electric nate

[quote name='krysh' timestamp='1405521728' post='2502683'] [url="http://www.roesselbass.com/purist/purist.html"]Roessel Purist[/url] [/quote] Oh my. Helloooo pretty wooden things. [quote name='throwoff' timestamp='1405520190' post='2502655'] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Funny you mention a German Warwick. You could pick up a Corvette for 400 quid now, a Streamer for well under a grand second hand. The used market has just fallen apart in recent years... [/font][/color] [/quote] I feel just a tad smug to hear that. I did briefly own a Corvette $$ - not sure where it was manufactured but I don't think it was from The Fatherland. I paid about £600 for it, broke the nut, got annoyed with the preamp, decided the neck was hard work to play and then managed to ebay it with the busted nut for £700! It sounded lovely when you got the settings right, but everything seemed an effort with it, it was hard work to play and I never truly felt that sensation of the fingers effortlessly doing what the heart had in mind.

[quote name='throwoff' timestamp='1405499239' post='2502356'] Definitely put some kind of double coil on though if you go for it or it will be like a swarm of angry bees. [/quote] Dealing with swarms of angry bees is why i'm keeping the volume knob! Seriously though, I just finished shielding all the cavities in an old Ibanez bass with a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound in the bridge and that went from sounding like Merzbow was doing a gig in the next room, to being really well behaved unless you actually put something electronic right next to it. I thought the QP was more noisy because of it's higher output and such but now it's properly shielded it's quieter than the stock pickups in the jazz I use for recording. I'm not completely opposed to hum-bucking designs, but It'll take a lot to put the breaks on the love affair I have with the raw dynamics and tight, cutting sound s/c's give me. [quote name='throwoff' timestamp='1405499555' post='2502358'] [url="http://s30.photobucket.com/user/throwoff/media/Jonly_zpsd90367eb.jpg.html"][/url] Hell there is even the possibility of having just 4 screws holding that down to remove more crap. [/quote] [size=4]I rather like that actually. It's like a Diet P-Bass[/size] [size=4] [/size] [quote name='Musicman20' timestamp='1405502341' post='2502388'] Sandberg will make virtually anything I think, and it won't be silly money, especially if you go through them direct or through Alan at Synergy, [/quote] I was daydreaming about a custom Sandberg yesterday in fact. When you say it won't be "silly money" are we talking less than £2000 or less than £5000? Or am I not even in the ballpark yet? My idea of silly money is probably a fair bit lower than most people's. I understand the cost involved in producing a one-off bass but I'm not one to get sentimental about craftsmanship and wood. To me a bass is just a tool, there are well designed tools and badly designed tools and some fit certain hands better than others, but nobody pays over the odds for the perfect spanner or can-opener do they? I [i]think[/i] the point i'm trying to make is that aside from the cost of labor and materials, a lot of custom bass manufacturers make use of people's fantasies and hysteria as a big selling point, as if having a custom instrument somehow opens the door to the VIP lounge in the Elite Bassplayer's Club *cough*[size=2]fendercustomshop[/size]*cough*. So yeah, what makes me apprehensive about getting a well known manufacturer to make a custom bass is the fear of being sold an acre of dreamland along with my chunk of wood and wires. I'm always afraid to email and ask for a quote on something I almost certainly don't have the money for at the moment. In my view, all the tone and soul and expression and feeling that you hear in music is coming from the musicians, the instruments are just there to facilitate its release. I used to be really inspired by expensive basses when I was younger, imagining how good I'd be if I owned a vintage Rickenbacker or German built Warwick or whatever else, but as i've gotten older (and some may say more cynical) I've gotten way less 'spiritual' and precious about basses, hence why I'm now looking for something really minimal and sleekly functional. RAMBLE RAMBLE RAMBLE [i]note to self: this is what happens when you have 3 pints of coffee for lunch[/i]

Yeah, the scratchplate is doing basically nothing on that bass besides covering the control cavity. Personally I'd prefer it in black with a matching headstock and a rosewood board - the tone pot can take a hike too - then I reckon i'd be pretty satisfied.

