Happy Jack

AliKat / piezo So this is where I came in. My original interest was in using the ToneDexter to make the AliKat sound more like a wooden bass. Then I convinced myself that this wouldn't work. Then I heard what the ToneDexter could do when 'misused' by pairing with a mag pickup. At this point I had four WaveMaps stored in the pedal, two each for the Zeller and the Kolstein. Well it would be rude not to try them. The natural acoustic sound of this bass is at recording #09a in the next post, but the f-hole plugs (anti-feedback) reduce the volume so much that I also saved recording #09b with a 6dB increase to make comparison easier. Yes, I could have removed them, but do that often enough and they will break ... they're only foam rubber, after all. Recording #10 is the AliKat being played through the ToneDexter but on Bypass, then we have: · recording #11a - the AliKat through the ToneDexter using the Zeller/LA320 map, · recording #11b - the AliKat through the ToneDexter using the Kolstein/LA320 map, and · recording #11c - the AliKat through the ToneDexter using the Kolstein/Nadine map. Are any of those an improvement? Depends on what you hear and what you like, I suppose. I'm comfortable that none of them make the AliKat sound worse, and in a real world gigging situation I rather like the idea of having four slightly different outputs available at the twist of a knob in order to make the sound 'fit' the gig.

05 Kolstein Unplugged.wav 06 Kolstein Nadine PA.wav 07 Kolstein ByPass Clarus.wav 08 Kolstein ToneDexter Clarus.wav

Kolstein / magnetic The natural acoustic sound of this bass is at recording #05 in the next post. The bass has had some issues recently; it is louder acoustically than the small body size would have you expect, but there's something of a rattle there and we haven't managed to work out what it is yet! Given our success with the LA320 it seemed sensible to simply repeat the process with the Kolstein and see whether anything would work at all (see grumbling about the Manual). Well it worked, yes, but in truth the sound wasn't that great, and I considered it no great improvement on the basic sound of the Schaller magnetic pickup, which drifts into Precision territory. As it happens, I had the Ear Trumpet 'Nadine' (another large-diaphragm condenser) mounted on the Kolstein already so I thought we might as well give that a try. The result was little short of spectacular, with the ToneDexter using the mag pickup to successfully reproduce the acoustic sound picked up by Nadine, and at the first attempt. To hear Nadine played through the PA, check recording #06. Recording #07 is the Kolstein being played through the ToneDexter but on Bypass, and recording #08 is the sound of the Kolstein as modified by the ToneDexter.

01 Zeller Unplugged.wav 02 Zeller LA320 PA.wav 03 Zeller ByPass Clarus.wav 03a Zeller ByPass Comparison.wav 04 Zeller ToneDexter Clarus.wav

Zeller / piezo The natural acoustic sound of this bass is at recording #01 in the next post. For our first pass we mic'd up the Zeller with a Samson C01 as being pretty much the vanilla flavour of condenser mics. The results were OK but nothing special, and what was most obvious was the loss of volume ... what we got out was noticeably quieter than what went in. We were also concerned that the pedal was over-emphasising the higher frequencies, although we could easily solve that by rolling off the treble knob on the pedal to about 10 o'clock. Apart from that, by and large we were trying to keep most of the knobs in a central position. [Incidentally, you can't compensate for things like this through rolling off the treble before setting up the recording. The tone controls only affect the output from the WaveMap (their jargon) - the initial creation of that WaveMap excludes the player from messing about with the input.] So we tried again, this time using the rather nifty LA320 large-diaphragm condenser by Lauten Audio which is a significant step up from the (perfectly decent) Samson. The LA320 is very much a studio mic - you wouldn't want to take this on a gig - and this showed in the immediate improvement in the sound quality. To hear the LA320 played through the PA, check recording #02. Again the output through the pedal was much quieter, leading us to wonder if the frequency shaping done by the ToneDexter is always about subtracting things rather than boosting. To hear this loss of volume, check recording #03a. For the remainder of this review, bear in mind that I was constantly adjusting volume levels between recordings to compensate for this. I won't mention it again. But at this run the important thing was that the piezo pickup was sounding very substantially like the acoustic sound of the bass, i.e. the pedal was working. Note that this pedal costs (as of today) £419. That is one helluva lot of money for a pedal and it would be a massive disappointment if it did anything other than work! Recording #03 is the Zeller being played through the ToneDexter but on Bypass, and recording #04 is - at last - the sound of the Zeller as modified by the ToneDexter. This is what I paid for.

