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I really love the classic look of the Ashdown CTM300 head but unfortunately it's just not in my price range at the moment. To tide me over until I can save up a couple of grand, I decided that I'd try to at least achieve the look of the amp even if I can't get the sound of it right now. I've spent my spare time over the last week building this new case from scratch for my ABM 500rc Evo iii and I'm really pleased with the result so thought I'd share it here. 🙂

NBD today after seeing it on Facebook shared by @cd_david in a super cool little music shop. Man it’s good! Originally sunburst but refinished in Oly White in 1973 when the J pup was added. Owned locally since then by a pro theatre musician. Always had flats on so frets are almost brand new. Bar that everything is original and man it sounds well! Looking forward to gigging this next year 🤘 Shots with and without the covers 😍

I know Lawrie Macmillan. He is very tall, dark and handsome, and up until recently drove an Alfa Romeo. If, after a significant amount of lessons, for some unexplained reason, your girlfriend's bass playing is not getting any better. I would suggest you get her to to swop to a uglier, fatter, possibly with bad halitosis, bass tutor.

I did this on a semi pro basis for 6-7 so... framing, framing, framing - move your focus point so that the entire subject is the frame, headstock, the lot. You can always crop afterwards Spotlights *will* cause over exposure and lens flare so watch out for that and roll the exposure back a touch You'll need at least 2 bodies - one with either a short prime or a short telephoto - I always took a pair of Canon 1D's the 35-70mm f2.8 L on the 1st body with the 70-200 or a 300 2.8 LIS f2.8 on the 2nd. Sometimes I took a 3rd lower spec (20D) body with fisheye/semi just in case. Shoot like crazy - 7fps min, pref 10+ Anticipate - know the material (if possible) so that you know if there's a solo/vocal section/whatever coming up

I got a cracking bargain on this bass off a local guy who was shifting a load of unused gear. It needed a clean and some new strings but otherwise was set up well and all electronics are fully working if a little crap on account of being cheap parts. The stock pick up's sound grand and have that jazz bass thing especially with the new strings. Gonna change the wiring loom to some better pots with a proper 'sweep' across their range rather than 'on on on on on on off' but otherwise I'm quite chuffed. I'll be using it at rehearsal tonight and tomorrow with two different bands so looking forward to hearing it at volume! Plugging into my pedal board, (Tone Hammer DI and comppressor) the Tone Hammer it's really complimenting the sound and of course the new strings are adding to the crisp top end. I've tried a couple of other pre-amps with it but this is a great pairing for this particular bass - bumping the lo mids is giving it the right amount of oomph and I look forward to fine tuning that with the drummer later tonight. Been about 6 years since I've owned/played a jazz and it's a very familiar and enjoyable tone for £120! Certainly prefer this to a recent PJ i was using but hard to qualify why?!

That HiWatt model sounds great on bass though!

Looks like a Sire P7 to me but with a slightly better headstock.

Here’s mine. All wired up. Compressor and 4 way psu in the rear and a nice 1u space to house the DI and wireless cables to pa.

Ashdown Update: I took the amp over there this morning. Quite a pleasant 50 mile drive there surprisingly. Guy had a look at it, put it on the bench and gave it a full service. Said the drive was working but it's a subtle thing, not a gnarly, gritty thing. Replaced the valve for a higher output ecc83 JJ one. Still not a lot of grit so, he modded it with a resistor and a bit of techie magic. Seemed to improve it a bit. He also fixed the mute button issue. Turns out someone had removed the three transistors??? How much did they charge me? Zero, zilch, Nara, nothing. Ashdown, you now have a friend for life. Well done Mark and the gang. And mostly a big thank you to Guy. You sir are a rootin, tootin, troubleshooting superstar.

One problem is where a drummer isn’t really aware of the parts the other members of the band have to play/sing, and the feel of those parts (e.g. in the example above the singer not being able to fit the words in). The more au fait the drummer is with the music/singing, not just their drum part, the more chance you’ve got. Too many drummers IME just think about playing the drums, rather than playing the song, and it doesn’t seem to occur to them that playing the wrong tempo can make other people’s parts difficult or unworkable.

Ooh - it’s beginning to look like a real cab!

Just realised that in French Basschat = the cat who plays bass 🙂

I went over to Stevie’s on Monday to look at the counter on his coil winder. As my cab was almost complete he suggested I take it over and he would measure it. The result was that the response was ruler flat to about 5.5KHz, where there was a slight peak and 7KHz where there was a slight dip. According to Stevie, these could be flattened by tweaking the crossover values and were due to differences in the drivers. So could you hear them? No compared to a studio monitor, also in the room, you could not tell the two apart. What this does show is that unless commercial manufacturers individually tune each and every cabinet, there will be differences. This probably applies to active PA cabinets too.

