SumOne

I think EQ makes the biggest difference, and what your Cab can reproduce. I've gone into the finest of details testing pedals A-B and picking apart why one preamp or distortion is better than the next, but nowadays I've pretty much come to the conclusion that once it goes through an Amp/Cab and playing with a band the difference is almost imperceptible - especially if using EQ to match the sounds. Perhaps a keen audience member could hear the difference between a Rat vs Muff vs Tube screamer, but I doubt anyone could notice any more detail 'that sounds like Green Russian , they should be using a Ram's Head', likewise- bright Roundwound strings can be made to sound a lot like dull flatwounds with the right EQ.

If the band agrees that playing Bass live while a backing track also has Bass is a bad idea (it is!) then there are a lot of ways to remove Bass from a backing track (e.g. Moises app). I suppose the other option is to remove the live Bass - mime, or don't bother attending.

Nice. I've got tickets to see African Head Charge in May, looking forward to it.

Behringer B-Tron III available in March: https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=0709-ALB

Here's a challenge:

Yeah, luckily though the only issue the 7 piece ska band I'm has had from venues is actually fitting in. The main limitation is that the pubs tend to pay the same fee for a 3 piece of 7 piece, so it isn't exactly a money maker being in a bigger band. I do feel that 7 piece is a bit OTT sometimes, could potentially be trimmed down to 5, or perhaps even 4 if we were good enough musicians (myself included, I can't sing backing vocals while playing bass). Capdown managed it well with 4.

I didn't say I was a Taylor Swift fan (or that I wasn't a metal fan), just that she is popular and rock music (or 'band' music) in general is getting less-so. And I didn't say people in an orchestra wouldn't know their fellow musician names, I'm saying that that a general audience won't know their names - but they will know the conductor/composer or the 'star' of the performance, similar to a Taylor Swift concert.

Perhaps we've circled back in a way - not many could name the musicians in an Orchestra, in music halls, or in big bands, there was a frontman 'face/name' and the other musicians were quite interchangeable and unknown to audiences, somewhat similar to the Taylor Swift of Bruno Mars live band musicians. The days of pop bands with the whole band being reasonably well known as one unit was perhaps a bit of a blip in the timeline of popular music - and even in 'band' heyday there was still a lot of popular music without being a band, stuff like Motown or a lot of Reggae with session musicians supporting the singer, and solo artists like Elvis, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Michael Jackson. It's possibly more a sign of declining pop success of rock and punk music, which are almost always bands.

Older people in the 1960s were probably saying the same things about the change from big bands to 4 piece pop bands. ..."declining society, the youth of today are clueless, media control, not proper musicians - can't even read music, record companies, commercialisation etc"

Something I like about the GX-10 is this mode: Simple but good live: One footswitch for 'clean', one for 'dub', one for 'dirt' (and press two together to scroll through to other groups of 3x presets). I set the knobs for EQ. Expression pedal for volume, heel down for tuner/mute, toe press to engage an effect (e.g. on 'dirt' it makes it dirtier by engaging a fuzz, on 'dub' it engages an echo and reverb). That does me well for live stuff without getting complicated. I think you could do similar with the Core and an expression pedal - not sure how it'd do the heel down and toe press as switches things though.

The GX 10 has some annoying interface things, but generally it is pretty good. It is similar sounding to the Core, but not as many routing options and a few little things missing (like a visual display of the Compressor levels), and I've got a suspicion things like the GX pitch shifter have a slightly longer latency. The Core is better for the 'brains'. GX 10 screen and expression pedal are nice to have though. But yeah, Core with an expression pedal and some external footswitches would generally be better.

I love trying out new pedals and mucking about with sounds nearly as much as I love playing Bass, it is sort of a hobby within a hobby. ...saying that though, I've come to the conclusion with any bands I've been in there really isn't the need for fussing over small sound details. Going through an Amp/Cab and up against a drummer, 2x guitars, singer etc any subtleties get lost and it comes down to the fundamental things: simplicity, reliability, being in-tune, transportable, perhaps stomping on something for boost/drive, and compression helps but isn't essential. At the moment a Boss GX-100 is doing that for me. Now I almost take it as two separate things: 'Bread and butter' tough, reliable, gigging equipment, and 'mucking about with sounds at home' equipment. For the 'mucking about with sounds' as I'm just doing that at home I'm finding a good Laptop, Interface and Plugins (via 'Gig Performer 5' host) to be a very deep rabbit hole as the possibilities are pretty much limitless (and using a synth/keyboard, but that's a whole other thing), it does potentially lead to too many options, and isn't very road-worthy, but then again, I'm only really mucking about with it at home for the sake of mucking about rather than Bass gigging so it's all good for that.

