BigRedX

[quote name='mr zed' timestamp='1455556672' post='2980192'] My daugher bought me one of these for my birthday a couple of years ago. Keyboard player said she didn't realise there was a Mr Bassist [url="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bassist%60-hobbies-occupations-perfect-guitar/dp/B00FS5YFGC"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bassist%60-hobbies-occupations-perfect-guitar/dp/B00FS5YFGC[/url] This is allowed because it was a present and it could have been socks! [/quote] I'd have rather had socks.

[quote name='ahpook' timestamp='1477051215' post='3159514'] Why wouldn't you take the chance to check your tuning if you have the opportunity ? [/quote] There's doing it when you have the opportunity (during a guitar-free song intro or while the front man is telling the audience something important), and obsessively compulsively doing it between every song irrespective of whether your guitar has gone out of tune and holding up the flow of the set.

IME unless his guitar is very crap or he's keen user of a non-locking vibrato system, then it's entirely down to OCD/comfort blanket. Any modern guitar (that's something made since the mid-70s) is very unlikely to have machine heads so poor that they are causing string slippage. On the other hand he might not be fitting his strings properly in a way that they don't slip. I personally think that a lot of guitarists spend far too much time between songs fiddling with their tuning and completely ruining the flow of the set. No one in the audience wants breaks in between the songs where the musicians muck about with the gear even if it is silently. In the days when I was playing non-programmable synths, which are far more time-consuming to set up for each new song than a simple guitar tuning check, I made sure I knew exactly how to get to each new setting as quickly as possible from the moment the last note of the previous song had died away to where I needed to come in on the next without the band having to wait for me. I don't see why guitarists can't do the same. For me learning this is just as important as learning what to play on the songs themselves. Also IME you have to be very out of tune for most of the audience to even notice. I once did a gig where our guitarist had accidentally managed to change her pedal tuner from A440 to something else. For the whole set we played completely out of tune with each other although perfect in tune with ourselves. Only our (very musical) drummer noticed anything and kept asking us to check out tuning, which of course according to our individual tuners was perfectly fine. It wasn't apparent what had happened until the next rehearsal where it was much easier to hear that we were out of tune with each other!

The Terrortones actually did one gig without any PA at all. We had been booked to play one of our fan's birthday party at a known music venue in Newcastle. Unfortunately in between time the pub had undergone a makeover which involved taking out the in-house PA system and replacing it with... nothing. Luckily a member of the audience was able to lend us his guitar amp and an XLR to jack lead from a nearby rehearsal room, so that we had some form of amplification for Mr Venom and his theremin even if it barely cut over the sound of the rest of the band playing very quietly. It made for a rather "interesting" gig. I'm sure that even if we hadn't been able to find some make-shift amplification for the vocals Mr Venom would have made do with shouting very loudly in the ears of the most attractive girls in the audience...

It depends entirely on what kinds of gigs you are doing and how good the monitoring system is. My band plays all sorts of gigs where the PA ranges from just about enough for the vocals provided that we play fairly quietly (and no foldback whatsoever) to huge rigs with individual monitor mixes for each stage position and the only time I can actually hear any sound coming from my rig (as opposed to out of the monitors) is when I'm stood right in front of it! A lot of the time, if it's a venue we've not played before, there no way of knowing what level of PA is going to be present and unfortunately experience has shown us that even if a gear list is provided ahead of the gig, what is actually supplied on the night can be something entirely different. In these circumstances there is no way I could risk not having a full rig behind me. Of course you also need to consider that for some types of music not having a big stack of amps and speakers at the back of the stage just looks wrong.

The 355 circuit diagram I have, gives the inductor value as 15H, but when I went to buy one from my local electronic components shop it turned out to be quite a lot larger than I was expecting! IIRC I settled for a 1.5H component (or whatever was the closest they had in stock) and ended up with something that fitted comfortably in the control cavity of the guitar I was building.