Here are a few pics of a Fenderbird that Taka, the bass player from Feeder made. Pics from his instagram account, @rebirthcustomguitars. I love its look as im a big fan of the Gibson Thunderbird II basses, and the original Fender precision basses.

"Has no bum notes"? Hand it over pal, I'll find 'em.

Yeah I've got some of them. 😁

Very unkind of his colleagues to make light of a medical problem

Friday night I saw John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett. A great evenings entertainment and unlike anything you've ever seen.

AFAIK the EVO IV is when Ashdown changed the valve drive to be fatter, before that it was more like a subtle nuanced addition

Still showing as £299 pre-ordered from Guitar Guitar, I think most would like to save £100 and wait! Had a brief play, sounds good - only subtle differences to the VTDI and YYZ though, lots of crossover and similar tones to be gotten from all 3 units. Will delve into it more over the coming days.

Well the yellow strat has been finished and has been delivered and the fella is really happy with in fact he paid me more than the agreed price so that’s s bonus!! The skip find is almost ready for spraying, and on a side note I’ve just started making a Les Paul/Tele hybrid (which is for me) it’s going to be orange and it will have a Maple tele style neck and black hardware............. 😀

Just realised that in French Basschat = the cat who plays bass 🙂 Heureusement qu'il n'y a pas de " e " à la fin !!!

That's some ambitious flipping!

And has your tech tried adding a washer or two under the truss rod nut? That may be all that is needed to buy back some more adjustment. As mentioned above you might want to get someone else to look at it.

I have a Nate Mendel P, but the signature aspect was irrelevant - I don't even like the Foo Fighters. I've always steered clear of P basses on account of neck girth. The modern Mexican ones seem to play OK, but feel plastic coated to me. I was interested in the slightly narrower neck and nitro finish. I love it. After years of re-EQing a Stingray in the studio, the P just sits exactly right and despite being passive is actually higher output than the Musicman. It pushes the valve front of my amp very nicely and through a Rat, it just roars.

I suspect rear facing drivers will not be allowed until driverless cabs are allowed.

I have a 2006 SG Bass and I’m not sure how the neck pickup compares to the old EB pickups. I do know I don’t even use the bridge pickup, I don’t know why it’s there.... I also have a Model one I think it’s a “will power” on my other baby.

It'll sound fine that way up, but if I were intending to use it like that all the time, I'd turn the horn round to increase the vertical dispersion of the compression driver/horn. The cab is quite low down and you'll hear more of the important upper mids with the horn reoriented when you are standing close to the cab. Unfortunately, turning the horn round means taking a jigsaw to the baffle, but it's a fairly simple task. The good news is that the horn frontplate is square and you can therefore use the same holes. I'd love to claim that there was a great plan, but the fact that the cab works like this for rack gear is pure serendipity.🙂 Looks good though (although it's definitely going to need four more feet). The question is: where to put the badge?

Loving been introduced to Kinga's work by Q, she is such a fresh and fun and very talented bassist:

Aye and a lot of them urinate all over their Fender counterparts.

Maybe that's an adreneline rush thing if its affecting you in so many different areas of the body. Do you tighten up with stress when playing ? I'm 59 and being in a 70's Glam Rock covers band so platform boots etc but only pains i get are sore fingertips by playing too hard at times. Not every gig, just the ones i'm really getting into. I have heavy amp and cab plus its usually me that helps the drummer with his flight-cased gear. I'm no fitness fanatic but i do walking every other day for 5miles or a little bit of cycling maybe. Someone on BC posted an exercise regime while back that was pretty simple to do and strengthened the core ie stomach and back areas. Sure you might recognise him below but i found this quite helpful.

Time for the yearly airing of my DIY support strap. It started life as a padded tool belt. I velcro-ed on the end of a spare shoulder strap I had, which attaches to the bass with a strap pin in on one of the neck bolts. You can't see anything from the front, and the shoulder strap is there largely as a balance aid. The waist strap takes 80% of the weight. Supports your beer gut too. I'm no spring chicken - 62 years young.

