Leaderboard

Phew, the headstock binding is done. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty happy. I also routed the truss rod access cover. Still a bit of tidying up to do, but I think it's time (finally) to glue on the fretboard.....

I don’t think Ashdown have any more issues with their gear than most manufacturers. I had an ABM500 head a few years ago which was built like a tank. I dropped it off a stage once and broke a few knobs/sliders, messaged Ashdown and had the replacement parts mailed to me free of charge within a few days. Top service really. Wouldn’t hesitate to buy Ashdown in the future

I feel I should add my comments to this. The original 1x12 project was started by Lawrence, Phil Starr and Stevie and made an excellent single 12” cabinet. I came to the project late, and offered little ,but hopefully helped by building the first prototype for the Mk2. I then built one of two (Stevie built the other) Italian Poplar cabinets, mine loaded with the Beyma SM212 plus Celestion 1415 compression driver and P Audio horn. I gigged that Cabinet for two years until the lighter Faital Pro driver became available. While the road to the CNC Kit Mk3 looks smoother than the final cabinet’s frequency response, the road to getting here was far from smooth. There were many cold days spent in Stevie’s measurement room fine tuning various combinations of driver. There was also comparisons to many other drivers and commercial cabinets and I was present for only some of these sessions. Stevie did many on his own, often in the depth of Winter.The measurement room is in a cast concrete garage and whilst well fitted our for measuring cabinet response, it it not the warmest room in the depths of Winter. The big change from the MK1 was the single large port that proved to be less prone to chuffing than multiple ports. Like many of the improvements, the large port makes little difference at lower volumes and Phil had gigged his Mk 1 cabs with four ports for a couple of years without hearing chuffing, until under test conditions. However it allows the British Cycling have used the concept of marginal improvements to put Britain top of the cycling tree and Stevie did the same with the MK2/3. Tuning the response to a true FRFR response was only part of the story. The real genius for me was rotating the horn. Although it looks a little odd, it gives more of the mids to the player when standing directly in front of the cabinet. Compared to me Mk2 with the horn horizontal, The MK3 , with the vertical horn, allows you to hear yourself however close to the cab. At 30cm/1ft, the Mk3 is easier to hear than the MK2 at 4-5ft/120-150cm. This is ideal if you are on a tight stage. I look forward to Funkle’s input as he uses the cabinet but I will be surprised if he does not love it.

Sometimes you just know that an instrument is 'wrong' for you. You may not be able work out exactly why that may be, but if it feels wrong it is wrong. Someone else will probably love it though.

I love Ashdown amps. I have four. I just bought a Spyder 550 on eBay for peanuts, turns out I paid less than it cost them to make them 😳 My ABM head cost me £90... It’s possibly (perceived) market saturation - they tend to be very easy to get hold of in shops and second hand, and perhaps some of the cheaper ranges have devalued the others. Maybe being a UK company makes this the case - are they seen as more boutique overseas?! They do have an excellent set of class D heads in the RM at the moment and their RM cabs are pretty light so it’s not like they don’t do lightweight stuff. I’ve always found them hugely helpful and respectful - the amount of time they’ve taken over the years talking to me and entertaining me when I pop in to see them is insane, I’m a nobody in the bass playing world but they always have the time for me. All I want now is a CTM preamp in an RM800 box. And a stripped back, half-width ABM500 too. It’s not too much to ask 🤣🤣

Bridge glued and holes taper-reamered. I double checked that it hadn't moved at all and, happily, it's still where it's supposed to be Next job fitting the pickups and then the back can go on (I know - you're supposed to do it the other way round...)

There is a very simple way to get around the problem of them not being equal in height - simply stack them vertically like this. 🤪

That's me this Saturday giving a run to my new Noguera 8 strings bass at our small comity Bass Bash at home...

I suspect the placement of the single split coil pickup isn't ideal for an articulate low B. Which is probably why you don't see many five string Ps and the ones that are out there are typically expensive, as it's taken more work to get it right. I'd was trawling through YouTube videos to try and find a P fiver with a decent low B not long ago, and from the videos I saw Xotic and the latest Fender professional series sounded good - not played any of them in the real world though.