It's basically an extreme tremolo where you can change the effect patterns....not particularly useful for Bass! But I quite liked mucking about adding it to pad type effects (lots of reverb and delays) and then 'slicing' the sound. I expect an expression pedal to blend it in would be good.

Nice one, yeah the Core does a good fuzz, and the Octaver tracks very well. If I'm being picky I am a bit more of a fan of analogue octaver sounds - until they warble, which they do quite a lot! The core octaver is up there with the best of the digital ones though. I couldn't get the Bass synth sound I'm usually after (Minimoog sort of stuff) or envelope filter (MF101 & Mu-Tron), but that might be my programming skills lacking - with 3x split paths and up to 24 effects blocks I'm sure some great synthy sounds can be made, I got it doing some great atmospheric/pad type stuff with a lot of reverb, and using stuff like the swell and slicer, and and octaver and fuzz and gates do some good more agro sounding stuff.

The Octamizer and other analogue octavers I've used (MXR, Markbass) do all tend to do that 'warble' thing with sustained notes. You can limit that a bit with playing style - clean/muting, pickup selection, dial back the tone, quite high string action to get rid of as much buzz as possible, and string choice - trying to reduce harmonics and focus on the fundamental. Certain strings often seem better than others, and not playing notes below about low A on a 4 string. Although that is a lot of things, I'm yet to find a digital octaver that sounds quite as good as the Octamizer when it's working well. The OC5 did track and sustain notes much better though. Some of those same tracking problems are similar for synth pedals but generally I found the C4 to work well on sustained notes.

I've gone through quite a few of them and in some ways it's much of a muchness for the sounds when played through an Amp/Cab and the rest of a band, so a big part for me is size/practicality. I'm liking the Boss GX-10 as it fits in my gigbag and has pretty good visibility and controls. In this mode I basically have a preset for each footswitch, can use the knobs for EQ, and the expression pedal for tuner/volume and 'toe press' for different things on each preset (e.g. engaging Reverb in the 'dub' setting, or a boost in 'clean' setting). For me doing cover band stuff, that is enough. Someone in a jam band wanting a footswitch for each effect, or a professional band needing more outputs would probably want something bigger.

So, Collider with a makeover?!

Yeah, great isn't it! I was playing Dawn Penn's 'You don't love me (no no no)' with the band at rehearsal the other day and we unexpectedly just keep going around - guitar solo, around again, vocals, around again, brass solo, around again, only bass and drums, around again...and kept going, like group meditation. And for me, standing in front of a loud cab and just repeating that dubby bass that you can feel almost as much as hear, locking in with the drums and everyone else, nothing virtuoso or flashy - providing a hypnotic foundation is my favourite thing with bass playing. 'meditate with bass weight'

C4 XL (in the hardware of the Ventris & Collider pedals)

A couple of my favourites are the Creation Audio Grizzly Bass (partly probably because it looks cool!), and the Idiotbox Landphil. But I suppose it is like 'what is the best food/bike/car etc' in that there isn't a definitive answer, depends on specific tastes and needs.

Yes, I now remember that the Core does something similar. I understand it more when there's that limited space and no touchscreen so I didn't find it so annoying, but with the GX on manual mode pressing the onscreen effect block that's assigned to a footswitch only turns the effect on/off - which is exactly what the footswitch also does, so what's the point?! It'd be so easy to have a setting where pressing or long-pressing the touchscreen block opens the parameter editing. Frustrating.

