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Good idea, I've done that -- she sends her thanks to you all.

Social media is society's cess pit. The very worst of human personality flaws are allowed to flourish and grow there without any kind of consequence and, as a result, it just gets worse and worse. Do yourself a huge favour and remove yourself from it, forget it exists.

Boring update from me (at least my wife struggled to feign interest). I got some longer screws for my bridge so I can intonate properly without the saddle being partially beyond the length of the screw. This necessitated a lot of research into the correct type, for which Fender were quite helpful but beaten to the punch by someone on Talkbass. If you look at most vintage mustangs you’ll see that the screws are not long enough to offer much adjustment, particularly in the D and G strings. Perhaps this is why the bridge is a tad further forward on reissues, who knows. Anyway the correct screws are Phillips UNC 6-32 2-1/2inch (or 2 inch for E and A). Exciting 😜

It's finished, again. Still not totally happy with the envelope filter, but it's the best small one I've found. I'd like a noise gate, but there's no room...

Its so your flag doesn't get a crease down the middle where the cabs would otherwise meet.

yep been there also, you would not believe some of the stories i can tell of .... timewasters, scammers, people taking the pi$$, buyers that dont live in the uk, people asking stupid questions, people that have not read the description, people asking will i deliver half the country away people that do not turn up even though you waited in for them people asking 10 questions for days then "its ok iv found another one" people sending you dodgy links people asking you to swap for this, then sending you a dodgy link people asking for your address and contact number then radio silence. people offering a courier to collect with cash. people whos mum really want it but he is working off shore on an oil rig peoples buying for a son or daughter cus its their birthday they can pay but are out the country. people then when you click their profile have pics surrounded by palm trees, and live abroard people that are a pastor and want you to send to a friend yep facebook is rife with scammers, you have to be cautious. and can be a real pain in the crack. on saying all that, once you can navigate the minefield, i have met loads of really nice buyers and sellers. and the best bit.... no Ebay fees ! .... but at the cost of all the sh!t you have to put up with. my rule number 1,.... if it has to be sent....i dont except paypall, only bank transfer for obvious reasons. and if collecting its cash ONLY !

Sadly it's the world we live in. There are some wonderful, amazing human beings out there but there are equally some complete and utter tool's with toilet paper for brains. They walk among us and we sadly come in contact with them now and again.

It's not quite day 1 of the project as I've spent a while doing research. I play mandocello in a renaissance-folk-rock band. I have two mandocellos - both acoustic with pickups, both really quite loud. I started off thinking an all-electric would be good for quiet practice, but the more I looked at donor electric guitars the more I thought I wanted to work on a more 'rock' sound. So today I bought this 6-string donor. In red, devil horns shaped body, in the Angus Young / Epiphone SG style. Rather than a full 8-string mandocello, I'm going with a single C string on the bottom, so the tuning will be C-GG-DD-AA. The plan: remove three tuners on the lower side of the head. Dowel the holes, make good & re-drill for four tuners - making 3 on the top, 4 on the bottom. make a new 7 groove nut New bridge & saddle - probably modified bass parts New larger pickguard to surround the new pickups TBD: Pickups. Hofner bass pickups and Telecaster neck bar pickups are on my list Edit to add: I fall in the "expectant customer" category. I'm doing as much of the work as I can, but the skilled work will be done by my local guitar technician.

once a buyer asked me to deliver an item (giant bean bag!). I put it in the car and drove to their flat. I rang the bell and…. They switched the lights off, closed the curtains and pretended they weren’t there. It was actually quite funny. What was less funny was the guy messaging me again asking for details and if he could pick it up. People are genuinely mad.

For me, the bass is the bridge between rhythm and melody. That's where it should stay to complement the song. When players come out of this pocket, that's what turns me off. I hate w***ing of any kind over a piece of music, be it bass, vocals or even gratuitous overly played guitar.

