Leaderboard

Had to show off my new handy work to people who get it (the wife was pretty underwhelmed/didn't have a clue what I was talking about) Backstory: wanted a flat case style pedalboard, didn't want pay £££s for it. So I bought an old synthesiser case from Gumtree for 20 quid and relined it with mounting fabric. Then Covid hit😷, so I thought I'd do some tinkering..... So I've built in some features (cue a lot of cussing at the soldering iron😖). I've add a bank to the side with jack in and out with a true bypass to skip the entire pedal chain, power input and switch and a di (stole the innards of a Behringer 400p passive di box). Cost me total of about 50 quid *smugface*😁 The chain is Input (with bypass)>Boss limiter>polytune 3 mini>Ehx Tri parallel>output The 3 mix loops are subject to change as I've just stuck then all on into the order they fit with the patches I have currently. Loop 1: Boss bass chorus>Boss odb3 overdrive>boss ls2(as a bypass for the 105q tone suck)>Dunlop 105q Loop 2: Mxr blowtorch>agent 00 clone(custom built by BCs very own paul_5)>bass big muff Loop 3: Ehx soul pog(pog 1st)>Donner EQ seeker(effing great eq pedal for £40 if you can find one!)>earthquake dispatch master>dpfx echidna overdrive>boss syb5 synth Whaddaya think?!? I'm pretty chuffed with how it turned out. Any advice on chain or good custom length patch kits very much needed....

Yes - I think that is OK. Phew! Clearly, the fretboard will be eventually properly finished and the binding will be rounded - which I will do once the neck is carved. But you can see the overhang of the binding here (which will slim just a touch when they are rounded off) which should mean that sharp fret-ends won't happen even as the neck and fretboard ages. The demarcation stripes should also show up nicely once the neck is carved: Oh...and, of course, the obligatory mock-up

I was bored at home, and had some Seafoam Green, and custom mixed Smooth Mint (Fiat 500 car colour), nitrocellulose lacquer leftover from previous builds. I wondered how the colours would look together. So, I made this: 2 piece, double bound, Tele body. 1 piece maple neck. Gotoh tuners and bridge. Fender Pure Vintage 64 Tele pickups. CRL 3 way switch, Fender Pure Vintage knobs, and CTS pots. All lacquer finishing was applied here at home. (I masked off the binding on the sides, and scraped back the front edge binding using a scalpel blade.

Pick the one who tunes up with the volume off

So here’s a bit of good news...for once! After sterling efforts from the sender who ended up going the extra mile and also the PA to the CEO of Parcelforce my bass finally turned up today. This after nearly five months of emails and many phone calls and texts. The best bit and a tribute to a Fender is that despite it being unwrapped at some point the bass and case are virtually unscathed. A tribute to modern Fender build quality. It really was in tune too!

I never uploaded pics of my shorty. It's an ACG TKO Modern 4 string. 30.5" scale White Limba body with a Figured Maple top, stained black 3 piece Ash neck, with a reverse headstock, stained black Rosewood fingerboard Reverse Splitcoil pickup, with passive vol/tone Black Hipshot B Type bridge, Gotoh tuner Currently wearing TI Flats (not in the pictures though) Cheers, Eude

As with all these things I can never discern a difference. Personally, to me (and I’m sure I’ll sound like a heretic) a P bass sounds like a P and jazz a jazz, woods and necks don’t make much difference.

Did a dep gig with a 40's/50's band at a retirement village in Surrey on Saturday afternoon. First gig since lockdown. It should have been a dead easy gig, but when i arrived I found out only the guitarist and sax player were from the band's regular line up and myself, the drummer and the girl singer were all deps! Still, it all went OK and the elderly punters loved it. 😊 The girl singer took this pic.

Collected today from Jon Shuker ....😁

@marleaux62 & @GuyR - as you asked for my thoughts... The bass arrived today, I put some flats on and have had about an hour playing. It sounds fantastic, very clear and crisp with some awesome lows on the E string. I’m looking forward to getting to know it over the next week when playing it with less of that ‘new bass anticipation’ thing going on. The vintage vibe is there in buckets, and at times when playing I really did think I was on an old bass when I looked at the neck! It’s not a bass that’d fool a collector or vintage fan, but that’s not really the point is it? I think it’s a great value, but high quality and lovingly made, unique instrument. And throughout the sale John was awesome, especially while two couriers tried their best to screw this up.... but the Bravewood won, and I got it on time.

@Drax speaks much truth.

Go with the one who smelled the least.

Just grabbed my bottle of hand sanitizer (70% isopropyl alcohol) and it did the trick! Thanks!

Struggling now - need to take this to pieces to finish it off but having too much fun playing it!!

