Leaderboard

Actually, the folks at David Dyke have worked a bit of magic It was going to be tricky to get the right thickness without a lot of wastage (and with DD, you know the quality is going to be good) and so I spoke to them and they have cut some for me straight away and it will be with me tomorrow. Excellent service. In the meantime, I'm starting to get the fretboard ready for fretting. I'm going to do what I have on a few other builds - using a feature-line binding that will be attached a mm beyond the rounded fret ends. This is maple, but you get the idea: The binding is scraped to the radius and the edges rounded, but you still end up with the fret ends inset by around 0.5 - 1mm. What you also get for free is the demarcation line without the need to add veneers under the board The fretboard has been tapered at to 4mm smaller than the finished size to allow for the 2mm binding either side: The stainless steel fretwire is here but, before I start cutting and fitting the frets, I'm going to be adding a couple of swifts at the 12th - which is tomorrow's job

I'd say it's around 9lbs. I've made an executive decision and it's staying. I can live with the lime!

Well, two days under full string tension and it's still holding tune. So it's time to see if we can really break its spirit - by adjusting the neck relief 10 minutes after a required 2.5 'quarter turns' and still in one piece:

Stolen bass... Today I was given some old gear from a coworker who sold his house and is abandoning his studio. Among it is a hand built precision from the Netherlands. I had never heard of the builder so I searched google and found the man's Facebook page. I noticed he had 2 mutual friends. Posted him photo's of the bass asking if it is from his hand and it was indeed. I had also posted 3 pics of it on FB, stating I was handed this bass and I did not know the brand. It did not take long for the rightful owner to recognize his custom made bass which had been stolen from his rehearsal room more then 25 years ago! He showed me pics to prove it, and some social media posts from 2017 of him searching for his lost treasure. Today, I found him his bass and soon as I noticed it is his, I rang him up and gave him my address. Tomorrow he will pick it up. That will be quite a moment for sure! Happy days.

I ordered one of those new Charvel PJ's last week and it arrived safely today. Upon opening it however, I was shocked to see that it was the metallic lime green version, not the blue one. The shop had clearly messed up. Well, when I say that, what I mean is I ordered the wrong one...

If it can break - it will. Maybe not this week, maybe not next, but it will. It really isnt a hard ship to take a spare just in case. Even a cheapo £50 bass.

Today I tried to remind myself of Teen Town by Jaco Pastorius. I know I left out a few bars, but I hated playing again because it took me about 15 takes to record anyway, so don’t be too strict . I used only humbucker with just a bit of mids added and old Elixir strings directly into Focusrite.

If you PM me the address I could try to go and see if they still have it?

Surprised no-one has mentioned Toy Matinee yet. Couple of others I've picked up on are Save Ferris and No Doubt.

It rang true in the @donstrumental Familyman video that I also started young listening to Bob Marley but gradually grew to not listening so much - thinking it's too commercial or overplayed, but there's good reason the music is so popular and going beyond 'Legend' or 'Exodus' there's loads of stuff that isn't overplayed. Today I'm playing this stone cold classic and really taking in the excellent Familyman basslines:

Bought back my old ‘95 Ray recently, so here’s a photo with its mates, a Special & Old Smoothie. Edit - now also pictured with the ‘95 restored to original.

UPDATE: Guy at Ashdown has not only put the correct Pot. in the post, But also supplied the Schematic PDF, and talked me through the replacement procedure... All at no charge... So, THANK YOU ASHDOWN, this is customer service above and beyond!

I've broken a string on a couple of occasions, but not in the last decade. I use active basses, and I've had a battery die on me before now. I have a double gig bag, so I always take two basses. Tune the second one up while the guitarist is fiddling during setup (plenty of time there), bung it on the stand (or put it carefully in the gig bag) and it's a matter of seconds to change if needs be. It's no real effort, so I don't see why not. I have spare leads, batteries, picks, etc (even a Behringer BDDI DI box I've never had to use, but only cost me a tenner). I see it as a professional approach.

I’ll take two basses to 90% of my gigs. I’m the same in that I’m primarily a ‘passive P’ type player, but the way I see it, if something breaks on a paid gig, I want to quickly be able to turn around and grab another bass. Rarely ever happens, if ever, but no skin off my nose taking two basses. One is very much a spare, I’m not swapping between them. On rare occasions I’ll have to train to a gig or something, so I’ll take one bass, but make sure I have spare strings etc. Si

Never had to, which is just as well as I've never taken a backup. I do keep a set of old (and therefore already stretched) strings in the gig bag so if I bust one, the replacement won't be forever going flat. I carry batteries, duplicates of every lead and a spare amp (which I think far more likely to expire than the bass).