My number 1:

My board as it stands now! Everything except the comp and chorus (multi programmed with various chorus/flange/phasers) is in the T70 loop so the octave is totally clean underneath. The scrutator also has a moog expression for filter/bit crush sweeps 😁 Chain is EBS Multicomp set at multiband so the highs are compressed more than the lows Cog T70 octave set for channel 1 a clean octave sound with a deep filter setting and a hint of octave up. Chsnnel two filter set for a synthy buzzy octave with the dirty octave up at unison vol and the clean signal taken out, very synthy. The sub control set to sound as near as possible to rhe classic OC2 setting, is say it's 90% there😁 In the t70 loop Malleko scrutator (bit crush/sample rate reduction/filter wah) Boba fuzz (Mastatron clone, with a much heavier gate) MXR Bass Envelope filter EHX enigma Qballs (set for low pass filter and a downsweep, I don't use the distortion) Custom cog grand Tarkin Fuzz In series wirh the T70 Source Audio Gemini Chorus (set as above) Currently looking at adding a nice overdrive,but space is limited 😁

It’s done. The badge is the final touch, and the strong double sided (slightly foamy) sticky tape is holding well. (Link for tape at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071ZYRKQS) The angle I took it at makes it look like the badge obstructs the port a little, but it doesn’t. I’ll take some final glamour shots tomorrow in daylight. I’ve been playing it a lot, and although speaker ‘break-in’ is very likely a myth, I played a looped bit of bass from my Zoom B3 looper through it for a few hours as well anyway. I really like the sound of this cabinet. Tomorrow I’m going to try a lot more fx through it. Look ma, I made a black box. 😂

So I’m getting excited seeing @funkles build and been planning my own. One of the provisos that my other half put on me having another “box” was it had to look as nice as my Mesa walkabout- that’s a green tolex, brown leather corners and handle and tan basket grill. While I could have just copied it I decided to go for another colour, like Stevie I’m going to mix my own Tuff Cab - combining turbo blue and black to get a dark blue (coincidentally not far from my bathroom wall colour in the background of the pics) for the grill I’ve got a tan coloured fly screen. Over 50% open and hopefully opaque enough not to look stupid - if it does I’ll pick up some black stuff and try that- it’s proper tough stuff so will be able to get it quite taught. For the leather corners there is a shop in our village called scrap, that sells erm scrap stuff for craft type projects. There is a bit of an ever changing range of leather offcuts from a local leather producer or user. I managed to pick up a couple of options for a brown - and also a light teal blue which might be quite fun. (Though crying out for a matching colour aluminium grill)

I peruse the basses for sale section two or three time a day just seeing what's up there...while I have no real wants or desires; I've got four cracking basses I love, but I do admit to the harbouring of nugget or two of ache for a handful of basses that I've only played for a few seconds (Rickenbackers, heh) or ever seen photographs of. While there's some beautiful stuff on sale, for me a lot of it is just eye candy. I think where I'm going with this thread is the observation that some gear just never seems to come up. When I was offloading my Thunderbirds to fund my Lulls, I seemed to have sparked off a landslide of Thunderbirds for sale, now though things seemed to have settled and there's none for sale (much the same as it was before I started hoovering them up...I think I was up to 12 at one point). Granted some of these manufacturers don't trade anymore or are highly desired, viz. Hamer/Kubicki (I'd pull the trigger on either a decent Cruisebass or Ex-Factor today if one came up), or companies only building a handful of my desired models (Spector Forte 4X), or that some basses are just keepers (the PJ version of the Fender Jaguar). I bitterly regret not buying the Jeff Ament Hamer 12-string that was on here a couple of years ago. Ho-hum. Lunch over. Back to the grind.

PS - it was about 6 years ago I became a convert. Before that I was in the “woolly” brigade but realised the error of my ways. An ABM is a superb amp to have behind you on loud gigs with no PA support. An Ampeg.... not so much IMO!

Why not buy quality used flats from Basschat?

