as well as the Neunaber stuff. Sounds more complex and ethereal than most, without being shrill or having any glitchy artifacts. Bear in mind that they have quite a few pedals that can do shimmer, such as the Wet reverb, plus many of the pedals can be re-programmed to be a totally different pedal. So if you see their chorus cheap on eBay for example, you can hook it up to a computer and turn it into a reverb pedal.

Yeah I think .47 is vintage, .22 a bit brighter, .1 rarely used but brighter still?

Don't forget the extra costs involved of a board, patch cables and power supply. That can eat your entire budget before you've bought another pedal!

The B3n is a good place to start. For one, the B7K model in it sounds better than the real B3K if you ask me. It has a B3K model too but it sounds a bit dark for some reason! That means you could potentially sell the B3K! In terms of other effects, you may well find better individual effects out there that would beat what you get in the B3n. But it will take a bit of time and money to experiment. But no matter how good the effects may be, you might find you just don't get on with multi fx units and prefer single pedals, like me! For £120 you could pick up a used TC Spectracomp, TC Corona Mini or EHX Bass Clone, and maybe a cheap preamp like a Joyo American Sound or Beringer BDI21.