Woodinblack

Just coming to post this, looks interesting, although as I am still not really using the b1 four and b3n probably best I don't get one at the moment! but the XLR is back, seems to be concentration on the DI aspects

I would go for two stacked volumes I think and one tone. Failing that 2 volumes, I don't think I have ever knowingly used a tone knob

I believe they are on the same list as us at GaggleFest in July so will see them then, hoping we don't have to run like last time!

I think the refinishing is done well

I don't yet put the bass through the PA, but a few weeks ago when practicing I forgot my power leads, and it turned out I only had two mains leads on me. As is the way in our band, I am the guy with spares, so noone other than me had any, so couldn't power my amp or pedal board. So with 2 all I could power was the PA and the Mixer, so rather than go home and get more I decided as it was just a practice I would go bass->desk and desk to Evox. Wasn't looking forward to that. Turns out, apart from missing the echos and stuff I needed for some songs, I didn't really miss the amp at all. I think for future practices I will save myself the hassle of dragging my bass amp (hardly a hassle there!) or my bass speaker, I will just take the PA and maybe my B1Four with approximations of effects I need, so bass, mic, mic stand, Evox and B1Four. That would be so little effort compared to normal. and then I may need to start reconsidering why I take a bass amp to gigs - maybe the next gig I will take the bass amp and stuff, and set it up but just go through the PA and see if it messes stuff up. If I had a 2nd Evox, I would certainly do it.

For me the evox has been pretty transformational. It is heavy, much heavier than the altos, but not too surprising, it is in a wooden box and has poles etc, whereas the Alto is a plastic box that is just one speaker and a little horn thing. However, the additional clarity (and volume) it has given to the sound has been great - I realise at this point I am not comparing like for like, but I am not able, or willing to just go out and buy the latest expensive things, and also I am the one that stores them and they are pushing the room I have. I have my doubts about the size of the treble drivers and the frequencies they do, but I am happy with my (second hand and < £500) purchase. I don't care about monitoring - I bought the PA, I bring and setup the PA, I use in-ears to listen, it sounds great to me, the drummer also uses in ears. The old guitarist occasionaly complained he couldn't hear much to which I told him many times he was welcome to either get in ears or buy himself a monitor, there is an output ready for it, but it is not something I need, want to buy or store, so of course nothing happened. The singer used to have a monitor which broke and was never replaced. He seems happy enough with the evox. The new guitarist was surprised at the lack of monitor, but said he had no problem at our first gig.

these were my changes to get rid of feedback, which largely worked. Probably more the noise gates. And also just put a notch on the sax at the feedback frequency that helped a lot

It was a big problem with the altos, it is still a problem but not as much. our singer is not very clear (I am clear enough and so is the drummer), and we are always getting complaints that we can't hear him or the sax. The Evox has made it a ton better but we still have problems, and just going louder goes to feedback, especially the sax, which is ok, I can mute that when he is not using it, but he uses it a lot. Last gig I spent some time in practice putting gates on him and compressors and the last gig he was as clear as anything, but he wasn't keen that he had a harder time talking (due to the gates). Its a work in progress. I wish we had another evox 8, but haven't got the money for that and they have all gone up.

Mine was going for 7 years with a pair of Alto 312s and then backed up by a behringer 12" sub when we were ouside. Now we have the RCF Evox 8 instead of one of them. Never had a problem with bass, always a problem with vocals.

Yes, that is all the Gecko can do so I guess it relieves the buttons of the core from doing that.

Oh they are nice. Would be interested in those, but I don't know why, as I don't (or rarely) play acoustic guitar!

I have a crafter acoustic, but not full acoustic like that, a Crafter SA-QMMS, which is one of the blue quilted ones with the side F holes, a piezo in the bridge and a lipstick pickup by the neck. I like it a lot, Had it for ages, never really wanted another acoustic. Although a bit of a heresy question - why do you want so many very similar looking acoustics, are there differences?