I've never owned a white bass...hard to believe I know I lied....just realised that I had a Pearl white Bass Collection Nanyo 5er. I thought that I was going to have to go on a white bass GAS trip...

I'm the bass player...

I used them on my P Bass for ages, really interesting sound from them and they feel great too.

There's a number of things at play - the actual sound of the IEM - not all IEMs have the same sound signature - but the reason I push the UE6 over the UE5, is the extra headroom that the UE6 will offer over the UE5. The UE5 will sound slightly tighter due to the use of balanced armatures over dynamic drivers... but the UE6 gives you the headroom comparable to a quad balanced armature (UE11 - quad balanced armature), at approximately 350 quid less. It depends what sort of budget you want to spend... and as I always say, don't put anything in your ears that you don't want to pay the money for... as it can be agonising to drop down to budget having heard up the range! edit - headroom, particularly in the bass, means less chance of distortion (even if not audible - it’s less tiring for your ears)

Here's my pretty face to brighten your day. 😘 Xx

Again, thanks everyone for humouring me I have bought special long paper and a presentation board to tape it onto. I have a 3B pencil and a rubber. I am almost certain I have a long straight edge in the garage. I am on fire!

While I'm sure that the OP was nothing but diplomatic and sensible in his dealings (and really, the whole issue of wanting to book gigs and then cancel them once his holiday is arranged, that's just out of order) a mate tells me of one of his former bands where the entire band except the BL quit purely because of the BL's blind dedication to the band. My mate had departed a couple of years previously on good terms, but noted at the time that the semi-retired BL was happy to live in the back of a transit and devote all of his spare time to the band, and didn't seem to allow for the rest of the band having jobs and needing to get up for work five days a week. the band was actually doing very well - loads of gigs, albums released, management in place, but it wasn't a living for any of them, and it seemed that the BL's attitude ground them all down over time

Sorry to hear that but i think its for the best. It might put the band back for a while but less stress for you and maybe a more harmonious band going forward. My guitarist turned up to rehearsals last night carrying a guitar without a case. 'guess what i forgot' he says.....'your guitar case' i replied....'nope, my guitar, just had to hire this one from the studio' 😂 He only lives about 15mins away, drives, and has at least 8 guitars. The mind boggles.

Having installed a P bass pickup into a Stingray 5 and can say there was a definite increased flubbiness to the low B with that pickup. I think it is probably a mix of issues - the pickup being pretty close to the neck, and the sound curve of a P pickup. So now it'a PJ. For the odd note I'll often leave it as just a P, but if there's a lot of low B action going on then it's PJ. that J really tightens it up and stops the flub.

My bitsa P, cheap and cheerful but great to play..............👍 Im thinking of doing my Jazz the same to have a matching pair!!

The answer of course is that Leo created perfection, and no matter how hard you try, you can't get better than perfection. Why does it have four strings? Because that's all a Precision Bass needs. Need more, then you don't need a Precision, you need something else. There might be some more tangible/physical reasons also, such as that below (and having played a few 5-string Precisions - a few cheap ones and one very expensive model - I suspect there's a lot of truth in it). The same type of question can be asked of so many instruments; why were the 90's TRB5s so much better than the four string versions of almost identical spec? I always felt there was some magic about the former, that was perhaps not the result of the number of strings per se, but a by-product of it (greater neck mass, playability?).

As @Christine says, for any own design, it is pretty essential to draw it out - preferably full-size - to check the geometry, work out the cable runs, etc and make sure, for example, that top chambers and cutaways don't clash with back chambers and cutaways ;) Hand sketch is often all it needs. Ref the blank thickness - as always, there are a few ways of tackling this. In broad terms, then yes, @owen - the more dramatic the curve, then the more the overall depth of the body becomes. So if you were carving out of solid, for a given thickness of body, then it would need to be deeper by the difference in these two distances: There are some disadvantages in carving from solid - mainly relating to the difficulty in getting the control wire and pickup wire channels in the right place and also the cost of thicker pieces of timber - but it is entirely feasible. If you are carving this kind of depth, by the way, then you probably will need to hog out the concave with something other than micro-planes ;) If multi-piece blanks are OK for you, then one option is to have two blanks - either of the same timber or of differing timbers: Or, to reduce the amount of hogging out and resulting waste of wood, you could use a depth equivalent of through-neck wings at the back (and clearly, triangular section wings would be even more efficient): In my lightweight builds, I use a variation of this and go for a through neck and take that concept one stage further by using more standard through-neck wings, but deeper than the neck (which is shown in blue here): So to conclude, there are many ways of skinning the cat (although they all feel much the same to the cat...)

