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Had this for around 2 months now. Yet to gig it, as for the Soul band, the Dingwall 5P, is pretty much perfect for that. Got quite a few function band deps lined up for next year, so going to have a proper play around, as there is a massive amount of on board controls. So as of yet, I’m still playing around with it. Bought it off someone on here, and wasn’t cheap. Sold two MusicMans, a Framus, and loads of pedals, but it was totally worth it. 35” scale QW5 Modulus Quantum. They did two wide spacing ones- 19 and 21.5 mm. This ones the 21.5 mm. So basically their big standard 17mm 6 string neck, but with 5 strings. It’s really wide

Well, the basic carve is done, ready for final sanding: This is why I like the cabinet scraper - you wouldn't think that this hasn't been sanded at all yet. And so in terms of what's been progressed: The headstock is now at finished thickness - a really nice bit of maple, this. The heel is still presently deeper than the fretted neck, but the neck depth from the spine to the top of the fretboard is now the same, as is the overhang: A volute on a P Bass?? Heresy! (But @SpondonBassed might want to treat it as a Christmas present ) And an offcut of the radiussed fretboard is ready to be cut-and-carved and then added the other side of the nut: I don't know how much extra will be done before family duties for Christmas start taking over, but the next jobs will include cutting the nut/fitting the fretboard extension and drilling the tuner holes so that I can temporarily fit them to allow me to cut the heel to the final depth and angle.

Today there are loads of good basses for £500. I'm a big fan of the Bass Collection Nanyo SGC range - search around and you can find one for around £150 - you'll get loads of bass for your buck. There's a whole thread here where you'll find out why you should. You'll also find G&L basses in that price bracket. I'm a big fan of the SB2 - and you'll find them available for around £300. Lots of Squiers in your budget - I really rate the Standard model (PJ) - again you'll find these for around £200. Sires - there is good reason why everybody has owned one - amazing basses for under £200. If you can find a NS Spector for around £300-350 snap it up. All the above basses are miles ahead of basses that were available when I started playing back in the 80s.

Usual reaction from anyone who sees it..................

Now down to £379 which was too hard to resist. 😎

Something from one of my band's Christmas do's last week. My ol' P sounding lovely, I reckon.

My first bass in my latter period of playing was a Fender Modern Player Jazz, in fact I had a Mk1 and a Mk2. Once set up they were sublime. I got both for £375 each. They don’t come up second hand that much, I expect because it’s a shed load of bass for little coin. I swapped out the Mk2 neck for a fretless neck, it was lush. I think they were easily the best basses I’ve owned in a bang for buck sense, by miles.

Correct. It is only limited by the maximum voltage , maximum current (amps) and the imagination of the marketing department.

@bassist_lewis, @hiram.k.hackenbacker check the 3Leaf site every day this week - there will be another bunch of B-stock Octabvre IIIs listed but they’ll go quickly.

How do you know? The knob position doesn't reveal the amp power output, nor does anything else. With a low voltage input signal the knobs could all be wide open and yet the output -10dB or more from rated output. With a high voltage input the knobs could all be at 9:00 and yet the output +6dB over rated output. I once blew a 200 watt EVM-15B with a 50 watt amp when I hooked up a pink noise generator for testing. I didn't realize that the generator was cranked, so when I turned it on the voice coil blew in less than a second.

.....but at the potential expense of all other aspects of a tone and feel that might not like or be appropriate for the music they play? I'm with WoT on this.....probably not a thing. I find that different basses want different strings (obviously that sits within our personal preference for things). I had flats on my passive P/J Lakland 44-94 for a while, it sounded fine, but wasn't right.....I couldn't tell you why. Put some roundwounds on it, boom, perfect. Similar excercise with my 1971 Precision, it had rounds on it for a little while when I first got it.....wasn't right, but some flats on it....boom, perfect. My 55-01 had rounds on it for a bit, horrible.....put some tapewounds on it, boom, perfect. To that end, I would suggest that all players, if they consider that a certain string isn't working for them, don't be all 'naaa flats/rounds are bad', just think that they might not be right for that particular bass. Si

I spent a fair wedge putting Aguilar pickups, a Babicz bridge and Kiogon loom into a Squier VM Jazz. I did it not because I was trying to build a 'super jazz' on a budget, but purely because I fancied a go at modding. I had a lot of fun doing it and I was thoroughly pleased with the results.

