BigRedX

The guitar version great. I have an Eggle-era custom model. I've also tried the original bass version which IIRC had an EB3-style pickup arrangement. That was ridiculously large and horribly unbalanced. It didn't sound brilliant either.

When I was in the first year at secondary school (in the early 70s), we were asked if anyone would like to learn a musical instrument, and if so what? For some reason I decided I'd like to learn the trombone. I had a single "try-out" lesson where the teacher tested to see if I could get a note out of the mouth piece (after a bit a trial and error, I could) and then to see if I could reach the full extension of the slide. I couldn't. That was that. I was told I was too small to play the trombone. Nothing else was suggested like a different instrument that I would be able to play, or a suggestion to come back in a year's time and try again.

What exactly do you want to do? Use the external cab instead of the built-in speaker? If so why? Use the combo with an additional cab? In which case you need a cab with the same size and number (and ideally type) of speakers as in the combo for the best results. However, you'll need to look on the back of your actual amp as there are several different versions of the GP7 combo and by looking at photos available not all of them have additional speaker outputs. If they do the impedance information for the extension cab should be marked next to the socket.

For me with a lined fretless it would depend on how "visible" the lines are under stage playing conditions. If they can be easily seen (or as easily as actual frets) then the markers will be fine between the lines as they are on a fretted bass. If the lines are going to be subtle then it would be worth moving the dots to be where the lines are.

Everything I hate about "boutique" electronics. No proper case to protect the valves and transformer (that'll be why it's lighter than the competition). Un-ergonomic layout of the controls, borderline illegibility of the legends and no markings for the knobs. If this was a one-off a home-brew for the maker to use himself it's probably OK but to expect people to part with large amounts of money for something that looks like a half-finished prototype...

Get Newtone to make you a set.

You only need to do this with strings that have a round rather than hexagonal core.

Newtone will make you strings of whatever length you want. However what is the problem of just cutting the strings to the correct length?

Do your neighbours live close enough for a device in their residence to be causing the problems. Remember wireless technology is no respecter of legal boundaries. Any reason why you can't use a wired connection? It would be much more reliable.

Just get two identical cabs. Mixing different cabs is of no benefit to anyone other than the person standing in the "sweet spot". Everyone else will experience a different (probably worse) sound to varying degrees. If you are relying on your rig to provide bass guitar sound for the whole venue, that means the sound and volume of the bass will be different depending on where in the audience you are stood. If the bass goes through the PA then your cabs make zero contribution to what the audience hears.

I would agree with @barkin about the qualifier need for left/right as opposed to clockwise/anticlockwise. I always thought this was a side effect of the fact that I am slightly dyslexic, but I think that it might be more to do with the fact that often I need to be adjusting screws at weird angles. I've found the simplest way is to use a ratchet screwdriver with the direction correctly set so that turning in the wrong direction does nothing.

I haven't worn trousers with enough spare material to flap since 1977...

Mine has a Made In Korea sticker on the back of the headstock.

The strings are two years old. Unless they are flat wounds or the bass has been barely played, they will be knackered and more than ready for replacement.

I take it you used the circuit diagrams on Fly Guitars to get the wiring right? When I added a varitone circuit to my guitar IIRC it worked as a bass cut control (my circuit was based on those in the Gibson 345 and LS6 guitars). Does it work in the same way on the EB3 to take a bit of "mud" out of the mudbucker?

£1400 for a bolt-on neck and slab body with parts bin hardware? I don't think so.

However unless you are using PA equipment for you bass rig, there is no "flat" setting. All bass amps and speakers have a noticeable baked-in sound, that why you pick one over the others, you go with something that has a basic sound you like.

It would be fine. 🙂 You'd need a ridiculously loud bass rig for it to make any noticeable contribution to FoH sound at this sort of venue, and as I said previously if that was the case, the sound engineer would be asking you to turn down. They'd just put a DI on the bass and feed you through the FoH and foldback, so that you, the rest of your band and the audience could hear you.

Because I see myself as composer first rather than a "musician", I'd always prefer it for one of my bands playing my songs to be successful. However saying that, the only band I have ever REALLY wanted to be in was a Nottingham band in the early 80s called "None So Blind". They had great songs and a brilliant bass player, whose bass parts I really admired. I settled for being a fan and going to see them play as often as possible. A couple years later when their drummer, and subsequently their bass player left, I really hoped that I would be asked to be their new bassist. Unfortunately they picked someone else and TBH I simply wasn't a good enough player at the time have done the songs justice (even now there are some songs of theirs I'd struggle to play properly), and no matter how much I'd have enjoyed being in the band, the real magic of the music was in the interaction of the original band members and with two of them gone, it was never the same. I got my "revenge" for not being offered the bass player role by nicking their keyboard player for my synth band.

I think they are arranged like that so when you switch them on in the down position the sound is more like the unaffected one, so the change in tone is minimised?

Except that back in the late 70s it would have been a lot more expensive to release. Even if you had gone the ultra-budget Desperate Bicycles route, it would have still cost you at least £150 to record and press 500 copies (the minimum a pressing plant would consider) and back then that was a significant amount of money. And unless John Peel had picked it up for radio play and Rough Trade had distributed them you'd probably still be left with 450.

Buy some new strings. That'll almost definitely be the problem with the tuning stability. The truss rod has nothing to do with tuning so leave it alone.

Depends what your pedal board is for. For most of the last 35 years my amp has simply been a means of getting my bass guitar signal loud enough for the audience to hear and therefore the only control on it has been volume. All my tone shaping is done from my effects.

Brilliant! When I made my guitar in the late 70s I was "lucky" enough to have diagrams for several of the Gibson Varitone circuits complete with values rather than part numbers, courtesy of the book "Guitars: From the Renaissance to Rock" by Tom Evans. Unfortunately in at least one case the decimal point was in completely the wrong place, as I discovered when I tried to buy the part and was told it would be larger than a typical amplifier transformer!

I play powerful music too. I also used to have a very big and impressive looking bass rig (not to mention expensive), that was sold when I realised that for almost all the gigs I was playing, it was offering zero sonic benefit to either myself or the audience. On big stages I couldn't hear anything from it if I wasn't standing directly in front of it, and on small stages I was being asked to turn down so much, so as not to ruin the FoH sound that I could hear more of me from the guitarist's wedge on the opposite side of the stage, than I could from my own rig behind me. Going directly into the PA, I've never had a problem with monitoring that hadn't been sorted out by the end of the first song, and on multi-band gigs with quick turn-around times the stage crew love me, because my setup is simple to deal with. The rest of one of my bands can be quite picky about the on-stage sound, but we've always been able to sort it out quickly in the setup time available. Personally I'm happy if I can hear enough of me to be able to tell that I am in time and in tune with the rest of the band, and anything beyond this is a bonus. I've also always been of the opinion that if it has to be loud to feel/sound good, then the songs I've written aren't good enough and I need to go an write some better ones.