Virtually finished now just the soldering, string up, headstock logo and a set up to do...... 👍🏻

I take the bass I am going to use, plus this tucked away in my gig bag:

It's kind of double voluted as well, with the neck to body carve.

These new picks are an 'opportunity' to learn again how to play guitar, so I'm starting from scratch. Today I did Page Fifteen of Bert Weedon's 'Play in a Day' method, the first playing exercise in the book. Open strings only, down strokes, then up and down, then moving between strings, with a sort of arpeggio thing to finish, across the strings. Tomorrow I'll do the same again then turn the page, the next day again, and so on, with an extra page a day. It's all written on staves, so I may get a bit of reading practise at the same time, which can't hurt. I'm not so sure about the 'Play in a Day' part, unless one gets up very early and skips meals, but the first lesson has gone off quite well, and I didn't drop the plectrum..!

Not the answer i wanted lol

I’d look at a used Fender US Standard (2008 onwards) or US Professional.

Low -"Things We Lost In The Fire 20th Anniversary Visual Album" :

Thank you both. That's brutal. 20% on a private sale, it's insane.

I always much preferred Ratt to Crue, Poison, etc.... they just seemed to have the edge on cool riffs and had much better guitarists.

I’ve got 2 stack knob jazzes and I love em, not only do they look cool, but controlling each pickup and tone individually is great , I will agree that it does take a while and a bit of playing around to get used to the settings

Looks Great. -- IMHO DiMarzios should be Cream --- 1977 Heaven!!

https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/filter/filter_2.html The advantage is the ability to change the rolloff frequency of each pickup independently...

^^^^ Yeah that's a good one. Mungo's Hi Fi and their Scotch Bonnet label put out a load of great stuff. 'Serious Time' is a great album and includes this

It’s Special. Not a Special - just Special 😂

???

You will learn about the SWR Mo'bass and then you are in trouble in wanting and finding one. Bi-amp Trace Elliot, Mesa 400+, ampeg, tce 1140 and Alembic preamps, LAB Gruppen power amps, Hellborg... I am sorry to inform you dear @javi_bassist, the list is endless.

I'm not in the amp-less era and doubt I ever will be. I want to stand in front of my amp and feel my sound when I play.

I take a backup, which is the hofner cricket bat, it takes no room and stays in the car. I have never really needed it, but I did once use it as I wasn't getting on with my primary bass. But for me it is just there for me to feel confident. I have spare leads, batteries. Ultimately the only things I ever really need are spare things of whatever the guitarist uses, as he is the one that forgets / breaks things and never carries a spare. Which is odd considering he brings 2 or 3 guitars and switches between them.

if you fit different value caps it does sound subtly different to VVT, if you wire it the modern way without the resistors the two tone circuits interact even with the volume completely off on one pickup so you have more variable tone controls, however finding the tone you like can be harder and remembering what you have as the mix of settings for the tone or tones you like can be a pain, I ended up putting a dot of white on the knobs for my favourite sound so I could easily dial that in. It's something like 95% neck with 20% tone mixed with 70% bridge with 50% tone, which is pretty similar to 100% neck and 40% bridge with 30% tone on VVT but a smidge fuller on the higher strings Look at the wiring diagram for the pink MIM Flea Jazz, iirc I put a '47' on the neck and a '33' cap on the bridge on mine

The green is way nicer than the blue! I think you got the better one.

Just shows that your hearing is rubbish. Uneducated hearing, that's your problem.

For a pub gig, unless I'm doubling on upright I only take one bass. For bigger shows when I generally have to travel further, I've normally got a spare.

Matt and I are discussing offline the control chamber stuff and then I'll start routing some of the lightening chambers and I have some ideas what I want to do at the back. But that purpleheart is bugging me. It will be easier if I take it off and start with some new. To remove it, I did the same as if taking off a fretboard - a hot iron and lots of patience! The patches are oil coming out of it. Stinks too. Weird when the wood to work on always seems dry as a bone. Anyway, it's off...and the walnut is pretty flat again. Just got to get some more purpleheart - I'm going to try somewhere else than DD's with their leadtimes being so long at the moment...

