Al Krow

I found the LS2 to be a little noisy / not completely silent. Does that chime with your experience?

Finally got around to creating some bespoke preamp patches for each of my two gigging basses on my B1-4, instead of relying on a generic one size fits all set of preamp patches (clean, motown, presence), which suited one much more than the other. In addition, one of the basses has higher output pups and has benefited from having the Zoom noisegate (ZNR) sim at both the start and end of a patch signal chain. I guess using one of our band PA active speakers (RCF 912A), as my home rig, rather than having a separate practice rig has been a helpful nudge, as I'm getting to hear something a lot closer to my live bass tone but, even so, it's taken far too long for me to get around to making use of this obvious preset capability of a multifx!

That's a very glowing review and great to hear about so many usable tones straight out the box! Just wondering whether the effects bank that you're loving @Woodinblackis based on that available in the Boss GT1000/Core, for those wanting additional flexibility those models offer? I'm guessing the answer must be yes? In which I might need to have another look at the GT 1000 Core, which our guitarist snaffled off me and is loving it, before I'd really got to grips with it. (Aside: and he's finding it much more of a breeze to dial in tones he likes than the two other guitarists I'm working with who are using the older tech Helix Stomps).

£258 delivered for a Mk4 with all of the upgrades that have gone into it?! That's a really good deal! It's not a great deal more than used Mk3's were going for a couple of years back and so much else has had eye watering price increases since then. I really tried to love my Mk3s (several attempts!) but couldn't get passed the tracking / glitchiness issues I was getting and I wasn't prepared to change my playing style to suit one pedal! I understand from @Quatschmacher that has now been sorted with the Mk 4 - and at that price I've no real excuse not to give it a spin. If it's good enough for Mohini Dey... DV 247 are obviously feeling generous, they only charged me £257 😊

Did that one become a regular venue for the band then? 😅

I agree the that the CQ20, or more likely CQ18 for me, does look like a tasty piece of kit! The one thing that my cheaper Soundcraft MTK can do though, is multi-track recordings.

Gigs can often be great fun and sometimes it's the unexpected that adds to it! We had a great time being the course rock band at the Hackney half marathon again this year: it was a beautiful sunny day with eager runners streaming past, but... Al Krow (@al_krow) • Instagram photos and videos If you've got any amusing tales or clips - please do share!

Thanks Phil! Soundcraft MTK12. It's pretty decent and good value for money but not the ability the tailor that a good quality digital desk would provide and certainly no separate EQ for the monitor channels.

The differential sound in IEMs vs FoH is a really interesting one, I very much relate to. I've a particular "presence" patch on my Zoom B1-4 which cuts through the FoH mix really well (boost at 1.6 kHz and 3.6 kHz) but sounds unpleasantly harsh through my IEMs, whereas a non-presence-boosted clean tone sounds really good through my IEMs but is less good a cutting through. I'm seeing if a half way house patch is going to cut the mustard in terms of FoH mix and IEMs - will be able to give it a road test tomorrow night.

Well after last Friday's pub gig when @ratman did an excellent job depping for me, and both he and the guitarist used backline, our vocalist has decided that the vocals sound better through the RCF732A PA without bass and guitar competing and that it was pretty straightforward to get a decently balanced mix. So I'm going to let the main line-up have their wish and revert to using backline, without FoH support, which will undoubtedly be a more enjoyable gigging experience for us individually and if it turns out not to be, then I guess Alex will find himself doing more dep gigs 😂

@Dood thanks for that video! Intrigued that the Zoom H2N doesn't distort even at loud volumes! Do you need to adjust the input levels manually to achieve this or does it do so automatically? I'm guessing the former otherwise you would get variable volume recording? I guess the fly in the ointment is that this set up isn't going to add too much if the band have gone for a silent stage approach and are putting as much as possible through the PA with no backline.

If you can pick it up for a price that you're going to get back on it, seems like you've not much downside? Treat it as a free rental opp - who knows you may even like it 😅 I mean you're putting the PM2 to far better use than I ever managed! Polyphonic and very tight "tracking" makes it quite usable live IME.

You finding it's sounding better than your B1-4?

"You get a sound you like." Grab a coffee. Get on with your practice.

