dannybuoy

Heads up, Gear4Music have a PF-50T for £349!

If it’s just octave down you’re after, is Ba Octave no good? I thought that one worked pretty well on the B3n, a pleasant surprise as my recollection of all the octave and pitch effects in the previous generation Zooms were that they were all terrible.

Drive rolls off highs and lows and adds distortion dependent on the gain level. Don’t be afraid to roll your mids way back when using lots of drive, it’s a great way to get Sansamp style modern rock sounds. It took me a long time to discover this, having it drummed into me that bass needs mids to be heard. But with the drive up, the treble control morphs into more of a high mids control so you can boost it without getting that shrill high end. With the mids flat or boosted the drive gets very woolly which is great for blues/Motown type stuff. A very versatile amp!

Try before you buy. Helix Native runs on PC and Mac and has a free trial. All you need is an audio interface, and you can probably use your existing POD as a clean audio interface. Give it a go and see if you think it's worth the extra!

I've had two Orbits. The original had no blend but had an additional switch that let you get cool 303 like laser sounds as in that demo. The later one added a (much needed) blend but lost that switch, so it doesn't have the same array of sounds!

You'd have to check the manual but I remember reading that you can flick it over with a long press, so the footswitch is optional.

There are other ways also you may be unaware of. I believe you can flip the unit between red and green LEDs by pressing and holding the footswitch to give you 6 presets with no extra MIDI pedal required? Also, more restrictive, but if you aren't blending drives in parallel you can set up different drives on the left and right channels and use an A/B box to flip between them.

The Diabolik is definitely gated. It's what I would reach for if I ever needed a synthy/gated fuzz, so I hang onto it! Only used the iPad editor I think with the Source Audio stuff, but I think it has pretty much the same features. It did excel at fuzz sounds, particularly if you blended a distortion in parallel to give it more bite. There's nothing in the Helix that can touch the Mosaic btw. Yet. They have hired some polyphonic pitch shifting geniuses and promised improvements in that area, but right now that's one of its weak points!

Yup, I was talking about the Wooly Mammoth clone mentioned in a previous post where @GisserD said it sounded a bit weak and nasal. Mastotron is better equipped to deal with actives. @Al Krow, have you tried the Diabolik? I could never dial in a satisfactory tone from the Mastotron, but the Diabolik works well for me if I ever need a synthy fuzz. Which is never!

Oh and anyone with an audio interface can download a 2 week trial of Helix Native to give it a spin - it sounds exactly the same as the hardware unit but runs on your PC or Mac.

I’d go for the B3n. A definite step up over the previous generation B3 / B1on and the generation before that (B9.1ut). The Ampeg sims in particular are very good indeed, I even prefer them to the ones in the Helix. It also has a Darkglass B7K sim that’s very close to the Helix one. I also prefer the Z-Tron filter in the Zoom to anything the Helix has to offer. The B3n also has a Sansamp sim that the Helix doesn’t. There are lots of things the Helix does better though, signal routing, external send/return jacks, flexible parallel chains and crossovers are all at your disposal. You can compress your lows and send your highs to a guitar amp for instance. The analog delays feed back and oscillate just like the real deal. Ultimately though, for me the Zoom matched or beat it in the few limited areas I care about!

Look, if I wanted all that I'd go to Lidl, not Basschat! 😁

I wouldn’t bother TBH, I understand Carlo Robelli are just cheap Chinese guitars that serve as in-house brand for a couple of US stores, kinda like Harley Benton at Thomann. Much better options out there!

It was seeing Joe play this bass in the It Gets Funkier video that made me seek to get a Stingray style bass equipped with flats, ending up with a Sandberg Basic and TIs. Such a great tone that I was kinda gutted that he played Jazz basses on almost everything since!

Set the EQ flat, attack switch on, gain around 25%, volume set so it's even no mattter where the blend is set, and blend set around 65%. Add an additional LPF module or speaker sim to get rid of the fizzier treble if going FRFR. I also boost my high mids but that's because my bass is passive and my strings usually pretty dead! And try it in a mix before making a full judgement - it's sonic signature is a fairly extreme mid cut around 500Hz, but the attack switch boosts around 1-1.5KHz, I find it leaves a nice hole for crunchy guitars and male vocals while still cutting through.

You can get closer to an OC-2 using one of the other random effects that's not even an octaver, pitchringmod or something. I did post the settings elsewhere a long time ago! Is that a new Mutron model? I wasn't blown away by the filters when I last dipped my toes in, but a decent Mutron would probably seal the deal for me!

Crossover points sound good to me! Don't confuse this with a speaker protection HPF like the Thumpinator, the HPF here only affects the high channel. You could rightly want a 30Hz HPF on the low channel, but that's not where the HPF is in the signal chain. The HPF just affects the highs going into the distortion and the LPF just affects the lows going into the compressor, both sides run in parallel like the DP3-X. You really don't want anything under 100Hz going to the distortion here, the other channel is taking care of the clean low end. Setting the HPF to 1KHz would be similar to the DP3-X which is fixed at 1.2KHz. Setting it to 500 or 100 would let you have more fullrange distortion without the big hole in the midrange that the DP3-X has. The only part I don't get is why the lowest setting on the LPF side is 50Hz and the lowest setting on the HPF is 100Hz. If you set the LPF to it's lowest setting you would end up dropping all the critical 50Hz-100Hz range (unless the cutoff slopes aren't that steep), it would make more sense to make 100Hz the lowest for both controls.

Best place for a buffer is first in line, unless you have any fuzzes that sound better connected directly to passive pickups. Once your signal has been through one, it is much less prone to signal degradation, meaning that your choice of cable after that point becomes less important. However if you are getting significant signal loss with an active bass, your bass already has a buffer in it, and adding another one won't make much difference. Signal loss after a buffer stage often means you have a damaged patch cable somewhere! I would go for one of the many solderless cabling kits, I've had noise issues with the flat cables due to them using unshielded plastic plugs.

And I'll do you a good deal on an OJ that has only seen 5 minutes use, still has the protective film on top! 😉

Don't buy them from there then! £52 from Bass Direct for 4 licensed ones: http://bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Hipshot,_Licensed_tuners.html

What kind of sound are you after and what don't you like about the BSF? That would help, as there are just as many that love the Mojomojo as there are that didn't like it. It's quite dark and squishy, great for Motown / Blues etc, but not really bright or aggressive if you want a more modern sounding pedal - for which it would be hard to go wrong with one of these:

The Aguilar Agro is worthy of investigation. Set to low gain and presence I can get Blueberryish tones out of it, but it can get much angrier from there!

The Line 6 product manager has been posting in the Helix HX thread on Talkbass: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/line-6-hx-effects.1324948/page-86#post-21687227

I recommend it, and I've been a individual-pedals-on-a-board guy since forever. The Z-Tron envelope filter, B7K and Sansamp models are my favourites, I could easily gig with just this. Although I expect to move to a Line6 Helix HX once they add the Sansamp model they've been hinting at! Much easier to use and better sounding (in terms of amp sims and dirt at least) than the B3 / B1on.