tauzero

A picture's worth a thousand words, so here's a couple of kilowords. The basic jack-jack plus one DC extension: I have another one to power an MS-60B (centre negative) and a Smoothhound (annoyingly, centre positive), for which I use two wall-warts. Colour coded, as are the wall-wart plugs, and put into a braided sleeve (took ages but it's lovely and neat):

Keep leads tidy. Coil them properly, velcro-tie them. If you use wall warts or similar PSUs, don't wrap the leads round the body of the wall-wart. Wrap them round your hand and use velcro ties on them. And if you use more than one wall-wart, put some coloured heat-shrink on the plug so you know which is which without having to go back to the wall-wart itself. Periodically go through the leads bag and weed out anything you don't need. You will need: 1) all the leads to connect your gear up (you're probably doing the PA too, so those leads too) 2) spare leads for all of 1) 3) spare lead(s) for the guitarist(s) (which should be bright yellow) Besides the set list being in big enough letters, make sure it's in black ink and that you've made any necessary additional notes (like which key it's in or which note to start on or if it's one of these modern tunings like drop-D) Make sure that at least one person other than the singer reads the setlist and tells the singer if he/she has suddenly skipped two songs (adult supervision). Please feel free to have a 20-page discussion if you are a singer who is offended by this. Have a checklist for car loading and make sure that everything is in Make sure there's enough extension leads Colour coding leads can be handy if you're doing the PA If you're running a pedalboard with separate PSU, get a DC extension lead the same length as the jack-jack lead from the pedalboard to the amp, cable-tie the two together, and keep the pedalboard PSU by your amp

Well, I was going to mention Flanders and Swann (two mentions so far) and Tom Lehrer (just beaten to it). Another couple of names - Allan Sherman, Ivor Biggun. And I've written a fair few comedy songs too.

NT Thumbs are 26 frets (well, one of mine is zero frets, but it used to have 26). However, they are also considerably better looking than that.

I use a Tascam GB-10, though that's not exactly what you want as you transfer MP3s or WAV files to it. They do work well though.

A decent 1x12 (eg. Barefaced Big Baby 2), or two 1x12s stacked. 500W+ amp.

I've been in a couple of bands where they could gig without me, although they preferred not to. I preferred them to take the gigs if they could rather than miss out on them, although I think they would have asked about alternative dates (something you can't really do for weddings, birthdays, or saints' days, of course).

I was so happy with mine that I fitted another couple of basses with them.

I can see the point in an established band which was all-male or all-female who were looking for a replacement musician wanting to keep the gender line-up as it was. But when you're trying to put a band together, refusing to countenance a considerable proportion of the musical population because of their sex seems somewhat short-sighted. I could understand wanting a vocalist of one sex or the other, but bassists, drummers, keyboardists etc don't play differently because they're one sex or the other. Still, his putative band, his rules.

My 1987 Thumb has the one-piece bridge (Schaller 3D). I think the change came in 1988, I've seen 1988 Warwicks with the two-piece setup.

I was doing a bit of spring cleaning and I noticed that one picture was taking up 3.3MB and, like many others, was called "image.png". I assume that was one that I pasted in from the clipboard rather than dragging an image file in, as I use JPEGs. So I went to the original image, cropped it as I'd done before, saved it as a JPEG, deleted the original image from the post by removing the attachment in the editor, and dragged the shrunken JPEG in instead. That saved about 2.5MB.

If you have phono-to-phono leads, a brace of jack-to-phono adaptors will do the job. Doing it with a proper cassette deck, decent soundcard, and good software (when I did this a while ago I used Audacity) means you can record to WAV rather than MP3 which gives you the best starting point to go from.

The unmodded one looks quite nice apart from the headstock, the stripped one with the Al scratchplate looks hideous.

The torpedo bridge looks attractive, at least on the right bass, and if you can get past the annoying presentation of the bloke in the Youtube video on the website, pretty simple to fit. Unlike other bridge swaps, it's not really reversible because of the holes drilled through the body. The sliding post that the bridge sits on looks quite substantial so it will probably only flex a bit, and only tilt in the tube that it runs in a bit and not seize very much at all, and as long as you use a really really long allen key/screwdriver, the body of the bass won't get in the way of intonation adjustment. It's very expensive as well (and don't compare the price with the ABM headless system, you need to throw in a set of tuners to make the cost comparable). I won't be putting it on any of my basses, I like them too much.

Ahem. Five posts, no fewer.

They shouldn't be driving their lawn mowers on the road.

I feel an idea for a play coming on. "The man who mistook his bass for a hat".

That looks interesting. Are the circular parts eccentric cams to raise and lower the string height, or does the string pass over the central cylindrical part of it and you rotate it to set the height, then clamp it with the top pieces?

So rotating the cam affects the string height, and screwing the intonation tube in and out changes the intonation - and surely will also change the string height. But then changing the angle of the tube in order to set the string height back to where you want it will also affect the intonation. So it would be an absolute nightmare to set up.

You have a tube screwing into a bridge body. The string is angled against the lip of the tube. Any flex in the tube will absorb vibration and reduce sustain. Any movement in the thread/thread interface will also absorb vibration, but if there's no movement, the tube can't be screwed in and out. It seems flawed in such a way as to defeat the very objectives that it sets out to improve.

So who wants to tell Trudy that she's spelt Calliope wrong?

"She", surely? Not many men called Trudy.

When I bought my first Warwick Thumb in 1988, it was £950 (I got it for £900, Dave at Musical Exchange was a jolly nice chap). For comparison, a new 3-bed semi-detached house had cost me £17k five years earlier. I had terrible crises of self-confidence deciding whether to buy it and finally made up my mind that I would. Since then, I've bought two more Thumbs and three Seis (all second-hand, I'm not made of money), and haven't bothered with having crises of self-confidence again. As for Fodera, playability is a subjective thing. I've played a 4-string Fodera (since I moved over to 5-string only) and found it far less playable than not just my old Warwick JD Thumb but also a Cort GB4 I have. Based on that, I wouldn't buy one. Obviously, far better bassists than me (eg. Victor Wooten) don't feel the same way about them. Or perhaps they do, but they relish a challenge and get paid lots by Fodera.

I thought bass 1 was clearer, bass 2 was a bit more ill-defined and woolly. Based on that, I've guessed that bass 1 is the USA/Ki0gon, as it would be terrible to spend money to make your bass sound worse 😁