Al Krow

Get those itches scratched Mr T! You in a band?

FWIW it's a good little AB-Y pedal and doesn't require to be powered In addition to those very neat flat patch cables, I'm just gonna leave you with the thought of a HB-50M board. Inexpensive and a really useful size (check my post a couple of pages back which illustrates).

I think that's a Mooer AB-Y pedal rather than a DI. What made you decide to dump the VTDI?

Well the £800 was on the following - quite a lot I'd happily recommend to fellow BC'ers: HB 50M board & Iso5 Pro PSU - board has atypical 17.5cm depth perfect for a Zoom B1X-4 / Zoom B1-4, and the Iso5 is a very neat, noiseless and value for money PSU. Tech 21 VT Bass DI – seems to still be the most loved of the Tech 21 pedals. It’s a great tone shaper. I’ve gushed about this plenty elsewhere! 3Leaf Proton (2020) – really easy to dial in and quality filter pedal. 3Leaf have taken all the best bits of their earlier models and packaged it neatly into this unfortunately very pricey, as with all things 3Leaf, little pedal. Fishman Fission Powerchord – one came up at a very good price and they’re pretty rare. Always been interested to see what these things did. My attempts at doing a powerchord sim on Helix (and certainly on Zoom, which can’t really handle pitch shift at all) were pretty much a mush. More recent attempts on Helix have come a lot closer using the effects in parallel. It’s a bulky pedal and won’t be making it onto a pedal board. Likely to be moved on. Lekato Loopstation Pro – the loopers on the Zoom and Helix are pants! This packs a huge amount of functionality into a tiny 1590A sized box and has taken the place of my old Boss RC-30. Was about £45 new including import costs. Highly recommended. Zoom B1-4 – significantly smaller form factor than my B1X-4, now sitting at the heart of my mini board. Again a complete bargain at £45 used. Holding onto the Zoom B1X-4 though – will be very handy headphone amp / multifx to slip into a bass gig bag. Ciocks DC7 – means I won’t need a separate PSU for my Helix – can power both the HX FX with 2 outputs / 1.3Amps leaving plenty of juice (3.3Amps over 5 outputs) for the rest of the board. Like all Ciocks gear, it comes at price.

That's a tidy haul! How are you liking the Subspace? Doesn't the Spectradrive have a built in tuner? I've just totted up - actually I've not been any more restrained than you! £800 on pedals and £1,100 on a bass and cab - although the latter two were right at the start of lock-down, when none of us knew how long our purdah was about to be and and there was a chance that they would soon be used on gigs. Haha!

Weird thing about delay, chorus, flange, phase is I find that is stuff that current multifx can do pretty well (filter and synth is still tricky stuff, and decent pitch shift a challenge at the more budget multifx end). So for the cost of a B1-4 you could have yourself an excellent delay, a headphone amp, a tuner, a drum machine and a bunch of other fx!

Sounds like I was lucky to manage to snap up my B1-4 from the FS a few weeks' back then! £1k is an impressive sum: what did ya get?!

Haha - not only will you not need another Spector (obviously avoid speaking to @Eldon Tyrelland certainly don't ever discuss these things with @cetera!) you could well find it's really an effective GAS killer when it comes to other brand basses: I've not come across a bass yet in the same price bracket I'd want to trade my Euro 5LX for! Enjoy.

If you really want to be talked out of getting another bass, then spend some time on this thread: However, if you actually don't want to be persuaded to make do and mend, this is the thread for you 😉

Very nifty. How much of your DC7 (I see it's in the FS) did it take to power your Helix and how many outputs were left over? @bassfan - same question for you, buddy. And does it slot in under your board as easily as your DC5? Pics please! PS Walshy - StubbyM and I are just jeal you've got a Noble!

May as well mention the lack of solar panel whilst you're at it?

It's kinda family though, right? I bet it sees itself as the true and worthy descendent of its "illustrious" 1918 forbear.

Wow! What an introduction to your Spector bass journey - congratulations! EMG 40TW pups with the single coil / humbucker options for both? This thread has gotta take the biscuit for the amount of GAS induced spending on a particular brand of basses, right?!

