bertbass

I saw a lefty in green at Anderton's and bought it. Not a bad bass at all, me thinks. Changed the strings for Newtone and it sounds and plays a lot better. I've not been able to play it loud yet, and probably not in the foreseeable future, and the string spacing is taking some getting used to, but I'm liking it a lot!

Wow! Drummer using Pro Tools, our drummer can't even use, or own a smart phone and doesn't do emails, only snail mail. He occasionally answers the land line though.

Love the song and the video. Excellent!

There's no such thing!

The simple answer is no, it won't follow the radius of the neck. All the fret slot cutting videos I've seen show a cut straight across the fretboard whether it's radiused or not and it would seem from the replies above that the jury is out on this one. All the fret cutting jigs that I've seen, that are available to buy, only cut a flat slot.

Sorry for the tardy reply but I've been a bit busy. In my enthusiasm to post I'd assumed that what was in my head would have been easily understood by all, however, what is is in my head is quite often not understood by even me so my apologies for not explaining properly. To answer your questions, A couple of reasons really. The laser only cuts a slot 0.1mm wide so although the slots would be perfectly spaced they'd still need opening up with a saw, also, although the laser in a precision machine in operation, setting the work pieces in place isn't, so a great deal of trial and error is involved getting things square. This isn't a problem normally but if I wanted to cut fret slots square to a fret board, I'd only know if I'd got it right after it's finished cutting. Secondly, The varying density of the wood being cut effects the cut which means that it is not uniformly consistent over the whole piece of wood, so a hard bit of wood in the middle of a fretboard would result in a slot being less deep than the others and could even end up burnt. I have used the laser to cut a fretboard for the long term P bass that I'm making and here's a photo of the results. When I say P bass, I don't mean precision I mean Pallet, as in made from pallets. If I eventually finish it I'll post its construction. To answer the other questions, here's a photo that hopefully illustrates the principle behind my thinking. That's not actually a fretboard, it's just a bit of wood that I had laying around.

When I've made basses before, to cut the fret slots, I've used squares and various blocks of wood to try and get the slots square and vertical. This worked OK but was time consuming. Now I have the urge to make a couple more I got to thinking, is there a better way? I could perhaps buy a mitre jig but they are a tad expensive or perhaps I could make or buy a tiny table saw with a 1mm blade and then use a slotted rule for fret positions. That could take quite a while to design and build. So what to do? Having a laser cutter / engraver the obvious solution for me was to make one from 6mm thick acrylic. I calculated the fret spacing for a 30" scale and then designed the fret slot cutting jig this was transferred to the laser cut and cut out. The individual pieces were then glued together. Once the glue had dried, a quick pass through the band saw saw the jig nearly finished. The edges were sanded and polished to make it a little more professional looking and the finished jig looks like this. Just a quick buff needed to get rid of the excess glue marks. The jig sits over the fretboard blank. The fret cutting saw just fits in the slots and the acrylic being 6mm thick should hold the saw square. I'll let you know how well it works after I've tried it.

I use mine vertically on an amp stand. Sounds great.

If you want roundwounds get in touch with Newtone strings. They'll make you exactly what you want and they won't break the bank either.

That brings up a lot of questions for after 31st December 2020. You might be better off stashing it in the UK and just transporting yourself to gigs over here if we ever gig again.

And you know this how?

I use a headset mic so I could use one of these, If we had any gigs that is.

Simple answer is no! Music in the early 60s was not that inspiring. Classical or classical, a great choice. I did join the lunchtime guitar club when I bought my first guitar, a Vox stroller, single pickup and a TV aerial socket as an output jack and it was brand new! I shared a half watt amp that my guitar playing mate had built and we both got thrown out of the club for being too loud.

Thanks for that, very interesting.

When we had a 3 way PA I used to use faith healer by The Alex Harvey Band. Perfect for checking each frequency band was working.