Just a heads up. I'm going to be helping Paul out at the Drum Show in Manchester on the Custom IEM stand on 21/22 September (I know it's the same weekend as the bass and guitar show in London... somebody didn't really think that one through did they? Some vendors/manufacturers can't be in more than one place at once... but hey). Anybody want to check out the offerings from JH, 1964 and UE, come along and I can hook you up and talk all things IEM with you.

I think they've probably had their moments, as have most manufacturers to be fair, but by and large their customer support has always been great. The ABM stuff has always been well made, I think it's some of the cheaper stuff that perhaps got a bad rep. I used to use a rehearsal space in Glasgow and I kept blowing up their stupid Ampeg SVTs, eventually they bought in an ABM, for us tricky bass players, and it never missed a beat. Real workhorse stuff. And as far as the Superfly being a bit crappy, I think it was the first commercially available class D bass amp on the market, which nobody ever seems to give them props for never mind all the extra crazy stuff it did too. Sadly, I think Ashdown are a brand that some folks like to bash, and I have no idea why. They did but after Gibson, who bought it from Kaman. I got my first TC amp just after the Gibson takeover, as far as I'm aware the original work done by the real Trace engineers was still in effect with Kaman, and then Gibson came in and ruined everything. For some mad reason though, folks were selling off pre Gibson stock cheap, even though it was far superior! It was a good time to buy... Personally, I'm a very big Ashdown fan. Eude

That AirTurn looks pretty cool. I’ve got one with bells and whistles but actually only do basic page turning and I must admit that, much as it works fine with soft touch pedals, the feel of a stomp box switch would be more reassuring. I paid the extra after hearing horror stories about reliability. Has the AirTurn been safe so far?

Thanks for your kind words everyone! You guys are absolutely right, its a difficult finish to apply well. ive had a little bit of experience with it before and did some practice before having a go at this, but the steps i followed are as follows: sand the surface back to 600-ish all over i mixed up a 2lb cut of the shellac with methylated spirits. its a pain to get clear methylated spirits in the UK without a permit, but some model railway suppliers do sell it in small quantities. i let it dissolve for at least 24 hrs, with a regular shake. using the 2lb cut of shellac, i layed down a fairly thick wash coat over the surface, not using a rubber just using a lint free rag. with about 3 hours of drying time inbetween to ensure that it had totally gassed off. make up a few french polishing rubbers. I use lint free t-shirt cloth wrapped around cotton wool pads for this. using one of the rubbers, add a small amount of the methylated spirits, and dab a very small amount of fine pumice onto the pad, and begin working it over the surface of the bass. this fills the pores very effectively. you can hear and feel the abraision happening, and then adjust the alcohol and pumice accordingly. this needs to be done pretty slowly, but it leaves a good base for the final polish. once the surface is filled and flat, i actually diluted the 2lb cut slightly, as it wasn't as thin as i was used to. this was then applied to another of the rubbers, and lubricated very slightly with a drop of olive oil. the polish is then applied in figure 8 motions. the length of each polishing session can vary, and its best to just do this by feel, but generally each session of polishing was about 5-10 minutes for me. if you feel the surface getting soft then stop and let it dry before coming back. between sessions it use useful to wipe over the surface gently with a rubber with only alcohol to remove any residual oil to remove the fine swirl marks after youve done 2 or three sessions, sweep over the surface with the grain with a rubber with just alcohol once i'd done 5 or so polishing sessions, the pad had started to build up a bit of a crust of shellac, and at this point i began to add some more pressure and added more pure alcohol to the pad to burnish the surface. once youve reached a good gloss to the finish, a final gentle wipe down with very little alcohol will help to even out the finish. I let the finish dry and harden for a few days, and then wipe it with a soft rag and some good quality furniture cream polish, just to bring out the gleam that you see in the above photos and feel free to ask if you want any more info on the finish! with that in mind... Here she is!! in a case with some foam and velvet, where she belongs! needs a proper set up, and some proper photos taking, and i will record some sound clips but these will give you an idea of the final look: As i say, needs a proper set up doing, some fret leveling and truss rod adjustments, but at the moment its still a lovely bass to play. ended up very heavy (over 12lbs) but this is a gig bass, not one to take to practice for a few hours. the preamp is a john east U retro with a passive tone control, and the bigsby combined with the roller saddles and graphite nut dont knock it out of tune when used thankfully! i will get round to signing the truss rod cover with a gold sharpie as well, but as itll be on and off a few times i thought id best not just yet. The inlays didnt seem to mind the neck being under tension or the first minor truss rod adjutments, so that's more good news. ive strung it with one of my spare sets of optime gold strings, but i think it would benefit from a set designed for a longer than 34" scale. I hope youve all enjoyed the log, and as i say i will get some proper photos and some sound clips done. but in the meantime it'll be onto the next one!!