So back to the principle, "What is it you want to do on your Gecko that you can't do on your Core alone'. When you change to a preset (there are 20 on the gecko), it sends a number of channel changes out on midi. At the basic level, if you set the midi channel on your gecko to the midi channel on your core, then if you have changed nothing, selecting preset 1 on the gecko will set patch 1 on the core, then changing to 2 on the gecko will set patch 2 on the core. I assume you want to talk to multiple devices, as this doesnt' give you anything you can't do (I assume) on the core itself, so if you have a second device, unless you want changing preset on the gecko to change on both the core and the other device to the same preset (which is what would happen by default), the other device needs a different midi channel from the core, and you need to tell the gecko something like 'channel 1 goes to preset 2, channel 2 goes to preset 35 or something. Hard to say as an abstract without you saying what it is you want to control to do what

Someone will pay that much, then when they do, it will become the norm, so lots of other places will make that the price, then berfore you know it it will be the 80s ones going up

Thats odd - the battery in mine lasted fairly well

I think there was a change at one point, I think it used to be Volume balance piezo volume, but then was changed to volume volume volume. I had one a while back, great bass but too good for my fretless ability. I think if you changed the system to give active passive switch you might then lose the piezo when you went to passive mode, unless you got creative with the wiring. Or even a john east - I don't think there is one that works with piezos is there? Bartolini do replacement modules though, so maybe there is something there.

I really wanted one of the red pulse 1s, but I never got one, and then ended up with two spectors anyway.

Understandable if it isn't immediately obvious, but one of the advantages of MIDI and why it has survived this long is because it is really simple, really really simple. you send a bunch of bytes to something down a cable and something happens and something gets sent back. The two things on either end don't have to know about each other beforehand, as long as they send the right data, which is why you can still to this day use it with a controller that came out last week and a Jupiter 6 from 1983, which is pretty rare with digital technologies. There are some very basic concepts to midi - there is a channel (from 1-16), and there are a series of values you can send from 0-127.. There are a few different predetermined type of messages, note on/off, program change, parameter change, control change etc. A lot of these are default sorts of messages, and the midi implimentation chart says what the system responds to with each one. I am sure noone wants to know specifically in this depth, and you don't need to know this to program a controller, but say note on - you send 3 bytes, the first byte is a combination of the note on code (9) and the channel (0-F), the second byte in the note and the third byte is the velocity. So the hex bytes 90 3C 7F tells the sound thingy to play a middle C as loud as it can on channel 1. Then you have to send a 80 3C 00 to turn it off. Where it gets more useful for the hardware you are talking about here is the program change, so if you take the program message, which is C, so C0 for channel 1, and a program number from 0-127. On a device like this it would be a patch so sending a program change of C0 02 would tell the unit to change patch to patch 2 (or 3 if you start at 1). Largely if you just want next patch / previous patch that would be a simple controller function of telling the controller to set the buttons to do that, or to send a specific patch number. You only need to know the implimentation if you want to start changing actual values, for example echo time or output level etc, and generally you probably aren't going to want to do that.

That is a midi implimentation document - very important and lists everything that it responds to or provides over midi. In a way it is like a dictionary, you open a dictionary to find out what words do, not for a good read. That document will tell you everything you need to know - however, you have to know what you want to know before you ask the question! If you just want to change presets, all pretty easy stuff, or if you want something more complicated you can do that too - depends on the controller or your requirements.

Good oportunity here to improve things. You remember those fibre optic lights that were all the rage in the 70s? Well, they just had one light, a disk with lots of colours that just slowly spun and a group of fibre optic elements. If you can find one of those in a charity shop, take the disk out and fit that to your cab - so if you play hard enough you get a colour light show!

I would imagine that every time you have driven the cab hard you haven't been facing it?

I do the start of that, as the drummer always shouts out 'what was that, jajagoogoo' when someone makes a request