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Hello everyone, I haven’t posted for a while. This winter has seen me dive back in to playing bass whenever I can and have been doing lots of practice every day when pain levels allow. ( music takes a back seat in the summer as my other love is motorcycles, but as my health continues to go downhill music will hopefully fill the void motorcycle might leave any time soon) and to my main point, Santa brought me a five string fretless in the form of a Sire V10. I set it up to my preferences and noticed the A string was a little quiet. I left it until I had a new set of Cobalt Flats to put on it, expensive but worth every penny, and although better string balance, the A was still a little quiet. I don’t like the strings to get progressively lower from B to G and always set them up with 2.25 mm clearance on each string following the fingerboard radius. I set my guitars with staggered pole pieces the same and always have good string balance. I measured the individual string height to the individual pole pieces and the B was about 3mm the G was 2.5 but the A was over 5mm. Also when sighting across the strings the B and G were way lower than the middle 3 even though they were radiused perfectly. So I thought I would set the saddle heights for the B and G by eye rather than measuring, bringing up the height of each by about .5 mm and then resetting the pickup heights. I don’t why the two outside saddles were so much lower when following the fingerboard radius, but once adjusted to match the middle three saddles with just a gentle slope, the string balance is perfect and it hasn’t affected the playability. If anything the B string sounds fuller and has more tone. I am 57 this year and have played since my teens but still seems I am still learning. Anyone else have a similar set up or encountered problems with string balance. If so how did you solve it?

What a difference 16 hours makes - I've been listening to Vengeance by New Model Army this morning and Stuart Morrow's bass playing is crazy, frenetic, odd-sounding and chuffing brilliant.

You don't get these problems at Fairport Convention gigs. Though if you are sat at the back you can be blinded by the lights reflecting of the sea of grey hair in front of you.

Two years ago I bought a cab and cover that stank of cigarette smoke. I sprayed it with this (bought from Tesco). It immediately masked the bad smell with a pungent floral whiff but once this wore off (it took a couple of weeks) the fag smell had completely gone.

Also one of the reasons I wouldn't want that (regardless of being wireless, but if I wasn't), I need a real physical volume knob for partually to adjust as I go along, but mainly because at some point towards the end of the gig, our singer will somehow select the most tone deaf and loud woman in the audience to screech into the microphone with him, and I need to be able to kill that instantly!

I think we’re starting to realise the reverse, the expensive stuff ain’t what it’s cracked up to be 👍

Raisin Hell - Bullet for my Valentine

Check the earth lead of your pickup goes to the earth of the rest of your bass

Yes, I am very surprised it works, and I can only assume that A&H realised that people plug headphones into their mixers, so they decided to detect that and boost the output. I would expect that there is little risk of damage to any pro audio equipment because the companies would expect things to be done wrong, and also when you have an signal output it is designed to be laid over a stage and may sometimes get damaged and shorted, and that has to not break the amplifiers so there should always be be protection against that kind of use.

To enable the headphones over AUX it looks like you have to select 'listen' for that particular AUX out. So doesn't look like something that would be done accidentally. And I've never seen a line level input 'blown' by putting headphone level output into it. You just get an awful lot of distortion. So even if you did have something connected to that AUX and selected Listen, it would be unlikely to do any damage. Consumer electronics are very robust.

I suspect I'm a tier 2 fail as of ordering a Swiff IEM last night.

I had to do that at a Motorhead tribute band, Motorheadache. That's exactly what I ended up with, a headache. I kept moving further and further back and eventually put silicon ear plugs in. Other people were quite content to head bang in the bass bins. My ears were ringing at the back and my stomach was moving in time with the bass, so no idea what they were feeling. I have a little container as well I take to gigs for the same reason.

Although speaking as someone with nine trace elliot cabs I'm with Yngwie on this - more is more, overkill is overkill... and I love it 💣 !

Just sold a Sire acoustic bass to Dave, excellent comms, quick, painless transaction, a gentleman and a scholar, Obviously this earns him the barely sought-after Frank Blank Seal of Approval...

Thanks so much, this is what I was hoping! 🙂

Here's an example - 2:23 to 3:15, an absolute masterclass. https://youtu.be/hqWdNSDc-uc?si=IIO-yhPChaDf07tc&t=143