The good news is that the mating surface of through-neck and wings are pleasingly flat And to the internal features and chambers - but to do that, I need to know, broadly at least, the external carve. And the carve to me is also an iterative process. The mathematicians amongst you will shake their heads disapprovingly and mutter, "Iterations on top of iterations...it's going to turn out like a camel..." Anyway, camel or thoroughbred, it's the only way I can work. So time to take some of the bulk away that I know needs to go before I can see what might make it look nice too... For roughing out, I ought to buy myself a proper carver's chisel, but this is what I'm starting with - including my trusty Veritas Pullshave...the one example (or maybe the ONLY example) of an impulse buy being exactly what I needed as well as what I wanted All plays havoc with the arthritis, but half an hour later: And another half-hour, a decent start-off point: Bear in mind that this body is still oversize, but just having this done helps me think where to take the back carve next. I would hate to do it CNC...there is no way I could envisage it all first!!

@Daz39, ive got a few ideas brewing as i mentioned earlier in the thread, a lot of the material choices for this bass were made with the consideration of "if this experiment goes to s***, how much is this going to cost me?" and so most of the wood choices were relatively inexpensive... as such id love to have another stab using some more expensive wood options in the future, and ive got a few changes id make to the pickups and preamps next time round as well. @binky_bass, certainly not too prying, im happy to share if it helps others! The wood costs were broadly as follows: Body wood - Padauk - approx £22 Body veneer laminations + extra veneers for the neck: approx £80 (these are expensive partly because they are thick constructional veneers, and partly because they cost a lot to ship) neck laminations (veneers /oak boards / rosewood) - approx £50 Namibian rosewood block for the neck through - approx £45 other various veneers etc approx £30 macassar ebony fretboard - £40 inlays - approx £100 Flamed redwood top (imported from US, bit of a difficult one to quantify as it came with a couple others) - approx $80 for the top approx $70 for the shipping plus import tax... probably total about £100 for the rest of the parts: Bigsby b500 clone (a good one) - £35 brass parts for customisation - approx £10 Tune - o matic bridge - £21 TUSQ graphite blocks - £12 Sperzel locking machine heads - £91 assorted extra hardware (inserts, straplocks etc) - approx £30 for the electronics: 3D printed pickup covers + switches - £33 truss rod - £16 carbon fibre in the neck - £32 PCBs for pickups, bobbins, preamps - approx £50 spool of 41AWG wire - £26 electrical components (resistors, caps, pots, knobs etc) - approx £40 bits for power supply + custom cable - approx £30 there were many other assorted costs for sanpaper, fresh router bits+jigsaw blades etc, and stuff i already had like the finishing products which i can't total up here. (if id had a swear jar in the garage id be broke) so based on that math, total would be somewhere around £850-900 ish. which is frustratingly expensive really, ive built some nice basses before for less than half of that, but there just arent many cheaper ways to do some of the stuff on this one. as for time, thats a difficult one to say. i think with all of the reworks of various things id hazard a guess around 240 hours, but maybe more than that. hope that is helpful to anyone wondering like i was saying, id like to do the next one with some fancier woods/veneers... just seen this fretboard blank for sale... that sort of gets the cogs turning

Had a look at the warp in the top and now understand exactly what it is and where it is - and I can put it to one side for sorting later as it may sort itself. End on - it's like this...and I'd be proud if I'd done it on purpose - it's basically the shape that @TheGreek asked me to do on his Psilos bass : This is an end-on shot looking from the tailstock towards the nut and it is the purpleheart that's doing it. It was glued under clamping, but the moisture from the glue clearly has expanded the pupleheart, the top has glued and is held by the less porous walnut, the bottom has then dried and shrunk and pulled it into a bow. The same sort of thing can happen when you are gluing veneer, but that doesn't have the strength to bend the underlying wood. Now, if I was skilled enough, I would carve the mating surface of the oak to be the same shape, because my cunning plan on reducing weight is to add a touch of this at the back - not as extreme as this (which is @Len_derby 's lightweight Swift) but more like the curve above : "And if I was skilled enough, I would carve the mating surface of the oak to be the same shape..." But I'm not Under clamping, it will flatten - but it is a huge force that I wouldn't want to be sitting in the middle of a bass over the next 20 years or so. But I will, any event, be routing out much of the purpleheart out and that will help. If it doesn't fully sort it, I can cut some stress relief slots along the length of the internal face of purpleheart that will sort is and still be fully invisible. But all of that can wait because it's onto finalising the back weight relief, control chamber, etc, etc, etc

This is my Forte 6. I think it has quite a fancy top (but opinions may vary) , so yes, nothing is really impossible with these. And I love the plain ebony board on this one.