CameronJ

You can get a lot of amp for £600 these days...

That’s good to know. I may need to try a proper Orange rig at some point.

I honestly find it hard to believe that will sound better than your Yamaha. The BBs are tone monsters! If you fancy a new bass I’d say get a completely different flavour alongside what you already have. Something with an MM style humbuckers maybe, or a Jazz. That is, of course, if you have the option of keeping both basses.

Ah, ok. I’m sure the Orange Crush 50 is a decent practice amp but for Ska and related genres you’ll really feel the benefit of a beefier system. Rest assured that a beefier amp will put a big grin on your face! In the meantime, have you tried using the onboard headphone amp & Aux in on the Orange? Play along to some of the tracks you’ll be gigging and see how close you can get to the sound you’re looking for. Using decent headphones of course. The amp may still be a limiting factor here though, as apparently it applies a cab simulator to the headphone output. Others may be more qualified to judge but I’m not sure the “Orange sound” is synonymous with Ska/reggae/dub? I could well be wrong. In any case, start with the Amp’s EQ flat and experiment with the controls on the bass to begin with. You’ll get there!

Agreed. I use a Phil Jones BigHead headphone amp and even with some cheap (~£30) Sony earbuds my bass sounds great.

My Yamaha BB1025X was a dub machine! And I was using fairly light gauge rounds. Typically I used either the P+J together or just the P, but either way I’d always roll the tone off a bit and it was perfect. What amplification are you using? That’s more likely to be your weak spot than your already magnificent bass!

I'm actually primarily a singer and use a TC Voicelive Touch 2 extensively. The thing is, with these units, you really need to devote time to learning them the same way you would an instrument. Understand the menu structure intimately, understand the behaviour of the effects, understand the routing options available to you on the unit. This will better enable you to troubleshoot on the fly in a live situation, rather than leaving you staring at the unit with a perplexed expression wondering why the hell it seems to be stuck on the looper page when you want to disengage that ping-pong delay you only wanted to last for half a bar. Most importantly, set up YOUR OWN presets. You can kill two birds with one stone here as I found I learned my unit most effectively by creating and editing presets, only referrring to the manual when I couldn't get exactly what I wanted on my own. The factory presets tend to be extreme examples of what you can do with the on board processing power. If you want to use these units in a musically useful band context it's essential in my opinion to fine tune and tweak your own presets in order for them to avoid sounding cheesy. Particularly with regard to things like the harmony and autotune parameters, less is almost always more.

Every time I see these basses I get a little bit of GAS. Really enjoy the look of these early 50’s style precisions. The pickguards, narrow headstocks and little control plates really do it for me.

Haha yes the world is your oyster now! Though for “lounge noodling” I can’t recommend the Phil Jones Double Four highly enough. You wouldn’t gig it but for low/medium home volume it’s glorious. Tiny and built like a tank too.

I’m curious about these genzlers too - http://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Bass_Array_10_2_Genzler_Amplification.html What cab/cabs are you currently running?

The first sound clip on the Synth Voice page sounds very much like an Aguilar Octamizer with the octave Filter knob all the way down.

Yeah they make serious gear. I couldn’t believe that sound was coming from a single 10!

Yep, very nice playing and great tone. Really like that arrangement!

Heard one of these in action last time I was at Bass Direct and was very impressed with the tone coming out of it - http://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Eich_110XS.html

As has been said, there’s a time and a place for everything. As a loose rule I do tend to try and play fretted notes wherever possible and this is made easier by owning a 5 string bass...but there are definitely certain songs/basslines which require open strings purely for ease of playing them. I do notice and appreciate the tonal differences between an open string and its fretted equivalent but again, there is a time and place for both, context dependent.

Yeah a used Ibanez, Cort or Yamaha will see you through nicely. My first ever bass was a Yamaha RBX774 which I got on a good collection-only deal off eBay years ago. Still makes me smile every time I plug it in, although I’ll sadly be listing it up for sale soon...

Source Audio customer service is really on the ball. Give them an email at [email protected] or give rsmith601 (president of Source Audio) a message over on Talkbass. Head to this thread - https://www.talkbass.com/threads/source-audio-sorcerers-society-s-a-s-s-part-3.1056621/page-299 Theyll do whatever they can to help you out!

Yep. Just buy a Double Four and stick something like a Blackstar Tonelink into the Aux input if you want Bluetooth connectivity.

Definitely a vertical 212. It ain’t gonna be cheap though! 😖

I’m guessing those are the Mooer pedal toppers? Good to see that they fit a decent range of slightly different shaped pedal switches. How snugly do they fit? As a side note, I got rid of my Boss Harmonist for similar reasons to the one you’ve said above...

There was a TC Spectracomp on sale recently for £45 the other day! A bit of a steal if you ask me.

😂 I would suggest that for anything other than Mike257’s usage above, you’d be best off using literally anything but this Marshall amp. Especially for bass. See if you can find yourself a decent (and reasonably inexpensive) used combo either from here or one of the many gear groups on Facebook or even eBay. Good deals can be had all over the place. Typically, for bass use I’d avoid anything with the word “micro” in the product title - one of the only exceptions being the Roland Micro Cube RX which @ped can confirm is a good bit of gear. Budget will obviously be a factor but as a general rule, it’s worth saving up and paying a bit extra for quality when it comes to bass amplification. It really can make all the difference to your playing enjoyment!