bassman7755

Ah fair enough, so it looks like your not doing parallel clean+low / OD+highs as I assumed but more like bi-amping your basic tone. I'm currently investigating various means of doing clean low / OD highs "live" at the moment (without using 2 amps ...) as its what I use for recording, been looking at the likes of the BF machinist and Darkglass microtubes 7. Probably a discussion for the effects forum though.

This probably, the single centre position pickup gives a natural mid emphasis which trades off some bite on lower notes.

Yes but with two light cabs vs one heavier one you can carry them one at a time, or maybe just use one for rehearsals or smaller gigs. Plus 2 vertically stacked smaller cabs will generally give better dispersion characteristics and auditability at ear level that a single cab on the floor. Not convinced by this. Modern amps generally have a massive surplus of power so 8 vs 4 ohm is somewhat moot.

A bass amp is generally a fairly straight forward beast and doesn't really do anything magic with the sound, with the EQ set flat your amp will sound pretty much the same as a bass amp setup similarly especially through headphones. The EQ / tone controls on your guitar amp wont work very well for bass though as they are aimed a different set of frequencies. I think its probably worth getting a rumble and selling your amp, as they both go for similar money you would probably not be out of pocket if you bought second hand, just don't expect a miraculous change in sound, mainly just a more useful set of tone controls.

This is exactly what the Barefaced Machinist pedal does isn't it ? (not the cab part obviously)

What is it that you perceive as the deficiency or limitation with your current setup ?

What I'm trying to develop/refine is the ability to instantly play any arbitrary sequence of notes that I hear, as opposed to learning and retaining actual melodic ideas (if that makes sense).

This nicely demonstrates what I've said elsewhere - that movement that you can see, you cant hear so its just wasted energy an wear and tear on your speakers.

Not so much a thing nowadays but guitarists tuning by harmonics used to grind my gears, thing is youre just on to a looser trying to educate someone on the spot about intricacies of natural harmonics vs the even tempered scale.

Interesting, In my experience the nut is the most common thing I see wrong on guitar and bass setups. Every bass and guitar I've ever had has had the nut cut too high so I've had to cut the slots down and/or lower the nut on pretty much all of them. I'm probably a but OCD about it to be honest but a high nut grinds my gears something rotten.

Haha thanks, obvious in hind sight, anyway found this ... https://random-music-generators.herokuapp.com/melody Absolutely brilliant for my intended purpose of practicing hearing and playing random tunes cold.

Even on a well set up instrument open strings and fretted notes are always slightly out of tune with each other, its down to the basic physics of the instrument - a fretted note always has a slightly higher string tension than an open note. Despite what people may tell you you cannot fully compensate for this with intonation adjustment because its a non-linear effect, if you intonate the instrument to open and 12th fret then notes except open and 12th will be slightly out, if you intonate 1st and 13th frets then all frets will be in tune but the open will be slightly flat. This is why things like Feiten Tuning exist - it uses a "compensated" nut which slightly decrease the distance between nut slots and first fret to compensate for the open string flattening effect. Making sure that your nut as cut as low as possible will mitigate effect. I'm not completely sure but I think a higher action at the bridge actually helps (in combination with a low cut nut) as the tension increase would become more linear as you move up the finger board. Theoretically higher gauge strings also help as the fretted/unfretted tension disparity causes a smaller pitch error with higher tension strings. mind you I still use light strings and and a low action being the wimp that I am 😁

As per title, have been trying without success to find something that does this. Just to add than I do NOT want something that explicitly tests me on the melody by making me enter the notes on some on screen keyboard, I just want something that I can hit a button and it plays something random maybe within configurable upper and lower notes, then hit it again for another random phrase etc. Any suggestions welcome.

He is a monster player no doubt about it, a genuine virtuoso, and highly entertaining to boot. A know a lot of "serious" musician rag on him and davie504 but these are the guys who are getting the attention from the youtube generation of kids. I mean davie504 has nearly 10 million subs, that astonishing for a niche musical interest, only slightly less than BBC news !.

Why would it not ? do you seriously think this dude is coming at it from a perspective "oh look at me I can improve on the original" ?.

Well they are awful but thats kind of the whole point, its musical comedy.

Your just going to have take a punt, Alex's recommendations are generally on the money and you've got a 30 day trial so...

A well designed 10 loaded cab will have plenty of bottom end. At one point I scaled down my rig from a 4 x 10 plus 1 x 15 monster stack to single 2 x 10 cab (of much higher quality) and it was still plenty loud and deep enough for any conceivable pub/club gig with a suitable gutsy amp. EDIT: I say this as a 5-string player (low B) as well.

If you can "see" any excursion at all you need a high pass filter as your eyes can only see something move up to about 25hz above which it should just be a blur, so if you can see it then by definition you cant hear it and its just wasted energy and speaker compliance. RE the OPs point - using a well setup high pass filter will allow you have a lot more usable bass volume and depth from any given speaker to the point where you might not actually need to preplace them. Also worth noting that in cab design size matters but weight does not - all other things being equal a bigger cab can go lower and louder (more efficient) than a smaller one but thats purely a function of its size NOT its weight.

I've always liked my bass sound through headphones and hifi speakers more than how its sounded through "bass" speakers, of the latter my barefaced cabs as are least objectionable ones I've yet tried (within my very strict weight limit requirements). I set my tone using my IEMs and trust the speakers to do decent job of projecting that sound to everyone else. Pretty sure I would get on just fine using decently specced PA speakers if I really needed to, I recon a hi end pair of 12" PA speakers will handily outperform most bass gear for both sound and portability. Got me thinking that traditional bass speaker form factors were possibly driven more by the requirement to produce lots of noise cheaply and efficiently (as amps of the day didn't have power to spare) than to actually sound good.