That's quite a shopping list of upgrades for such a budget bass! I'd imagine all that expense will actually make the upgrades cost more than the bass was originally bought for, or importantly would ever be worth in the future, so on that basis alone I would say don't do it.

Another vote for Yamaha... I've had loads, from a BB3000S down to my current RBX460. £170, and it's a cracker with a good setup and flats. Even an RBX170 I found for a friends son was a belter and under a ton on fleabay. Anything from Yamaha or Ibanez can stand up against gear twice the price. I love to find good quality affordable gear, and as long as it's set up correctly and sounds how you want it to, it's a bass for life. I'd rather have a few sub £500 basses to chose from than a couple of expensive ones.

"My muting technique isn't very good, so I'm going to use flats." said no-one. Ever.

Got to agree. That body shape is minging.

There is a queue… every single person in the queue “I KNOW HIM SO WELL!”

I bought a Squier CV Jazz in Olympic White in 2009 for £250 new. I still have it. I very much doubt it would fetch more than £250 now. Which is fine, I’ve modded it incessantly and I have spent probably a thousand hours on it when I was at music school. It has served its need well. IMO there are better ways to speculate with your money. I don’t think the CV’s will appreciate the way the JV’s did. The supply of CV’s is considerably higher.

G&L Tribute, whatever your poison is (Precision-a-like, Jazz-a-like or one of G&L's own take on things)

Sealed designs are simple compared to ported. The advantage to sealed is that they're hard to mess up, so long as the drivers used have the right specs for sealed. It just so happens that the right specs for sealed are high Qts, which are what's usually found with inexpensive drivers, so if you're going to use an inexpensive driver just stick it in a sealed box and you're good to go. Ported cabs work best with lower Qts drivers, which also tend to be more expensive, so if you have a more expensive drive it probably needs to be in a well designed ported box for best results. Ported goes lower than sealed when done right. What you don't want to do is to put an inexpensive high Qts driver in a badly designed ported box, as the result will usually be a boom box. When you hear people complain about ported speakers being boomy it's usually because they had a cheap driver in a bad box. Like most generalizations it's not true. The Ampeg SVT, for instance, was made sealed because that's what gave the best results with the high Qts drivers that they used. They could have made it ported and probably would have if they were able to find low Qts 32 ohm drivers, but none were to be had in 1969. Damping factor is a non-factor other than in extreme cases that are very rarely seen. http://www.cartchunk.org/audiotopics/DampingFactor.pdf

Here's my pedal board! I feel a bit inadequate 😔

I assumed they just did a 50/50 split between Kings of Leon and Wilson Picket and figured they had it mostly sorted.

I’d keep the aerodyne. It’s blue and a pj what’s not to like! 😃😂

There's a couple of fairly reliable blokes I use. I could have a word if you like... oh, whoops, please ignore.