Updates! Back from holiday and back in the garage! The Truss rod and carbon rods arrived so it was time to let loose with the router. I Want to have my truss rod access on the body so routed out this space first, it finishes outside the fret board angle profile marked in white pencil. Maybe the first mistake in the build, the truss rod fits really snuggly in the main channel, but I should have perhaps continued the channel with a 10mm bit so the truss rod end was also supported and not sitting free within the rounded access section, it's easy to locate the hole with the hex key but next time i'll do it differently. After the truss rod I installed the carbon rods. Snug! Scariest bit done. On to the bandsaw to cut the neck to size... which revealed mistake number 2... ...The outer wenge laminates are cut through when the neck is profiled, now this is either going to look really cool or terrible. Next time I'll double check the laminate thicknesses in relation to the neck profiles. Alot of this material is removed in the neck shaping profile so you might not see any of this but for right now... it's a bit of a disappointment. Had time to thin down and drill the bridge. I have ferrules coming for the string holes but can't install them until the bridge is mounted to the bass body. I'll only be able to slot the tree once the bass is being setup so that'll be cut much later on. In my opinion looks really nice on the bass, glad I decided to give it a go. Works well with the body ash too. Finally got the headstock wings glued up to the neck, two nice chunks of wenge to match the body at the bridge end. Next! I need to think about doing the fret board so that'll need cutting to size and then thinning down. Then there will be some CAD modelling to do, once I have the fretboard profiled I need to work out how high my bridge should be and how much of the body I need to cut away, it's currenty 42mm and this will be taken down to accommodate the bridge and the saddles so the action can be set nice and low, but this will all be modeled first before I go cutting. Before that the fretboard will need to be glued to the neck so lots of fun to be had. The neck laminate has bummed me out a little bit... but it could go either way it might finish really nicely.

A few points to add to this. What look like ports on the One10s (and all our 10CR models) aren't conventional ports - there's other stuff going on as they're Hybrid Resonator designs. Having the external resonator outlet (that thing that you think is a port) on the underside of the One10 results in a lower tuning frequency for that part of the resonator and a deeper tighter bass response. If you turn the cabs sideways then you raise this tuning frequency, giving fatter but less deep lows. Some people prefer this and it works better in some rooms. It isn't the default orientation because more people/basses/amps/rooms prefer the cab the other way around but it is a useful option. There's a lot of mythology about the coupling effect of putting a cab on the floor. Actual mechanical coupling is almost always a bad thing (despite Orange claiming it a benefit with the skids instead of feet/wheels on their cabs). Acoustic boundary reinforcement is usually a good thing but that doesn't stop when you lift the cab off the floor - it just shifts from acting on everything from the low-mids downwards when the cab is within an inch of the floor to acting on just the deepest lows when the cab is many feet off the floor. If your ears have had years of playing in front of loud 4x12" stacks then they're going to need all the help they can get! 😉

To clarify, I never said anything about being idiotic. There are certainly common tonal themes across most of the bass amp models, going back 50 years. That's bound to be the case of course, given that the designers of those models were consistent over most of those years. The exceptions are (imo and ime) the Carbines, Big Block and Titan (which were very much a more modern take on bass amps, paralleling the rectifier series popularity), the Strategy/Prodigy (which focused on a tighter approach to bass amp overdrive while maintaining the aggressive voicings of the Carbines), and to a lesser extent the Walkabout (which was distinctly different in many ways). I was brought on board to bring more focus into the bass amp/speaker products without the distraction and workload of designing guitar products at the same time. My goal is to take the best, most popular elements of a particular amp family and combine these with new features, new approaches, refinements and to update the products so that they meet the needs and expectations of today's players. For players this doesn't work for, that's fine. There is no shortage of good used amps of all types (and at bargain prices too... a bonus to players that these amps appeal to).

Choose the one with the least obtrusive hunchback.

There isn't any strict definition for vintage, but generally speaking for collectable items it's anything that is more than 25 years old. That now includes plenty of 90s basses and guitars...

Assuming the sniff test is inconclusive, who has the best availability? The best musician in the world is a p.i.t.a. If they can’t or won’t commit to gigs and rehearsals. So, you may have to do some investigation on job, family and other band situations.

I'll be stoned for this, but I can't hear any difference at all. If you hadn't put the graphic up and hadn't told us this was a comparison, I'd have assumed this was one bass playing the entire time.

Another dot/bound/lollipop 66 Jazz Bass! Super clean example that I got off pmjos on here a couple of years back. Absolute beaut to play, hear and look at!

So the back veneer is on and “roughly” shaped and I remodeled the bit near the neck plate. Tomorrow I have a good few hours to work on the bass, so the front veneer is drying and I should get it to a point where I can slowly start thinking finish.

That’s great! I’ve been fortunate to meet some really nice people in life, especially in music. In the early days there were a few people who really took a chance on me and gave me an opportunity. In the first band I was in I was really out of my depth. They were fabulous musicians and I was a bit younger and nowhere near as good, really struggling to keep up. The easy thing would have been to have gotten someone better (locally they were a decent draw and could have had their pick of players) but they gave me a go, taking me under their wing and mentoring me. Sometimes all you need is someone to believe in you, isn’t it. The guy who sold me the bass was a fabulous player - he’d played in a semi-professional capacity, backing all kinds of acts from Frank Carson to Englebert Humperdink on the cabaret circuit! - and was really encouraging. Never turn down a gig, he’d say, and of course he was right! He could see I was really keen on music/bass (to say the least) and just decided to help me along the way. The bass is special to me, and I’ve an agreement with my wife that (in the hopefully significantly distant future!) when I shuffle off, as long as she doesn’t need the money, the bass should be sold and the money donated to a charity for mentoring underprivileged kids who want to play music but may need a bit of a leg up... As I say, hopefully that’s a long way off yet!!!

