BigRedX

It's all very well saying that a traditional rig gives a consistency of sound when gigging, but unless you're playing small venues where the PA is vocals only or you never move from being stood a couple of feet directly in front of the bass cabs, that's not the experience you are going to get. I was finding that on both large stages and small ones (where I was generally being asked to turn down so as not to mess with the FoH sound) that the moment I stepped away from being in front of my cabs the bass in the foldback for the other band members completely took over. For me the bass amp and cabs were simply a means of getting the bass guitar to a volume suitable for the band I was playing in. Having an amp or cabs with "a sound" was never a priority when choosing what to buy and in many cases could be serious disadvantage if it wasn't the sound I was after. My bass sound comes from: 1. Me 2. My bass (although no where near as important as the other factors) 3. My effects The important things I need to hear on stage is that I'm playing the right notes at the right point in the song. The amp and cabs were a necessary evil, and now they are no longer necessary I'm glad to be rid of them.

I ditched my amp and cabs completely for the very reasons described by the OP. I used to own a very nice (and very expensive) big rig that looked very impressive, but as the OP has discovered when all the gigs you do the bass goes through the PA it was starting to look a bit redundant. On the big stages as soon as I stepped away from being directly in front of my rig I could hear more or "me" in the fold back than I could from my cabs and on the smaller stages I was being asked to turn it down so as not to interfere with the FoH mix, that even stood directly in front of it the bass being supplied for the guitarist in his wedge on the other side of the stage was louder! At the same time I'd been following the various FRFR threads on here and they were making a lot more sense to me, so I sold everything and bought a Line6 Helix Floor and an RCF 745 powered cab. As I also play Bass VI in another band having a "neutral" sounding amp and cab system was a lot more versatile and saved having to carry a massive and complex rig that could cope with both "guitar" and "bass" sounds. And after selling all my conventional amplification I actually came away with a small profit! I don't miss the old big rig in the slightest. For the big gigs (Nottingham Rescue Rooms, Leeds O2 etc.) I do I don't even bother taking the RCF cab. I just give the PA a DI from the Helix and get a monitor mix that is balanced all the way across the stage. For the one gig I've done since changing where the PA was strictly vocals only the RCF was more than adequate for projecting the bass sound into the audience. For all the other in-between gigs I usually tuck the cab out of the way (the size and shape also lets me fit it in spaces where there would be no room for a conventional bass rig) and often have it firing across the stage so the rest of the band can hear me without it disturbing the FoH mix. All the sound shaping is done with the Helix and therefore what the audience hears is exactly what I hear on stage only much louder and with no nasty frequencies ready to spill into the drum and vocal mics and ruin the sound. It makes you think that the only bassists really benefiting from expensive boutique bass rigs are those who just play pub gigs where the bass doesn't go through the PA and their rig is entirely responsible for the bass sound that the audience hears.

Given it's origins it would almost certainly sported an "Audition" logo when new. To be fair apart from the missing vibrato arm and the broken tone tone knob it looks in pretty good condition - certainly compared to all the ones I was able to find photographs of. So unless the back is suffering from major buckle rash it might be worth looking for proper parts to replace the missing and broken ones and keeping it in close to "original" condition.

IIRC the Teisco connection is entirely wishful thinking on the part of people with these guitars to sell. Back in the early 70s when Woolworths was selling the "Audition" branded versions of this guitar they were priced at £19.99 and TBH that was a bit overpriced. I think they are only rare today because despite being manufactured in huge quantities most of them ended up in the bin when their owners either moved on a decent guitar, or gave up because they were so unplayable.

Are you sure that it's the PSU that is dead and not the device itself? Do you have a multimeter for testing to see if the PSU is actually outputting anything? Edit: I've just had a look at a review of the device and the signal path is completely passive the PSU is only required for the status LEDs and the headphone amp, so if it's not working the the unit itself has died.

If you Google "Audition Guitars" and look at the images there's an identical guitar to that (along with the "Steel reinforced adjustable neck" sticker) but with an Audition logo on the headstock, so almost definitely a Woolies Special.

@leschirons it may be an optical illusion, but does you guitar have both a truss-rod cover at the head and an adjustment wheel at the base of the neck?

@Bassassin should be along with all the info you need. However it looks like a "Woolies Special" to me.

I've just had a look at the original photo that NewUser posted of their Traben bass, and AFAICS the bridge construction is the same as on the Phoenix that I used to own. A large metal bass plate incorporating a design with a block that holds the saddles in place. Unless it tuns out that you can unscrew this block from below once the whole baseplate has been unscrewed from the bass (I have to admit I never looked that closely at mine but had always assumed that they were a single piece) I can't see how the bridge can be replaced.

While you can't beat networking for finding bands or musicians to form/join bands, it has IME be the right kind of networking. For instance I know of plenty of musicians for all kinds of instruments who I could call on for a recording session or a one-off emergency gig dep, but, despite being very nice people I don't think I'd want any of them as permanent replacements in either of the bands I play with currently simply because they don't have sufficient understanding of the music that my bands are playing for them to be able to make any kind of valuable long-term musical contribution. In the same way, from my experiences, I would be very surprised to find anyone with a serious interest in playing any of the genres I like at open mic or jam nights. Maybe if your are looking to join/form a standard covers band these methods would work, but for most originals bands (from my experience) they tend to be dead ends. I joined one of the two (originals) bands that I currently play with from an ad placed on JMB. I was very specific about the sort of music I wanted to play and the level of commitment that I would be putting in and what I expected from any band I might want to join. I then waited for replies, rather than trawling through the other musicians wanted ads. It took several months for anyone to contact me about the ad, but they were exactly the sort of band that I was looking for and I'm still playing with a version of the band that got in touch 4 years later. The other band I joined because I was already a fan and was following them on Facebook, and therefore saw when they posted that they were looking for a new bass player. Because of this they already knew who I was and what I had done musically in the recent past which definitely gave me an advantage at the audition.