Not exactly a Fenderbird like Peter Cook made them. It's my take on the theme of a hybrid between a classic Gibson and a classic 7ender I call it Telebird:

It’s fair to assume I was talking about drive sounds on the helix considering the thread title. Recreating the SH1 and it’s 7 or 8 controls with the HX stomp should be pretty straightforward what with the assignable eq, global eq, parallel signal paths, hpf, array of amp and cab sims (including the Hiwatt) and drive pedal options. It’s being a tad obtuse to imply I was saying the stomp can recreate ‘any sound’ with enough time spent programming and imagine you were well aware of that you cheeky imp! Anyway following your recent pedalboard thread update I’ll let you get back to programming your Stomp looks like you’ve still a bit of work to do...

Paul responded to a plea for help and sold me (at an extremely reasonable price) a Zoom multistomp. Deal couldn't have gone more smoothly. Top basschatter, top bloke!

Can another some other luthier take a look for you

Although undoubtedly an example of a front facing driver, right? 😁

"You'll never play a guitar the same way again.." or words to that effect. The new range is going to be entirely left handed with just one shitty bottom of the range right hander in black only with no options. A small recompense from years of neglecting left handers. That's it, if you want one you have to play it upside down.

EDIT 22/10/2019 As the new v3 firmware launched yesterday I will move the discussion to a new thread and lock this one as much of the information here has been superseded and/or incorporated into the new v3 manual. Thank you to everybody who contributed to discussion here as it helped get me involved in working with Panda and helped shape the manual for the new firmware. __________________________________________ Original post: At the behest of @Al Krow I’m going to start a page which should hopefully serve as a helpful resource for understanding and using the FI and for sharing patches. For the moment, I’ll include an explanation of some of the features in the editor, which I wrote as a PM to @GisserD, I’ll add to this in due course. There is a new editor due out after April so I’ll amend once I’ve had chance to familiarise myself with its enhanced features. If anyone would like me to explain a particular feature then please comment and I’ll do my best to add it below as quickly as possible. I’ll also include a link to patches I’ve created and will add to this as I create new ones. Likewise, if you have useful tips or patches to share then please do! Please give me a “like” or comment if you’ve found this useful. It’ll encourage me to do more! Thanks. __________________________________________ Editor tips: In the VCF/MODULATION section, “Freq Vintage” is the cutoff of the original Deep Impact filter (with its imperfect scaling). “Freq New” is the cutoff of the new, perfectly-scaled FI filter. You can only engage either one or the other. Switching has to be done by the Vintage one though. Set its slider to “off” and it will engage the New one; turn it up and it disables the new one. After reading the manual again, it appears that the number that “freq new” is set to corresponds to the MIDI note number of the same value. That is to say, each increase of 1 corresponds to a semitone. Note 36 (min) is C (65.4Hz), note 122 (max) is D (9397.27Hz). ”Freq 2nd” is the cutoff off a second (bandpass) filter running in parallel. Turning its slider up engages it. You can then space the two filters to create dual-peak, vocal formant- type sounds. An increment increase of 1 provides a one-semitone offset from the main filter. Oddly, this second filter still reacts to envelopes and LFO even if you turn off the main filter with the dial in the top right of the screen. This can yield some interesting results.  In the VCF/ENVELOPE section, “attack” sets how quickly the filter(s) open(s) from cutoff to maximum. “Decay” sets how quickly the filter(s) close(s) from maximum back to the cutoff point. Back to the VCF/MODULATION section, “AD” sets how much the VCF AD envelope will affect the filter cutoff - higher values will open the filter further. “Env. Follower” sets how much your plucking dynamics (bass’s volume envelope) will affect the filter cutoff - again higher values cause the filter to open further. You need to be judicious in balancing the “AD” and “Env. follower” sliders in the above section. If you want a regular, always-the-same-shape, keyboard-style envelope then only use the AD slider. Adding too much of the envelope follower can override the shape of the AD envelope you’ve chosen. A bass’s volume envelope has a reasonably quick rise to maximum and then a longish decay as the note dies out. If you’re trying to program a slow upward filter sweep on the AD, the envelope follower will swamp that. Likewise, if you’re trying to program a very snappy decay on the AD (like acid-type bass sounds), the long decay of the bass’s volume envelope will ruin that if you apply too much envelope follower. “Resonance” controls how much a portion of the signal is fed back into the filter. This boosts the frequencies around the selected cutoff point, thus creating a resonant peak. Turning the resonance to maximum on 24dB mode will cause the filter to self-oscillate, yielding a pure sine wave oscillator. When using a bass guitar, you’ll need to have “bass” turned up in the VCF INPUT section (it needs a trigger and pitch reference). It probably works better when