AHA! I've found one! Sadly it's not really my style aesthetically, but i've found one bass that's only routed for a j bridge p/up

A scratchplate is arguably the most unnecessary thing you could have on a bass besides a pair of fluffy dice hanging off the headstock! With respect and gratitude for your efforts guys; I'm not looking for bodges or clutter. I was hoping someone might know of an obscure minimal bass that I don't know about. It's sort of frustrating that something so simple seems not to exist. My googling shall continue but it's looking more and more like i'm going to have to spend a wedge getting something built for me

I've thought about going that direction, but don't like the idea of filling in pickup cavities, it involves a lot of glue/filler and if the woods don't expand/contract at the same rate then the fill could become unstable and visible through the finish - which would have to be completely redone. It seems really against the flow of my ethos of simplicity to do extra work to a bass in order to remove something. Perhaps i'm just crazy.

Being the no-frills extreme metal kinda guy that I am, I only ever use the bridge pickup on all my basses. I've seen plenty of manufacturers that make stripped-down [i]guitars[/i] with just a bridge pickup and a volume knob, but nobody really makes a bass in quite the same vein. I have a real love of minimal design and for what I do, nothing else is really necessary. I don't need a neck pickup, or a tone control or an onboard preamp or finger ramp or a humbucker the size of a brick or any fancy active stuff - I like things simple and straight to the point and it annoys me that all my basses have a bunch of extra bits going unused, taking up space, being in the signal chain unnecessarily. I would just remove them, but then there would be all the unnecessary holes where they used to be! Does anyone know of a single instrument currently in production that is routed for a just single jazz bridge pickup, a volume knob and nothing else? There must be something somewhere surely? I don't want to waste a custom shop luthier's time with such a rudimentary build, and really I'd rather buy something cheap, slap a nice pickup in it and then rag the crap out of it as a rehearsal/touring instrument. The closest i've found so far is the Ibanez GRS100EX ([url="http://www.musiciansfriend.com/bass/ibanez-gsr100ex-soundgear-bass-guitar"]http://www.musicians...ear-bass-guitar[/url]) although even that has 4-too-many pole pieces and an extra knob I'll never use AND it's basically non-existent in the UK. Am I asking for too much? (or perhaps that should be too little?)

it's a shame the official fender version gives you far fewer options

I've yet to come across a single manufacturer that offers a bass with just a passive J-bass bridge pickup and a volume and nothing else. I've been wanting a super simple bass like this for years but I can't bring myself to fork out for a custom shop build - especially not for such a basic design. In an ideal world i'd probably have a 51/tele headstock on it as well, just because that's EVEN simpler than the standard fender shape. Maybe even a reversed tele headstock, just to make it a bit more unique.

I was recorded as one track, the engl runs into the U5 so the U5's EQ applies to the whole signal, I guess if I were doing a proper album recording it would make sense to track them both separately but I wanted to give an idea of how it sounds live

Here's an idea of some of the nice dirt I can get from my rig: https://www.box.com/s/3441db0fc45215020362 (raw recording straight from the U5) https://www.box.com/s/3725931be7b43d5b492f (with some compression and limiting added after the recording) I was going to record some clean fingerstyle and all sorts of other lovely things but I ran out of time so it's just metal for now \m/

[quote name='chrismuzz' timestamp='1341799393' post='1724334'] Delicious! is the ENGL pre originally intended for guitar? [/quote] Yes, the Engl is a guitar pre. It's not bad for bass at all but it's pretty un-subtle and obviously rather a lot of tweaking and messing about is required to keep it from sounding too 'fizzy'. What you can't see from that photograph is that there's a Boss LS2 line selector pedal tucked in the back of the rack blending a clean signal with the output of the Engl and then that blended signal goes into the Avalon. When I can afford it, I'd like to add a compressor so I can squash the clean signal a bit to match the sustain of the dirty signal and catch a few peaks when my picking gets a little too enthusiastic . Essentially I was trying to recreate the sound of running a bass amp and a guitar amp together which sounds HUGE but is quite a pain in the arse to take to gigs. I'll post some sound samples later if I get a chance.

