Leaderboard

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.

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

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..................

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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! 😃😂

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

So, you've been a member of BC for four days now. How you finding it? 😬

My Precisions (or Precisionishes)

I guess the question is whether what you end up with will have cost you more than buying something that's already that spec.

While I am sure there will be a number of people recommending Reaper, if you are already familiar with GarageBand and like the way it works, then Logic is by far the best upgrade for you. Reaper may be technically free, but the amount and quality of the bundled plug-ins is not a patch on those that come with Logic. You can quite easily cover the £199 cost of Logic just by considering what additional software you may need to buy to get Reaper up to the same level of functionality you are already getting from GarageBand.

Fixed it for you.

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.

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

Well, there's one on Bass Direct for £250 right now and they aren't known for bargain basement pricing.

The early bass cabs that were open backed might not have benefited from being sealed, as they used generic musical instrument drivers which were guitar oriented anyway. Besides, they could give a good tone, they just couldn't go loud. Play just about any Beach Boys recording and you're probably hearing Carol Kaye playing through an open back Fender Super Reverb.

We still do Thunder's cover of In a broken dream, its an awesome song!! Great to see someone wanting to cover Curved Air, there are a few CA tracks I'd love to do, but I can't see me getting em past the rest of the band lol

thank god some people also find it differicult to sing and play bass at the same time i thought it was just me, iv taken over lead vox and play bass, iv got 20 songs down so far but by god it has not been easy, first gig march 2022, im now looking forward to it, but its still not natural lol

Orchid DIs.

Loads of fun today... a few of us (including @warwickhunt, @cd_david and the God-like Dave Wilson) got together to shoot the breeze. We all turned up with a handful of basses each, apart from Warwickhunt who literally brought a van-load. All good fun - some rare birds, and some whacky stuff amongst the usual... \ \

Being into my vintagey tones (think flats and valves, motown and Deacon) it still really surprises me that my MIJ 75 ri Jazz bucks the common generalisation that P’s do that best. I love my P but honestly this jazz sounds so good, like the old recordings