thodrik

Totally over the top. However, you only live once and the three ‘big’ amps and cab were pretty much my dream amps when I was a teenager and before class D amps were a mainstream thing. Before I finished the soundproofed garage last year I was still using the same Park by Marshall 30 watt combo I got when I was 12. So essentially I have changed my practice rig once in 22 years.

The ad for the Trace V8 is haunting me at the moment...I hope somebody buys it quickly. The ad for the Trace V6 less so, so I bought one in 2013....

You are right, probably need a bright box on top of that cab.

I would have liked a 1x18 and a 1x12 speaker in a single enclosure with an internal crossover to deliver full range response but that is because I have been looking at old Trace Elliot brochures and have lost all sense of reason and sanity.

Drop C is an awkward tuning due to the difference in string tensions between the strings. Most off the shelf string packs, even ones 'designed' for downtuning are generally designed for tuning all the strings down by the same amount, rather than tuning the low string a whole step lower than the other strings. That is the reason I didn't like the DR DDT 115-55 strings for Drop C, the high strings were way too tight and the low string were way too floppy. However I love the DDT guitar strings. D'addario have a 'balanced tension' set of 120-50 (120, 90. 67, 50) strings which is great for D standard and drop C. Also much cheaper than going the Newtone or Kalium route as you can get a set for about £20. Another decent but not too expensive set is the GHS Bass Boomers Heavy set 115-55 which I generally thought was good value at £20 quid. I used the D'addarios pretty much exclusively for 7-8 years until recently. However, I did find that I was changing the D'addario strings a lot when gigging and rehearsing (generally every 4-6 weeks) so the cost added up! However, the cost of the D'addarios was less than I would have been paying if I had been changing custom made sets for double the price every 6 weeks! I now use a set of single Elixirs (130, 95, 70 50) for my drop C tuning uses. They are expensive but they last for ages provided you like the initial tone and feel (I do). A 130 would be a bit tight for using for D standard, so if I needed the bass to do D standard too I would probably use a 125 or 120. Buying singles of your favourite brands of strings is also a good idea once you have worked out your preferred tension. Again, D'addario have an online string tension app but there are plenty of other ones available. String tension itself isn't the be all and end all (one gauge will feel way different on one bass compared to another), but it is helpful place to start. Pyramid Strings have a drop C set too but I have never used them.

To be honest, much as I like valve amps, I find that sometimes an emulation of a full valve amp (i.e. capturing preamp and power tube overdrive) will deliver a more authentic 'all valve' sound than placing a single 12AX7 valve into the preamp circuit and labelling it as 'all tube drive circuit'. It really depends on how good the overall circuit is, rather than whether it is a real valve of not. Laney have been running their Nexus Tube and Fet range for years. So I have no issues with them on trying something new here with class D technology.

I love Free. I started loving Free because of the bass, so much so that I bought a 1974 Gibson EB3 when I was 15 (it wasn't much money then). In the last few years I have been playing a lot of guitar and have really gained an appreciation for Paul Kossoff. I even ended up selling my current guitar and bought a Les Paul, though I generally use it to play downtuned rock and doom music rather than classic blues rock. I would highly recommend the Songs of Yesterday boxset. Some of the 'alternate' takes are better than the official 'released' versions.

Quite cool as a concept and saves a pedal if you are playing a 'drive pedal always on' type of gig. I think Manson did a Matt Bellamy guitar with inbuilt ZVEX fuzz or something. Not something I need, or necessarily something I want, but certainly something I would like to try.