https://audiosprockets.com/tonedexter/ I have three double basses, each very different from the others, each presenting very different challenges at live gigs - and yes, I gig all three. #1 is my trusty old Andreas Zeller 3/4 bass with a piezo pickup in the bridge wings; #2 is a Kolstein Busetto bass with a mag pickup on the end of the fingerboard; #3 is an AliKat 3/4 aluminium bass with twin piezos - one for the string sound (in the wings) and one for the body (under the bridge). #3 is very showy and a real head-turner, but the native sound is best described as a cross between a double bass and a steel drum. It can be tamed by someone who is either very good at what they do or is very familiar with that bass, but I normally use it at the big festival-type gigs where who you get as sound engineer is just pot luck. At these gigs, people tend to listen with their eyes. When I stumbled across the ToneDexter by Audio Sprockets, my interest was piqued by the idea of using it to persuade the pickup signal from my AliKat to emulate the acoustic sound of one of my other DBs. I soon realised that this was never going to work, but by that point I had become interested in using the ToneDexter 'properly' with the Zeller and the Kolstein, down-playing the sound of the pickups and trying to reproduce through both bass rig and PA the sound of the acoustic instrument as amplified by a really nice microphone. So I ordered a ToneDexter from Gollihur and sat back to wait. The packaging was simple but effective, and the pedal came with a multi-country adaptor plug, which was helpful. The manual and set-up process were so unnecessarily frustrating that I've given that issue a post all of its own a bit later. All of which said, from a standing start and in the course of a few hours, we were still able to get very useable settings for both the Zeller (easy enough) and the Kolstein (rather more surprisingly), and of course the issues described above are the sort of things you only encounter when using a complex product for the first time. And you can ignore any tosh online about the pedal only working with Piezo pickups. Very few people want to wade through a mass of very similar recordings so, for each of the three basses, there's a post describing what I did and what I found, followed by another post (which you can skip over if you wish) containing the recordings.

I have no doubt that these sound different to someone with superb hearing, but to me they all sound pretty much the same. Seriously. I'm listening through decent studio monitors at sensible volume levels, and I suppose there's a very slight tonal variation, but nowhere near enough to make me prefer one of these basses to another. I have reasonably bad tinnitus which interferes with my hearing of high frequencies, but not the mids and lows. Put that guy playing those basses in a band situation and I doubt if anyone could possibly hear a difference between them. As always with these demos, they've chosen an immensely talented bass player who thinks that he's there to show how quickly he can play lots of notes. There's no actual law that says you can't demo basses by playing a simple walking bassline that allows the listener to concentrate on what the video is supposed to be about.

More totally reliable dealings with Owen ... dead easy and all good.

A Google image search did turn up a few 'custom' colours, including this:

Your description of the smell is actually quite re-assuring ... when I had mine that smell was one of the most distinctive things about it! Just ask @Clarky. This was mine (nine years ago), and this finish was the one I used to see the most:

Does the bass smell? That's a serious question. The material used to build an Ampeg BabyBass is a type of plastic that - after time - emits a pungent and really quite unpleasant aroma, especially after the bass has spent a period in a case or gigbag. I have to say that the finish on that bass doesn't look like anything that would have left the Ampeg factory.

An update for you all. I phoned Thomann UK (i.e. a UK phone number which connects you to Germany) and spoke, as usual, to a charming and helpful young man who spoke better English than I do. He gave good sympathy, made encouraging noises, and reassured me that Thomann could do absolutely nothing to help but not to worry because UPS always get these things sorted out. I ended the call feeling like someone had just patted me on the head and said "Good Boy ... Good Boy!". Then I tried the UPS Support team. Again. Making a payment requires you to log in first but the system still won't let me log in because my email address is already in use. (No, it's not.) Registering using another email address doesn't work - the system recognises that it's the same IP address. I found the Contact Us button ... How would you like to contact us, email or telephone? I clicked 'email' and the system invited me to log in. I gave up, with the worst possible grace, and went off to watch a documentary about Zaha Hadid (who once tried to poach me from another firm), leaving @Silvia Bluejay to show me how it's done. How it's done is apparently something called Facebook. Having PM'd a bot at 1108, were in PM communication with Angel at 1324 assuring me that the UPS Customer Services team were now on the case and that the box would definitely be delivered today. At 1645 the box arrived, ripped open savagely down one side and easily able to spill - for example - a couple of 20M rolls of Speakon cable. Yup, that big. We checked the contents and nothing had actually gone, but that was sheer blind luck. The driver was unable to get his handheld device to connect so was unable to find out how much I owed. I printed a copy of the UPS bill and gave it to him. He was unable to generate a fee-charge and asked me if I had any cash. (!!!) When I said I didn't, he asked me to pay on line. When I stopped laughing I explained why that was not possible and suggested that he get his Supervisor or someone to call me later. He went away. I sent an update to Angel at UPS Customer Services. UPS came back straight away and apologised for failing to make a delivery as they had promised. Some of you may recall Well it's now four months later and I think that I have at last reached the tipping point.

