neepheid

Time to trot this one out again, I guess: BWB pickguard, GFS Lipstick Strat pickup, thumbrest, full size tuners, bridge from a Vista Series Musicmaster, bored through for through body stringing.

Chunky? The G&L Tribute L-2000 neck is a half baseball bat. I know chunky, these aren't it.

I feel I must retract a statement I made a few times in this thread. These EB basses do indeed have the coil splitting option, despite it not being mentioned in any of the blurb. I checked a 5 string when I was in Guitar Guitar in Glasgow recently and I can confirm that it has push pull knobs which would suggest that the coil splits are still there. Still not interested in it though

The body shape is one of my favourite ones, familiar yet different at the same time. Thanks for confirming the passive tone control, I thought I had read that somewhere but I wasn't sure.

Also, I had a try of a 434 in a music shop recently and despite really wanting a 734A I must say I was impressed. It was one of the teal blue ones and I thought it was quite "vintage" looking in terms of use of cream pickguard and dots. Felt really nice to play, comfortable neck (that sort of inbetweeny size/profile neither Jazz nor Precision), was playing sitting down and no strap so can't comment on weight but didn't seem overly heavy when I was looking it over. What surprised me the most was how bright it sounded for a passive bass. Yes, the blurb says "Alnico magnet pickups tuned to deliver the classic BB vintage tone, slightly updated to provide a brighter sound that cuts through in live performance situations" but you know, you don't actually believe that stuff, right? I hadn't cut my fingernails and it was super sensitive to them if I caught the strings with them. I actually preferred the sound with the tone control about 1/3 rolled off. That's the first passive bass I can think of when I've felt the need to do that. The tone control actually did something in a reasonably graded fashion instead of being either all or nothing or achieving very little at all, so kudos to Yamaha for that. I really like the new, sleeker, simplified look. Some of the more recent BBs have been a bit garish and fussy looking for me with far too much extraneous chrome (like pickup rings) and I'm glad to see them gone. Pickguard's a nice shape and doesn't cover too much of the body. As a Gibson man, really appreciated the black headstock The 434 gave me serious cause to consider whether or not the 734A is worth the extra 300ish notes or not, simply because of the brightness of the tone of this passive bass. The 734A has different pickups (with a larger number, so they must be better, right?), active EQ, a sandwich body construction (alder/maple/alder) and more luxurious fingerboard inlays but I have to ask myself how much I care about these things. Also, you can't get the 734 in teal blue, which I think is the pick of the new colours. I haven't bought a new bass in ages. GAS is escaping...

The 734/5 is passive/active switchable. Don't know if there are any passive tone controls or not.

Get 'em while you can...

[quote name='FinnDave' timestamp='1501577789' post='3345574'] The delivery date for my Vintage Pro T Bird at Gear 4 Music has been pushed back to 30th December overnight. I thought the 1st of September was a bit optimistic! [/quote] The day before my birthday! It's surely fate

[quote name='Grahambythesea' timestamp='1501458123' post='3344832'] yes, that's what I meant. I'm surprised Gibson/Epiphone haven't sued! They stopped everyone else from producing lookalikes. [/quote] Sure they may have nods to each other but I don't think it's similar enough to cry "copy!". The pickguards are similar in how they swoop across the body but the ends are very different. Body shape is different enough to my eyes - the Dimension is a bit more offset feeling at the bottom whereas the Embassy is very round and straight and the bottom horns differ significantly between the two basses. Also, the Dimension not being a Precision or a Jazz means it will probably get cancelled in a few years - and I mean that in no way as a slight against the bass itself, it's more a comment on the majority of bass players having conservative tastes. Perhaps Gibson/Epiphone aren't really that concerned as a result.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1501487553' post='3344883'] Who writes this stuff? Andertons or Gibson? [i][color=#231F20]"You have 2 volume controls for each pickup so that you can blend the pickups however you want to with a master tone control."[/color][/i] [color=#231F20]Ignoring the fact that this sentence barely passes (or parses) muster as English, that could imply that the bass has four volume controls, or in fact five. In practice, it has three knobs, and presumably at least one of them is a tone control.[/color] It's a pig-ugly bass anyway. [/quote] I believe that's Andertons' own words. Not that inventing extra volume controls and non-existent coil taps or dropping the price through the floor is going to help this bass. I can honestly say that if I was given a Gibson "New" EB bass for free I'd probably sell it on (if I could) then buy one of those new Epiphone Vintage Pro Thunderbirds instead. Now *that's* a pretty bass, I don't care what anyone says

[quote name='NancyJohnson' timestamp='1501403086' post='3344409'] Shouldn't that be the other way round? [/quote] Indeed, the Embassy predates the Dimension by about 5 decades

By the way, if you can get over the lack of batwing headstock, have you seen the price of the Embassy? £329 new? That's a mistake, surely? For using a little less glue? It's got funcy special knobs too.

