Happy Jack

With double bass, timing is everything.

Yes, who was that masked camerawoman, I wanted to thank her!

Hit me up (or some other pathetic Americanism such as 'bad boy') with what you've got. Better still, just list everything you've bought in the last six months. Cash waiting. No time wasters.

Have you ever considered trusting your own common sense? Bwahahahahahahaha!

If you think that you were being quoted £235 for such an upgrade, then I can only assume that there has been a massive communication breakdown somewhere along the line. I have been shipping stuff from the States (on an occasional basis) for many years ... basses, audio equipment, accessories, you name it ... and I have never been quoted anything remotely like that figure. Are you sure that you are not confusing the situation by adding in quotes for insurance? Incidentally, and as a side issue, I have never ever paid for extra insurance on any purchase. One day I may have cause to regret that but, in literally hundreds of transactions, I have yet to have done so. YMMV 🙂💋

You should only use or accept the use of USPS if given absolutely no choice in the matter. Most big US institutions work on the basis that 99.9% of their business will be domestic, so don't waste time on a tiny number of customers who are stupid enough to live outside God's own country. No, really, that is exactly how they think. Try doing business with a US bank or cellphone company or whatever and you'll soon find that out. Don't ask me how I know. If you deal with a proper courier company (i.e. not USPS) then you should have no trouble and no long delays. UPS and Fedex aren't perfect, but then neither are DPD and DHL (though DPD come pretty close). I bought a microphone from LA a few months ago, it arrived within three days. A pedal from New Jersey took about the same time.

There'll be no shortage of people recommending basses for you. Without knowing your target weight and of course your budget, I can't make any helpful suggestions so I'll ask instead, why "unfixable"? Are you talking slipped disks and crushed vertebrae here?

Yup, but I had my reasons ...

I was very happy with the ToneDexter and quite content with my sound, but we were performing under ... ahem ... acoustically adversarial conditions and @Silvia Bluejay isn't happy with using these results as the yardstick of success. First gig in six months, performing at fairly low volume with a noisy crowd between us and the cameras, the overheads didn't work quite as planned, we had a f***ing bouncy castle right next to us (with a compressor that masked/interfered with a range of bass frequencies), and the Kolstein turns out to have a bit of a wolf note at C# which Silvie had to EQ mercilessly to tame. Don't get me wrong, it was a great gig and we had a whale of time playing to a garden full of very happy punters who were quite clearly there for our music ... there were Rockabilly fans, Elvis fans, Eddie Cochrane fans, Jerry Lee Lewis fans, these weren't random people and they really liked what we were doing. But if we're being picky, this wasn't a gig where we'd have boasted about either our performance or our sound. So we're playing again on Saturday (at The Wonder in Enfield), the setup will be very similar but with no bouncy castle and we'll have learned from Sunday's gig. I'll be playing the Zeller to see how that fares with the ToneDexter, and hopefully we'll get some better-quality recordings.

+1 I've only ever used Hot Wires on my Status Streamline and I've never yet regretted it.

My signal chain is unaffected. Previously I ran the signal from the DB pickup into an AI Clarus, using the amp both to drive my cab (stage) and as a DI to the PA (for FoH). That's exactly what I will do tomorrow, except that the signal from the DB will pass through the ToneDexter to get a mic'd up sound.

Yeh, but can you play Brown Sugar on it?

I bought it from Mark at https://gollihurmusic.com/

That was the whole point of using it with the AliKat. I was using the WaveMaps from the Zeller and the Kolstein to modify the sound of the AliKat.

Can you powder-coat chrome?

That would be it then, for that recording I had nothing plugged in. More importantly, that means I can only hear it when playing acoustically. As soon as I amplify the bass, it disappears. I'll be gigging this bass on Sunday afternoon (at The Nag's Head in Sunningdale) and I'll post a video from that gig as soon as I can. I doubt any rattle will be audible. 😎

By the way, Mark Gollihur has read this review and emailed me to say Did you not get our "quickstart" sheet that I wrote up? We include it with every TD we ship out, and it "bullet points" the process of creating and testing a Wavemap, using layman's language.

Hi Alain, used to love my TB10, only sold it when I had Safran Bass make me a custom 5-string Iris. When my recordings mention 'Bypass', I'm playing the bass with the signal from the pickup passing through the ToneDexter pedal but NOT affected by it. I could have routed the signal straight to the amp but I wanted the most direct A/B comparison I could get. I should also have stated that, wherever I am using the ToneDexter in a recording, it is always a 100% blend ... i.e. there is NO uneffected signal there at all.

Why Douglas, I'm touched ... that's quite the nicest thing anyone has said to me this year! Not get back to yer tom-toms. 😂

How to irritate a new user The manual is colourful and glossy, but poorly worded and badly thought out. As an exercise in communication it is really quite frustrating. The box says "for Piezo pickups", page #1 of the Introduction says that "Magnetic pickups are not recommended ... but may sometimes yield usable results", page #5 states that "ToneDexter only works with piezo pickups". The trickiest part is the initial set-up. The process is fraught with pitfalls for the first-time user which could easily have been avoided. Example #1: The manual emphasises that it's best to use headphones to ensure that you can hear what you're doing clearly, and goes on to suggest that you set the level from the mic input by playing in a certain way. So, position the mic, on with the headphones and start playing ... the correct lights are flashing, it's obviously receiving a signal, but the headphones are dead. Play with the settings, check the connections, replace the leads, adjust the headphone volume level, exchange the headphones for another set, nothing, nada, not a sausage, bugger all. To hell with it, let's go forward anyway. Plug in the instrument lead from the DB pickup and instantly everything springs into life. It was all working all along. Turns out that you're not actually supposed to hear the feed from the microphone in the headphones. A single sentence of a dozen words would have saved 30 minutes of frustration. Example #2: Having created a first pass at a WaveMap (their jargon), obviously it's time to listen back. There's no difference, none at all, whether the pedal is engaged or disengaged. More checking of cables, connections, settings before realising that the Character control is actually a Blend control with a really silly label. If Character is rolled right off, then all that feeds through to the amp is the uneffected signal. Another short sentence opportunity comprehensively missed. For a section entitled 'Getting Started' this is a very poor performance. Incidentally, on a much closer reading of the manual, the Character knob turns out to be even more complex, having three different functions depending on where in the range of the knob you are operating. The first half of the travel (from 8 o'c to 12 o'c) does one thing, the next quarter (to 2 o'c) does something else entirely, and the final quarter (to 4 o'c) does something slightly different.

Live band rehearsal With the first post-Covid gigs coming up, my Rockabilly band was well overdue for some rehearsal time. We routinely rehearse amplified but low-volume, with the singer's mic NOT plugged in; that way we have to play at the volume level set by unamplified lead vocals. I chose to use the setup heard in recording #08 and it just sounded wonderful. To my ears, and in the mix, it sounded exactly like the bass played acoustically and amplified through Nadine. Unlike me, the other two guys in the band are Rockabilly afficianados with a wealth of knowledge and experience plus very strong opinions on what is acceptable. They both liked it. Result.

09a AliKat Unplugged normal volume.wav 09b AliKat Unplugged enhanced volume.wav 10 AliKat ByPass Clarus.wav 11a AliKat ToneDexter Clarus Ch.13.wav 11b AliKat ToneDexter Clarus Ch.14.wav 11c AliKat ToneDexter Clarus Ch.15 reduced volume.wav