Just like every other bastard with a new looper pedal, I had to see how many loops I could stack up....

Ditto Looper & Baritone Tele

A bit of sunday morning fun in an empty house! I love Shane Embury's tone on the Napalm Death album "Inside the Torn Apart", so I wanted to see how close I could get with the 100-T and my P bass (tuned to B). 

Signal chain: Precision bass > 100-T > Alesis MultiMix8

I was running in 25W mode through my 410 Neo.

Overdrive Channel settings:
Gain - 10
Blend - 7
Bass - 8.5
Mid Freq - 9
Mid Lvl - 9
Treble - 8

It's a little mushy - at .130 my low B string isn't big enough for my liking, but it's doing the job okay in my doom band. I'd also back the bass off a little - the 410 Neo trims the bass response nicely & tightens up the tone, but going direct you get all the low frequency content.

Bassman 100-T grindcore bass demo

A lost track from the Desert Ghost vault; I don't think I have another copy of this in full anywhere.

Presumably recorded on either the Zoom portable or the Roland digital multi-track. 

DG - Hurried Conversations With Roland

I recorded these riffs (badly!) directly into a loop pedal, then played it back through a recent ProCo Rat reissue with the allegedly inferior Texas Instruments op-amp. I then swapped the chip out for an LM308 & played back the loop with the same settings.

I did a much more extensive set of recordings with the Gain and Tone at various locations, but for the purposes of a double-blind test I don't think the extra data is relevant.

Signal Chain:
Squier VM Jazzmaster > TC Electronic Ditto Looper > ProCO Rat > Fender Bassman 100-T (DI taken pre-eq)> Alesis MultiMix 8 

Files were edited in Reaper. 

In each riff, there are two bars of one chip, followed by two bars of the other chip.

In all cases, the Volume is at 12 o'clock and the Filter is at 9 o'clock.
"Ribbon" - Gain 9 o'clock
"April" - Gain 12 o'clock
"Enemy" - Gain 3 o'clock

I applied Normalization to the individual recordings, then I applied a rough "cab-sim" LPF at 4kHz with a Q around 0.9; this was necessary to avoid the awful killer bee tone.

Finally, I used a Loudness Maximiser set to -6dB threshold to even things out as much as possible. 

There seems to be a difference in DC offset between the two chips, see if you can pick which one is most biased.

ProCO Rat Mods - pick the LM308!

Squier VI, capoed at the 2nd fret.

This recording is just the Middle + Bridge with the Strangle Switch on, through a vintage Proco Rat 2 and straight into a SansAmp ParaDriver DI. 

When the neck circuit is added in, it will be run through a MicroPOG for added suboctave. I'm genuinely scared for my speakers - think I'll have to make a little Hi-Pass Filter to run at the end of that chain!

Bass VI + Rat 2

Messing around with my heavily modded Squier Bass VI. The neck pickup doesn't extend to the B & e strings, but with enough gain you can pick up something. There's a strange kind of sympathetic reverb deriving from the Jazzmaster style bridge assembly.

The only pedals used are a Catalinbread Manx Loaghtan fuzz into a Zoom MS-60b, which is set as an emulated Bassman + cab sim with no other effects. A significant amount of volume boost was applied in Reaper to bring this up to a good listening level.

the Oateson Skyline - VI Ghosts

Here is the first of my clean demos, as usual featuring a mangled version of the riff from "Quarantined" by At.The.Drive-in. What you're hearing is two repeats of the riff with each source: Pro DI, Bassman 500, Bassman 100-T. The amp signal was taken with the DI in the PRE position.

Signal chain:
- Fender 2014 Dee Dee Ramone Precision Bass strung with fresh Steve Harris Rotosound Flats*
> Pigtronix Infinity Looper (looped riffs for consistency) 
> Radial Pro DI (passive) to Input 1 (Mic/Hi-Z) of Steinberg UR44 interface
> Pro DI THRU to Bassman 500 or Bassman 100-T
> Amplifier DI set to PRE and sent to Input 3 (Mic / Line) of UR44

All three tests were done with each DI's GROUND switch engaged (not lifted). Levels were balanced at the DI send. Recorded in Reaper, no edits except for ~10dB of normalisation. 

Okay, first thoughts:
The Radial Pro DI is clean, even though I had to push my interface's input gain to 90%.
The Bassman 500 by comparison has notable hiss or possibly digital noise over 5kHz, which is also present in the Bassman 100-T, but to a lesser extent. This was determined by using the open-source Voxengo SPAN plugin.

Now, this may not be _caused_ by the Bassman 500 in any way shape or form, but there's no denying that there is a massive difference. A steep Low-Pass Filter at 4 kHz gets rid of it, but even though I'm all for it, that's not ideal for every bassist. This speaks volumes for the continued relevance of passive DI boxes in 2015 - if this had been a hurried recording session, the engineer would have still had something clean to work with. 

Other than this noise issue, I don't think the input stage of a 12AX7 tube contributes much of any importance to the bass tone.

Radial PRO - DI Vs Bassman 500 Vs Bassman 100T PRE Test

Here is the second of my clean demos, as usual featuring a mangled version of the riff from "Quarantined" by At.The.Drive-in. What you're hearing is two repeats of the riff with each source: Pro DI, Bassman 500, Bassman 100-T. The amp signal was taken with the DI in the POST position.

Signal chain:
- Fender 2014 Dee Dee Ramone Precision Bass strung with fresh Steve Harris Rotosound Flats*
> Pigtronix Infinity Looper (looped riffs for consistency) 
> Radial Pro DI (passive) to Input 1 (Mic/Hi-Z) of Steinberg UR44 interface
> Pro DI THRU to Bassman 500 or Bassman 100-T
> Amplifier DI set to POST and sent to Input 3 (Mic / Line) of UR44

All three tests were done with each DI's GROUND switch engaged (not lifted). Levels were balanced at the DI send. Recorded in Reaper, no edits except for ~10dB of normalisation.

The Vintage Channel of each amp was set Volume 10, Bass 7, Mid 7, and Treble 7. I've deliberately given it a bit of a scooped character in this case, just for something different. You'll never get truly flat on the passive tone stack anyway.

Master volume affects the output of the DI on the 100-T when set to POST; I had it on 4 in this case.

Radial Pro DI Vs Bassman 500 POST Vs Bassman 100T POST

The same recording from the PRE test, but with a steep LPF set around 4 kHz to cut down the noise.

4kHz LPF - Pro DI Vs 500 PRE Vs 100T PRE Test

Arpanoid jams

Signal chain: Fender P-bass with fresh Steve Harris Rotosound flats into a Radial Pro DI (panned hard left) which is linked through to the  Bassman 500 (panned hard right).

Four repeats of the "Planet Caravan" riff with the 500's DI in the Pre position, followed by four repeats (and two through the fade) with the DI in the Post position, EQ is 7 7 7.

Finishes up with a bit of "Stacked Actors" with the DI Post, Modern Channel at Gain 10, Blend 10, EQ 7 8 8 5.

Rude Mechanical

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