SumOne

With the TM5 it seems string spacing can be from 18mm-19.5.mm. But does anyone here know if you could have the 19mm+ spacing between all strings? It seems like the obvious answer is yes, but I've been caught out with this before on an ibanez - individually strings could be moved the maximum distance apart, but having all five of them that far apart meant the B and G were were easily slipping off the edge of the frets.

I went from a 4 string Fender Jazz to an Ibanez SRMS805 which is a great Bass and was quite an easy transition (fanned frets were no issue), only issue for me was the small (16.5mm) string spacing, but some people prefer that. They are about £900 new but you'd probably get 2nd hand for about £500 and it'd hold that value if you didn't get on with it and sold it.

I'm after a 70s passive Jazz Bass tone (playing stuff like Reggae , Funk, Blues) but in a 5 string (probably 35"+) with wide string spacing, about £1400 budget. I generally hear that Fender aren't necessarily the best for 5 strings and this review for the Lakland 55-02 got me thinking it's the next Bass for me: "Tonewise, this bass is a chameleon. It can mimic the P, PJ, J, Jaco and StingRay sounds to a certain degree. Lakland fairly admits that the bass was designed to mimic those classic models in the first place. The overall design of the bass and the advanced coil split capabilities of the humbucker offers a tonal versatility second to none. The humbucker isn’t on the StingRay sweet spot. Instead, it covers the 60’s and 70’s Jazz Bass bridge pickup positions. Therefore; the authenticity of it’s 60/70 JB is better than the authenticity of it’s StingRay sound. The neck single coil has a split coil design, but is still a single coil pickup. Therefore; it leans towards the Jazz Bass neck sound rather than an old mean P-Bass. Combining those factors, you are getting a 60’s + 70’s Jazz Bass in a single instrument, which can also get into the P & MM ballpark." https://www.lakland.com/testimonials/review-of-lakland-skyline-series-55-02/ Do you agree with that? Or the DJ 5 is the other one I'm considering. I know trying one out for myself is the only real answer but I'm trying to narrow down the field though seeing as I can't try out Basses in shops and I'm a bit impatient with Lockdown practice time on my hands.

Nice one, so you reckon the BT2 has enough mids and highs to be a decent PA? that's good to know....there's a BT2 for sale on here for £600 and I guess it should have at least a 600W amp (2nd hand for about £400) so I could have a decent Bass rig for about £1k that could also double up as a Reggae DJ rig (perhaps combining with my current PA amp and speakers for the DJ stuff, but ideally it could replace them to partly fund it....and as I think my wife might kill me if I fill the house with many more speakers!).

I reckon this is complete. I really like all of these pedals and there's no room for any more unless I level up my Tetris skills.

To confuse things ideally I would like to be able to use the Amp and Cabs not just to play Reggae via the Bass, but to also use with my Decks and DJ mixer (and perhaps combined with my current PA Poweramp and speakers) when I DJ Reggae. The DJ mixer has separate main output and monitor outputs so could possibly run the PA Poweramp and speakers via one output and the Bass Amp and Cabs via the other. Or possibly something like the Barefaced Big Baby covers the whole spectrum better and it could replace the PA gear, but them I assume a Bass specific Amp isn't going to be ideal for that.

No sign of a Dubster 2, but there is a Barefaced Big One which I've just enquired about - looks good. Almost anything would be an improvement on my current setup of PA Poweramp and speakers (saved slightly as it's fed via tube DI and a Cab sim pedals).

Nice one, I've got my eye out for a Dubster 2, they seem pretty rare though.

Cheers, that was my long term plan so am considering a bit of future proofing for the amp to handle it - my understanding was that they would combine okay but it looks like I'll have to give this more thought. (GAK's upselling pitch for the Orange 115 is "Combine with one of the AD200B heads and a OBC410 cab and you'll have a completely Orange, 100% floor-punishing bass rig!") .....I might not go for Orange at all though. I mostly play reggae/dub so eventually want to build up to something that can push out a lot of sub and rattle chests and assumed 15" were best for that.