[quote name='Andyjr1515' timestamp='1476970925' post='3158913'] Ah.....but I DO have a 25k linear pot! Just wired that temporarily and think I'm getting somewhere! With the pot about midway, it's almost same volume as the clean neck pickup, it's in the same tonal range as the neck pickup with tone rolled right off but a tad different. I think this is usable The other two switch positions, taking it through the inductor's split primary and full secondary, make very little difference to going through the full primary. As such, I might have a look to see if, instead, I can use the three positions to bring in three different values of capacitor... Still got no idea what I'm doing but it's immense fun (other than I should be doing other things today ) I will get a trim pot to replace the full size pot so I can use that in the final version. Thanks for all of the input so far, folks. I think I'm starting to clamber up some of the early foothills of the enormous learning curve mountain [/quote] The baritone circuit that I have for the Gibson 355 guitar uses 0.001µF, 0.003µF, 0.01µF, 0.03µF and 0.22µF capacitors for the 5 filter positions (the 6th is a bypass) if that helps?

Depends entirely on the musical style and image of band I'm in.

[quote name='3below' timestamp='1476909807' post='3158471'] This is what 'surprised' me when I put the LRC configuration and values into the simulator. More so when you think about the 'mudbucker' in an EB3, why would you want to further remove high frequencies. I have treated the pickup simply as a source of ac emf and not factored the pickup's resistance (impedance) and inductance into the circuit. I wonder if my simulation was too simple. More research / exploration needed (or an EE on BC). [/quote] Which EB3 circuit are you modelling? AFAICS the [url="http://www.flyguitars.com/gibson/bass/EB3_schematic2.php"]version 2 circuit[/url] has the choke and capacitor in series which should give a notch filter effect. I don't know what the value of the EB3 chokes were, but using the 1.5H choke from the 355 circuit and a .47µF capacitor gives me a 190Hz notch unless I've got my decimal points in the wrong place... The [url=http://www.flyguitars.com/gibson/bass/EB3_schematic.php]version 1 circuit[/url] appears to do something slightly different since it taps into the filter circuit between the capacitor and the choke. Of course given what we've been told previously it could all be Gibson misinformation!

Surely the varitone circuit should be a high-pass filter? Certainly the one I made copied (and expanded) from a Gibson 355 circuit sounded that way. The more usable settings made my DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker sound as tinny as a Telecaster single coil!

Synth bass in "pop hits" goes back much further than the DX7. How about Giorgio Moroder or Kraftwerk both from the early 70s almost a decade before the DX7 made it's debut...

We've had this all before. One of the things that makes the bass guitar to way it is is how you play it. Playing bass from a keyboard rather than plucking and fretting strings gives a completely different feel. Of course you could spend the time honing your keyboard technique to emulate the way a musician with an electric bass guitar would play, but what's the point? As someone who plays both bass and keyboards (and guitar) a good part of the skill of the musician is picking the right instrument to give the right feel and sound for the piece of music in question.

[quote name='cheddatom' timestamp='1476804537' post='3157417'] yeh, that's what I'll do in the meantime I've never bothered much with outboard. I do have a couple of multi-effects racks I use for reverb occasionally, but because the reverbs on the PC are so much better I always go back to them. Right, time to research some reverb units! [/quote] Names to check out are: Eventide, Lexicon and TC Electronic.

[quote name='rushbo' timestamp='1476807196' post='3157451'] I've always had a soft spot for ABC....top quality Pop. I even like the "Beauty Stab" album.... [/quote] "Beauty Stab" and "How To Be A Zillionaire" are my favourites. Not all that keen on the new album, to me it sounds mainly like tracks that weren't quite good enough to make the original "Lexicon Of Love" and I'm surprised that Gary Kemp hasn't sued over the most recent single... For those of you who are interested, Vice Versa, band who became ABC, have a [url=http://www.vinyl-on-demand.com/-1-18-507.htm]Retrospective Compilation[/url] which includes all the official releases as well as unreleased demos and a selection of live recordings. There's also new material on the way from Mark White and Steve Singleton. All well worth a listen.