The 2 and 4 ohm inputs on the V6 can make finding cabs tricky, since generally most mainstream 2x10, 1x15, 4x10s, 2x12s tend to be 8 ohms. I have read that the V6 will cope with a single 8ohm load but I have not tried this as the repair costs if the amp does not cope with an 8 ohm load are astronomical. The Super 12 is pretty much an ideal cab in my opinion. I think that the original VType cabs were sealed but I have used the V6 with mostly ported cabs and it sounds great. I currently use my V6 with a Mesa 6x10 (non-sealed). Complete overkill but great sound. Ideally I would get a 4 ohm 4x10 or 2x12. Something like a Bergantino/Aguilar or Mesa would be great. The V6 is a great amp. I have had one since 2012. It has only needed revalving once, though that was bloody expensive. Loud as hell, very clean sounding so not much pre-amp 'grind' but with an overdrive pedal it can certainly get very aggressive. I don't really like the Deep and Bright switches though so they generally remain off.

The Matamp GT2 to me is very much Matamp's more 'modern' two channel approach to guitar amps as opposed to their normal single channel approach. It would probably work well enough for bass. If you wanted a Matamp amp that would work for bass and/or guitar though I would probably look at the GT150 or the GT120. Just my opinion though.

I used to be in a band with a drummer who absolutely loved Death Grips, based from his love of the drummer Zach Hill's work in Hella. He is a pretty incredible drummer. I don't mind the music but I totally went off the band after they either no-showed or half-arsed a bunch of live performances, with the Lollapalooza no-show/debacle being the worst. Owing to that I really stopped paying much attention to them after about 2015.

Hmm, I always fancied a Eden World Tour head as the preset for it in the Bass Pod I had was really nice. As stated above by others, it is strange that Marshall have no proper bass products. The VBA was a lovely but utterly impractical amp. DBS stuff is nice too. However, Marshall are pretty slow at innovating. They really haven't delivered a new 'flagship' 50/100 watt guitar head since the JVM series over a decade ago. The Code/Origin stuff is fine and all but I didn't really like them when I tried them. However a Code/Origin bass offering would at least give them some market presence on the bass front. Perhaps Marshall thought they were best off focusing on guitar products rather than trying to compete against companies like Ashdown. Like even if Marshall spend a lot of R+D money on a bass head, would it actually sell enough to recoup the R+D costs?

The only 'dream' bass I really didn't like was a Fender Custom Shop Jazz. £3.5k for a passive Jazz. The aging was nice, it played okay but the single coil hum was pretty damn loud and I really didn't like the 7.5" radius and the set up of the bass was just borderline 'alright'. There was a genuine 1975 Jazz in the same shop that was twice as nice for half the price. So that experience just took a Fender Custom Shop off my list of dream basses. Most of the time my dream basses have delivered. I have only bought two basses in the last 10 years though (Vigier Arpege and Sadowsky NYC fivers strings) so my turnover of instruments is very slow.

I mean, I listen to lots of heavily downtuned 'doom' metal, so stuff like Yob, Inter Arma, Sleep and the like. However, I find them very easy to listen to as they are not unlike classic rock in terms of production: big valve amps, no drum triggers, no obscene amounts of compression on the recording and there is actually a lot of dynamics in the material (in my opinion obviously). However, it isn't something I listen to at home since my wife doesn't like that type of stuff, though I can generally get away with Mastodon, High on Fire and Red/Blue album era Baroness, which is my general 'acceptable' level of heavyness. However, my daughters taste in Peppa Pig usually wins out so I am pretty familiar with that too. I generally don't listen to much modern production djent metal, so basically anything with loads of drum triggers or has that highly polished Roadrunner America modern metal mix (i.e Five Finger Death Punch/Lamb of God type stuff, I would say Mudvayne too but the bassist is utterly incredible so they always get a pass). Not because it is too heavy, I just don't like that kind of rock/metal.

Thanks for the insight. That will probably save me some cash!

I was the same. I used D'Addario for years but the amount of money I was spending on strings was insane when I had two bands using two completely different tunings. I have switched to Elixir now and I have had the same strings on my Vigier for over 18 months, when before I was changing strings every 6 weeks. So while one Elixir five string set was expensive, it is much cheaper than a £25 set of strings every couple of months! I might try the D'Addario coated strings next. To the OP, yes, the packaging on the Elixir sets are a bit inconsistent and not the best.

