BigRedX

They were good enough to phone me up and apologise, but it was after 5 pm when they did, so too late for me to do anything constructive about re-arranging my time until next week. If it wasn't for the fact that they are significantly cheaper on this item than everyone else I would have probably cancelled my order.

Unfortunately the death of Rock n Roll has been slightly postponed. Having organised my week so I would be definitely working from home tomorrow when the RCF was due to be delivered, I've just received a call from Bax Shop telling me that due to an error my speaker won't be out for delivery tomorrow. Not happy...

I practice the songs I'm going to play, each in the key I am going to play them. The rest of the time I work on writing new songs. History and experience have shown me that the musicians who do well out of the music business are the ones with songwriting credits on popular songs. My songs might not be popular (yet) but I'm earning PRS royalties from stuff I wrote back in the early 80s. Because the songs and the recordings last long after the band that originally played them has ceased to exist, their earning potential goes on pretty much forever.

Many years ago (it was when Sound Control was still a going concern and before buying stuff on the internet had really taken off) I wanted to buy Herco Flex 75 picks in bulk. A friend who used to work there had been able to get me a box of 100 picks which worked out at well under half the price of buying them individually and at the rate I was using/losing them it made good sense. As I was nearing the end of my current stock I popped into the shop to enquire about getting another box of 100. After a lot of poring over stock catalogues, was told "we'll see what we can do". A couple of weeks later, I was told my picks were in stock and I turned up to be presented with a pack of 6. Me - "No that's no good - 6 will last me about a month if I'm careful. Can you get me a box of 100 like you did before?" Them - "It was supposed to be 100. We'll place the order again." So off I went. In the mean time I had a search on the internet. It turns out that Herco Flex 75 are still available in 100s but seemingly only in the US. Still I'm sure that Strings & Things will be able to sort me out. And so for another 6 months I was bounced between Sound Control, Strings & Things and Jim Dunlop (who own the Herco brand) in the US. Jim Dunlop would only deal with Strings & Things because they were the UK distributor. Strings & Things would only deal with Sound Control, because they didn't sell direct to the public, and it didn't seem to matter how often I went into the shop or phoned them about the progress of order, the box of 100 picks still hadn't arrived. The manager of the shop looked embarrassed to see me every Saturday, and he had no picks to sell me. Finally I tracked down a source in the US who would sell me 100 Herco picks and ship them to the UK, and I was just about to do the deal when Sound Control phoned to inform me that my picks had arrived. I ended up getting a second box of 100 for free for being so patient. I've almost used up all of these 200 picks, but luckily there are plenty of sources in the UK who will sell me 100 Herco Flex 75s at a sensible price.

I suppose... However when I was getting into rock music and the instruments that it was played with in the early 70s, one of the things that made Rickenbacker basses stand out was the triangle inlays. In fact for a while I assumed that Rickenbacker must be the go-to bass guitar since so many of the bass players in my favourite bands used one, and I was quite surprised to find that they also made guitars!

The RCF 745 and the Line6 Helix (along with my Linn Adrenalinn) should cover all my bass and guitar tone-shaping and amplification needs and at worst when I sell my old bass and guitar rigs I'll make all the money I've just spent back.

Have a look at anything by Hughes and Kettner with valves in it. And to confirm what overs have said about output levels, I have a (now discontinued) Hughes & Kettner Tube 50 combo (50W) and have never used it without running into a Marshall PowerBrake on less than half volume. If I was looking at another all-valve guitar amp I probably wouldn't consider anything over 30W.

RCF 745 ordered!!

IMO (and especially on a guitar) cutaways should give easy access to ALL of the frets. Also I was meaning to ask on your last guitar build, when you essentially removed the heal and blended the neck into the body how does that affect the action of the truss rod? My understanding was that the truss rod acted on the neck between the nut/volute and where the neck thickens at the heal. If you remove the heal essentially making the neck longer do you need a longer truss rod?