Nope. He's too busy bringing free bottles of wine to Norwegian customers who pay £130 for the thing. 😀

Nobody seems to ever mention them but I really like the Fender 9120m black tapewounds. Really bright for tapes, more like rounds with the tone rolled back slightly rather than thumpy flats territory, almost feel slippery with the glossy tape and you should be able to pick them up for around £25. On one bass I swapped them for D'Addario half rounds as the Fender tapes were too bright, I've had LaBella white nylons on the same bass and they had less top end than the D'Addario half rounds.

I love a bit of Ashdown, I’m a massive fan and their after sales service is superb 🙂

There’s an album you might like called, BITTY McLEAN SLY & ROBBIE - LOVE RESTART , there’s some nice basslines on that , and also ,Raging Fyah have some great tunes too, I’m working on Judgment day, at the moment 🙂

Any good reggae tips? Been a while since I transcribed some reggae

Just caught the last of it!

Totally agree. What confuses me a bit is that Dave is still loving his 425, which isn't going to be a million miles from his P34 in body shape.

I first got an AirTurn several years ago the soft pedal Duo model. 2013? Maybe 2014? Took a bit of setting up at first as it was early Blu implementation plus the only vis aid was an led that flashed red/green - I am, of course, red green colour blind so that was a pain. The key was ensuring that it was in the right mode. From then it did many years of sterling, no problem service apart from the odd Bluetooth disconnection/reconnection issue when I closed the iPad during use or wandered out of range. Just needed reconnecting the Bluetooth and I put that down to normal usage/user error. I’d still be using it now if it hadn’t had a mishap that damaged the connections. I could have fixed it/got replacement bits and carried on with it but it would have been hassle and cost as much as the BT unit which had just come out. Just checked, got the BT just over a year ago. It was easier to set up, and uses Bluetooth 4, (so is even more stable). Feels nice and firm under the feet with the conventional switches, small footprint, good battery life and does everything I need for chart navigation with OnSong - Fwd/Back, Top/Bottom of song, Next/Previous song. Charges (or runs on power) with a USB charger (I have one which powers both iPad and BT for gigs. Very happy with it. I had been tempted by this page turner which looked really cool: https://www.codamusictech.com/products/bluetooth-page-turner-music-pedal-for-tablets but they didn’t supply to the UK then. I was wondering if I could finagle it via some American chums or something but then the BT came out and it seemed to give exactly the same functionality at half the cost (and hassle) - decision made!

There’s more to wireless than just buying a wireless pack and there you go. If wireless is not coordinated properly, likelihood is you’ll have drop outs and interference. The gear you buy greatly influences how many channels of wireless you can run. Id go P2 wired with some ZS10s (without mic version). Will get you a great feed and give you an idea of how IEMs are.

Hard to take in just how tiny a rig this is! And it sounds so nice, and will get nicer yet as it breaks in a bit. Astounding!