dannybuoy

I find the buzz from the J pickup is highly room dependent. At home I hardly hear any buzz at all, I really have to crank the volume up and listen out for it. It was a lot more apparent when I tried one out in a store though, with all the fluorescent lighting around etc. I still say an easier route would be to pick up a BB435 where those Nordsrtands would probably drop straight in!

They are not a standard size, so you will struggle to replace them without leaving gaps unless you get some custom pickup surrounds made up, you might have to do some additional routing also. Why in such a hurry before you've even heard what the stock ones sound like? The stock pickups are louder, more lows and less highs than typical PJs, but they sound great. If you want to drop replacements straight in, you would be better off looking at one of the newer BB models (e.g. BB235, 435, 735A) that use traditional size pickups. The stock ones on the new models are voiced more like vintage pickups (more mids/highs, less lows) and you may be surprised to find they sound as good as whatever you were planning on putting in there!

Indeed they are. Actually I've used some cabs with horns that sounded pretty good with distortion (Orange OBC410 springs to mind, and I bet the Darkglass cabs do too of course) but it was the piezo unit in the Markbass CMD121P that was responsible for turning me off tweeters!

I keep the gain between all the way off and 9 o'clock, tone around 2 o'clock. Then that's what I consider my clean tone, and add a pedal on top when I need to. I solve the high frequency issues by using a cab without a tweeter, as every proper bassist (i.e. none of this slapping, tapping, chords and harmonics nonsense) should.

@Al Krow converted eh? As in using it clean, or have you come to enjoy the microtubes engines? As I've said I'm a fan of the B3K mode at low gain not as a distortion as such, but more of an 'enhancer' with a pre-baked EQ curve.

I'm not sure if it needs to be shielded (or since it has a humbucker, just needs to be grounded properly) but I have certainly played some that are noise free and some that are very buzzy. I still need to get my head around why my Yamaha BB is totally silent (on the P pup at least, the J pup adds a tiny bit of hum) yet my Fender P can buzz a bit - reduced by touching the strings, but then coming back again if my hand hovers over the pickup.

If only. I have about 20 pedals, 10 basses and an amp I need to shift but I'm just too damned unimpressive and undisciplined to list them! Fortunately the prices of most of this gear has gone up in the last few years, so I look at them as investments!

They've apparently got plans for 5 string versions of the Cutlass & Caprice in 2018 according to a post I read on the main Talkbass thread about these basses.

His reply: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/new-damnation-audio-mbd-1-the-bass-distortion-ive-been-waiting-for.1247402/page-31#post-20351160

This is what you need rather than a lacklustre audio-to-MIDI converter: https://www.roland.com/us/products/gk-3b/

Analog octave up is possible but it is more of an octave up fuzz effect, just like the COG T65, Pearl Octaver, Foxrox Octron, etc. Useful for synth tones though!

Already did, he wasn't interested at the time.

They make their own pickups though, so could make them whatever size they wanted to... but even so, they could improve the P pup as-is by just moving the two halves a couple of mm closer to each other.

I've played a couple of these (one in Wunjos and another in Music Street in Huntingdon) and loved them. Especially the neck, which I found surprising since I thought I did not get on with vintage radius necks and preferred flatter boards.. until I played this.

Take one for the team and let us know how it compares to the more expensive competition!

If this one is any good for £58 then we may have a contender! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOtTEvqu06g

I would've bought that Damnation Audio pedal a long time ago if it wasn't so unnecessarily big! Does sound great though, there are other demos out there... I find a lot of Excane's demos sound similar to each other and rather different to my experience playing through the same pedals - e.g. he makes the HGBM sound like a high gain monster distortion whereas I found it more of a mellow overdrive.

Their first pedal was a clean one!

Bandcamp offer downloads in FLAC which is a lossless CD-quality format... so download that and burn it onto one of those ancient disc thingies, and Bob's your uncle!

How anyone can offer an opinion about the pedal when it's not out yet and we've only heard 5 seconds of a crappy Instagram clip is beyond me!

The editor is up there with TC in terms of what you can control... I just couldn't find a light drive sound in there that could top my analog overdrive pedals.

Aftershock - some awesome heavy fuzz sounds (especially as a result of blending two modes in parallel) but all of the lighter overdrive sounds and the Darkglass clone models were mediocre in my book.

I'd avoid the CTM15. Yes it has a gain control which the 30 doesn't have, but the trouble is it's useless - it seems to be a treble boost rather than a volume boost! You can turn it up a smidge but anything higher just results in a really bright sound, and the EQ knobs don't do enough to counteract it. It does sound good with the gain low and master up high, but that's louder than most would be able to get away with playing at home. I'd recommend a VT Bass pedal or VT500 amp, or some kind of modeller if you want that tube grind at low volume levels or in headphones.

My block version is true bypass, I expect the older ones aren’t but I bought mine new about 3 years ago. Check reviews first, I’m sure I read one somewhere that said this pedal wasn’t as good as expected for some reason... Original sounds better to me here, somewhat thicker and warmer: (read comment by bumble yeti on this vid who agrees)

Chowny sounded the best there, but I'm sure the others would have shone more with different settings. As an owner of the FEA I know it can sound a lot better than that!