[attachment=112539:IMAG0243.jpg] Here's my current rig. The only thing I dislike about it is the sheer weight of that QSC power amp. The rack box weighs more than the cab and the bass combined!

Ibanez. Sure they're nice to play but they're kind of soulless and lacking character in both looks and tone. It's not often (or ever in my case) you hear a record and go "ah, that's a classic Ibanez BTB tone" or whatever, it could pretty much be any modern active bass.

Ibanez GSR200 in transparent red. I've still got it. It now has a cut up tshirt super-glued to it because I got bored of the red finish. It has a bunch of ferrules in the back for through-body stringing, but they're not aligned with anything - neither each other nor the bridge - so they're unused. It has one incredibly low output (supposedly) original 60's fender p-bass pickup that an old bass teacher gave me for free, and one really high-output seymour duncan quarter pounder jazz pickup that's badly wired and noisy as hell. This is what happens when you let a 16 year old near a bass with a drill and a soldering iron. Tanglewood Warrior III brown. Semi hollow bass with a music man style pickup. Don't remember much about it. It was probably a pretty nice bass for the money looking back. Warwick Corvette $$ trans black. Sounded great but was hard work to play. Then the stupid fiddly adjustable nut broke and I got bored with it so I sold it to a guy in Canada. Kramer Baretta II blue. An Ebay purchase, I never liked the pickups or the neck or anything about it really. I bought it mostly because it was a neck-thru for less than £300. Sold shortly after purchase, don't remember how/where/who. Yamaha BB614 old violin sunburst (tobacco burst). Still got this one, it served me really well through my uni years. Cheap, comfortable, sounds decent. Never quite liked the look of it, but I don't play bass to look good - I don't do much to look good really The more I played it the more I decided I didn't like the active preamp and wished I'd got the passive version. one of these days I'll just rip all the electronics out and wire the pickups directly to the blend and then to the jack socket. Fender Aerodyne Jazz bass black. I've never been so happy with a stock spec bass before. I love everything about it. Fender Aerodyne Precision bass natural. Bought this off Ebay to compliment the jazz bass. It sounds a lot warmer to my ears than the jazz which is quite tight and precise sounding. I'd wanted one of these for bloody ages, chased them on ebay for about a year, missing and losing auctions. Glad I finally got a natural finish one though, it would have bugged me if I'd lost patience and bought a blue or a red one.

Setting up a bass yourself is fairly easy, it's a kinda 3-way thing between truss rod, intonation and saddle height. It's always worth doing the setup yourself if you can because then it can be adjusted to your exact playing style. If someone else does it, it might be too low for the way you pound the strings with your picking hand and you'll get buzzing and metallic clanky fret noises, or too high for your delicate tickling of the strings and you'll be putting unnecessary effort into fretting the notes. Tinkering with a bass is one of my favorite things to do. I usually mess about with mine a few times a year just to see what I can do with them really.

I'm not sure i've ever seen a bass nailed to a pub wall before. The idea of nailing a bass to anything is just awful though, it's like burning the Qur'an, pissing on a war memorial or privatising the NHS. I suppose the exception is if you were nailing a bass to the sort of person who goes around nailing basses to things

The dilemma about trusting the sound tech with your bass tone is why I decided to get an Avalon u5. I use it as both a preamp into my onstage power amp, and a DI box to go into the desk. Obviously the sound guy could still screw things up, but usually they won't touch your tone unless it presents a problem.

[quote name='achknalligewelt' timestamp='1333102067' post='1597336'] 'Well, you can get out. Don't waste my staff's time if you're just pissing about.' He then pulled the guitar from my hand and stormed out the back[/quote] This infuriates me. I work in both the music and service industries so maybe that's why, but when I read that, it made me want to go and cause that guy some trouble, maybe go in and just casually pick up his stock with sticky chocolatey fingers, or lead him on, and on, and on, get him pilling up thousands worth of gear and then give him and expired credit card at the end. Sadly Newcastle is a bit far to go just to harass a complete arsehole.

