dannybuoy

Don’t often see bass delays. Does the tone control let you filter the lows away from the repeats?

I hear the Chord OC-50 is supposed to be a close OC-2 clone for £40ish. Never tried one though. There is also the Chowny Pitchcraft. Not a great deal of reviews around for either of them though unfortunately!

Be sure to try the COG after the dirt also. I like an octaver going into a mild overdrive to fatten it up a bit, but prefer a more extreme gated fuzz to come before the octave so that you have a clean sub octave under that raspy fuzz.

There are TONS of other isolated options, but not any I'm aware of other than the ones I mentioned that will fit under a PT Nano/Metro. Until very recently, Cioks DC5 was your only option, the Strymon and Truetone models are pretty new, as is that Harley Benton by the looks of it.

Exactly - it's the 'recommended' one, not the only one that will work. What do you have now?

The Trutones kick butt. Mainly because you can pretty much ignore the mA labels and run silly amounts of each socket as long as you don't exceed the total for the brick. However the Strymon looks very good also with way more juice on tap - 5x 500mA outputs: https://www.strymon.net/products/zuma-r300/ Don't forget you can run splitters and daisies off these outputs to get even more mileage out of them. You don't need to run EVERY pedal isolated. I have 2x 3-way daisies and a splitter all hanging off my DC5! Hotrox stock all the spares for Cioks too.

Contact Taylor at IE and ask him what the optimal range is for the expression pedal. I'm sure it's not just the Moog it'll work with. Also any idea what resistance yours is? I think the Moog if 50K if memory serves.

Do you have an expression pedal already? Didn't know the Xero needed anything special, worked fine with my Moog EP-2 (and I can sell you one of those!). The Manta needs the hub to work with a generic expression pedal, otherwise you have to get the SA one. They are working on a new filter pedal though in the format of the Aftershock, although not sure how long that would be, or if it will accept a generic expression pedal (probably not). There is the EHX Enigma if you can deal with the size?

I was using a mixture of stuff at the time. But when I came to test cables, I just put my bass on a stand, then cable straight into a Thumpinator to serve as a buffer, then into a true bypass box into a PJB Bighead headphone amp. This let me switch any patch cable in and out of the chain, and the worst were EBS, Warwick and Bespeco, all of which added significant hiss once in the chain. All had plastic jacks, which is where I suspect the lack of shielding comes into play - anything with a metal jack was fine and made no noticeable difference in noise or tone, including George Ls.

I went back to George Ls! If you have a true bypass looper, try putting patch cables in it to see if any are prone to noise.

Not seen that 2nd one before, looks like a winner if you only need 9V. If you need 12V/18V with isolated outputs though, Cioks DC5, Truetone CS6 or Strymon Zuma R300 are the only ones I know of that would fit snug under that board. BTW I have gone down this road before, stepping up to an isolated supply only to find it did not cure my noise issues whatsoever. Further testing showed the noise was due to my flat EBS patch cables, looks like you have a few of those too! To confirm it is your supply, if you have a spare 9V supply around, try substituting that in place of the daisy chain connection for each pedal in turn. If the noise decreases then you have found a pedal that prefers isolated power.

Rather than going the full custom route, a cheaper alternative would be to get somebody such as John Shuker to make you a custom neck for your Squier?

It's quite easy to test, work out how much taller the board would have to be to accommodate the power supply going underneath, then put some books or something else of equivalent thickness in the bottom of the hard case. Then close the lid and see if you have to apply any force to compress the foam, a little is ok but you don't want an overly tight fit. There's quite a few people on Talkbass who have modded their Pedaltrains but most of it seems to be random gubbins found in a local hardware shop rather than stuff you can link to!

I've not tried any replacement feet but there is quite a bit of clearance in the hard case. I have a Bass Whammy with an Option Knob sticking out the top on mine and the lid closes without an issue!

They haven't had their day yet, but that time is coming. Maybe a couple more generations from now, but I didn't feel the Helix could replace my favourite analog pedals just yet. Things will change when you can design and upload your own FX creations to a modeller like the Helix, but some standardisation has to take place with a common open file format before that can happen. Tons of pedals are digital these days, but every one we buy needlessly converts to and from analog to digital, adding latency and reducing fidelity... Take away the physical components and you are left with the algorithm, which can be sold at a lower price. A system like VST FX for your DAW but on your pedalboard is required where you can buy effects for a few quid each or even free from multiple vendors and upload them. Closest we have to that right now is the Mod Duo on Kickstarter.

TC Electronics Spectracomp and Mojomojo: Heard a few glowing reports for both but have learned to take internet forum opinions with a pinch of salt. I expected the Spectracomp to be noisy and the Mojomojo to have some low end loss, but was pleasantly surprised to find neither were true. Both pedals have replaced boutique competitors costing many times as much even though price was not a factor in my decision. Tech 21 DP-3X: Pre-ordered this expecting to move it on after trying it out. I'm not familiar with dUg or Kings X, didn't like his tone that much either from demos, and the pedal had the biggest mid scoop ever, lowpassing the clean at 200Hz and highpassing the dirt at 1.2KHz. Biiiig hole in the mids. Yet it totally works in a heavy rock mix to carve space for the guitars and create an overall big wall of sound. Lows are punchy and present, dig in a bit and you can still cut through from above.

Or here! 😉

Separate power supply for the Moog, or invest in a supply with isolated outputs!

Get some taller feet on that board and put the power supply and MIDI hub underneath! What do you use the hub for anyhow? I just used mine as an expensive dongle to make the Manta work with my Dunlop mini expression pedal.

@Al Krow if you're not ultra limited for space, the full size Spark is a great bass overdrive as well as a clean boost by the way!

Not even close IMHO, the Mojomojo wins that fight. I bought the Beta when it first came out, moved it on pretty quickly as it was very muddy with a baked in bass boost. I actually bought a second one a few years later as I was using a very bright sounding always on Darkglass B3K/M900 sound and wanted a darker sounding drive pedal to boost into it. It worked pretty well for this purpose, and it went on my band board. But listening to the pedal direct it was pretty bland, and the drive quite harsh and fizzy. Not tubey at all, very transistor like - a lot like a tubescreamer in fact, just with hyped lows and subdued highs. The Mojomojo has just as much (or even more if you want it) low end depth but the drive is much more natural sounding, a softer top end yet with more clarity / less mud than the Beta. I can happily play a P-Bass into a Mojomojo direct into headphones, and I couldn’t say the same for the Beta.

Missed the humbucker requirement. I don't think there are that many options in a Strat size. Do you want a humbucker for the tonal qualities or noise reduction? If you want a humbucker for noise reduction, maybe try some of the noiseless Strat pickups out there. If it's more the sound, what is it exactly you don't like about the current one? 'More vintage' is rather non-descript as it means different things to different people. Are you after lower output, less bass, and more mids/highs?

I would try a lipstick pickup like the Danelectros use?

Joyo AS is only used as a crunchy amp sim for the octave up fake guitar sound. Mojomojo for a fat dirty boost if playing more classic rock / blues / etc with a P Bass. DP-3X for more modern rock with my BB1025X. Also keeping the Agro, B3K and Alpha Omega on standby! Everything else is on the way out.