Live Bass Rig

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fob

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hi you people


I am going to be playing some bass live. I am going direct to the P.A.

My computer is a late 2015 MacBook.

Signal Chain is bass > Keeley compressor > sans amp > avalon u5 preamp > P.A.

I want to bring my laptop and use the darkglass plugin as well if I can. I have a presonus firepod interface, and that seems too bulky but I can if need be. I also have a Scarlett 2i2. Would this work? How would I do this?


Thx
 

GunpointMetal

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I wouldn't even mess around with the plugin. More crap to haul and more crap to worry about points of failure. between the comp and the sansamp you should be able to dial in a solid tone.
 

fob

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I wouldn't even mess around with the plugin. More crap to haul and more crap to worry about points of failure. between the comp and the sansamp you should be able to dial in a solid tone.
It would only be my laptop and an interface, which I already have Maschine so I'm used to that gear anyways. :) And I absolutely do have a solid tone I'm happy with but id like some extra layer options or extra tonal shaping options. It works fine at my house so the only difference would be going through a PA instead of monitors. Should be fine if it's fine at my house right? I just don't know what equipment I require for this.
 

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TedEH

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Can you do it? Sure. You can do whatever you want. Depending on what order you put things in, you might need something like a re-amp box to get back to an instrument level signal to go into any gear that's expecting that. Or if the laptop/interface is the last thing in the chain, you can probably send the outs of your interface to the PA.

But it honestly sounds like it would be an unreliable thing to maintain, and you now need to worry about latency, software updates, having your project up and ready to go, etc. I would not trust a PC to be part of a live rig if it didn't have to be. Imagine you're halfway through a show and all of the sudden some service starts up, eats up all your cpu, and your bass sound crackles out. Or maybe Windows will decide to restart and update itself just as your first song is about to start. Oops! It's not so bad if you have a video or something going that can crap out - your set can still go on. But putting that right in your signal chain is a risk I wouldn't be willing to make in any kind of uncontrolled environment.

If you're going to spend any amount of money on it, it would make more sense to me to just go out and get a darkglass pedal and avoid the potentially unstable setup.
 

fob

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^^^^
Just trade in the sansamp towards a Darkglass pedal.
Darkglass is end game of course! I really want the compressor and the X7. Until then I'm making the most of what I got.

I'd still like to KNOW how to run this type of rig even if it's not the best choice. It is a practical one if it works.
 

GunpointMetal

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Well, your Sansamp and the Darkglass VST are basically doing the same part of the processing of the signal chain, so to me it seems redundant to use both, but they should both be in approximately the same place in your signal chain. If it were me, I would pick one or the other and remove the one you don't use from the chain completely, but I'm the type of person that, if playing bass, will dial in a tone I think fits the situation and never touch anything after that, so I don't need to worry about turning FX on/off or switching tones. Since you have the interface, you could run one output to a DI box and one to whatever amp you have on stage.
 
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