funkle

I have done it and found it helpful for improving my technique. I would recommend it; it improved my finger style, slap, and pick technique. There is not much musical content to the course. If I was to invest simultaneously in something to improve me musically, I would also buy Jeff Berlin’s etude books, starting with number 1 in his ‘Bass Mastery’ series. I have never seen such a logically laid out number of pieces for bass. Playing this from start to finish also improved my technique, and gave me something to use the Technique Accelerator for.

Also a native 4 string player even though I have a 5 and have played/gigged on a 5 off/on for 9-10 years. It is what it is.

Good advice!! Logic I would have gone for, but Mac only. Too spendy for me to get into when I was starting out. I actually did start in Cubase but at that point didn’t properly commit well enough to make a go of it. I wonder what I would do with it now. Probably make better sense of it Reason was cool but the ‘back’ of it and the cabling confused me at that point. Performer I just plain haven’t heard of, I’ll have to go check it out. I committed to Reaper about 8-9 years ago and just decided to bend it to my will. It’s grown hugely in that time and improved a lot IMO. I’m always finding more as I keep using it. As an aside. I picked up @Beedster’s old RME Fireface 400 and the drivers are amazing. I have tweaked it and I can get stably down to 48 samples latency in my little projects. I’m a convert for life now.

Sold a Zoom MS60B to Martin, painless transaction with easy communications. Can deal with in good confidence! Thanks Martin. Pete

Bought an RME Fireface off of Chris, he did a great job packing it and shipping it, and he dealt with a difficult situation gracefully, after the couriers damaged it in transit. Works beautifully though and Chris was, as usual, straightforward to deal with. Deal with in good confidence! Pete

Good points all. I really like the ‘just use it’ attitude; it’s waaaaay too easy to get lost in customising it. My main use for Reaper was as MIDI editor. It was not usable for me out of the box, at all. I had to bend it to my will, or find something different. And I didn’t really get on with some of the other things I trialled, so….Reaper it was. I’d be strongly tempted by Ableton now. But I committed to Reaper about 8 years ago.

Reaper is a winner for me. Light on the system, flexible, and does everything I want. Rock solid performance, if it crashes it’s invariably a VST that has done it, not Reaper itself, and you can start it in an ‘offline’ mode which lets you get rid of the troublesome plugin. Its biggest pro is also its biggest con. Configurability. Just about everything can be remapped or adjusted, which is brilliant, but also a pain, lol, as many people’s Reaper setups will be quite different. It’s not like moving between different ProTools setups where everyone will know the same shortcuts. The stock setup preferences are a bit odd to me, at least some of them. I don’t like the menus either, and replaced them with an improved set I think called ReaMenus. A new starter to Reaper definitely benefits from Kenny Gioia’s videos. Kenny G is my guru! Jon Tidey as well. I had to tweak the MIDI editor *a lot* to get it how I wanted and to have access easily to actions I wanted. I quickly learned how to make custom actions and cycle actions (toggling states of other actions). I love it now, single click to add notes or delete them (as in FL) is sensible to me. I tweaked mouse modifiers and keyboard shortcuts a lot too. Zooming on MIDI notes was a bit odd until I tweaked it. I also dislike the stock theme. Thankfully I adore the iLogic themes done by a guy called Blankfiles, which makes everything look beautiful. The latest is iLogic 3.85, looks fab and I donated £10 to get that and the iLogic 2.0 theme he does, which also looks equally great. I’d say the DAW matters less than the familiarity with it though, overall. I’d just commit to one and stick with it.

I think I suddenly know why it’s hard to sell my very reasonably priced secondhand BH800. 😝 Not ideal that Anderton’s are killing off the secondhand market for me! I might keep it and sell my GK MB800 instead. Hmm…

Very cool. Pretty expensive though!

Ah, good to know, I spent ages trying to research that and find threaded inserts for the mute screws to go in to. If you ever find some that fit, I’d love to know, I’d fit them. And if you like what I’ve done..well…you can probably do it cheaply yourself if you wait for stuff to come up secondhand…there are no shortage of secondhand Ray4s out there…