Thanks Luke - I gladly accept your corrections, which all make good sense! The question arises would the K12.2 provide enough low end if they were the main PA speakers? Or are we talking about getting the heavier RCF 735As to deliver this? [Aside - we use RCF 310As which are just the ticket in terms of power and portability for vocals, sax, and acoustic guitar. If we tried putting bass through them, I suspect it would be a non starter, and the advice on this thread seems to be that we'd need something along the lines of the bigger RCFs to deal with bass also. I did some sums right at the start of the thread and going from 310As + quality bass backline to e.g. 735As didn't result in any weight saving although there was potentially a bit of a cost saving].

Darn it, all that was needed on the Fat Tube drive sim was to turn its patch vol down, so that there is no vol spike when it's engaged, and it was a bloomin' good substitute for my favourite dedicated drive pedal which costs a LOT more than the B1-4. Wasn't expecting that! UPDATE - replacing the AG 750 with the SWR 400 amp sim, gives added crunch! Taking the gain down to 30 on the BlueB BOD get's it close to perfection.

Haha - that's exactly where I got stuck two years back! I ended up with a BF SC (or BB2) & D class head for rehearsal / gigging purposes. My back is happy. The real challenge, if the FRFR crew are being honest, is getting a FRFR unit that is not specifically tuned for bass which can deal with bass frequencies as well as a quality dedicated bass cab. From what I have gleaned, you need to be looking at something like an RCF 735A to really deliver similar quality. Obviously there will be plenty of kit that will be "good enough". But, even then, not at the weight of a BF SC cab.

A little trick that I only learned a few months back (from Chris_B as it happens) is that you can slow down the playback speed on YouTube vids to 3/4, 1/2 (or even 1/4) - via the "settings" - without impacting pitch. I've been surprised at how many other folk, besides me, that was news to! Really useful when you're (literally) getting up to speed!

Oh and I guess if you're going to change one thing about a bass (which affects its weight) without affecting its tone, then the tuners would be that thing, right?

+1^^ I'm nearly as bad! Must be an ex-425 owners' thing!😁 More importantly that's now an 8lb bass, which would be down at the bottom of my basses weight wise. And he's shaved off 1/8 of the weight of the bass just by swapping the tuners. That's a very good result! Yamaha if you're listening... You'll have to talk me through why the cheaper Hipshot Ultralites needed you do do that?

Enjoyed that Scary Pockets Hanson cover a lot. Our drummer in our 50s/60s band is incredibly short sighted. When she was a kid she saw Hanson on TV and thought that if the female (or so she thought!) drummer of Hanson could be so good, then so should could she! Great mistake, from her point of view, to have made and started her passion for drums... My mistake was when I went along to mate's 40th when he mentioned that they were after a bass player. Well I'd played all manner of 6 string guitars, so I thought "can't be too hard, can it?" - particularly as my missus had one in the house which she'd managed to do one gig with 15 years back. School-boy error, but 7 years later I couldn't be happier that I made it! I've heard that the bass line to Rhythym Stick is fiendish - looking forward to a challenge! Norman Watt-Roy is one of the unsung heroes of bass.

Actually that doesn't look too bad at all. And, besides, only you will ever see it, or possibly also the drummer! And you can always load the originals back on if you ever decide to sell it on. How much of a weight saving did the new tuners deliver?

Haha - you're welcome. I guess that makes us family! 😁 Out of interest - what does the reverse of the headstock look like with the Hipshot Ultralite / Y-tuners i.e. are the original holes showing?

But does it retain low end?

Hey JB, it's pretty good. Although using the same patch set at - 12 rather than +12, I prefer the octave down on the Helix, probably because the small amount of latency is more noticeable on octave up. It is a little tinny and my Digitech Mosaic is an improvement (it's really very good!), but that's a single effect dedicated box. But if you're after a truly authentic, latency free octave up, then there is only one solution - an 8 string bass!

You're clearly making subliminal reference to @ped's favourite fetish of limiters I take it? Very good at dealing with unwanted peaks...