Pitch to CV or MIDI for the bass guitar is just not feasible unless you have the world's cleanest and precise technique and are playing downtempo music. The laws of physics are always going to be against you. The theoretical minimum response time has going to be one complete wave cycle for the device to have a good guess at detecting the pitch. The open E on a bass is 41Hz, that means at the very, very best you are looking at 24ms between playing a note and the device working out what pitch it is. That's slap-back echo territory (i.e. noticeable), and in reality the actual response time is going to be closer to double that. Notice how in the demo in the OP you never get to hear the controlling signal in combination with the synth output except when it is making random glitching noises along with the drums. Also notice how the controlling signal is always something high-pitched like guitar or another keyboard. You can't blame the manufacturer for wanting to show their products in the best possible light, but I think a lot of purchasers are going to be very disappointed when they try and use these in a real world situation. There are various tricks that you can use to make the tracking quicker and more accurate but all of these take the expressiveness away from the controlling instrument, and IMO the whole point of using something like a guitar to control as synth is that you can make full use of that expressiveness. Otherwise you might as well use a keyboard and the standard synth performance controls. Also while in theory a monophonic device might be fine for bass parts, in practice one of things that makes the feel of a bass line played on bass guitar different from one played on a keyboard or other monophonic device is what happens when you play parts that swap between the strings. And once you've lost the feel of the bass part from that of playing on a bass guitar you might as well play it on a keyboard (or sequence it). There are players that can make pitch to CV or MIDI work for them. What you will find is that they are mostly guitarists and that they have spent years honing their technique and modifying their instruments to get around the inherent limitations of using pitch detection to control a synthetic waveform. I found very quickly that it was far easier for me to develop enough of a keyboard technique in a day or so that enabled me to play synth parts than it was to modify my guitar playing style to get the tracking to work well enough to satisfy my very basic requirements.

IMO it's one of the improvements of the new version of the site. It takes a couple of seconds to dismiss the pop up and having a look at the new posts before actually posting your own can be useful at times.

As someone who does quite a bit of design work for exhibitions, roller bands to me always look a bit crap, especially for bands. They always come across as something promoting a cheap and nasty fly-by night product, that will be history in year's time. Even on the very expensive versions the sides always start rolling over after they've been used a couple of times. Also I'm not entirely convinced about their robustness in a gigging environment. A couple of years back I was onto a nice earner replacing damaged banners for a medical supplies company who were using them at conferences and exhibitions, and were needing at least one of the 3 banners they had replacing every 4 or 5 weeks. Now I don't know exactly what was happening to them at these events but unless medical reps party extra hard, I would have thought that the average gig was far more demanding.

This. Or alternatively I'll put on a track from my latest CD or vinyl release and then try and flog them a copy.

Fender nicked it of Paul Bigsby, who nicked it of Martin who in turn nicked it off any number of 19th Century German luthiers.

Yes it has.

There's lots of luthiers who will build you a very nice bass guitar. However if you want a Warwick only Warwick will make you one.

Back when I had a lot of disposable cash, and the StarBass II have just come out I tried to get Warwick to build me a custom version. I filled in all the details on their custom enquiry form on the web site and waited... Nothing. So I had another go, and waited... Nothing again. So I had yet another go... And still no reply from Warwick. Eventually I was able to get a MiK StarBass from Thomann when they were EoL'ing them, and at a much cheaper price than my Custom version from Warwick would have been.

Are you in a band? If not join one now. IME you learn more and at at a faster rate playing with other musicians than you ever can no matter how motivated you are sitting on your own at home.

Actually having watched the video all the way through now, I don't think he's actually using the pitch to voltage conversion, just running the bass sound through the filters and using a combination of the envelope follower and the trigger detection the modulate the VCFs and VCA.

A great bass tone is one that sounds great within the context of the song/track/band. It doesn't matter what it sounds like on its own.

