Al Krow

I've noticed at a few rehearsal studios that certain channels don't work particularly well and that we need to swap to another of the input channels. Found that happening with our band desk yesterday - the singer was just not getting much volume from one mic channel input but the adjacent ones were fine. We couldn't fathom any particular reason for this being the case in terms of the settings and that particular input hadn't been particularly "abused". Have any of you experienced similar issues? Any thoughts on possible causes and fixes?

Been using a full pedal board live for a little while with a Zoom B1-4 multifx at its heart, rather than just the B1-4 as a standalone multifx and tuner. Found a really good bit-crusher sim ("Lo fi") on the SY 200, which I've tweaked to suit my personal taste. I don't recall having a bit-crush feature on the SY-1? If so, this is a really nice-to-have additional capability. The patch seems very usable e.g. for a Sweet Dreams/Eurythmics style bass line and probably means my dedicated bit crusher pedal could be for the chop, in which case the SY 200 just paid for itself! The polyphonic & superb tracking that the Boss SY pedals have also means I don't need to worry about noisy glitches during a song, which was a key reason for going with this in preference to a couple of the market leading alternatives.

Excited that you've joined the club! I'm currently focusing on getting my Boss SY-200 knowledge up to speed and then will be turning my attention to the GT 1000 Core. I'm hoping that there will be a fair bit of OS overlap!

Oh dear, I agree that wasn't the best deal to sell something for a good price used to replace with a new unit! Still I'm not complaining, haha! By coincidence I spotted that ability to set how many patches you cycle through on my SY-200 just a couple of days back, which is a very useful live feature that Boss clearly seem to have on all their newer multis? Saves me scrolling through 128 patches on the SY-200!

Seen a few of these exchanging hands recently in the FS and thought a thread for those of us up to speed to share their wisdom and those of just starting out to post any queries we might have could be helpful. So please share thoughts on how you're using yours, any stock patches you rate/recommend and details of your own bespoke patch ideas.

I tried it out in anger on Sat night and it was getting a little lost in the mix so I've given it a little volume boost and the nudged the treble up a bit to give it more presence. Here's the updated Xotic BB patch: The individual sims are in order: Black Opt - Comp 35 Lo 80 Hi 40 Vol 50 Bass BB - Gain 85 Bass 5 Treble 7 Vol 50 SMR 400 - Bass 7.5 Treble 0.0 Gain 50 Vol 70 Mid F 160 Hz Middle 0.0 ENHNC 50 ZNR - Detect GTRIN Depth 100 Threshold 30 Decay 0 Patch Vol 40 Let me know what you think!

Does that mean a certain rather lovely KS is very much off your radar now? 😁

Aha, that bodes well for me then! I'm just getting an OBP-2 fitted on my Yamaha BB 2005 to replace a rather tired Yamaha pre-amp with an NE1 mid-cut circuit that never gets used. How's your OBP-1 changed the sound to make it such a step up? So what were your top 3 waste of money upgrades and why didn't they hit the mark?

After churning through over 25 basses over the past decade I've ended up with a herd of 8 including 3 basses that I'm regularly gigging and finally feeling "yeah, this lot are really good!" I guess the fact I've not actually bought a bass in a couple of years is perhaps a good sign that I'm pretty happy with my lot. However it's fair to say that even my current herd have not been without their niggles and I've started going down the route of seeing if I can put through a few judicious upgrades to sort out the flaws without replacing the bass outright. I've got a couple of stories to share about tweaks to my Spector Euro 5LX which has made a really positive difference to an otherwise great bass and more recently about my Yamaha BB 2005 which is currently being upgraded which I'll come back to shortly and maybe add some more pics: In the meantime, thought it would be interesting to swap stories of any mods you've put through to basses you really rate, and what it is about them that make them special, where the modifications have had a really positive outcome, or any that you thought "oh dear that was a waste of time & money!"? Pics very welcome!

With pleasure - should have a bit of time next week.

Ah...interesting pedal running order: I've always had my Octave and Filter reversed in running order to yours - to give the Octaver the cleanest bass signal to bite on at the start of the signal chain and the Filter towards the end to give it the most complex wave pattern to filter. And I'd have the HPF at the start to clean up the signal for the rest of the pedals. The other thing about Octavers "doubling up" the lowest notes with the second harmonic is that there is a very slight latency which I guess then sounds like a second string and which I presume is how we hear a thickening up of the sound? But I digress, again, haha. As you were, back to HPFs...