In my write up of my home-made fretted bass, I mentioned that the original neck I mad earmarked for it was damaged by a badly behaved bandsaw. This is the story of what I did with that damaged neck blank. For about two years, that neck blank sat propped up against the wall in the attic. I had a vague idea of making a headless bass with it, even though I've never been a huge fan of headless instruments (this is before their sudden renaissance really got going). However, I'd looked at how much decent headless bass hardware cost and scampered away with my tail between my legs. (A Hipshot bridge/headpiece set costs like £400, which was more than I was planning on spending on the whole project). Then, one day, I stumbled across someone (perhaps of this parish) selling a set of ABM individual bridge-tuner units and a hand-made brass headpiece for £100 on eBay. I snapped them up because that's about £200 less than they would have cost new, and this was during the pandemic, so no-one had new ones in stock anyway. With this stuff delivered, I made some measurements and started working on a design. My main priority was that I wanted to have the tuners easily acessible without having them hanging off the back, or having the body cut inwards to make them acessible. Like the odd annulus things on some Alembics – I've always thought those access cutaways give your bass a sort of flabby cloaca thing. Below is the design I settled on. My thinking was that without a headstock to counterbalance, I could dispense with the top horn, and if I followed the staggered angle of the bridge units with the lower edge of the body, I could handle tuner accessibility with a routed-out recess. The little shape in the upper bout was going to be either an inlay or a soundhole-like thing – I hadn't decided which, but I felt it needed something there for visual balance. The idea was that this would be a two-piece ash body with a walnut top. The ash would be chambered to keep the weight down. It was to have simple passive electronics and cheap jazz pickups because I wasn't sure about the integrity of headpiece, and didn't know how I'd go about replacing it if it didn't work, so I bought all my parts with the possibility in mind that the whole thing might be a bust. I'll continue this tomorrow, but I should note up top that I took far fewer pictures of the process of making this bass than I did with my other one. I think this was because it was the spring of 2021, and I was in an Omicron-lockdown fugue state. That means this write-up will probably be a bit more concise than the last one (it didn't require a "15 years earlier" prologue, so that's a good start).

After a recent thread where I asked for string cleaner recommendations I have done some more research, taken as much advice as I can and come up with a solution. It seems to be the case that most string cleaner products are essentially mineral oil, sometimes with a little extra scent. However, if that's the case then £8-£10 for a few ml of mineral oil seemed like a bad deal to me, so I figured I'd do it for myself. 500ml mineral oil £7.99 (about 100x cheaper than any commercial string cleaner by volume) 5 lint free cloths £3.99 2 marijuana tins £7.99 In other words, for somewhere about the price of 2 lots of commercial string cleaner you can get two infinitely refillable tins, enough cloths to last ages, and enough oil to refill the whole shebang 25 times over. Nice! I poured a few ml into each tin, stuck the cloth in there so it got nice and soaked and put one in my office where I play bass and one in my gig kit bag. It's been about a week now and so far it's working just as well as anything I've ever used. Which is to say that the strings feel shiny if you wipe before you play and then they still feel a little shiny next time you pick them up if you wipe them down after you play. I'm not entirely convinced that any of these products inherently make your strings 'last' longer before going dead, but it can't hurt, right?

I forgot to post final pictures. Such an amateur.

I've been tweaking various bits to try and make sure it's tunable and that I don't fix into the design, things that are wrong. I've printed a few neck pockets, adjusted the height slightly so that when I follow the tuning guide that @SamIAm posted three pages earlier. The bass plays well in the lower frets but I still feel the strings are too high when I get to the dusty end of the neck. However I discovered that small changes in the truss rod do work, so I'm a lot happier. I feel that I might be getting to the stage where I'm tweaking for tweaking sake and not actually progressing the build. I have all the bits printed now and am focussing on the pickups and mounting them. I spent a few days messing around with body mounting the pickups but the height limitations of the pickup area means this is hard. I'm playing with a few mm here and there. This is due to three simple measurements, the aluminium backbone 15mm, the printed central spine, 10mm, and the maximum depth of the body 44mm. This gives me a depth 19mm, plus the height from the top of the body to the strings, in which to mount a pickup. Its hard work to design a pickup that connects to the body securely but also has enough movement to lower and raise as needed. So I'm now going back to mounting it on the pickguard and will (possibly) use some lightweight foam to dampen it. I may well steal the design from my six string to do all of this This means I'm now into getting the control panel fitted using a Squier set of pots and pickups just to get things going. I have other ideas for the control panel, but I want to get it going first before the mad ideas come into play. So things to do now: 1. Design a functional pickguard for the body. 2. Design a functional pickguard for the control panel. This means I'm going to have to glue things together <shock horror>. 3. Put the low tension strings on to replace the tug boat strings. Thanks Rob

@ped please lock my thread. It has become an argument-a-thon.

That Yolk Isn't Runny Any More ～ The Smïths

I've just snagged a used green one for £500 on ebay from a local seller I've bought off before. His basses are usually set up with the lowest action of any I've ever played so dying to get my hands on it tonight.