Something that's annoying me more than it should are interface related things: Say I want to edit parameters of the Overdrive - from this view: ....I'd assume long press that 'overdrive' area on the touchscreen? Nothing. Long press footswitch? Nothing. Press the knob buttons in? Nothing. Press some other buttons or combination of buttons as quick access? Nope.... this is annoying as it feels like wasted opportunities. What you do need to do is a somewhat convoluted bit of menu diving. It generally feels that more thought could go into the interface: The knobs are all push-button which could be great - but that feature usually does nothing, that feels a waste of hardware. Long-press footswitches or screen buttons aren't generally a feature, why not? Again, a real waste of the hardware potential and presumably something simple to add to the software. 'up' and 'down' footswitches together in the main views access tuner - but so does 'heel down' on the expression pedal so the footswitches together should have the option of doing other things like opening the looper, or opening a tap tempo mode, 'page' view scrolling (which includes tuner), or accessing 'bank' mode ('bank' mode is a good feature but let down by the interface with the need to menu dive to access and once in that mode it needs menu diving to get back to 'manual' mode). Tempo BPM is displayed on the touchscreen - pressing it does nothing though. To access it you need menu diving then turn a knob to set tempo - it does not allow tap tempo in this way (it'd be a good use of the knob as a button press). Also, how hard would it be to allow a flashing dot on the screen to display tempo vs needing to assign a footswitch for that flashing light? They seem like easy and obvious things to make it more user-friendly, it's frustrating as the hardware has the capability and I can't imagine it is a difficult software thing. It means that for tap tempo you have to assign a footswitch (tip: use the 'carryover' to make it apply to more than one preset, then you can have a 'tap tempo' preset and then scroll back to your other presets to still have the 3 footswitches available). The preset name screen has plenty of space to show what the 'C1' footswitch will engage, but it doesn't show you. Again, it'd seem a obvious and easy thing to implement, I'm not expecting big expensive new bits of hardware or software. On 'manual' mode the preset name is tiny (see where it says 'clean' in the picture above, it is about 3mm high - really tricky to see from 2 metres away) even without changing anything on the rest of the screen it'd be easy to make that text bigger and fill that space. Again, anyone testing it in a real life gigging sort of situation would surely have noticed that - and how hard would it be for the software to just put a bigger text size to fill that space?! You cannot assign the knobs to the 'global' EQ parameters, which to me is what they would be most useful for (I seem to remember that it can be done on the Core). And this might be more than just a simple interface improvement but it would be nice to be able to set the 'L' and 'R' outputs to mono and have them branch off from different parts in the signal chain, or use the headphone out for this. Then you could have an output to PA with cab sim, and another output to your Amp/Cab without it. A workaround is to use the effects loop for this, but you only have one effects loop to use. It is a shame as these are relatively small but annoying things as they seem quite obvious and I expect would be easy/cheap implement, they would change it from being a good but slightly flawed multi-fx to an excellent one. Fingers crossed someone from Boss reads this and all of these are implemented in a software update.....I'm not holding my breath for that though! Overall it is decent, top marks from the team making the hardware and the sounds are good so I will be keeping it and I would recommend it......but the team changing the software interface from GX-100 to GX-10 basically hit copy/paste (and it wasn't even ideal on the GX-100), slackers!

I've not used the B6, but had been considering it vs the GX-10 and I've owned a few Boss and Zoom Multi-FX pedals. Personally, I chose the GX-10 because of: Boss build quality/reliability. I haven't had issues with Zoom things but Boss stuff feels more sturdy/reliable to me. Boss sound/effects: I might be wrong, but I think the GX-10 has the BB-1X and BC-1X software within it - both were on my shopping list, the BC-1X has almost universally good reviews, whereas I've not been much of a fan of Zoom compressors and I find compressors to be a key thing for Bass. GX-10 seems more powerful for effects chains/routing: 15x effect blocks vs B6 6x effect blocks. GX-10 can have a parallel effect signal path, B6 can not. Size: GX-10 is small enough to fit in my gigbag, or could potentially be added to a bigger pedalboard. Expression pedal: GX-10 isn't just a normal expression pedal: Heel down = tuner, toe press = switch to engage effects, can program quite complex things like adjusting parameters past a certain sweep of the pedal. The B6 wins out of some things though, the main ones seem to be more in/Outs & more footswitches. And although they are approx. the same price new, there are now second hand B6's available (one for £200 on here).

Yeah, I'm not sure if the superior brain of the 1000 is just used for the increased amount of blocks and split paths available and sample rate, or if it also makes a difference to things like pitch shift latency - I don't think Boss advertise as that, but I'd kind of hope that more processing power is also used for stuff like that.