thodrik

D'addario also do coated strings but I have never tried them. By all accounts I understand that D'addario also make the strings for Elixir who then carry out the signature Elixir coating. I will probably try them next if my current Elixirs go dead. I'm hoping that the Elixir issues get sorted out though.

Essentially, it seems that the the company who owns Elixir strings (W.R. Gore and Associates) are having difficulty sourcing the materials required to give the strings their coating. So there is presently a big shortage on Elixir strings. I would expect that it will be sorted out at some point soon. Philip McKnight (American Youtuber) did a brief video on it.

I think it would be more practical than a 1200 watt mono amp for me. Surely a 600 watt should be more than loud enough for most purposes even if it is class D?

1200 watts sounds ridiculously powerful. I wonder if in classic TE style it is actually be two separate 600 power sections with each power section assigned to a 'channel', either to be run in stereo or as a separate footswitchable 'clean' and 'dirty' channel?

I used to use the Steve Harris set for C sharp tuning(probably 10 years ago). Gauges are 110, 95, 75, 50. In standard tuning the tension was insane so credit for Steve Harris for playing them in standard! I didn't consider them to be 'dull' sounding until I went back to flats last year and got a set of Labellas, which I though were too bright and removed after a few months! I see that EB do a 55-110 set which would be fine for D standard.

I am intrigued. I have a bit of a 'no graphic preamp = no Trace Elliot' mindset, which makes no sense whatsoever given that I have a Trace V6 which also has no graphic preamp. It isn't a 'British' company any more, or even a company given it is now a Peavey sub-brand. However, I do get the feeling that the team within Peavey are really committed to re-establishing the brand so I will credit them for that. If the product is good then it will sell. Truth be told I am more interested in the prospective line of cabs. If there is a lightweight 4ohm 4x10 then I am frankly just going to buy one to pair with the said V6!

That is what I thought. A three dot inlay on the twelfth fret would be fine. As it is I just think it is a bit cluttered looking.

In terms of headstocks, I like it more than I like the Bite guitars headstock or but less than the Alleva Coppola 'traditional but slightly resembling a boat oar' headstock.

I am intrigued to know this. From the interview, I wasn't aware that Yoshi started Atelier Z, though from looking at the stylings I did previously 'think' that there must have been some kind of connection.

I don't usually start threads but haven't seen anybody else post anything relating to this brand yet. I just saw that Guitar Guitar are now stocking the brand known as Three Dots guitars. They are apparently the new line of instruments by Yoshi Kikuchi, who previously headed up the Sadowsky Metro division in Japan. Guitar Guitar have a cool interview with him as well: https://www.guitarguitar.co.uk/news/141388/ Guitar Guitar only have one bass in stock, a J bass at £1,849 https://www.guitarguitar.co.uk/product/210330367911003--three-dots-jb-model-british-racing-green Personally I think there is a bit of a mismatch between the untraditional headstock married to the very traditional body which I don't really like. Similarly, the 'three dot' inlays remind me too much of the stickers teachers use to help beginners learn scales. So probably a 'no' for me. At least now the question of 'what is the man who was formerly in charge of the old Sadowsky Metro Japan team doing now?' question can be answered for the half dozen of us who were previously wondering. Fit, finish and fretwork should be on point if nothing else. It would be cool to see if anybody is able to try them out and share their thoughts. Cheers!

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.