In: Some strings Out: 2020 strings Expecting the same for 2022

I Think It's Going To Rain Today - Nina Simone

So the graph below is the predicted response of a 12" speaker in a 60litre box, the red line shows a ported cab and the blue line a sealed cab. Same driver same box. The first thing to see is that above 300hz the lines converge and pretty much the whole of the midrange and top end are going to be the same. Exactly as @Twincam discovered when they tried the experiment. Below 200 Hz and for a full two octaves the red line is higher showing that the ported cab is a lot louder and gives a lot more bass. There's an extra 6db at 50 Hz where the port is tuned. That's the same as if you moved from a 200W amp to an 800W amp, and more is better right? It's really hard for a designer to ignore this effect, when you go to try the speaker out in a showroom the ported cab is going to be louder and bassier and sales teams know that this is what sells. It is also what most customers want so why would a designer choose to withhold the extra bass? The sealed cab gives a -3db of 76 Hz and the ported -3db of 50 hz, hands up who will buy the 50Hz cab over the 76Hz cab? OK now move into a gig. Put the cab on the floor and the bottom end gets a 3db boost, back against the wall another 3db. Now you start to notice something else. That sealed cab has a nice flat response that tails off slowly, the sealed cab has a sharp knee and lots of deep bass. The extra 3db makes up for the missing bass for the sealed cab and it sounds a little better. 3db of deep bass isn't so helpful for a cab which already has enough deep bass and it starts to sound boomy/muddy. This is exactly what @BassAdder27 was describing in terms of mid-punch versus fullness or roundness. Extra bass isn't always good, you need to make decisions based on what sound you prefer and recognise that what works in one situation won't sit comfortably in the mix in another. Now there is quite a lot of over-simplification here. I've deliberately chosen a driver which will 'work' in both a sealed or ported cab and which is the sort of speaker you'll find in a lot of mid priced commercial cabs. I've also used the sealed cab size that gives the flattest response, that happens to give the nearly 2db peak for the ported cab. I could have easily changed drivers, porting and tuning to create a flat response ported cab. I've chosen to emphasize difference too but you are always going to get that extra bass from a ported cab all other things being equal. It's the sound coming out of the port that does that and the port does other stuff too. There's a bit of a generic difference between ported and sealed cabs but a good designer can create a good response from either sort of cab with the choice of driver and the careful matching of the cab There's one other thing to think about too. We almost can't hear bass, not the deep stuff. Most of what we hear as bass is the second harmonic, 80-160Hz for a four string so -3db at 76Hz is more liveable with than you'd expect and on top of that what really makes the timbre of your bass is all up in the mid frequencies where the cab makes little difference.

My strings make a noise. Given how much I've spent on basses and amplifiers I'd be really bloody cross if they didn't

I bet you iron your jeans, too.

My Precisions (or Precisionishes)

I recently picked up one of the Bass Collection Guy Pratt Betsy models, got it s/h with a nice gig bag from Bass Direct for £450. Pretty standard Jazz bass fayre but with EMGs like the actual Betsy. Excellent finish and I really can’t fault it. ‘Cheap’ basses (and guitars) really aren’t what they used to be! I got one of the Harley Benton Les Paul copies from thomann in the summer for £238 delivered and it’s absolutely brilliant!

Like the one @ped is selling?

Go to a professional studio to record your bass parts. Seriously. I see this all the time in all sorts of situations - not just recording - where the suggestion is that with the right hardware and/or software anyone can can do anything and get fantastic results. It simply isn't true. Perhaps if you spend many hundreds of hours working at it you may find that you have the right aptitude and ability to produce great recordings, but it's more likely that you will spend a load of time and money and not be any better off at the end. Trust me, I've been there. I started out recoding at home because back in the 70s if you had very little money there was no alternative. Most of what I produced from a technical PoV was rubbish, but because the equipment I was using was low quality, I was able to easily convince myself that with a better multitrack/mixer/more outboard gear I would be able to produce recordings as good as those of the bands that I liked. By the time I got to the 90s, the gap between the "home studio" and the professional one as regards equipment had all but vanished, and finding myself in a position of having lots of disposable income, I threw a lot of it at building up a very serious recording set up. However, no matter how much money I spent, my recording still didn't come anywhere close to the quality of the records and CDs I was buying. It turned out that I simply didn't have the ability to produce recordings of the quality I wanted. This was brought home to me with a bang when I joined a band with a drummer with an acoustic kit, which I didn't have the facility record at home. So we went into a proper studio. There the engineer was able to produce a great sounding recording almost instantly and using equipment that, technically, was actually slightly lower quality than what I had in my "studio". It wasn't a one-off occurrence either. Every studio I went to over the next 5 years the story was the same. Eventually I had to concede that the weak link in my studio was me, and that I had wasted the best part of £30k over the past 15 years, buying hardware and software that I simply did not have the skill to get decent results out of. Since then I've sold almost everything (at a considerable loss) and my studio exists for me to do drum programming for one of my bands (something that I can do well) and very basic demos for songs, where the sound doesn't really matter so long as all the instrumental parts can be clearly heard. If all of that hasn't put you off then I suggest the following: 1. Don't spend any more money. What you have already from a technical PoV is probably far superior to the equipment that was used to produce some of the most memorable recordings of all time. Learn to use what you have, and get to know all of it inside out, before even contemplating opening your wallet. 2. As others have said, the weak link in your recording set up is most likely the listening environment. Learn its strengths and weakness. Spend hours listening to your favourite recordings on your set up so that you know exactly how they sound. Only when you are completely familiar with how great recordings sound on your system can you start to make objective judgements about your own recordings. By the time you have put in the hours doing the above you should be able to tell whether you have the aptitude to make recordings yourself that are up to the standard that you require. I know if I had my time again I'd take all the money I spent on my "studio" and hired a proper one along with a decent producer. At least that way I'd have come out of it with a finished album that sounded great, instead of a handful of recordings that I have never been completely happy with and a load of half-finished tracks that are lost forever. I'd probably even have enough left over to spend on effective promotion.