I just got this from an audio blog: "Many sound engineers will say that “underpowering”, or using amplifiers that are too small for the speakers, is worse than “overpowering” them. Although they have good reasons to say such a thing and in practice speakers do tend to break mostly when the amp is being driven beyond its operating range, the truth is a bit less straightforward than that; basically, overdriving a small amp can actually release as much power to the speaker as a big amp, and it isn’t the distortion per se that breaks the speakers but rather the increased power of the signal at different frequencies............It’s usually a good call to err on the side of caution by choosing a bigger amplifier than strictly required; it will happily output the correct power cleanly, and if it eventually runs loud enough to break the speaker, that’s a good sign that the speaker needs to be replaced with something bigger. A smaller amp would have been clipping at that point, and most likely would have eventually broken the speaker anyway." https://proaudioblog.co.uk/power-ratings-2-why-speakers-break/ So I guess although something less powerful than 1000W would be probably plenty, it's not necessarily a bad thing to get the 1000W and just keep it turned low. (this one I've got my eye on is a fair bit cheaper 2nd hand than the 500W brand new).

Nice one, cheers. Yeah I wasn't considering the Watts per speaker rather than per cab but that makes sense. There's a 1000 Watt Terror for sale at what seems an alright price (£400) which I'm considering as long as it's not overkill that's going to blow any speakers I get in future.

Do I understanding correctly for this example: 4x10 600W 8 Ohms + 1x15 400W 8 Ohms = Two 8 Ohm cabs wired in parallel have a total impedance of 4 Ohms. Orange Terror Bass 500W is 250 Watts into 8 Ohms or 500 Watts into an 4 Ohms (but that is split 250W per cab). So that Amp only ever actually powers each cab up to 250W, meaning the 4x10 will only ever be powered to less than half of it's capacity and the 1x15 at less that two thirds. ......so potentially something like the the Orange Terror Bass 1000 Watt version wouldn't be complete overkill (as long as not turning up beyond about 3/4) because it actually gives a maximum of 500W power to each 8 Ohm Cab?

It has a footswitch to change the order of the loops - so one loop could have chorus and octaver (that you can click both on/off with one footswitch) and the other loop could have distortion, you can either have chorus and/or octaver feed into distortion or click to reverse it and have distortion feed into into chorus and/or octaver....as you can have several pedals in each loop it opens up a lot of combinations, it took me a while to work out what pedals always sounds good in front or behind each other to put in one loop and which ones sound good either way around and need to go in separate loops. Or if you don't think the reverse thing is that useful for you and you just want to turn on/off several pedals in a loop with one click it's probably worth considering what loops you would like your pedals to be in (I guess the compressor and tuner probably won't be going into loops). Bright Onion do everything from 1 up to 12. Or perhaps you'll want to blend in your clean signal to loops. There are pedals for that by Bright Onion, or the Boss LS-2 or the EHX Switchblade or tri-parallel mixer, or Old Blood Noise Endeavors Signal Blender. I went through all this about a month ago, my conclusion was the dual reverse was mot useful to me but if I had the ££ and pedal board space I would have gone for the Boss ES-5.

Not many loop switchers do the reverse loop thing so it depends if that's something you think would be useful. Personally I thought 2 loops with the reverse was more useful to me than 5 loops with no reverse. As far as I know the ES-5 is the cheapest option for 5 loops and being able to reverse loop ordering but its cost and size are disadvantages.

A loop switcher is indeed what you need to turn on/off 2 or more pedals at the same time with one footswitch. Bright Onion pedals are good for this. I got to a similar situation about a month ago (9 pedals) and I got something slightly different from them worth considering: The Bright Onion dual reverse looper https://www.brightonion.co.uk/dual-reverse-looper/ for £65. It was handmade and sent to me within a few days (you get to customise your LED colours). It's good. I have octave, chorus, envelope filter in one loop and distortion pedals in another: can get a couple of pedals in a loop ready to be switched on/off with one footswitch rather than tap dancing, and cuts pedals out of the signal chain when the loops aren't activated. Plus you can reverse the order of the loops with a footswitch - that opens up a lop of options. I heard good things about the Boss ES-5 which can do all that with 5 loops, but that costs £330 and I didn't feel I had enough pedals to justify it.

