Jack

Considering how slick most of the Andertons videos are, that one was dire. I know NAMM is a difficult environment too say the least but that shouldn't stop someone holding a microphone still or knowing what they're talking about.

There's DIY kits to take a lot of the work out the design for you. If you actually want an internal preamp that you'd usually find inside a bass, but in a pedal, then what about the many variations of the Stingray preamp? To my mind, a preamp is a preamp no matter where it is, so there's loads of options. Super trivial to have two of them in one enclosure. Keeping with the kit theme, you could even use an A/B kit in the same box as both preamps. Hell, combine it with a mixer kit too! Many ways to skin this cat.

Great idea. Smaller is better! Should you ever need to, you can pick up dinosaur cabs like 8x10" to pair with your Elf for pennies these days so it'd be trivial to bring back the rock rig whenever you wanted.

That's crazy. You remember when a decent amp was £500+? Assuming, of course, that it's actually a decent amp.

There's a drive and a compressor or two, same as everybody else. That DI/headphone/reamping box looks like a decent catch though. There's loads of competing products sure but as far as I know the only ones at that price point are chinese cheapies. To have something at that price from a name like Ashdown could be a coup.

Yes, +4dBu is line level and the DI output on your head is mic level, try the -10dBu setting on the Apogee. 🙂

Thanks guys. I went on the Aldi website to buy a £13 sack truck and I ended up with a tool box, a power extension lead and a multi tool. And I also ended up with £56 less than I had this morning...

Ouch, that does seem like you'd be against them after that, I know I would! What were you using them for? Rack to floorboard or something else? I dunno, I might have more of a concern for mine if they were 'necessary', you know? But honestly, if the cable between my rack and the floorboard fails (which hasn't happened to me at all in over 3 years of Kemper or Helix use) then I could wait until a set break to replace it without worry. The floorboard isn't mission critical for me I guess. The nice ones that I use are £8 on Amazon, and if one wants they can be had for a lot less than that. If they ever broke I wouldn't be upset.

I've only had the helix for about a year but I had a kemper for ages before that and I've never had a problem. They're light, cheap, replaceable and and I've never had one break. They use them for digital snakes all the time, albeit often with dual ethernet cable runs as backups I guess. Anyway I was only partly being serious... 🙂

I getcha. I thought you meant modding the preamp not modding the cable. Thanks.

Most amps have the clip light after the gain stage, so (as you were expecting) if you turn down the gain you get fewer clipping events. Some amps (including the venerable GK RB series) have the clip light before the gain as they figure you might purposefully want to drive the preamp. These clip lights therefore only watch the input and will be effected by the pad as you've noticed or by simply turning the bass guitar down. Regardless, driving a preamp shouldn't cause any mechanical problems. In this case if it sounds alright don't worry about it.

Yes, yes it would. As an alternatives, might I suggest either BrightOnion (who make the BEST routing solutions on the planet) or, one the other end of the spectrum, a DIY solution.

Simple, swap to the helix rack. 😛

This thread is proof that being in the majority of a vote doesn't necessarily make something the correct choice. I'm trying to think of another example, maybe a newsworthy and topical one, to prove my point... 😀

The RCF 3 series will probably be the equal of a bass combo that costs the same amount, which is to say that they'll do a lot for stage monitoring and would cover a quiet gig by themselves, but there will be some situation when they'd be underpowered. If you want one speaker to rule them all you'll need to step up the RCF 7 series. They're closer to £1000 but then so is a really great bass rig. The savings to using an FRFR over an amp are usually weight, size and dispersion, not so much pure, hard cash.

Hah, this shows you how long it's been since we switched to using the guitarist's laptop and I stopped paying attention! EBS is right, ethernet is just for control. My point about the behringer only recording stereo to a usb memory stick still stands, you have to use a pc and a daw (connected via USB not ethernet!!) to have all 18 tracks pre processing. So you do still need a seperate PC to have 'proper' recording. The A&H and a few other mixers can do every track straight to a memory stick which is the superior solution IMO. One less thing to worry about.

Yes, it's technically superior for sure. However, the major drawback is that recording via ethernet requires another pc on the other end of the ethernet cable. You've then got to plug that pc into the wall, plug the ethernet cable in, turn it on, fire up a DAW, setup the channels, etc. It's much easier to just plug a usb memory stick into a port on the mixer.

Oh man, too right. We used to use a rackmounted pc with Ubuntu Studio on it, now we use the guitarist's laptop. The Behringer will do every channel (pre everything) but only over ethernet. The advantage to your Mackie (or I want the A&H) is that it does it direct to USB. My Behringer will only do stereo L+R to USB. Still it means we get every gig for just us to listen to (go over mistakes and that) and when we can bothered to set up a proper laptop we can have everything to mix later in a DAW.

You're welcome, sorry I quoted your post but I'm aware that it was also aimed at @Frank Blank. If you think of those rackmount mixers as mixers then they're versatile bits of kit. If you start to think of them as loads of inputs connected to a really flexible and reasonably powerful PC then they're truly astounding. I use the XR18 in two bands (with a scene for each band instantly recallable) and I love it. I lust after the Allen and Heath QUSB. Next time, maybe.

The problem with that is that anything else plugged into the mixer would need an identical channel in each scene. As in, say you have a vocal mix plugged in channel 1. When you change a scene to move from bass to guitar, you'll need an identical channel 1 set up for the vocal mic in the new scene. If youv'e changed a setting or something on the vocal channel it'll get really tedious having to scroll through lots of scenes to change it in all of them. The other thing to do (as long as you have more channels than instruments) is have a virtual channel per instrument in the mixer (say, channel 1 for bass, channel 2 for guitar, etc) and then you can use midi to assign any given physical input on the mixer to any virtual channel. That way each instrument's channel would always be live and you would negate any scene issues. So there's one cable from your place on stage to the mixer, but you're using midi to essentially really quickly unplug that cable from one channel and plug in into the next. Mind you, I'd just have a channel per instrument and live with having several cables, no midi needed!....

It has to be the absolute winner in terms of cm^3 per £. You could land a helicopter on it. You know, that might be a selling point. Maybe.

You say that as if you don't...