Oh I feel your frustration here! Our journey hasn't been an overnight success - it's taken us nearly 18 months to get to a consistently balanced FoH sound with this current line up. And even that's a first with any of my bands over the years. Are you the band leader in your crew? Are you the only one who's bothered about the situation? Is getting louder impacting on how the band's being received - I mean it is a common trick to start at a lower volume and build up once audiences have got used to the volume, but obviously within reason! From what you've said there is a solution, but not one that's going to get a smile from the drummer: ask him to (i) not increase volume during a gig or (ii) use an electronic kit so his volume can be controlled via the desk. PS apologies to the OP for this side-track! Although tbf at least we've established that this isn't really a concern about IEMs - they can and should work really well when used properly!

As a 19 y/o in college the only pedal I'd really come across was a dirt pedal 😅 It's very much a funk bassist's pedal eg Bootsy Collins, although also often used in combination with other pedals eg check out the bass line on Fratellis' cover of Bacarra's "Yes sir I can boogie", which I think is very cool, or on several Tool tracks. I'm sure the filter pedal users on this thread will be able to give plenty of examples of where it's been used tastefully and well. Obviously YMMV as to what's tasteful!

Yeah - that's going to be tricky if you're standing at the back and your bandmates are turning themselves up during the gig and getting louder and louder during the gig causing things to become unbalanced, rather than them having the discipline to leave their sound levels where they were at sound check. Sounds like a band chat is needed to point out what's happening, and see if you can get them on board? You're pretty good at recording gigs so that should hopefully help in getting the message across? And maybe another option is for you to stand nearer the front? You were sounding pretty good and in balance on that clip you posted recently with your new DJI camera - was that at the start of a gig? Good luck!

I've now got a set of Sonicfoam tips for my KZ ZARs based on your recommendation thanks Alex - they seem pretty good value (as are the ZARs). And I'm hoping your enthusiasm for IEMs rubs off on my crew when you're depping for us on Friday! 🙂

I kinda get what you're saying. The key point for me was what you said in your post - the band who sounded terrible had "no real out front mix". That sums up the issue in a nutshell! The starting point for any gig has got to be how the band sounds out front to the audience i.e. the FoH mix, right? Sorting out what it's sounding like on stage / via monitors or IEMs is then a separate issue which is obviously also important. Do you guys play a song at, or close to, gig volume during sound check with one of you out front listening to what the FoH mix is sounding like? We've found our FoH sound has been improved a lot by putting as much as we can through the PA - the guitar is finally not stupidly loud and in balance with everything else. We're also getting much less feedback from not having backline. The most common complaint we used to get was "your singer can't be heard over the band", that also now seems sorted, so all in all a very positive journey. In the main line-up for the band 3 of us are using (or planning to use) IEMs and the guitarist who's not keen has a small monitor for his guitar and is standing pretty close to a PA speaker which gives him pretty good monitoring for the rest of the band.

IEMs make really good sense when you have a silent stage, or at most acoustic drums and no backline, and put everything through the PA to get a really nicely balanced FoH sound. It's pretty common in the function band scene. If you're using backline then, agreed, there's much less need for IEMs for the instrumentalists. The vocalists obviously need to be able to hear themselves and be heard by the band but a small stage monitor should deal with this. I don't think how good the two bands you mention sounded had anything much to do with one using IEMs and the other not though? Much more likely to be down to how good the two bands are. As you said, your mates (i.e. the better) band use IEMs when the need arises - I'd be very surprised if IEMs made them play / sound worse.

"will be great"...and won't be cheap! But then if folk are prepared to pay 3Leaf prices then fair enough, there's demand for a quality filter (although did anyone mention EBS recently? 😅) That thought then just made me wonder how common filters are on pedal boards? We're probably going to agree that drive/fuzz will be be the most common effect, but would filters come in second? Or get pipped by chorus and octavers? Dunno! (I'm not thinking of EQ and compression/limiters as being "effects" in this context).

Sounds great! Guessing being digital it will come with the ability to store several presets, which would be ideal when playing with different basses and swapping between up and downsweep?

Had a Stomp (twice!). Will defo be checking out the MS-60B+ ie the souped up version of the 2013 MS-60B

[Deleted comment: a much more useful / straightforward suggestion by @gazhowe below 😊]

Brilliant! Clearly could do with a bit of make-up gain applied to one of them though? And the saturation looks way too clean! 😅