Wolverinebass

Just now, JLG said:

File the nut?

 

To accommodate the wider string gauge.

Just now, JLG said:

They're expensive. Almost £20 more than D'Addario

Yeah, because they're great and you won't have to file the nut. That's the whole point of them. Wound at higher tension so you can downtune and not get enough flop to necessitate giving the strings viagra.

11 minutes ago, JLG said:

I do like the low action so I'm reluctant but I will try it.

Thanks

The action on my Rick is stupidly low. You won't have a problem with the DR'S.

I use DR DDT 105-45 on a Rick for C# standard tuning. They're great. String tension is same as E flat. At least to my feel.

3 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

 

So US/Sweetwiter $500 preorder, Thomann £611 (or $775).  Bonkers.  If I do pull for one of these it'll be though my brother in law on a US trip.

Tell him to take a slightly bigger suitcase as he'll probably end up being "the mule." Ha!

10 hours ago, dannybuoy said:

I’ve bought all my Tech21 stuff from US sellers in the past, and most of them ended up devaluing the package to avoid import fees... I work for a US company now though so would probably just get something sent to a colleague’s house and get it from them next time we meet up!

It is a lot of money for a pedal, but looking at it in a relative way, it’s half the cost of the dUg amp (which is one of these with a power amp) and twice the cost of a regular Sansamp (and it has double the knobs/jacks/etc.

If I can sell my BDDI and DP-3X and get the same tones + more out of this, I may be interested.

That's a fair point actually, but I feel it's still way too pricey. If it had dual inputs (which it doesn't) I'd probably agree with you.

For a pedal to have an almost 50% markup from US to UK pricing is obscene.

8 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

 

I know @tonyxtiger bought in some Tech21 stuff. 

 

The one thing that narked me with the Rocky Road distribution was that they didn't have a clue about the products they were dealing with; when my Ged rack lost its clank, it went to Rocky Road and their opinion was that, 'It's making a noise, so it's working, innit?'  Err, no.  For the salary they're likely paying their tech guy, they could just as easy have sent me a new one under the warranty.

 

 

Sounds like they didn't have a tech guy at all. I'm glad I haven't had to deal with them. Still, somebody on here could be able to shed some light on buying stuff in the US and selling it here? It's non region specific thanks to the cute plugs with removable prongs, so does that mean if someone were to buy 30 of them and make a small profit selling to the basschat massive......?

1 minute ago, fretmeister said:

 

I'm giving some serious thought to one of those. Sound great on guitar and bass by all accounts.

They do. I recorded someone in my studio about a month ago who had one and it sounded great

14 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

 

I just don't get how hard it is to set up as a distribution company.  We've discussed this previously.

 

My brother in law spends a lot of time in Houston...

See, I'd love to do that, but I bet we'd get sued as Rocky Road are the "exclusive" distributors in the UK. Or like Westside with Mesa some time ago, there would be a "non valid warranty of US items" policy just to choke it off. Am I wrong?

Who was the guy on here that did the bulk preorder of the Dug pedals for folk?

36 minutes ago, fretmeister said:

Isn’t the 3 button Tonex under £400 as well?

Yeah. It's £335. 

Now that the pricing is confirmed at £609, who's getting one? Ha!

I put the comment on Tech 21's Facebook page about the preceived price gouging going on here by the distributor. No answer, though some of our American contemporaries were like "how much?!!" when I put it in dollars. It's costing almost 50% more. 

Frankly, for 600 quid, it'd better have dual inputs and every single button and dial function recallable via midi. Yet, it doesn't.

For £680 you could get an HX Stomp new. The Darkglass Infinity/Photon/ADAM are £550 new. Just to put that in context.

Until Tech 21 gets a decent distributor in the UK, they're dead to me and that's really saying something.

9 minutes ago, NancyJohnson said:

 

That's quite an interesting instrument - I can see the appeal from the other stuff you have.

 

I shall enjoy putting a dent in it playing it at the Bash.

 

Well, I'll bring it along when the date gets arranged!

1 minute ago, Hellzero said:

Love everything about this bass. 😍

 

Congratulations!

Many thanks for your help squire. It really is greatly appreciated. 

9 minutes ago, Ramsay777 said:

Grainger make really nice stuff! Is it bolt-on or neck-through?

Neck through. Sorry, I'll post a picture of the back.

8 minutes ago, simisker said:

The body shape may not be my cup of tea, but everything else about it is ace! Congratulations

 

So if you just go mono with a single lead, does the bass "sense" this and send an aggregate output of both pickups blended, like a normal bass config?

 

 

Thanks. 

Yes, the way the jacks are wired is like a Rickenbacker. So if you use a mono cable, the circuit won't output through the stereo jack. Vice versa also works the same way. 

The precise wiring is beyond me in terms of what wiring does what, though I do understand the concepts of how it works.

Incidentally, both ways are "single lead." It's not wired like a Billy Sheehan Yamaha Attitude. Jack nearest the bridge is stereo, the one below is mono.

So, yesterday, this arrived. Before we get to the photo, if anyone doesn't like pointy things, leave. There is nothing here for you but pain.

I ordered this in 2021. How has it taken so long you ask? There was a thing called covid if I recall. Also, there were also hilarious parts problems on backorder for ages.

Enough of that nonsense. What is it and where is it made then? Grainger basses and guitars are up near Peterborough, and around the time of one of the lockdowns they posted a bass in this shape that had a mad blue acrylic top. The cogs started turning.

So, my idea was to have this wired like an Alembic Series 1 bass and it is. After chatting to Nuno at Lusithand about it I bought some filters off him (his stuff is great by the way - check out his site) with the caveat that it might not work. 

Undeterred, I sought the advice of the basschat massive and many thanks to @Hellzero who provided the Jack wiring diagram. 