Latent Lemon https://www.latentlemon.co.uk/ (within that link it says '........also stock pedals from my most excellent fellow UK builders Tate FX, Zander Circuitry, Raygun FX, Bad Penny FX, Hylight') Bright Onion do switchers https://www.brightonion.co.uk/

Nice work. I've just bought one from @dodge_bass and am happy with it but I was already mucking about to do this same thing but in a much more basic mechanical way with technics lego so if I click 'colour' it also clicks 'boost'..... I failed and gave up after about an hour though so I'm not sure I've got the skills/patience to do what you've done! I was also considering just changing the switches for more heavy duty things that I can do more easily by foot without damaging them- breaker switch type things.

Yeah, I guess it's been designed so other hardware can be added so that's fine....have added some things to my shopping list!

I am really liking the C4, I just wish it had a bit more hardware control as there's so much going on, at a minimum to be able to use the 'alt' for control 1 and 2. Feels like this size pedal and controls works for the Aftershock, and perhaps the Spectrum, but the C4 needs more hardware control if you don't want to keep hooking up your phone/laptop or buying additional controllers. Ideally for me it would be the same size as something like the Collider (6 knobs, 2 footswitches, 2 toggle switches), and include a patch number indicator or a small screen like on the small Zoom pedals. In fact, Zoom pedals like the MS60B manage to give a lot of control and information for low cost in a small enclosure. I guess there's the option to add something like the disaster area footswitch and a midi controller with knobs - but doing both of those doubles the cost and uses more space than if the C4 had a bit more hardware control and information. I think I'll be in the market at least for a Disaster Area micro midi in a few months.

Excellent, thanks. I have just started mucking about editing so will get onto that. I'm pretty sure that with a bit of time doing things like that the C4 will cover everything the M82 and Octamizer did, plus all the additional synth stuff makes for a great pedal.

It's a great synth pedal. The only other synth pedal I've owned is the Boss SYB-5 - the C4 does all those sounds and countless more with very low latency and good tracking. Using it to replace an Octamizer and MXR M82 is a slightly more tricky choice: Octaver: I'd gone through a lot of octave pedals to get to the Aguilar Octamizer which I think has the most usable and natural (least synthy) octave down tones, also can be ran clean to use as a tone control. I haven't found a C4 preset (yet) that replicates the Octamizer, some things very close though. This isn't a deal breaker as I usually use an Octaver with something like distortion or filter after it so the subtleties get lost anyway. Envelope filter: It does loads of envelope filter very well. Thanks to Quatschmacher for the 'Purple 2' which is the best I've found at replicating the M82 and is very very close. There's possibly a slight bit of M82's mojo that gets lost- perhaps that's down to the limited hands on control, or is me being sentimental and I'll just need more time to get used to it. The main issue I can see is that to fully replace my Octave and filter pedals like-for-like would need the ability to click with my foot for either/or both - I'd need an extra footswitch (like disaster area micro midi), a workaround is I have 3 separate toggle switch presets assigned (filter, octaver, octaver + filter), it's not quite the same as clicking by foot though. And to get all their knob controls to hand I'd also need some type of midi controller.....price creeps up and any pedal board space saving gets lost. Also has: Distortion: Good range of distortion, probably won't be replacing any of my distortion pedals but is decent enough. Tremolo: Can work well as a tremolo pedal, I'd like time-based effects like echo but they don't seem to be an option. Quatschmacher's Upright sounds. ....and probably loads of other things I haven't found yet. The C4 is a certainly a keeper, a great synth pedal. It doesn't fully replace all the hands-on control of separate Octaver and Filter pedals but adding some additional control pedals could mostly solve that. I guess in my ideal world the C4 would have some extra mappable knobs, and an extra footswitch or two go through presets - obviously that would make it bigger and more expensive though and can buy those controllers separately so can't really complain.

Perfect!

Nice! Well deserved. So far so good but I've only spent a couple of hours on it. I'll be happy if I get a decent sounding envelope filter, octaver, octaver+envelope filter, and the upright sound - and your presets seem to cover that! Bonus if I can get some Parliament 'Flashlight' synth (which I expect is possible), and using it just for time based effects seems like a good possibility too.