Greg Edwards69

I'll be blunt, my opinion of Jon Willis has plummeted over the years. I've known of him for a number of years since the Facebook Yamaha attitude owners group before the helix came along. He's somewhat crowned himself as the helix bass guru without credentials and most of his presets are variations of the same thing, mid-rangey, Sheehan-esque p bass type stuff. All dialled in with an RTA and headphones. Fine for Sheehan style rock stuff, but not a lot else. I tried his synth pack and didn't find it useful at all tbh. I've been using the helix for at least 6 years and like you, I'm loathed to pay money for presets. I've dialled in my own and was generally happy, although synths are my Achilles heel. But over the last year I've been enamoured with Ian Alison's tones so I bit the bullet and bought his vintage synth pack. Oh my! These are the real deal - they sound extraordinary. Genuinely useful, especially the mini moon preset. I enjoyed it so much I bought his signature pack too to see if I could learn anything and he improve my own. Needless to say a modified version of his signature amp preset forms the basis of my core tones. Organic, gritty, gooey goodness and very versatile. A while ago Jon and Ian had a rather public spat of social media where Jon "bought Ian's presets to review so you don't have to" and heavily criticised them for having round numbers in the settings. As if that's proof they haven't been dialled in and finessed over hundreds of gigs. He accused Ian of being nothing more than a used care salesman and then proceeded to tweak Ian's presets by 0.1 in each block and give them away for free. the community did not approve. I lost all respect for him at that point. honestly, IMA's presets appear costly, but they are the real deal and sound great, and dead easy to tweak if you need to shape to your taste and requirements.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108294 This overview explains it quite well. Aside from eq and compression it appears to do loudness normalisation for standard streaming platforms.

I'm in the process of doing that to some video footage of us playing at the international scout and guide jamboree last year. Our entire gig was filmed and recorded and they provided us with a huge mp4 file of the whole gig. They said we can use it however we see fit as long as you can't see the kids faces in the crowd. So we got a friend to splice and dice the video into several shorts and a couple of showreels/montages that look great. Only thing is, the sound is lacklustre and very low volume. I reckon it was recorded straight off the desk. The general mix is fine but sounds lifeless (not to mention a couple of tuning issues for one of our singers whose pitching can waver when he gets overexcited). The stem splitter is fantastic. I've been able to add a little more excitement to the drums, guitars and vocals with some compression, eq and reverb, adjust the mix and stick it though the mastering assistant. In addition, I can fix those errant vocal issues with flex pitch - which is proving to be fantastic. Hopefully, once I'm happy with one of them, I can reuse it as a template for the others.

Indeed, Wikipedia describes Wham! as an English pop duo. But yes, the etymology of "band" is open to all sorts of interpretation. Is a one-man band considered to be a band?

Richard Osman and Marina Hyde tackle this subject in their excellent podcast. Apparently, only three bands to have a single week at No.1 so far this decade - Radio 1 Live Lounge All Stars, The Beatles, and Little Mix! https://fb.watch/xK6ndcppeM/

I blame two things for the death of creative pop/rock music - bands or not. 1. Simon Cowell/Fuller and their ilk for the death of creative pop music. Yes, I know that manufactured pop has been around a lot longer - such as The Monkees - but everything changed when the audition process was combined with the burgeoning reality TV format, and the talent show format very soon after. I remember watching Top of the Pops not long before it ended and seemingly most of the artists were pop idol/pop stars/x-factor people singing covers. Indeed, my brother was in a pup circuit covers ban some years ago with some younger people - one of them seriously believed that they were going to make it big playing the same laminated set list of cover songs. And why not, when the TV and airwaves are saturated with people doing the same thing? 2. Streaming services (and the iPod to an extent). Rock bands used to craft albums. Some, like Led Zeppelin, for example, were "album bands" (their singles chart performance is atrocious). Growing up, I used to listen to whole albums on a regular basis, usually via my personal cassette player and later MiniDisc. The iPod came along with "1,000 songs. iI your pocket" with a shuffle mode - instantly breaking albums apart if you so wished. Then streaming happened - just ask alexa to play a genre and she'll comply - hours of shuffled music (I'm just as guilty of this myself). How do albums compete in this landscape - where's the incentive? Maybe they don't. A lot of bands don't make money on recording music anymore, so they tour and sell tickets and merch at exorbitant prices to break even. I remember Motely Crue saying some time ago they weren't going to make albums any more, just release the odd single.

PLease do share if you find out about getting them for the IE 400's. I notice they aren't listed as well, although admittedly, I'm quite happy with the comply foam tips.

It has USB, so might be possible to hack them for midi control, like the original Zoom Multistomps could.

There are, but there's not many cheap boxes that use Neural Amp Modelling. I did note however that it's output is unbalanced, so will likely need a DI to plug it into a mixer.

I very rarely tweak anything while I'm gigging. My presets are dialled in at home and tweaked at rehearsals at gig volume. Any eq issues are swiftly dealt with on the mixer. LIke you, I make a mental note if something isn't quite right and address it later.

Intriguing. Could be a useful thing to keep in a gigbag as an emergency backup.

I like that. They appear to have implemented well chosen mid frequencies.

You probably don't need the eq to boost the clean path. The merge block where the split paths rejoin has a mixer so you can balance the two signal paths. Also, try experimenting with different types of split. The crossover split (set to around 200hz) is quite useful for certain drive models to retain a clean low end.

I thought it was discontinued due to the amp module they used at the time was discontinued, not poor sales. https://www.talkbass.com/threads/official-barefaced-bass-cab-club.868480/post-22406117 Seeing as they now have a reliable amp module, hopefully, they will bring it back. Besides, I think there's more bassists using modelling these since it was discontinued - the HX stomp has become the a staple of many pedalboards.

Hmmm. I wonder why they added this to the 1x10 and not one of the bigger 12XN cabs, especially if it's aimed at amp modelling users? My understanding is that the 10CR series was more coloured and "vintage" sounding, whereas the 12XN options are transparent - indeed, the BB3 and Big Twin are marketed as FRFR. Personally, an Active Super Mini T or Super Compact T would be a fantastic solution.