I don't mean to go off at a tangent, but if you're new to buying PA gear then please please pretty please DON'T BUY NEW! Few things go down in value quite as much or as quickly as low to mid-range PA gear, and the best way to find out what you really need is to buy a simple system, try it, and work out what (if anything) is lacking. I just did a quick'n'dirty search on eBay for "PA system" + Used + Buy It Now + UK Only. If I set the Budget at "Up to £200" I get 370 results, and whilst much of it is dross there's at least a hundred rigs there that I'd be happy to gig with as my first rig.

As a long-standing fan of Thomann, I'm depressed to say that it's unlikely I'll buy from them again, especially since this is actually down to their choice of courier! @Silvia Bluejay and I put in an order for about £200 a couple of weeks ago, our first since Brexit. Instead of the usual snappy and efficient turnaround, we had to chase them for a valid tracking number, then we waited a week for a message saying that our goods were held up at Customs and would be delivered a week later (i.e. today). Had an update this morning from UPS stating that the goods would be delivered between 8:15 and 12:30 today and that there were fees to pay. Fine, sat there waiting. At 2:45 re-checked to find that UPS had "attempted a delivery" at 8:51 (a lie, no UPS van even came down our street) but had been "unable to receive payment" (another lie, they hadn't requested any). Checked the UPS website and found an option to pay the fees online (with a warning that we'd then need to print the receipt to show the UPS driver, presumably because the system doesn't actually update in real time). You can't pay unless you log in. You can't log in unless you register. It won't let me register, says my user name is already in use. Life's too short for this sort of 5h1t. I've emailed them telling Thomann to eirher insist that UPS actually come here and ring my doorbell or just cancel my order and refund in full.

Well just don't tell them ...

@MacDaddy

Did it come signed personally by King John?

"Those born again Christians have got nothing on, Satanic sex rituals that last all night long." Y'know, I'm pretty sure that there's a comma in the wrong place. Unless he knows a lot of born again Christians who like to get back to nature ...

By and large, you don't. Record everything first, with vox / guitar / bass / drums all being in the default, centre position. Then do an initial 'gain stage' mix to get the various track levels to match, at least roughly. There's endless YouTube about this. Then (in your DAW) go through each track in order and apply EQ (including pan) and compression as required. Then go through each track again, this time adding FX as required. Now you're in a position to do a decent mix.

There was an old man of St. Bees Who was stung in the arm by a wasp. When asked, "Does it hurt?", He replied, "No it doesn't, I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet."

Well we’ve got no class And we’ve got no principles And we’ve got no innocence We can’t even think of a word that rhymes!

Ha! Mention the movie biz and immediately you can up your profit margin by 500%. My 'main' trolley is https://www.thomann.de/gb/rocknroller_r8_mid.htm which is complete overkill for most situations. @Silvia Bluejay and I have this because our studio is down a short, steep slope from street level, and we bring the complete PA for all gigs by all bands I play with. Having this trolley means that a couple of up-hill journeys is enough for the load-out before setting off to a gig, while a single down-hill journey is usually enough for the load-in at 2am. The Thomann trolley folds rather more effectively than the Filmtools version shown above, and I imagine that it's probably lighter too, but you wouldn't want to take one of these in the vehicle with you unless you have a van or (as in my case) a large MPV.

https://www.screwfix.com/p/folding-sack-truck-80kg/1209p

Do you remember the excitment about those uber-cheap trolleys that used to be occasionally available at Lidl? I seem to remember them being something absolutely potty, like £12, but you needed to know which branches of Lidl had them, and exactly when they'd be in stock!