dannybuoy

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.

Contact Yamaha directly too. They quoted me a price on a set but it was a long time ago.

That’s just pretty much just a USB audio interface shaped like a pedal though, not quite what I had in mind. The closest thing in existence to what I’m talking about is this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modduo/mod-duo-the-limitless-multi-effects-pedal Various manufacturers could produce a range of devices from the size of the Zoom MS-60B up to the Line6 Helix that could all run the same common plugin format, with no need for a connected PC.

I'd be happy to go purely digital though once a few things had been straightened out. All we'd need IMHO is a commercially successful attempt at providing a universal standard for pedals to be able to download new single FX like you can for VST plugins on your DAW. Then you could buy plugin host pedals either as single pedal sized units or huge multis, that can all interchange the same FX, that can be bought from app stores, or from open source. You'd be able to buy either Zoom's, Line6's or Darkglass's own B7K model for example, and either load it into your cheapo Mooer pedal with a couple of knobs on, or your behemoth Helix style unit, or your DAW in the studio. One day!

The signal path is analog. In most analog compressors, the bit controlling the volume level (like the engineer's hand on the fader) is also analog (e.g. a light bulb for an optical comp). However in this case, the sidechain is totally digital. So you can have the flexibility of a digital comp where you can have control over tons of parameters like attack, release, knee, etc, but your output signal has been kept pretty pure by only passing though a simple amplifier stage rather than being converted to 1s and 0s and back again.

It stands for Impulse Response. Commonly used for cab sims and reverb modellers (to simulate the sound of a specific room), but most pedals you will see would be talking about cab sims. If you feed a white noise signal that contains an equal spread of all frequencies into a cab, then measure what comes out the other end, you end up with a specific EQ curve for that cab. That can then be used to apply a cab sim via digital processing, and you can download a ton of IRs from the web, e.g. one for an Ampeg 8x10. It's a bit more complicated than a simple EQ curve though as it takes time into the equation as well, but that's the general gist of it!

You could always run a splitter/daisy chain off the one 15V supply. However I don't recommend the Californiwah and it has nothing to do with the power requirements. I just could not get it to sound good at all!

Shame it's not multiband, I can't go back to single band compressors now I have been spoilt by the Spectracomp! Looks awesome though, touch controls show the future of what we might see in the range - I did say I'd like to see a system like the TC RH750's knobs and these look even better with no moving parts. The blurb suggests they were not aware of the Sonuus Voluum though, which is the first compressor with a digital sidechain and analog signal path that I'm aware of! The Hyper Luminal Compressor features the first hybrid design in a compressor pedal: an analog VCA controlled by a digital side-chain allowed us to capture and include the characters of some of the most legendary compressors in history while keeping the signal path completely analog.

Small Clone is a chorus, I presume you meant the Small Stone! Both the Small Stone and MXR Phase 90 are great on bass.