It looks interesting? TBH for the size of venues that these bands are playing on-stage amplification will make zero contribution to what the audience hears, and depending on how the monitoring is configured somewhere between zero and very little to what the musicians hear, so they might as well do something interesting with how the backline is arranged. For all we know the cabs are stage props only.

Facebook marketplace seems to bring out the worst in people. Just this weekend, I ended up staying in for a buyer that never turned up, no response to messages even though they'd been hassling for about a week with loads of silly questions and to arrange the collection time. I'd put off other buyers and changed weekend plans. I just can't fathom what's going through their heads to be such time wasters and so inconsiderate.

Love Me Three Times - The Doors

Well, it seems we're at an impasse...

Gig rig.

OK round one of the carving is complete. I left it 1mm thicker everywhere on purpose in order to give me a chance to see how the carving was going without risking it getting too thin. Time to get serious. I routed the perimeter down to 4mm, it's final thickness. Time to crack out the gouge and mini plane again. I'm not finding it easy planing it without getting tearout. Wood is like cats fur, it want's to go in one direction. Get it it wrong and the blade can get out under the fibres and pull out a chunk. Carving it is like butter, till suddenly it isn't. It's also a second grade piece of wood, so there's lot's of grain runout, making tearout even more difficult. So far so good though....

My latest go at a pedalboard. I am pleasantly surprised at the quality of the X5 effects, but at present no OD hence the MXR (Inserted using the FX loop between the octaver and chorus, the X5 is chained R to L). The X5 tuner does not cope with a low B hence the KORG at the front of the chain. I have a lot more tweaking to do with the settings on each of the X5 toneprints to dial in my 'perfect' sound. And I need to sort a wider board so the KORG is not sideways! (Slight OCD). Sam x

I agree, though some of those brains are probably more like used toilet paper.😏

You should never be using a shim to counteract neck. That's what the truss rod is there for. No you don't. The whole point of using a partial shim is that you can get away with something really small and thin (and probably invisible once the neck as been re-attached) that changes the angle at which the neck fits into the pocket which allows the saddles to be at a sensible height to get the right action. I once did a series of diagrams clearly illustrating this but they appear to have been lost when Photobucket started wanting payment for image hosting.

Things like this make me feel really old.

Ok….. cat amongst the pigeons…. I’m a rock guy, and having seen him play live a couple of times, and listened to a lot of his recorded stuff, I have never been able to connect at all with Billy Sheehan. Too many distorted fireworks going off there for me.

Social media is a cesspool. I have seriously minimised my use of it over the last few years, twitter can do one and I only remain on FarceBook to keep track of peoples' birthdays, band reasons, and sometimes I do sell stuff there. Must say I've dodged the worst of the craziness/nastiness, but I've had plenty of chancers/lowballers/tyre kickers, the occasional overpayment scammer. It's a mess. The process is exactly the same but none of these people would act like this if it was an ad in the paper and we conducted business over the phone in the old days. It's like people change into entirely different people online, it's like a switch. Older types like me who remember a pre-(consumer) Internet world and were there at the dawning of it with hope and awe now look on sadly. This is not how it was supposed to turn out

I’d say probably yes - equivalent to just under £120 here. I haven’t tried the Rumble 40, but if it’s anything like my Rumble 100 then it will be fine. The 100 is a great sounding amp, and I’ve used it for many small gigs with no problems. If you could run to a s/h one of these it would be more future proof than the 40 - over here they go from around £150 to £200 second hand (around 190 to 250 dollars). Good luck!

People don’t understand the emotions going on here. I think that people can be very cruel at times without realising it. When I’ve seen things that are advertised incorrectly, I’ve messaged the seller to point this out politely. Hope things get better for you and your wife.

I would dispute that.

From my years working as a local Newspaper journo, I learned that sometimes “good enough is good enough.” As in, 250 words by today’s deadline is worth more than 400 words next Thursday afternoon. I don’t think there’s any piece of art or music anywhere whose creator wouldn’t go back and tinker with but there’s a cut off point for me where it becomes diminishing returns - not a better or worse version, just a different version.

Here's both of the Overwaters I used to own - the 1983 version on the left and slightly later one on the right: IIRC the 1983 model was the first 5-string that Overwater made and was based on their C-Bass design. This one used to be owned by the session bassist Michael Féat, and may possibly have been used on some very high-profile albums, although I can't find any direct evidence for what it was played on. They were both very good basses, but overall didn't suit me as well as my Gus G3s and therefore weren't getting much use. Both were moved on when I had my big clear out some years ago.

