Al Krow

APRIETA - VINCEN GARCÍA - Great to see one of the world's top current bass players using a Yamaha BB!

Don't think you need to beat yourself up/feel bad about it Phil? Paid gigs are the lifeblood of any covers outfit, and if you're managing to get them for your duo as well as for your band then more power to your elbow mate!

@mike257 - with regard to our specific line up, we have a male low bass vox with a C2 to C4 vocal range i.e. 65Hz to 260Hz, but he mostly sings in the C2 to C3 range i.e. up to 130Hz. He's not got a particularly strong vox and the bass vox is harder to hear in the mix anyway. Setting the HPF across the board at 150Hz has left his vocals sounding thin. So I was thinking of making an exception for his vox, and lowering the HPF to 60Hz in line with what we have for the bass guitar, and as with the bass guitar giving him a 3dB boost in at around 120Hz (2nd harmonic of C2). But, unlike bass guitar, keeping that 3dB boost up across the full 120 to 240Hz range i.e. up to the 2nd harmonic of C3. In isolation his vox does sound a lot richer with the updated EQ settings, but we've not had chance to try it in a band mix and I guess the proof of the pudding will be then! However, I wanted to run it passed you (and others more expert than me on here) before I cause chaos at a gig when I'm unlikely to have the bandwidth to figure out / remember / correct for what's causing us to sound awful!

Hi Pete, it's not configured in the same way as the OC5/OC3 i.e. the basic octave patch is full range. I tend to think of the OC5/OC3 (optional) range setting as being more aimed at guitarists, as us bass players will more often want the octave thickening on the upper range rather than purely on the lower strings i.e. if anything we would want it reversed? If however you did want something similar to the OC5/OC3 then I think you can insert an fx block so that only the lower frequencies are impacted by the octaver - not tried this yet, but I suspect @MrDinsdale has made good use of frequency selectors already! Fyi - I've also offboarded my EBS filter pedal too now, so currently down to just the Core + SY200

Definitely! I think the money for most BC bands these days is going to be more in live performance, and material releases almost become promo material to get a following/fan base to come along to hear us play live? Btw loved your band's track 'We're connected' - great lyrics (and bass line wasn't too shabby either!)

Just came across this, which might be of interest: The Best Compact Analog Mixers for your Studio Flattering to discover two of the desks I've had over the years on the list (Allen & Heath and Soundcraft)!

So in answer to your question with regard to filters... I've now been using the GT Core for a week and getting my head around it's various features and possibilities. The EBS IQ filter pedal I've currently got on my board (pictured above) is one of the very best analogue filters I've come across - almost on a par with 3Leaf filters I've had the privelege of owning, and considerably less expensive. I've set up a filter patch on the Core, [using the Touch Wah fx in band-pass filter mode - in case of wider interest] which gives me the choice of up or down filter. I've also included an octaver, but just with the up-filter, to thicken up the sound. Really like what I'm hearing on both up-sweep and down-sweep. And the excellent EBS... well that's just been taken off my board and will likely be appearing in the for-sale section in due course 😊

The BB P35 is a superb passive bass! Great tone and playability. Loved mine - wished it had been a touch lighter for my aging frame and it would have been a keeper!

Fishman Powerchord FX Patch One of the things we've been figuring out in my covers band is how to fill out the sound when the rhythm guitarist switches to doing a solo and we lose both vox and rhythm guitar and just have bass and drums underneath. It can feel a little empty! I've been thinking along the lines of a Fishman Powerchord sim on bass. I actually briefly owned the original pedal a few yeas back but found it a little too glitchy for my liking. Pitch shift seems to be a significant challenge for most multifx to do well and my Zoom B1-4 could only produce a mushy mess! I guess this is where the serious DSP firepower in the GT 1000 / Core comes into its own. I've created a little patch with a parallel signal path for: Basic setting: Pitchshift sim +7 (i.e. adding a fifth) Ctrl1 1 --> adds in Overtone sim with a modest lashing of octave up On the common path, additional options to kick in: Ctrl2 --> Chorus Ctrl3 --> Cry Wah which tightens up the EQ making it more punchy / less bassy (but also less warm) Loving the lack of latency and tightness of tracking on this patch and IMO this actually improves on the old Fishman pedal quite a bit.

@SumOne now you've had had a play with the GX10 for a while, was it the right decision to "trade down" (the colour touch screen is definitely an upgrade!)? Just wondering whether a combination of Core + Expression Pedal might have been potentially as good / possibly better? Having said that, I'm obviously delighted you decided to drop muggins here a DM,wondering if I might be willing to take your mint Core off you for a good price 😂

Wish you all the best Dave - I've really enjoyed your "How was your gig last night posts" over the years, and you were always very generous in your comments to the rest of us on there. If you can manage to part company on good terms and avoid burning bridges, so much the better. Who knows where things may end? If, as you say, you're a perfectionist, you're likely to be delivering to a high standard and have been doing for many years. Goodness knows if they will find someone as good as you to fill your boots!