First post my new Matamp GT200 with matching 4x10

I'm sure some of these close-ups are actually shower hoses...🙃

As mentioned in another thread of mine, I'm attempting to get back into bass after years in the doldrums. Back in the day I rose up from nothing to being the best bass player in my bedroom. Sadly after year of decline I now see myself as the worst bass player in my bedroom. Basically I went from 5 string to 4 string and somewhere down the line I drifted away, basically playing various other instruments but not really bass. I have been galvanised this year by the fact that oldest son and oldest daughter play bass occasionally and I have 'seen the light' a bit again. So yeah, the plan is to make my own bass for the fun of it, and go back to 5 strings, where I was definitely more comfortable. Shape. Well I was going to be boring and go for a jazz bass shape as I rather like them, but then I was rather taken by the shape of Hadrien Feraud's signature Mayones bass, so I have based it upon that. Being a graphic designer I tend to draw up my own precise and detailed plans. So here's the bass plan: er .... the precision pickup will be the right way up! Ebony fretboard, Plastic MoP type block inlays, J-retro 01 (cos I have one spare) and ...... it's gonna have a pretty weird hand painted finish that probably no one will like but me! Anyway, it has been underway in serious since the lockdown thing started. Not that I've had any more time as I'm a key worker. I should add that although this is my first attempt at making a bass, I have previously made 5 electric guitars all of which I am very pleased with. I have already discovered that it is quite a bit different making a bass, and certainly more expensive! That is all for now.

Half rounds are a dream. The warmth of the flat with just a little more zing if you require. Reminds me I have a set for my Finn, must get them on there.

You can't go by the specs, as they're far too incomplete to be of any real use. I can say that the vast majority of powered PA, even those loaded with 15s, are made to work best in the vocal range, with the lows handled by subs. They also don't have pre-amps voiced for bass. That makes them very much a try before you buy proposition.

I wouldn't be concerned about the nerves btw. I am an absolute mess with nerves in an audition, or even a soundcheck sometimes. But get me in front of an audience and I'm like a man possessed. If someone had to overcome extreme nervousness and still turned up and played well, it speaks volumes for their determination, character and courage.

So I did a thing to one of my Les Pauls before: after: Sexy!

Great thread My lot: Yamaha attitude ltd Yamaha attitude ltd II Yamaha attitude plus 5 Yamaha attitude special edition Yamaha TRBX 505 Yamaha TRB 5 mk1 Yamaha BB1600 Yamaha BB714BS Yamaha BB424 Yamaha BB425 Yamaha BBG5s Yamaha BB604a Now I only have the BB714 and Attitude Ltd II

Not sure it'll qualify, but here's my '71. An old friend!

It’s a good point raised about what is Vintage So @Reggaebass your thread, your rules - what is Vintage? Is there a Super Vintage class and evening an über vintage?! Do we use human years or dog years?!

My phone did ok.. Not too much gunk between the windings, and it's had 16 months' use.

‘Bring visually’? So it comes down to who you fancy most? Being serious, personality every time, we went with best singer in one of my bands and I have regretted it ever since.

Only as scrap!

Don’t say things like that...I’ll end up buying one

You do need a half decent singer to even attempt quite a few Whitesnake songs. Something that old Coverversion is finding out as he gets older and his voice is starting to go...

Well, agreed, it doesn't have to be a straight copy and fills and trills are certainly as required and when the band is playing it like there is a bus to catch some of those have to go, as long as the core is there, like the run down on the line 'fool for your loving' which i have heard reduced to a note on fool and a note on loving

@MoJo, I still have the 414 I bought off you. It's still great. Solidly gigged for 4 years, never missed a beat, now I'm not in a band it's still the bass I record bits with.

I’m not sure full scale acoustic basses are such a good idea. I have a fender full Scale bass and it’s just too long when the bridge is in the middle of the body .

66 P

I'm lucky to have access to a big plotter at work - well, I was lucky, the b****y thing has died! Still it was working long enough to print my plans at full size. Needless to say, it is a very accurate plotter. First job was to make body and neck templates out of MDF I should add at this stage that I am not one of these people with an amazing workspace and fancy tools. These pictures show one of my two work areas, this is a small corner of table in our tiny utility room, and perched on here is where I do most things that aren't messy. I do the messy stuff either in the garage (horrible place with a leaky roof), or out in the back yard if it is dry/light. My only other work bench is a rickety thing with uneven legs.

Any fans of Incubus here?