Basically, the bass can be used stereo or mono with different jacks (like a Rickenbacker), but it's active with a filter and volume for each pickup also a pickup selector. So there's 2 jack outputs. I also got Darren and Gavin to make the bass modelling the neck on my own Alembics. They've done that amazingly precisely. Top and back is flame maple, body is walnut with headstock facings and neck strings. There is a touch of neck dive, but I've not used a wide strap yet. The bass is quite light as the upper wing is chambered.

Naturally, I've got a hipshot on it for drop D and there's a brass Warwick Just a Nut too. Bridge is Babicz mono rails to accommodate the narrower spacing. Inlays are mother of pearl.

Pickups are Nordstrand Zen Blades wired in parallel to keep as much top end as possible. The reason being is that Lusithand Filters go to 4kHz give or take, whereas Alembics go to 6.6kHz.

So, does it sound like an Alembic? In a word, yes. If you want that John Entwistle 1982 Who bass sound, you'll get it. Or if you want a great clean sound it'll do that too.

Darren, Gavin and Nuno were fantastic throughout this especially when there were wiring issues we had to resolve. If you're looking for a custom bass made by a British company (or anyone actually), then Grainger do really exceptional work. Also, Nuno at Lusithand makes really good preamps and pedals which are well worth checking out. 

I made a joke about this a long time ago. Mainly all the people who might say, "I'll come to the next one." 

I postulated that if we were playing a gig in their front room, they'd say they had something important to do in the kitchen.

That was at a time when I was in bands that played probably more accessible material ironically.

I think it's when you get into stuff that's quite niche that you have problems. He says in 2 progressive metal bands. When you're in a wide genre, great. If you kind of skirt round it a bit more or are a small percentage of it, not so much. 

6 minutes ago, funkle said:

I haven’t seen any Stingray pickups or cavities with a slope/angle, and I’ve owned a few Stingrays…

It wasn't the pickups themselves. It was the ears where you'd put the screws through the pickups into the body. What it meant was that even discounting the difference in depth, they didn't fit without being filed down. I just thought it was weird that it wasn't on their website as there was no way they'd properly fit a Stingray route without some filing. 

An interesting thing about the Herrick pickups is something a bit odd. Now, Martin advertises them as obviously needing routing for the depth. That's fine of course. What he didn't say was that the ears where the screws go in aren't straight and slope outwards towards the bottom. So, I had to get a tech to file half the casing back by 3mm up to halfway up the pickup.

Now when I said this, Martin told me he'd had feedback about this issue with standard MM cavities which I thought was peculiar he didn't say that or list it on his website.

Alas, I've not yet got the neck for the bitsa thr pickups are in, so I can't tell anyone how it compares to a Wal.

I'd be very interested to hear the difference if any. Certainly, the samples of the Alex Venturella bass on the Status website that are semi isolated I could tell the difference right away between the wood and graphite neck. However, it's worth saying that in a mix you'd probably never really be able to tell unless there was more higher notes played with a bit more percussive type sound. Obviously Slipknot is rather downtuned.

I've been toying with getting one as I missed out on getting a Stealth by a week when Rob stopped taking orders. Still kicking myself over that as the options I wanted haven't been used on any other stealth made. 

This is brilliant. This thread reminds me of the famous James Coburn quote from Cross of Iron. Please feel free to substitute the names in it for bass players you hate (cough - sorry, "don't get").

"Do you think that just because you and Colonel Brandt are more enlightened than most officers that I hate you any less? I hate all officers, all the Stranskys, all the Triebigs, all the Iron Cross scavengers in the whole German army."

1 hour ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

I wonder why they felt the need to update the drive circuit in the first place, and what went through their heads when they tweaked it and after testing it thought: "Spot on, that's THE tone, definitely a clear improvement, this is bound to be a hit!".

 

Exactly. Whomever made that decision has literally no taste at all. I think that clearly it's just being shoved out now for whatever reason. Considering the price point, there are so many things that are infinitely better around there. I can't see many folk using this giving the voicing of the pedal has been changed so much from the original.

Whilst I appreciate that the type of distortion one uses is a very personal thing ranging from mild overdrive, through tube distortion to full on djent chainsaw type, I can't hear how that pedals sound is going work for anyone that well.

If someone was recording bass in my studio and sounded like that, I'd probably have to have a difficult conversation about their gear and overall tone. Or I'd just re-amp it all through something decent.

What I'm now actually finding hilarious is the Facebook reels by Ashdown and PMT today. Which are some synth music zooming into the pedal on top of a combo and about a minute of James LoMenzo chatting respectively. None of them have audio from the pedal.

It's kind of "if we don't mention that it sounds awful, nobody will know and that's okay isn't it?"

I wonder if they have the "crisis management team" on call for whenever someone thinks about plugging a bass into this pedal and uploading a demo to the Internet they get smashed with a "cease and desist" legal letter.

I'm almost tempted to buy one just to really know if it actually is so unfathomably pish. Obviously, it'd be going back under distance selling regs, but it does pose some interesting questions. Will my rib cage survive either the dry heaving from being so violently sick after playing it, or from laughing so hard that I could forget to breathe for several minutes? 

In many ways I'd actually like to do a review of it by putting some insanely high end basses through it and seeing if any or all of them (possibly) come out sounding like an out of tune Sue Ryder bass from 1986.

Well, the PMT video is back up, though in a different cut. Kind of like Blade Runner, except without being any good. In case anyone is wondering, the demo still sounds absolutely crap.

I think this is quite astounding that Ashdown have in effect ruined probably the best pedal they've ever made. Don't expect any more demos as since they won't get favourable reviews, there won't be any. The only reason this is out is because LoMenzo is interviewed for most of the video. I think had it not been the case, it would have stayed taken down.