Old pedal board: Current iteration: The GT 1000 Core is a considerable step up over my long term love-affair with the Zoom B1-4, which has been an amazingly good value workhorse budget mulitfx, and has been at the core of my board for several years. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that, unlike the B1-4, the Core does a great job at providing a very usable drive/fuzz which I'm liking a lot and also an octave up/down capability that is easily as good as the excellent Boss OC-5, and which I can access different settings as presets e.g. starting with just octave down and adding in an octave up to further fill out the sound, rather than needing to manually adjust during/between set list numbers. Had its first gig outing on Saturday with just a few basic patches set up and performed just fine, so I'm looking forward to getting to grips with it via the easy to use Boss Tone Studio PC Editor over the coming months and refining my current patches and creating some additional gigable ones as well as some fun ones for home use. For some reason I never really bonded with either the HX Stomp or Effects, which I know a great many BC'ers love, despite several attempts! So it's great to find an alternative and equivalently capable mid-range multifx (but with a much more recent and more powerful chipset) that has been so quick and easy to take a shine to. I suspect it's going to mean a clear-out of a bunch of my pedals e.g. I have managed to accumulate half a dozen drive/fuzz pedals in my quest for that elusive drive tone...only to find one I really liked within a day or so of auditioning the factory presets on the Core!

Thanks for that - you and @MrDinsdale have both mentioned using slicers! Must admit that's not an fx I've previously paid any attention to. How have you both been making of use of it with bass? Does it do quite a lot more than a delay fx?

Aha ok that makes complete sense, thanks. You've pretty much done the equivalent of my Zoom B1-4-> GT1000 Core upgrade, by upgrading your Core to the high end QC. Not sure multifx get much better than that one currently? I will be holding onto one of my two Zoom B1-4s for the foreseeable, not least 'cos it has a very usable drum kit for home practice, and its tuner is more sensitive to the low B open than the Core's (I've got a workaround by tuning to the B on the 12th fret, or I could equally do an E on the 5th fret of the low B string). Actually that's not correct, just needed to switch on 'Bass mode' in the Master block for each patch and then it reads the low B string easily. Ideally there would be a global setting for this, but it's literally a 10 second job to engage bass mode on each patch so no biggie. So if you're missing having a pedal board friendly Core then maybe the same logic, albeit one level up, applies? 😊

Sounds like you delved pretty deeply into its capabilities. Why did you choose to move yours on? Any particular limitations or issues?

Not found a decent synth patch on it or Tone Central yet...but tbf I've not looked particularly hard, as I have a SY200 sitting next to it on my (significantly simplified!) little pedal board. Jury is still out on filter in particular whether my EBS IQ is sufficiently better than the up/down sweep patch I've put together, for an audience to notice.

Per discussion with @SumOne we both previously saying that we found that multifx were often much less good at filter, synth, octaver and fuzz than standalone pedals. The GT 1000 Core, to my very pleasant surprise, has made both my fuzz pedals and Boss OC5 octaver redundant because I'm finding it at least as good, if not better, on both counts. Was very straightforward to incorporate a cheap as chips Mosky dual switch with a TRS cable to get two additional footswitches with ability to assign to different parameters. There's scope for a second dual switch or alternatively an expression pedal down the line should the need arise.

Nice bass tone Dan - particularly stood out at the start of your final song Hives! Great to put a face to a name!

If you are gigging, it's worth noting that Zoom have designed the software on the 60B+ so that the patch name doesn't stay displayed but it defaults to one of the fx in the chain. This, plus lack of PC editing ability available on earlier Zoom models, were deal breakers for me and a few others on this thread.

Yeah, a lot of folk talk about wanting to tweak stuff live. But being competely honest, I don't have headspace for thinking about that during a gig - too much else going on! Definitely prefer to get to something that sounds decently good, based on prior experience, at home and then make a mental note of any adjustments (eg drive not cutting through the mix or whatever) during a live performance. I do love ability to preset on multifx, it's one less thing to think about and no worries about dials getting knocked etc. But then again I'm on PA & desk lead for my band - I guess if someone else is dealing with that then you're freed up to focus on "just" being the bass player, which would be grand! IMO, most things that are EQ related can be dealt with via a decent desk, and perfecting flavours of tone are nice to have, but not what a good band performance hinges on?

Fraction of the size of a B1-4 for starters. Not aware of any that look as good on paper as this one for the money and compact enclosure? I suspect it may well sound better than the B1-4, too, but I'd need to A/B it to find out and tbf no particular rush for me to do that as I've got my work cut out for a while getting up to speed with my Boss multi 😅 Greg's suggestion of it providing a back up is a neat one, though.

That's not a bad thought! It's not going to take up any space and as back-up can potentially cover off a full pedal board!

Valeton GP-5 - announced at NAMM 2025: super compact multi fx for £79! 100 effects Supports loading 3rd-party cabinet IRs, max 20 stored Supports latest Neural Amp Modelling (NAM), with 50 curated files, max 80 stored 100 patch slots (50 factory patches) Up to 9 modules able to work simultaneously, with the order of some modules being customizable Built-in chromatic tuner