The bottom line is that an amplifier capable of delivering 440 watts at 4 ohms (possibly 800 watts peak) is capable of damaging a 4 ohm cab with a thermal rating of 300 watts if you ignore signs of the speaker being driven too hard.

I’ll buy it from you the day after 😂🤣

Just turn the bass guitar volume down?

I once had an Ibanez SR500, which I paid around £200 for, second-hand. It was a really well built bass, if you like slim necks. Superb pickups and electronics in it too, with Mk1 Bartolini pups. Albeit, the bass had a distinctly "modern" sound, if you like that sort of thing. I sold that bass for pretty much what I'd paid for it, and there were times when I'd wished I'd kept it (Done that many times lol) So a while back, I was looking for a 5 string bass, and had a couple of stipulations: I wanted it to be as lightweight as I could get (for around a £500 budget), and I wanted a slim(ish) neck, but not so slim for the string spacing to be too tight for the plucking hand - so I needed a slim neck, with a degree of tapering, to be able to get my fat fingers between strings.... Anyhow, I picked up the SR505 and it felt a lot like my old SR500. I instantly felt I could get used to it (I don't play 5'ers much - I just "noodle" at home). Again, quality build, great pups & electrics, very controllable tonally. It's also pretty lightweight for a 5'er. They tend to go very reasonably second-hand too. Mine was new, but in a sale - so I had a good few quid off IMO the SR500 and SR505 are rather underrated basses. Another recommendation from me, would be the Squier, early China-made Classic Vibe basses, if you're looking for more traditional instruments like a P or J bass. My 2008 / 2009 CV Precision is a superb bass, and there are times when I wish I'd kept my 2010/11 CV P in Fiesta Red. That said, the newer CV range made in Indonesia are pretty good too. I tried one of their earlier Jazz basses, and that was OK - but I've played a couple of the more recent ones and I think they've improved.

Because a quality gig bag will actually offer more protection than a lot of cheap hard cases, especially those wooden rectangular ones.

I'd been using my heavily modified Harley Benton 75JB for a couple of years and decided to have something special made around the hardware which is/was: US Hipshot Ultralite Tuners & Xtender on the E Fender high mass bridge EMG Jazz pickups with 2 band BTS system After watching Guy Pratt's lockdown videos, some of Guy's other basses, my enduring love for the Chilis and so on I decided on a Status Graphite Jazz neck and Warmoth body. The body is a chambered alder Dinky Jazz bass body with mahogany top, rear routed with double battery box and finished in satin Taos Turquoise. It's turned out even better than I could have hoped for. It's always a gamble putting something together without being able to see all of the components together until it's all been made and assembled but here it is:

I play in a loud rock band with two guitarists and a heavy hitting drummer. My Barefaced Two10 destroyed them last week at rehearsal because I got a bit over-zealous with the volume control on my Glockenklang Blue Rock 😅

There's still stuff to do, but visually this is pretty much there so I'll do the 'finished shots' Photographing this, with or without total cloud cover, is...er...challenging. Anyway, here's a few arty ones: And two or three in the great outdoors:

The Boss Tuner TU-3 App which is totally free for Android and Apple smartphones. https://www.boss.info/us/products/boss_tuner_app/

Orchid DIs.