SumOne

Bought a compressor from John and it arrieved very quickly, well packaged and all as described - all good! Thanks

End of the working week summertime vibes:

Nice Ska setlists. This is the latest with one of the bands I'm in, quite a few the same as yours:

🧀♨️

Bernard Edwards is a good call but my favorite music is Reggae and Dub with Robbie Shakespeare probably my favourite bass player, but it's not a style of playing that lends itself well to the 'here's a YouTube video of some virtuoso playing' as it's all about timing, feel, tone, making a bassline that is integral to the rhythm while also often being the hook. It's a cliché but less is more (not less volume/mix of bass though!) and that's the way I like Basslines.

Yeah, it takes SD cards for extra memory. I've also got an Akai midi mix on the way but that's more for additional live mix/dubbing sort of stuff. A midi keyboard is handy too. It can do everything stand alone but I find it easier to complete full tunes using the Laptop DAW it comes with. On its own its best for sketching of ideas/loops and live stuff.

I plug straight into the line level input. It works okay for me but I have a high output active Bass that I also did a bit of a mod to to make the signal louder. If you've got a low output Bass then it'd either need a lot of volume added by the MPC or using a preamp pedal to boost it. The new Amp & Cab sims and tuner are pretty good and there are a couple of Bass specific ones. Not as tweakable as Helix stuff but not bad for something that isn't sold as a Bass effects unit and lots of decent presets including: slap, fat fuzz, valve DI ...and 'pant filler'! It means you get a decent EQ and drive and still have space to add three additional effects like compression, modulation, delay. Here's someone using some of the new updates with a guitar. He's using it to record a loop but you can just set it to monitor (rather than recording) and you still hear the effects and Amp/Cab sim that the MPC is applying.

Rhythm & Sound (and Basic Channel) have produced some of my favorite music. This one especially:

Royal Blu meets The Autos - Dancehall Session

Skip Marley Ft Popcaan, Vibe

The sniffer dogs found that though

I've been a few times and it's always been good, I'd go again but nowadays I'd be spening most of my time at the Firmly Rooted stage during the day and IIcon through the night...it would be great but I figured a few years ago I could save myself a few hundred ££ by going to smaller festivals/events that focus on the stuff I'm into (Glade, Boomtowm, Outlook, Carnival) rather than contributing to the fees of glastonbury headliners I don't watch.

Okay, I'll stop banging on about this now, but using the the MPC as a live Guitar/Bass Multi FX unit* and recording tool for Guitar/Bass doesn't seem to be mentioned much by Akai or reviewers or on forums anywhere and I only stumbled on it's usefulness for it after buying it primarily as a drum machine, so I'm spreading the good word a bit! Latest free update (23rd June) will include a lot of things, but specifically of interest to Guitar/Bass: NEW MPC TUNER MPC 2.11 also adds an integrated high-fidelity instrument Tuner to its arsenal of tools. Now you can tune your external MIDI CV synth, guitar, bass, fiddle, hurdy gurdy or any other musical instrument using the MPC Tuner. More than a plugin, use MPC Tuner in either desktop or standalone systems by selecting it from the menu in MPC. AIR AMP SIM MPC 2.11 brings a new Q-Link-mapped Amp and Cabinet Simulator to the MPC platform for adding sweet harmonic distortion to samples, vocals, drums, synths, bass, and yes—guitars. Lay down a guitar or bass lick in MPC or run your drum bus through a full stack to soak it in some creative harmonic distortion. This new MPC plugin offers colorful amp simulation and cabinet emulation effects of many types and sizes. *Caveat being I've only owned it for a week and haven't played out live with it yet. The biggest potential issue I can envisage to using it as a live multi FX (apart from no footswitches and only 4x simultanious effects per input) is if there's latency as it's designed primarily as a sampler/drum machine rather than a live Guitar/Bass multi-fx unit. I haven't done any scientific test to measure the latency but haven't noticed it being an issue, I guess to effectively monitor an input and then record it in-time with the MPC drums/synths etc it is designed for the monitor to have low latency. I can't see one example online of anyone using it as a live Guitar/Bass multi-fx unit though so perhaps I'm missing some fundamental flaw that I'll only realise once I've sold all of my individual pedals! https://www.akaipro.com/mpc211#New_Air_Effects

John Mayer: “When I’m playing on people’s sessions, I don’t bring an amp; I record all my guitars through my Akai MPC” https://www.musicradar.com/news/john-mayer-when-im-playing-on-peoples-sessions-i-dont-bring-an-amp-i-record-all-my-guitars-through-my-akai-mpc

The synths are pretty decent and fairly simple to figure out and get good sounds from, and not plugging into a Laptop to edit is great. I was considering gettting a FI or C4 again but I think the MPC potentially has a lot of the synth Bass sounds covered - at least for recording, perhaps for playing live too. Obviously it misses the performance/fun of playing them on a Bass guitar, but it adds more live control of the parameters - and bashing drum pads is fun and can be quite a performance! Hype and Odyssey are the ones I've used most so far (The Odyssey video is demonstrating it on the Laptop software, but the editing can be done on the MPC as a standalone like in the Hype video).

Chris bought a pedal from me and all was good! Thanks

This isn't a Bass Effects pedal but the MPC One is well worth a look if you want a hardware drum machine, sampler, synth, stand alone DAW, midi controller... And it turns out - a decent Bass multi effects unit. It's good enough for live effects with the Bass plugged directly into it that I'm selling quite a few pedals to help fund the slightly rash decision of spending £600 on the MPC. I wouldn't recommend just getting it as a Bass multi effects pedal as there are limitations (big, expensive, no footswitches, only 4x effects on a channel at one time, effects aren't bass specific, no tuner) but it's got loads of decent effects that are very tweakable via a 7" touchscreen and knobs, including compression, eq, drive, modulation, delay, filters (including auto wah). And you can still simultaneously use it's pads to trigger samples, drum hits, loops, or as a synth. And on top of all that, the next firmware update (late June) includes amp and cab sims!