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i should pop my new'un up. A bit of a rare bird... details here:

Surfin' USA - Beach Boys

Some people are just dicks

Two more days were spent filling the exposed ends of the fret slots with lacquer, which is a slow process of dripping stuff in with a pipette and then filing it down. After that I was ready to start painting in my newly aquired (from Argos) spray booth/greenhouse. I was a little stumped by how to hold an instrument that has no tuning peg holes or neck pocket to use, but decided on a big M-10 eyebolt through the jack socket hole. And here's how it looks as of right now. Don't worry, this is just the first step in what will be a fairly elaborate finish.

Good man!

Righty. So I've made more progress since the last update, but I'm afraid I've not been very diligent about taking pictures. When I last checked in, the new frets were in the board, but that was about it. The first big job after that was to trim/file them all to the right length. This is a painstaking process because you're filing and filing and filing for ages, but you're still having to maintain enough control that you don't accidentally gouge a chunk out of the fingerboard. I did one half of the fingerboard one day, then came back and did the other half of the fingerboard the next day. I've learned from experience that if you try to do the whole thing in one go, you're going to end up with a cramped-up claw hand. I didn't take any pictures of this process, partly because it's really boring and partly because I was listening to something interesting and got distracted. Here's the finished fingerboard. The little shiny spots you can see here and there are a mix of glue and sawdust, used to fill the tear-out from the fret removal. As I said, I didn't do the neatest job of that, so these are sort of like bits of tissues paper stuck on after a really inept teenager's first shave. Next comes the leveling and crowning. Again, not many pictures of this process. I did what I always do, which is mark the tops of the frets with a sharpie, then put some 320-grit self-adhesive paper on my 1-metre engineering straightedge. I only had to take a little material off here and there because the fingerboard was nice and level and the frets went in cleanly. After that I roughly rounded over the frets with my crowning file and then tidied them up with a three-corner fret dressing file. After that, it's polishing time. Which involves lots of 2500 grit wet/dry paper and a lot of patience. Here's the finished neck. I'll oil up the fingerboard when the rest of the work is done.

Sounds promising, but I think you should raise the T40 pickup a bit as the P-Bass pickup seems more powerful. I really like the look it with the added pickup. Congratulations, very nice job!

Sounds to me that venue acoustics meant the guitarists couldn't hear themselves, so they all kept turning up. Instead, the band leader should be taking control and telling everyone to turn down. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. I saw a band on Saturday night. They complained about the sound. The guitarist and bass player had amps set on stun, the sound guy had to turn off everything in the PA except vocals. At one point he went up to the stage and told them all to turn down. Which they did, but 2 minutes later, turned back up before the sound guy had a chance to sort it all out properly. I didn't see their soundcheck, but you wonder how they'd got to that point.

I picked one up a couple of weeks ago. I have a terrible habit of just not practicing electric bass at all between rehearsals and gigs, and I thought a handy headphone amp device might help me break that, as well as fulfilling some guitar functions. It is working for that, it's a handy little thing and I like that it charges off the ubiquitous USB C cables that are already around my living room. Though I must say I'm not really blown away with the actual sound possibilities of it so far. The amp models mostly sound somewhat like you'd expect, it's quite functional, but I haven't really dialled in something that makes me smile yet. Totally clean or strongly driven it works OK, but getting an amp model into where it's just very subtly breaking up and squashing at the top of my dynamics is quite hard to nail.

Haven't used my '90 Thumb Bass for a while and when trying it today, when I inserted the jack plug there was a static type electrical noise, like something being turned on, it lasts two to three seconds and then all is fine. It will do it again after removing and re-inserting the plug. It never used to do this and my other Thumb Bass, a '91, doesn't do it. A new battery doesn't help.

Bumping this thread. I believe they went under and stopped producing strings at their Welsh factory yet Picato strings are still widely available and have the UK flag on the packaging. Any ideas?

REAM AWAY!

Ooft.

Negative, captain...

There are some hipshots (possibly mini clover) with the same screw pattern as modern mini tuners and hole size…

Just the box. It may not reflect the contents. Cryptic.

Perhaps unusually, the most uncomfortable SPL I've been around was in a recording studio! The engineer kept trying different amps because he thought the bass hook needed more grit, and eventually I was plugged into a massive Hughes & Kettner valve head with an 8x10 fridge. We kept stopping and starting while he tweaked the settings, but I found I had to stand at the longest distance my lead would allow: standing too close to the cab was actually making me slightly nauseous! Eventually he stuck a RAT in the signal chain, everyone agreed that was "the one" and I finally tracked the bass part, wondering whether he couldn't have just plugged the damned pedal into a smaller amp in the first place. (And of course, by the time it was all mixed down, it didn't sound anything like as "big" as the sonic assault I was trying to keep under control in that soundproofed room...)

That's the problem with smaller companies that's for sure. G&L is a bit of nightmare in that regard as they seem to have no UK distributors for spares.

Oh don't worry, there'll be a skill swap soon - guy who helped me with the long drill and the cleaning out of the neck pocket on my other bass project is needing a laptop for his daughter, so I'm gonna sort him out with something.

Some very useable sounds there, Neep. I like.

Sharing my practise today and thought of recording it. It’s one of the songs we will play this sunday. It’s an original tiune by our church: Every Nation and it’s called Tribes. Locked in on my core tone with the Dingwall and Anagram. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNOBuDhzqPS/?igsh=cjZwY3pwdWRtODI2 I just hope our team will pull it off this sunday.