A return to the Apple and Parrott in Torquay last night. Our drummer couldn't make it as he had tickets for Mr Big, so we drafted in our previous drummer, my son, who still deps for us. It was party central and plenty of people up for dancing and a good time. In house PA and engineer always gives a great FOH sounds, although the stage sound can be a bit odd, but was sorted for set 2. It's a great vibe there which we can feed off. Lots of great compliments from people afterwards, including one guy who admired my playing and my Stingray. It was a late finish, but at least no PA to breakdown. Looking forward to the next one. My usual set up, Stingray 2eq, Ashdown RM 500-Evo II, BF 210 on gramma pad due to raised stage.

I was at the Dog and Duck last night when I saw Charles Berthoud sitting in with a blues band. It was terrible - he kept playing so many notes and was slapping and tapping over everything. He was also playing a class D amplifier that had no heft. Nobody in the crowd was dancing due to the lack of groove. Eventually the band got sick of him and invited a Basschat greybeard onto the stage to sit in. From the moment he plugged his (modified) Harley Benton into his vintage '80s Trace Elliot everything changed. The power and heft of his whole notes and the tasteful use of minor pentatonic shapes (no matter whether over a major or minor tonality) had everybody up on the dancefloor grooving away. I later saw Charles outside pacing up and down nervously and chain smoking, a bit like when Clapton saw Hendrix for the first time. True story. There's a lesson for us all there I think.

Last Night: Bloxwich hockey club's end of season awards/prizegiving/dinner/pissup at Old Wyrley Hall in Walsall (I think?) with Down to the Floor - 5 piece girl-fronted modern popular music beat combo. Britney, Beyonce, Dua Lipa, Arianna Grande, Rhianna, Girls Aloud, Spice Girls, Whitney type stuff. Load in at 5 so we're set up, soundchecked and out of the way before the awards and speeches. The stage is about the size of a postage stamp (a normal one, not one of the big commemorative ones) so there was barely room for my size 12s and the New Improved Enormous Pedalboard (NIEPB). The Bass amp was on the other side of the stage and I had to fold my stand up between sets, it was that small. I had a bit of a mare setting up as the Bass amp (not mine) decided to commit suicide (luckily I had mine with me) AND my midi controller decided it didn't want to play nicely, so I took ages to set up and had to soundcheck without IEMs and hope it would all be fine. Soundcheck done (sort of) and with some time to kill, a couple of us went to the drummer's gaff and watched most of Pretty Woman with his Mrs (Spoiler Alert: Julia Roberts is pretty and also a woman. Richard Gere is also in it (He's not a woman, as far as I am aware. I wouldn't call him 'pretty' either, but I believe he is generally considered to be quite handsome (if you like that sort of thing))). Back to the venue for 9ish, sat around and kicked our heels (and had the singer paint my nails a fetching shade of purple) while the prizegiving and roistering continued, went on about 10:30 to a room full of incredibly excited and heavily refreshed hockey players - imagine rugby players but without the restraint, decorum or dignity. They absolutely loved it, the dancefloor was packed from the first note, we played really well despite being wedged onto a tiny stage - I was so close to the drummer, I could smell his earwax. We had our first choice singer, she's fantastic - she's always nervous about Love on Top (the song), but she smashed it - including the four key changes and the whistle register stuff. Highlights were Toxic, which we nailed (a relief after we totally flubbed it last time) and Crazy in Love/Crazy mashup which is our collective favourite now we've nailed the arrangment (It's easy enough: 6, 4, 2, 8, 8, (4), 8, 10, Crazy, 6, 4, loads, (*4), ending). Two 45 minute sets, finished about half midnight... they would have had us playing til 3 AM, they were loving it that much. The organisers loved us, they want us back next year (again) and have promised a bigger venue (again). Played the 'Ray 5 -> New Improved Enormous Pedalboard (NIEPB) -> MB 802 (with PA support - I'd love to hear the OC-2 and C4 synth bassline on 'How will I know?' through those subs) Foot fans: White DMs with purple laces (to match the white shirt with purple tie and purple fingernails - you think I just throw these outfits together?!) Packed up (the drummer can now officially carry his entire kit including cymbals and hardware in one trip), home about 2 for last nights curry and a Westons reserve (8.2% ABV). Great night.

The great man said words to the effect that Jaco wasn't a musician, he was a dilettante.

Give it long enough and every bass player who's ever lived will be in this thread 😀

It’s wooten for me, seems like a really nice person but I struggle to watch him , and I’ll probably get shot down but I think Jaco is overrated