Oh my, that price is better than anticipated. That is highly unfortunate, said my wallet

[quote name='Burrito' timestamp='1499979492' post='3335000'] The new Epiphone Thunderbird is coming to retailers in October 2017 according to my email today. http://www.epiphone.com/Products/Electrics/Bass/Thunderbird-Vintage-PRO-Bass.aspx [/quote] Unacceptable! Not soon enough! Said everything except my wallet

[quote name='bazztard' timestamp='1499145026' post='3329451'] a switch won't give you 100% Neck and 80% bridge, if you don't understand how a Jazz bass works don't try and tell us how [/quote] Really? Can a switch not do that? My mind is blown! Well aware of how a Jazz bass works, thank you very much. You seem to not understand that a smiley face after a comment signifies at the very least an attempt at humour, if you're going to be like that about it. Why don't you get back into bed then try exiting from the other side?

Three way switch FTW

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1498931113' post='3328101'] Heathen! [/quote] To be quite honest my first preference is ebony, then rosewood. I'm going straight to hell, aren't I?

I think maple doesn't suit the BB at all, FWIW

Lithium - longer life, [i]slightly[/i] higher nominal voltage which won't matter at all (according to Wiki its 9.6V instead of 9V. Think of the headroom! Is it worth it? Your call. You say the bass is hungry - silly question first - are you unplugging it when not in use? When you say hungry - how hungry? If it's going through a battery in a couple of months even if you are unplugging it when not in use then I'd check for a wiring fault which is causing the battery to be on 24/7. If it is the case then no, lithium batteries won't be worth it - you'll just be burning up expensive batteries for no good reason instead of cheap ones. Hope that helps.

BB734A gets the thumbs up from me. I also did not care for the chrome control plate on the X models of the previous incarnation. I like the slightly less fussy inlays (straight lines rather than ovally things - less blobby looking, I think it looks more modern). I like the big controls. It's a yes from this BB fan (had in the past BB300, BB450, BB614)

[quote name='Ghost_Bass' timestamp='1496402174' post='3311075'] Removing multi-pin components from PCB's may be a real PITA and can take a lot of time, effort and there's the risk of burning the PCB or surrounding components whilst you're trying to remove all the sodder. The trick i use to do this with minimal effort is to simply use a dremmel tool and cut the pins on the component side, after they're all cutted and the component removed i can unsodder and remove each pin individually with minimal heat going in to the PCB allowing it to cool between pins. I've done this recently when i replaced the 12-pin footswitch on my EBS Multicomp pedal. Saved me about half-hour of work. If the component is salvageable then it's a different story and a heat station would come in very handy, specially if the PCB has double side sodder to that component. [/quote] Good shout on cutting the tags, the socket was defective so I wouldn't have cared if it was rendered unusable during the removal. Wish I had thought of that at the time, it would have saved a heap of time and heat.

Another year goes by, another year of bassy joy so time for thread revival/long term road test update. I finally got around to fixing the intermittent muting issue (5 year warranty ended in March), replacing the headphone socket looks like it has done the trick (hasn't muted itself in a couple of months now). Who would have thought such an inexpensive (£300) amp could have lasted this long? I am rubbish at betting, but I definitely picked a winner here.

Update: I replaced the headphone socket with a Neutrik branded one a couple of months ago (5 year warranty ran out in March). The old one was an absolute bugger to remove, I sucked as much solder off the tabs as I could but in the end I needed to incrementally heat the tags and use a plastic wedge to slowly prise the tags out of the holes. Finally got it out (probably took half an hour in total, moving it a fraction of a mm at a time). By comparison, fitting the new one took about a minute Long story short, I have had no recurrence of the random muting since I replaced the socket. It has been driven hard most weeks at band rehearsal and lugged about all this time. Happy to say I call this one fixed. Probably one of the least difficult things to fix has gone wrong after 5 years. Not bad for such an inexpensive piece of kit.