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If you call this a cut and boost, then you've never seen the response of a cut and boost...

The masses against the classes. Manics

Not a bass, so I figured I'd put this here rather than in the repairs/build-diaries forum. The weekend after New Year's I headed out to the countryside to collect this old East-German mandolin from @bass_dinger. I've been a mandolin dilettante for years (family of folk musicians) but I've never had my own one, not really. (I have an electric mandolin I made out of offcuts while working on something else, but I don't play it much). I figured the price was low enough to be worth a punt, and it seemed like whatever work it might need would be well within my skill set as a luthier and tinkerer. (Please excuse the cat, who wanted to be in my picture of the action). As fairly described by Robert, the neck was pretty bowed and the fretwork worn down. It was never a fancy instrument and it had lived a long life. I put in an order with my luthier supply shop of choice and set it aside. The following weekend, the first job was to take the frets out. I sat down with my special ground-down end-nippers and started the painstaking process of levering them up. No pictures were taken of this process because it only took about a minute. It turned out the tangs on the frets were not only 1.5 mm deep at most, but also completely smooth – no nibs, no little spikes. I could have probably lifted them out with my fingernails. I clamped the body into place and prepared my special heating tool. This may look like a crappy old clothes iron, but I promise it's a high-tech piece of equipment. I used a pallette knife to get under the fingerboard after it was good and hot and pinged the whole thing off, perfectly intact. I then routed a channel and stuck a length of carbon-fibre rod in there. Not the neatest job because my router plane was being difficult and it took me a while to remember the quirks of the adjusters on that particular tool. Fingerboard clamped back on with the rod in place. The rod is the same size as the one I routed into the (thinner and longer) neck on my electric mandolin, so I'm confident it will hold things straight for the foreseeable future. If I'd been more inclined to take my time with this, I would have spent a few hours planing a backward angle into the fingerboard (it's pretty thick and the neck is dead flat to the front of the body, which isn't great). I decided I couldn't be bothered – if nothing else, I explicitly don't want this instrument to be loud. I had to recut the fret slots because even the finest fretwire I had to hand was much chunkier than the stuff that had come out. I didn't take any pictures of the fretting process – just imagine someone smacking an instrument with a nylon-headed hammer for half an hour, swearing the whole time. Here's the finished job. I recut the nut and bridge slots, and reshaped the bridge a little, but left it otherwise unchanged. As you can see, the action has come down a lot, and the fretwork is now level and even. It plays beautifully and I've already lost several hours to noodling around trying to remember various fiddle tunes. At some point I'll replace the dot markers that melted during the heating process. It sounds like, well, like a £40 mandolin – which is what I expected and what I was hoping for. A fun thing for plinking away at on the sofa and during teams meetings (pro-tip! A mandolin can be played without showing up on the laptop camera if you hold it down low).

Brough a Gooseneck off Andy this week. Couldnt have gone any smoother. Even though i was in no hurry he made the effort to get it to me asap. Top block. Cheers mate 👍🏻

Haha, I also need to do this. There is one Project Of Doom in particular that I need to either get done or finally abandon. Stop starting, start finishing, as the maxim goes.

As well as a stereo XLR. For two you mean?

Follow The Masses - Re-Animator

Possibly a niche concern, but I'd love to see double bass string makers looking at the field of lively, sustaining metal core strings. Thomastik Spirocores have been around over 50 years and are still the state of the art in that area, and almost every new string on the market in the last 20 years is aiming for a darker, more damped gut-like sound to varying extents.

Playing at a local Wassail this evening. I'm right in front of the camera.

Just added my latest addition - Keely Bassist, purchased from BC this week. Everything I now need and an absolute tone monster for a mid range board. Once I’m back in the black, I’m going to swap Hot Wax and Battalion out for a Pork & Pickle and a Tech-21 VT. But no upgrades until I find some cash. For now this will do very nicely.

I have tried to stick with old-school 5-pin DIN MIDI, but after some unsuccessful studio sessions with descant recorder, I've just bought an Akai 'electronic wind instrument' (EWI). The budget model only has USB midi - plugging it into my MIDI hub didn't work, so I had to do some learning about USB hosts, and USB clients. The upshot is I changed my U4MIDI WC hub for the H4MIDI WC which includes a USB host. Bingo! Now the EWI works through the Roland XV3080. I'll try to record a video over the weekend. Inside the rack: ... and on the front, a shiny-new 'usb host' port. Annoyingly I didn't think to see if there was a black one. Oh well!

See that’s naughty - that’s trade dress and PCB layout that looks the same

So, I may have just wondered over to Bass Direct online. Been wanting another 4 string super light for a while different to my current TT SL for a bit of variety…got the royal approval then this just happened below (under 6lbs)…Monday hopefully! Probably sell my 5 string SL TT - don't want to but I really don't use it…and someone out there will need that beauty.

Should I Stay or Should I Go - The Clash

I guess I use mine as an instrument/ keyboard and I see it as an interface in a signal loop in the middle of whatever software holds the sounds.

Current writing/rehearsal board. The Blackhole replaced the Walrus Lore, and has changed the way i play ambient. Just waiting on a Russian Bif Muff to replace the R.Attack for that warm fuzzy drive.