plugging in a keyboard instead as you’ll probably be able to hear just the sine wave. It doesn’t seem to behave at all like it does on analogue synths - changing the cutoff didn’t really enable me to tune it very well. Weirdly it seems to be best in tune when the “freq. vintage” was set to 0. After reading the manual it looks like the new filter will behave correctly (see above under explanation of “freq new”). I’ll have another go and update this page accordingly. The “Slope” knob switches between a 2-pole (12dB per octave) slope and 4-pole (24dB per octave) slope. The latter cuts off the higher frequencies above the cutoff point more rapidly than the former. LFO can be used to control the filter, either on its own or in conjunction with the envelope(s). (LFO can also be used to modulate the oscillators’ pitch.) I like that it has a delay slider too so that the LFO fades in over time. I’ve used that on one of the patches I shared. The LFO can be controlled by MIDI CC #1 and so a foot pedal can be used to bring modulation in and out as desired. What is really cool is that the noise has its own AD envelope (next to the VCF AD envelope sliders). This means you can program a short burst of noise to create a percussive attack even when you’ve programmed a long decaying filter sweep. (Normally noise just goes through the same filter as the other sources so that if you program a long decaying filter sweep, you can hear the noise all the way through. On the FI, you can get the noise to just be present right at the moment of attack and quickly disappear, or conversely, have it silent at the start and then slowly fade in.) I’ve finally figured out how the harmoniser section works! It’s part of the distortion circuit. You need to turn up the “distortion” slider in the INPUT section and (at least one of) the voices in the MIXER section (next to HARMONIZER) in order to hear it. One oddity I’ve found with the FI is as follows: if you’ve edited and saved any of your patch parameters on the actual pedal and you subsequently load new patches into those slots, then the new patches will take on those tweaked values. If that’s not clear what I mean: on the pedal a parameter setting of 5 is the default, i.e. if all parameters are set to 5, the patch will sound exactly like it did when you created it in the editor. Say you make an edit to a patch on the pedal and set its resonance to 9 and save the change by clicking the edit knob; when you load a new patch into that slot, its resonance will be set to 9 also. I realised this quirk when my first patch sounded nothing like it should have sounded. Luckily, setting each parameter back to 5 sorts it out. You can do this for all patches at once from one of the power-on menu settings. EDIT - this was a bug and has been addressed. __________________________________________ Patch transferring Here’s a little pointer that is an answer to a query about how to actually load patches on to the pedal. I know a few people have struggled with this. This is a cut and paste of a reply I wrote on TB: You need to find out which patches you want to load onto the pedal and which slot number in the pedal you want to have it. If you just want to replace one individual patch with another then first find a patch on the pedal that you want to overwrite. Then find the file on your PC of the patch you wish to write to the pedal. Rename this file so that it starts with the two-digit prefix of the slot into which you wish to load it. Open the renamed file again via the editor then click “write single file to pedal” and it will get loaded into that slot. If you want to load multiple files at once onto the pedal then it’s best to create a folder, copy in the PC files you want to load onto the pedal. Then rename each file with the slot numbers you want them to go, choose that folder via the editor then click “write all”. Any blanks will be skipped over and left untouched in the pedal. I’ve gone a step further and have all patches I like in one folder (unnumbered). I then have a different folder into which I placed the 99 patches I want on my pedal at any given time and I number these with the two-digit prefix and write these all at once. If ever I swap any out, I delete the old file from this folder, add the new file and number it and then write all again. Or you could simply have one big folder with all patches you like and then just number the 99 that you want and click write all. Any unnumbered patches will be ignored in the write process. ______________________________________ Patch sharing: (I’ll see if I can create a shared drive like the one on Talkbass) My patches: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C7ZYqsyXkyNuasuuwLrQlICboSsGfXMp TB shared patches (including mine): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zto20lpne0dnent/AAC6W_8BHeYLrBTjkcoJBzCza?dl=0 __________________________________________ Latest firmware: http://pandamidi.com/support __________________________________________ My v3 sound clips: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1u2-dJaWdaAbPDnDdWkipu-P7IH_GHLQ2

There’s always room for one more bass. Always.

so here some pics of some 'wicks that have passed through my door in the last couple of years and which I have refinished

Not sure if I am in the right thread but here is my new (8 year old) arrival ! All working nicely except the treble control on the stacked bass/treble push/pull for split coil mode control rotates 360 degrees - hmmm! (And yes the Allen grub screw is tight)