While Roger Sadowsky is a well-respected luthier, he does have a vested interest in "bigging-up" the contribution of the woods used in solid electric instruments to defining the sounds of those instruments. He is after all a maker of instruments that are essentially Fender copies (admittedly very nice Fender copies - I've played several in his workshop in NYC - but still essentially Fender copies) and therefore to downplay the contribution of the wood to the sound of the instrument would be to instantly remove half the USP of a Sadowsky bass. The problem I have with "tone woods" for solid electric instruments is that they are given as absolutes (which the article very much re-enforces) instead of what I think as VERY rough guides. I've played instruments that contradict probably all of these presumed absolutes. Perhaps if you are Roger Sadowsky and you get all your wood from exactly the same source (and here I don't mean the same wood merchant but from trees grown in the same small geographical location for any given species) then maybe we can put some weight behind those generalisations, but no-one can tell me that wood from an ash tree grown in the US is going to produce the same tone as wood from an ash tree grown in Europe (not withstanding the fact that "ash" covers 40+ different species of trees). Even Mr Sadowsky himself says: "When I coach people on buying an instrument at a music store, I tell them to try to listen to several of the same model, made with the same woods..." If wood of a certain species was a absolute there would be no reason for this statement. The when you consider that most small scale luthiers are at the mercy of whatever their usual wood supplier can get in stock, and the large scale manufactures will on the whole buy with best value for money in mind, it is impossible to make anything other than most sweeping generalisations about tone when it come to choice of woods for an instrument. My position on tone wood is similar to that of Carl Thompson who said that the choice of woods used will have a impact on the sound of a solid electric instrument, but you can't tell what it will be until the instrument is finished. The problem with all these so-called tone wood comparison tests is that none of them are valid from a scientific PoV because of both flawed methodology and sample sizes being far too small to give any meaningful results. I've stopped worrying about the woods used for my solid electric instruments and concentrate instead on how each individual instrument looks feels and sounds when it is complete. It is only sane thing thing to do.

No. No it is not. If it was a proper acoustic instrument it would be fine without amplification. I’ll explain in full when I can type on a proper computer and not on my iPad.

Which applies completely to acoustic instruments. as I keep saying all those factors are far, far less important with a solid bodied electric instrument.

IME unless your fingerboard is made out of something very soft, round-wound strings won't do any more damage to it then they do to the frets on a fretted bass. However, it does help if you use "classical" vibrato technique (back and forth rather than side to side). Besides if you do manage to significantly damage the fingerboard you can always get your luthier to re-shoot it smooth, in the same way that you would have a refret to replace worn frets on a fretted bass.

I don't know. The pre-amp on mine (Phoenix 5) was active only for the 3-band EQ. The volume control and pickup blend were both passive.

I bought mine almost entirely for the looks. Unfortunately the other aspects of the instrument were distinctly underwhelming - the finish on the neck was so thin I could feel the roughness of the wood, nasty sharp fret ends, flabby sounding and feeling low-B despite the 35" scale length, and the pan pot failed after a couple of months. It looked great and always attracted admiring comments from people when I took it as my spare fretted bass to gigs, but I was thankful that I never needed to use it.

Why? If you are after that Mick Karn/Pino Paladino fretless sound you have to have rounds. Flats won't do, no matter how much you alter your plucking technique and EQ.

Actually what you can't beat is a decent song that sounds good at low volume. Pretty much anything can be made to sound exciting when it is loud.

TI Jazz flats or Pedulla Nickels depending on what sort of sound and feel you are after.

Surely the massive bridge is the whole USP of a Traben bass? Replacing it just makes it another run-of-the-mill low-to-mid-price Korean instrument.

I had the opposite experience. I got into music in the early 70s and the Grateful Dead were definitely one of the bands that you were supposed to be into if you liked less mainstream music. Several of my school friends were big fans, and I loved the album cover designs (especially Blues For Allah), but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get on with the music. It was pleasant in it's own way, but there was little in the way of sing-alone tunes, heavy guitars, or the right kind of weirdness for me. Luckily punk (and post-punk) came along and gave me exactly what I had been looking for musically. Nothing I've heard by the Grateful Dead since then has caused me to really change my opinion.

I had Luminlays fitted to my Warwick StarBass as The Terrortone used to play some very murky "stages" and the conventional markers were impossible see once I'd put my shades (part of our stage wear) on. I would have done the fitting myself, but with the bass being a set neck getting the ones at the body end in looked tricky so I took the bass to a recommended luthier in Nottingham who charged me about £70 for the fitting a took about a week to do it. They made a excellent job of it and IMO it was well worth the money. Had it been a bolt-on neck I would have probably done it myself. As others have said you need to remember to charge the dots up before you go on stage, so just remember to keep the charging torch in the gig bag or case that the bass goes in and you'll be fine. If you are really paranoid buy a spare and keep it in your leads (or other gig items) bag.

They wouldn't be listening with their eyes rather than their ears? Heaven forbid!

Whoever else is on the bill when both In Isolation and Hurtsfall play at the Wharf Chambers as part of Leeds Goth City on Saturday 9th September.

There with PMC we have the first mention of quality studio audio manufacturer in a HiFi thread, although the BB5 is from their Home Audio range rather than the studio one.