dannybuoy

LOVE Acid King, seen them a few times now. Purple Turtle gig sticks out for me, ended up drinking at the bar with them after the show!

Their Metal Drive is only £39 too: EBS Metal Drive II – Thomann UK

Your Beta is a fine choice for a good soul/Motown sound. I have a MkII that will be staying on my board for the foreseeable! The best pedals I’ve found for Motown are the TC Mojomojo and Aguilar Tonehammer. They nail that sound where the notes sound like twanging a rubber band, if that makes any sense. Tech21 stuff I love for more brighter aggressive tones, the VTDI and SH1 will do a decent Motown as well, so super versatile, but not as well as the aforementioned pedals in my opinion. Darkglass stuff is quite different sounding, none of that squishy tubey character, but keeps your original dynamics and adds a layer of ‘hair’, is the best way I can describe it! The Vintage series would be the one to go for, whereas the B*K pedals are mid scooped right in the place where a P bass with flats grunts the loudest.

Default preset boosts volume, and you can fine tune that to remove the boost via the app. If yours dropped volume, did you buy it used? Perhaps the previous owner meddled with it. I need to dive in and do that myself, just never bothered so far as it's never turned off!

Does it come with a telescopic case? 😕

If you liked the sub of the Cog, you may like the Octamizer! That thing goes deep.

He didn’t really isolate the octaver to give it a fair shot, but at least it sounded like there was no perceptible delay and it tracked well, which is a good start!

I love them - had the same set on my Precision for about 10 years now, I expect to get another 10 years out of them easily!

Depends if I also had to choose one bass / playing style! The Fwonkbeta kills with just a simple P (or my Sandberg Basic, a bit like a Stingray on sedatives) straight into an amp for some finger funk. But it doesn’t sound great with my BB1025X going into a dirty Sansamp, which is where the Discumobulator shines - it’s great for playing NIB or Dragonaut! Don’t make me choose!

I've tried a lot of Mutron clones - the Proton was decent but the VFE Mini Mu, Mojo Hand Wonder Filter, Keeley Neutrino were all cack, IMHO! The Trutron 3X was good but didn't have the greasy stank of the original Mutron III, sounded a bit too clean. I wish I'd discovered the internal attack control before I sold mine though, it being too slow for my liking was a reason for offloading it. I'd take my Fwonkbeta and Discumbobulator over the Trutron though any day!

It really depends on what tones you’re after. A lot of studio bass recordings have a clean/compressed low end mixed with the same channel routed through a guitar amp, and parallel chains let you achieve that in a live setup. Im really digging my Tech21 YYZ and DP3X pedals and have found that I can get similar results from Helix Native so much so that I consider parallel routing an essential feature. But if you’re not into dirty/aggressive/growly bass tones, it won’t matter as much. E.g. I prefer a straight and simple single path when it comes to old school funk / blues / Motown etc. BTW there is a Stomp XL coming out so I would wait for that to be released. Even if you’re happy with the original Stomp size, when that comes out you can bet there will be plenty of users rushing to upgrade and hence plenty of used ones popping up!

I think you’re better off with a clean sounding regular amp with as transparent a preamp as possible. That way you have a further EQ to tweak your on stage sound without messing with the DI signal going to the desk.

If you have the full sized Helix then you'll have more blocks at your disposal to be able to use a guitar way effectively in a parallel chain... but even with the Helix Stomp, I believe the latest firmware increases the number of blocks available so you might be ok!

I've never found an amp that could deliver the tones in my head, so messed around with pedals instead until finding what I was after in the Tech21 stuff - I have the VTDI, YYZ and DP3X. I tried the VT500 amp which was great but felt a bit gutless in the power section, so am running one of those into an Orange Terror Bass set up for a fairly neutral sound. The DP3X is like a studio producer in a box - clean compressed lows mixed with piercing distorted high mids, and the mid-mids sucked out to make room for the guitars and vocals. About as heavily processed as you can get, but fits like a glove in a really heavy mix, it really shines when you hear it alongside everything else, you can hear the bass clear as a bell without the ear fatigue you get from too many instruments battling for the same frequency range. YYZ is more midrangey, basically a clean channel EQ'd to emphasise the lows and roll of the highs, mixed with a dirt channel that has the deep lows cut off to keep the drive tight, and the mid-EQ placed before the drive. When playing solo through an amp I prefer the sound of the YYZ, but the DP3X sounds better in a headphone/monitor mix. But I'm not playing with anyone at the moment so hanging onto both for now!

+1 on the Mojomojo. Far better choice than any of the Sansamp lineup for a Motown kind of sound. Better than anything else I've tried in fact, which is er, most pedals out there!

I've got the Hotone Bass Press. Great little wah pedal, much better sounding than the Dunlop 105Q in my opinion. Are any of the Helix wah models decent on bass? I've not tried them but I know there aren't any bass-specific ones. You could of course blend it with clean or have it on the high channel of a crossover if you had the blocks to spare. It does the job as an expression pedal, but the Dunlop DVP4 Mini outclasses it in every respect. Wider, smoother, more stable, more travel, built like it would last forever.

One of these hooked up to a hardware synth would be fun to play with then: https://www.keithmcmillen.com/products/12-step/

@owen sounds like you are describing the EHX Freeze pedal?

It’d be a total marketing fail if it had those fx and they just couldn’t be bothered to list them, I think what you see is what you get. Shame, as they had the Spectradrive out so they could’ve included some drive models, then all they had to do was put out a filter before getting to work on the multi!

From the product page: FX include Hall Of Fame 2 Reverb, Flashback 2 Delay, Sub n Up Octaver, Brainwaves Pitch Shifter, Corona Chorus, Hypergravity Compressor, Mimiq Doubler, Vortex Flanger, Pipeline Tap Tremolo, Quintessence Harmony, Sentry Noise Gate, Shaker Vibrato, Viscous Vibe, Helix Phaser, Tape Deck Looper Lack of drive and filter rules it out for me as a multi fx, they’re the most important effects to me. Even if you were happy to have those as separates, you would be forced to have them before or after everything in the Plethora.

I've still not even bothered with the editor! Although I might do just do bring down the volume a tad. When it comes to pedals, I generally hate multi-fx and app-driven pedals, and this is coming from a techie that works in IT that spends all day fiddling around with scripts and settings. Maybe that's why in my downtime I just prefer simplicity! Luckily the Spectracomp works just as well in that regard, with it having just one knob.

I liked the stock one the best after going through them. I don’t find the volume boost a problem as I leave it always on and I prefer the sound of my drive pedals with a bit of boost into them anyway. You can always adjust the master volume via the app.