I'll add my voice to the choir of Trace-bashing. I cannot speak for their all-valve models, but I've never liked any of the solid state TE's i've played. I find they somehow manage to simultaneously sound 'dead' or sterile, and indistinct. The EQ seems to be entirely un-useful, it's like you can hear it changing your tone but it's never in a way that you like. You try to bring in some more top-end "air" and it just sounds ganky and vulgar - and not in a cool rock'n'roll way. Venues and rehearsal rooms love them because they're sturdy but that's all they are in my experience.

I've had a set of rotos where the winding unraveled itself from the core on a couple of them as I tuned up, and then the bare core wouldn't grip my tuners properly so they were useless. Thankfully I got them from Stringsdirect who are absolutely lovely to deal with. I emailed over a couple photos of what had happened and I had replacements in the post the day after! Unbelievable! I don't mind much how my strings feel, as long as they sound great. Feeling bad AND sounding bad is inexcusable though.

[quote name='sprocket123' timestamp='1330105590' post='1552932'] Hey Electric nat , you happen to have Avalon & QSC,which ones do you have buddy . [/quote] I'm currently using the Avalon U5 into a QSC RMX2450. It's monstrous. Total overkill, but that's what I like. Very few eq options, lots of headroom, simple but high quality. The thing is, with the Genz Benz cab being light enough to lift one-handed, and the QSC obviously containing some kind of dark matter my rack box is now about twice the weight of my cab. I do like the fact that I can lift the cab above my head he-man style though, that turns a few heads now and then I'd actually forgotten what oldschool bass cabs were like until I helped my boss' band lift a trace eliott 6x10 over a 5 foot wall. It was a 4 man job!

[i]Short version[/i]: Boss LS-2 is tone-sucking, can anyone suggest a more 'hi-fi' alternative for blending one signal into another? Rack gear or pedal or whatever else. [i]Long version[/i]: I'm currently using a Boss LS-2 line selector to blend the overdrive signal from one preamp with a clean signal before running it through my main pre and poweramp setup. This works perfectly but the Boss pedal adds unwelcome noise to my signal and the bypass sound is much more detailed sounding than when the pedal is engaged, even with no preamps or FX in the loops. - Basically, it's the weak link in my signal chain and is sucking my tone. Is there a better unit I could get for this purpose? The Xotic x-blender looks like it could be good, but I'm concerned it might have similar issues to the LS-2. It's hard to tell just from watching demos online because in most of them you can't hear the real fine detail anyway. I did wonder about some kind of rackmount mixer or something, but I'm not entirely sure how that'd work. I was hoping there'd be a company making a rackmount blendable FX loop or something but I can't seem to find much. I'm looking for something that will keep my clean signal completely high definition, so that if I were to adjust the blend to 100% clean I would then hear absolutely no tonal difference between the unit engaged and the unit bypassed.

I tried swapping out the valve in the EBS, but that just made the pedal sound a lot worse, so I'm gonna keep it stock and save it for when i want a rich warm overdrive. I did a bit of thinking and some digging around on youtube and various forums and I have now bought an Engl E530 guitar preamp that I blend with my clean signal so I can have stupid amounts of snarling nasty gain, and a tight punchy low end. To my ears it sounds absolutely huge, way more hi-gain, sharp and accurate than any bass-specific overdrive or distortion I've come across. I couldn't find any sound clips of it being used with a bass (At some point i'll get to recording some sound clips myself if people are interested?) so it was a gamble to buy it blind but thankfully it's given me the exact sound I was after. I probably wouldn't use it without a blended clean signal though. You guys were right though, swapping out valves was never going to get me anywhere.

Aye, but valves breathe a certain amount of life into the sound I think. Think of (to make an obvious example) the Peavey 5150 kinda sound. That's certainly tight and aggressive, but very much 'valvey' sounding as well. I'm not so foolish to think I can re-create the sound of an entire guitar head using one valve in a bass pedal though, but getting close would be a fine thing.