Apologies for the thread digress, but was interested in your comment - I used to be a massive fan of using octave pedals, but find that a 5 string largely eliminates the need in a band mix as you can often play an octave down anyway compared to a 4 string particularly for songs in keys of B, C, D and Eb. If you're playing in the low E string to A string range then the octave down is giving you a fundamental at 20hz to 30hz, which you're barely going to hear. The second harmonic from the octaver pedal is then just doubling your existing fundamental (which you've already got). I find even with HPF engaged it's not a great sound in the mix - pleasant enough when solo'd at home for sure - but you're obviously finding it works well with your set up and band? I've literally just taken my OC-5 off my board this past week! 😊

Cheers buddy - that's gracious of you. It's so easy to slip into casual sexism [or whatever...ism] without realising we're doing it! Back to HPF. I've actually got a decent ability to HPF on both our desk (100hz cut off) and via patches on my Zoom multifx which has a variable HPF sim, so no real need for something additional, although I had a Thumpinator on my home board for years. There's also the very simple option of cutting the bass EQ on your bass preamp or amp a touch? If I was getting another HPF pedal the Sine HPF mentioned earlier looks very capable and decent value. I guess the trick is to balance eliminating low end crud and getting a tight non-boomy sound without the bass sounding anaemic in the mix.

Or not some wee lad in the office, either, eh Dave?😉

Loved that post! I've bought and sold a lot of bass kit over the past decade - it's been an interesting, fun journey and I've got a much better idea of what I'm after these days - the last bass I bought was 2 years ago which is quite a feat for me, haha! It's more now a case of applying some TLC and judicious upgrades to basses that I otherwise love, rather than replacing them outright e.g. getting the onboard electronics properly shielded, fret dressing and upgrades to the preamps. Finding someone as skilled and easy to work with as @Garymac to apply his bass-tec skills has been a boon. I've also moved from trying to get the best rig within my budget to being content to go through the FoH to focus on getting the best balanced sound for my band. Second hand purchases tend to hold their value if you look after them, so it's not put me too much out of pocket along the way. Regrets? Spending far too much time on kit and getting into passionate debates over the minutiae of tone with fellow BC'ers and not enough on the fretboard and actually making music would be my only real one. But I can maybe do something to put that right now 😊

My little gigging pedal board with Zoom B1-4 very much at its heart! Couple of additional pedals for filter and synth which, together with pitch shift, tend to be weaker areas for many multifx: Tip: I've recently found that layering a little drive pedal before e.g. the Xotic BB patch I've made** on the B1-4 is giving me a drive tone that seems juicer (apologies for the lack of a technical term!) than pretty much all of the bespoke dirt pedals I've had over the years (and I've had a few, haha!). ** My Xotic BB patch combines the following B1-4 sims: Demeter Comp --> Xotic BB --> SWR SM 400 amp, and has boosted bass to compensate for the low-end loss on dirt sims.

Great post, thanks Mike! What's your view on IEM and silent stages vs using stage monitors in delivering a really good FoH sound? Is the benefit of a silent stage / IEM route more pronounced for smaller venues when the stage bleed into the FoH mix is likely to be relatively much more pronounced?

A&H do more budget desks too eg their Zed / ZedFx range. Not many aux out, but well built and very decent quality. Several pub bands I know, including my former band, use them. I don't think we should assume all pub bands use only budget desks though, any more than we can assume that the bass player won't be taking a high end bass rig and £1k+ bass to their pub gigs.

Yup. We can get 4 individual outputs from our Soundcraft MTK12 desk, which is all we need as a. 4 piece band. Fully tailored output on two, more restricted on the other two eg headphone out gives the FoH mix. Around £450. Our next desk (whenever we decide to upgrade) is probably going to be digital, but with faders / ability to tweak on the fly mid song without needing a tablet. There's a whole separate dedicated thread on compact mixers for you to dive into 😅

But any particular need to do that when it comes laden with actual mains out?

MixWizard WZ4 14:4:2 | Allen & Heath (allen-heath.com) - 6 aux outs

Well my £40 'Sennheiser' IE300s arrived and they work, so that was a good start. And the box came "fully laden" with all the gubbins you might expect of the real thing including a choice of silicone and memory foam tips Actually a better over ear fit than the KS ZS10 Pros Don't seem to have quite the same volume of the ZS10 Pros which is minus, but a slightly less boomy bottom end which is a plus I'll probably continue with the ZS10 Pros for live use for now. But these are a decent back up to have Just wonder if Sennheiser would be able to confirm whether the units being sold from the Sennheiser Digital Store are genuine - I'm very tempted to ask them, be good to know either way. The price appears to have gone back up to around £95 (inc P&P) since I ordered mine.

Cheers for that. #2 I'm actually thinking of working with a line up with electronic drums and guitarist losing his amp and going straight into the desk via a decent pedal board / multifx set up (Russ is going to be amused to hear me say that!) Probably means getting a new drummer and guitarist in the process, but they do say change is as good as a rest 😅

Was interested to understand what led you to giving up on the IEM route / why they didn't work for you? This is the path I'm looking to encourage our band to go down - and if there are issues or problems that you found couldn't be solved be good to hear in case it's the same for a couple of them too.