What do you want to hear through it in bypass mode? Edit: [url=http://sfxsound.com]SFX[/url]

[quote name='cheddatom' timestamp='1476778396' post='3157071'] We found a reverb for the vocal, which we both liked, but it was pretty CPU intensive. This coupled with reverbs on other tracks, plus drum triggers, some VSTs, and a lot of audio, meant the CPU load was quite high. This was fine with a large buffer size, but unusable with a small buffer The artist wanted to re-do his vocal, and listen to his mic monitored through the actual channel in the project with all the effect on it. I think I'll save up for some nice outboard reverb, that'll solve it [/quote] You should be able to get something fairly tasty for a decent price second hand if you don't mind it not being the very latest and best. The only way you'd get the latency down to acceptable levels would be by mixing down all the other tracks to stereo and just running the plug-ins on the track being recorded. Of course that don't make things easy if the artist wants to tweak the mix they are listening to...

[quote name='ash' timestamp='1476784062' post='3157133'] Here is a picture of the back and control cavity now it's stripped of parts and the giant back plate. Unlike some JB basses the cavity is quite small. [/quote] That's positively tiny compared to the J1 guitar control cavity!

[quote name='Garth' timestamp='1476786395' post='3157163'] HI all, I'm trying to arrange collection for a bass in a hiscox case. It will be bubble wrapped also. 1, Which way do you measure it? Is the thickness the height or width? 2, The dimensions are L -1175mm W - 349mm H - 65mm 65mm seems very small??? Any help would be fantastic Thanks [/quote] It looks as though you've got those dimensions off the Hiscox site. The 65mm measurement is the maximum depth of the instrument that will fit inside the case. The dimensions you want are: Length 1175mm, Width 410mm, Depth 135mm. That is the rectangular space the case will occupy. Remember that if you do not box the case, the carrier company will treat it as packaging and you will not be able the claim for any damage caused to the case itself. The case should always be boxed up for maximum protection.

[quote name='police squad' timestamp='1476782273' post='3157112'] yep it's only martin Fry, has been for ages. Most of the current band have been there since 2008/9. It's a very good band. Great drummer [/quote] What songs are they doing? Anything from "How To Be A Zillionaire"?

If it's anything like the J1 guitar that I saw reviewed in International Musician back in the 70s, then the control cavity needs to be that big because about a third of the body is hollow to accommodate all the electrics!

It's just samples. Granted they are probably very good samples (it's a bit difficult to tell from a YouTube video) and lots of them, but still just samples.

Is it really ABC though with only Martin Fry from the original line-up left? Interesting to note that the other two original members - Mark White and Steve Singleton - have gone back to being Vice-Versa who were the electronic band that morphed into ABC and IMO were far more interesting musically.

[quote name='Bigwan' timestamp='1476728339' post='3156748'] Just double what I'd like to spend! [/quote] Be thankful though that you can get something that will do the job relatively cheaply these days (even if it's more than you would like to spend). Back in the early 80s when I was buying my first synth, something that could do what the Nord Lead can cost about the the same as a terraced house here in Nottingham!

[quote name='Woodinblack' timestamp='1476564278' post='3155321'] Carlsbro stingray! [/quote] My first guitar amp was a Carlsbro Wasp. 10W of transistor power into a 10" speaker, all for £20 second hand in 1975. Two inputs marked bright and normal, Volume, Tone and Tremolo speed and depth. With a home-made fuzz pedal and the tremolo depth set to maximum I got some fantastic synth-like sounds out of it. I even used to amplify my bass on the recordings that nearly got my second band signed to a major record label. Can't really fault it at all.

[quote name='Bigwan' timestamp='1476725091' post='3156687'] Any examples you can think of? Not well up on this stuff and that's quite a shopping list! [/quote] My favourite is still the Clavia Nord Lead. Although I pretty much stopped looking at new synths after I got mine, because it does just about everything I want from a synth. A second-hand MK1 will be somewhere around the £400 mark for the keyboard version and a bit less for the rack.