Rackmount effects and preamps are certainly not very prevalent now. Not so much a fad as a sign of changing times. I still want to play a gig with 12 stacked Trace Elliot brightboxes powered by a Trace Elliot rackmounted preamp and separate Trace Elliot poweramp.

I cost me £300 to revalve and bias a Trace Elliot V6 in 2014 with new power amp tubs and that was with 6x6550s power amp tubes. The VBA has 8 power amp tubes and 4 pre-amp tubes. The VBA heads are great, though impractically powerful if you require power amp distortion

I would say Tool, but given that rounds out to three purchases in twenty years it is hardly a big commitment. At the moment: - High on Fire; - Mastodon - Inter Arma - Yob - Karnivool (though on the basis of the Tool comment above) - Metallica, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, The Cult, Baroness (out of habit rather than devotion); - Red Fang - Summoner - Graveyard - Lowrider - Truckfighters (though now on hiatus-ish)

Thanks, that is brilliant. I was really wondering about the differences in neck profile and feel of the frets from 34'' to 35 '' scale, so you have pretty much covered everything I am looking for. I love the look of the dual soapbar pickups on the Thumb 6. The dual j-style pickups on the 5 string Thumbs don't do anything for me personally. I am guessing that the Spector feels a bit more balanced? I have heard that Thumbs can suffer from a bit of neck dive. My current 5 strings are a Vigier and a Sadowsky neither of whom offer a 6 string (Vigier used to but not for well over 10 years). A Spector Forte is probably the most likely as I like the stripped down finish compared to the 'bling' of the glossed finishes on the Euro or full on US made NS series. I do love the 'woody' look of the Thumbs though so I keep coming back to them, as well as the fact that the GPS bolt on 6 string Thumb can be bout for just over £2000-£2,300 new which seems respectable in the current market. Luckily I just built a patio so the funds for the six string are no longer there. However, this is something I will be continuing to consider for the next couple of years so many thanks!

This is pretty irrelevant to the thread @Paulhauser, but could you be kind enough to provide a brief comparison between the Warwick Thumb 6 and your Spector Forte 6? The reason I ask is that both Spector and Warwick are options I am considering as a first six string in the future and it is highly unlikely that I will find them in a shop to try out side by side! Cheers!

This is a real shame. Particularly considering Mesa had left their previous distributor and it appeared that prices for Mesa gear were going to be considerably more affordable. Alas, while it appears that the the gear is going to be more affordable it appears that the gear is not being made for anyone outside of the US for the foreseeable future. I'm conscious that there are supply problems, however there are several other US manufacturers who are still exporting products and Mesa are presently the only company I am aware of who are deciding to simply not fulfil any international orders whatsoever. However, the position taken isn't actually as bad as the complete lack of communication to Andertons until such time that Andertons had probably secured a whole host of orders worth presumably tens of thousands of pounds going back the previous 6-7 months since the new distribution model was launched (amid a certain degree of fanfare). It appears that there has been a complete lack of transparency to international dealers like Andertons. I'm conscious that we are still in the process of coming out of a massive global pandemic with shortages to all manner of materials (I struggled to find concrete and sand to build a patio!) but the approach by Mesa is particularly poor. I am sure that Mesa have underlying reasons and that the parts shortages issue is a real issue, but the way in which the reasons were communicated (or rather not communicated) is disappointing and frankly, a bit Gibson-esque.

I have a background in playing baseball bat Precision basses, wide necked Sadowsky five strings and double basses with neck dimensions akin to a trunk of a small tree. I would have thought that the narrower string spacing on standard Warwicks would make the 6 string necks more manageable? I know Warwick do broadneck options as well though, which might be a struggle to navigate.

Non-Warwick owner here, but if I ever buy another bass it is likely to be a five or six string Thumb. Stunning basses.

Damn it, I knew I had forgot something!