For various reasons, I’ve been playing my bass mostly unplugged for a while now. Things like “bass is loud and I don’t want to disturb the wife while she’s working” and “I just want to play for a bit and don’t want to go through all the trouble of hooking stuff up” and more.
Either way, I have learned a bunch of song unplugged and thought I was playing them quite well. Yesterday, the house was empty for a bit so I plugged into the amp and…I’ve picked up some terrible habits. None of the notes are clean. The timing/coordination between my left and right hands is shot. Basically, everything I played sounded like a discordant whisper from the void, a blasphemous echo that no sane mind should endure.
I know what I have to do to fix it: take a step back and work on my technique with an actual amp and minimize, if not completely end the playing unplugged. At the very worst I need to dust off the headphone amp and put a new battery in and make sure I use that when I just want to noodle a bit.
Still, I am vexed as if my very thoughts have conspired against me, a ceaseless chittering in the recesses of my mind, mocking my every misstep like some eldritch specter of my own making.
I post this not for advice but as a warning to others: be careful playing without an amp.
Using a headphone amp is not only a good option for noodling. I mostly play with headphones, either through my DAI, amp or headphone amp. The headphone amp offers the advantage that you can start your practice without much preparatory work.
The up close and personal volume will reveal any flaws you have with the headphone. After a few recalibration fix you’ll be back as good as new. Then the next calibration is going back to the Amp. You’ll need a small adjustment yet again to the open air and position sensitive of playing on bass amp. When that’s done your ears are calibrated,
Just think, a little effort of plugging into the amp all those times would have saved you the effort of crafting that (very impressively worded) warning.
I’ve got that and it has such a strong buzzing/hissing sound that it drives me crazy. If I turn the tone nob all the way down on it the hissing goes down a bit but it’s annoying as hell regardless. Still, I’ve been using it for the last couple days but I’m looking at alternatives. Could it be that I just have a defective one?
Mine is only humming if I have my J pickup at 70% volume or higher (I have a PJ bass). Don’t know if it comes with the territory of single coil pickups or just an idiosyncracy of the Vox amPlug. Having said that, it doesn’t buzz much if the tone and gain are lower than 8 or so. Not sure if yours is defective, but maybe do play around with all the possible combinations of pickup volume/bass tone/amp controls to see if it goes away?
I can heartily recommend the NUX Mighty Plug and started out with this but do not use the noise gate setting as it will give you a similar problem to what you are seeing at the moment. It masks a load of little problems and when you move to an amp they show up big style
I found that out the hard way as well. Also practiced early on with the compressor, which also masked problems that I’ve been having to sort out since.
No, they are cr@p. Do yourself a favour and sell it on… For cheap, but decent silent practice, I’d suggest investing in a Zoom B1four. For the money, they are excellent. Plug the bass in, plug in the headphones, attach a music source to the Aux input and you’re away. In fact, leave it all (more or less) set up and you can be up and running in 30 seconds.
If you look second hand, you might pick one up for next to nothing. That said, new, they don’t exactly cost much.
But over the last 4 years on this forum I’ve read a lot of negative experiences about the Kinder Egg Vox. So on balance there’s far fewer positive reviews of that thing.
The Zoom B1 was head and shoulders better for hardly any money. Includes drum machine, tuner, various pedals/amps etc all for $99. No brainer.
The Boss Katana Go sounds amazing if you can find one for sale.
The only drawback to using the NUX with bluetooth is if you are using it with video. There is a slight delay between the sound and video, if you are using just with sound it is great. .
Wild. I’ve had two Vox plugs and they’ve been outstanding. Particularly fun with the drum machine.
Mind you, my focusrite scarlett interface is much more versatile in terms of things you can do without plugging into an amplifier.