I've never been convinced with out-of-phase settings on bass guitars, because they suck too much of the bottom end out of the sound, and bottom end is what the bass guitar is for.

If it's the same circuit as the original MS20 (and I would imagine it will be since Korg make a big deal about this being an authentic re-creation) then it is 40 year old technology and almost completely useless for turning pitch accurately and quickly into a stable voltage to use to drive the VCOs. I had an original MS20 in the early 80s, and I think I tried the built-in pitch to voltage module twice with little success before giving up on the idea of being able to use my guitar or bass to drive the synth. If you wanted random VCO glitches and warbling effects then it was great, but if you wanted to play an actual tune it wasn't up to much. However the trigger detection part of the circuit was excellent and allowed us to use any drum sound from our Roland 808 to trigger the synth without tying up the sounds that were also the built-in voltage triggers.

Sorry, I don't see what you point is in regard to my reply to mcnach - especially in the context of the whole conversation. Did you quote the wrong post? He said that string spacing at the bridge (for him) was an important measurement, and I replied that the string spacing at the bridge was only a part of the overall picture. This is because the spacing between strings is not constant along their length, and virtually no-one plucks right at the bridge, so unless you also know the scale length of the instrument and the spacing at the nut, the string spacing at the bridge tells us very little about what the strings do spacing wise between the bridge and the nut. I then pointed out that for me, it turns out that the important measurement (in so far as I have an important measurement - on the whole I'm very easy going about instrument specs) was the spacing at the point where I pluck the string and (hopefully) implied that this measurement could not be derived from the string spacing at the bridge alone. In fact I only discovered that this was the case for me when I wondered why I didn't seem to have a problem playing instruments with very different string spacings at the bridge, and that might be the reason.

Actually unless you pluck right next to the bridge, the other measurements are just as important. My standard plucking point is about 120mm away from the bridge when playing with a pick, and 140mm - 180mm if I'm playing finger style depending on where I'm anchoring my thumb. At those distances the taper of the string spacing from bridge to nut is a significant factor. The last time this subject came up, I wondered why I was so unconcerned with string spacing figures until I measured the spacing at the point where I was actually plucking the strings. This was when I discovered that on all my regularly-used basses, the distance from the low B to the G string was the same to within 1mm at this point (63 - 64mm), despite the fact that the string spacing at the bridge was quite a bit different on each bass.

I went from a decent spec Ritter to a Mono M80, because the Ritter simply wore out after being used to carry my bass for 4 years of weekly gigs and rehearsals. When I bought my Mono case I did a lot of research first and although things have moved on a bit since then most of what I discovered is still relevant. 1. What do you need your gig bag for? If it's simply something to cover your bass while you carry it to and from your car at gigs and rehearsals pretty much anything with some decent padding will do. There are plenty to chose from and you shouldn't need to pay more than about £40. If you are going to be using it on public transport then you should probably be looking at one of the semi-rigid cases like the Mono. 2. The semi-rigid cases are surprisingly big and heavy compared with something like a top of the range Ritter. My M80 is only a little smaller than a Hiscox Lite Flite. At the time when I bought it, it was the lightest of all the semi-rigid cases available, but it still weights quite a bit more than a more traditional gig bag. However the fact that they are semi-rigid means that they will squash into spaces in a tightly packed car that would not accommodate a hard case, whilst still properly protecting the instrument inside. 3. The semi-rigid case do offer a lot of protection, mine saved my bass from having a 2x10 cab dropped on it. I doubt it would have faired as well in something like the Ritter bag. 4. If you intend to use it to carry your bass any distance on your back, make sure you try it out first. For me the M80 is nowhere near as comfortable to wear as the Ritter was, and I no longer use it if I intend to make the 30 minute walk from my house to the rehearsal with my bass. In this respect it fails completely as gig bag. BTW to the OP the Mono bags come with a lifetime warranty which should have covered your friend's broken strap.