BigRedX

Thursday's basses come from Pagelli

Here's a Splash


and the Joel Reif version of the Ultra Zero Reduced Three Octave Comfort Balanced Body Fretless Bass (with Hyper Access)


When I started bookmarking all these basses I was originally on a quest to find the ulimate fretless bass. For me this may well be it! Extreme high end access, continuous finger board which acts as a thumb rest so you can find the ideal place to give the plucking tone you want. Everything about this bass says quality. There was also a 'cheaper' version made by Marleaux, (called the Marleaux Pagelli bass). This venture seems now to have been discontinued, although there are two of the basses available on the Marleaux store for anyone with a spare €6,000

I know nothing about the splash but I'm hoping that maybe Burns will license the design like they did with the Jet Sonic Guitar (which would lend itself to an intereting bass too)...

I have a late 80s /early 90s Washburn B105 5-string with really narrow spacing - 7.75mm at the nut and only 15mm at the bridge. Overall the neck is only a couple of mm wider thhan a standard 4 (42.5 at the nut - 57mm at the 12th fret). I'm thinking about selling this as I only play more conventionally sized 5-strings these days. PM me if you want more details.

Many thanks for the photo. I really like Talbos and own a Talbo Jr guitar (the one with the built-in amp and speaker). One day I'll get a Talbo Bass to go with it.

If feedback is a problem it might be worth opening it up, and packing the inside with some dampening material as the bodies are hollow. That should help keep it under control.

The eBay Talbo is the one from Music Ground in Denmark street which has been around forever and I check it out each time I go in, hoping that it's been reduced to a more resonable price considering that IMO the body is a second (it has numerous casting blemishes on it), and based on what I paid for my Talbo Jr in Osaka the UK list price is around twice what the price in Japan would be.

If you ever feel like moving your Talbo on please let me know first...

[quote name='Bassassin' post='59895' date='Sep 13 2007, 02:40 PM']...Tokai Talbo...

Jon.[/quote]

What colour is your Talbo Bass and is it the one with the aluminium body or just the wooden bodied one?

Any chance of posting some pics I can drool over...

Thanks

[b]Basses:[/b]
British Custom Guitars 4-String Bass (bought unfinished - need to find someone the machine the require aluminium parts)
Burns Sonic Bass
Carlo Robelli 8-String
Gus G3 5-String Fretted
Gus G3 4-String Fretless
Kramer KXB10
Lightwave Sabre A (with fretted and fretless necks - current fitted with the fretless)
Overwater Original 2 Extra Long Scale 5-String
Pedulla Buzz
Roberts Fretless (Prototype)
Squire Vintage Modified Fretless Jazz
Traben Phoenix 5-String
Wasburn B105 5-String
Washburn B-20 8-String (currently in bits being repaired/refinished)
Wesley Purple Acrylic converted to fretless
Unknown/unbadged Kramer Duke copy (probably a Hondo Alien)

[b]Guitars:[/b]
Andreas Black Shark
FretKing Esprit V Custom
Gus G1 Vibrato
Hohner TE12 Custom 12-String
Tokai Talbo Jr (with built-in amp and speaker)
Yamaha RGX612
Unknown/unbadged Reverse Firebird V copy (currently being restored/refinished)

[b]Others:[/b]
Yamaha EZ-EG

I think it very much depends on what sort of music you're playing a what you want out of your fellow musicians.

In my last band (playing high-tech dance-flavoured pop-rock) the drummer left because he couldn't get on with the singer. The guitarist decided to call it a day too since he thought it was unlikely that we would find a good enough replacement (with electronic drums and could play to a click track). It turned out we got a new drummer within a month who was even better (both as a musician and as a person). However it took us almost a year to find a suitable replacement guitarist, after countless rehearsals with idiots who seemed to unable to learn the simple guitar parts from decent recordings of the songs. By this time I'd learnt how to play all the guitar parts well enough for the band so we advertised for a bassist and found a great one straight away.

I like the Spalt Hybrids too.

Another interesting bass that's sold short by the pictures on the poorly desined (and never updated site) - the last three pics you posted show the instrument off so much better than the "official" ones. Does that belong to someone here in the UK? I'd love to have a go on one. I exchanged a few emails with Michael Spalt a couple of years ago, but in the end I decided I couldn't justify getting one without playing it first as there's a couple of design aspects that might not sit well with my playing technique.

3/16 definitely doesn't fit my VMJ.

Looking at the top of the truss rod in a decent light the hole doesn't appear to be completely symetrical which may be why the 4mm key is a bit loose.

Wednesday's Basses come from [url="http://www.tdlguitars.com/"]De Lacugo Guitars[/url]

Here's an Excelsior


and an Excalibur


Tony Delacugo specialises in custom metal-flake finishes like that on the Excalibur.
You can buy his custom-painted conventional guitar bodies at very reasonable prices on Ebay.

His complete custom guitars and basses are far more exclusive and carry matching price tags.
According to the site these are $3500 and that may well be out of date by now...
I love the amount of 3D sculpting on the bodies and headstocks of these two basses.
To me, there's a good chance that the Andreas guitars were influenced by the De Lacugo designs - there's too many similarities for it to be completely coincidental.

Looks like an Epiphone logo on the headstock right at the end?

Could well be [url="http://www.vintageguitars.org.uk/epiphoneNewport.php"]an Epiphone Newport[/url]

Right...

I would first get in touch with the [url="http://www.bill-lewington.com/qparts.htm"]UK Distributor[/url]
If that doesn't get you any joy try talking dircet to Q-Parts and explain that the UK Distributor doesn't carry the parts you want to buy and see if they'll back an exception to international sales for you.

[url="http://www.bill-lewington.com/qparts/mdome.htm"]Is it not one of these?[/url]

Interesting (and now sold)

Technically it's not really an 'Original' due to it's construction date and it appears to use a lot of the more recent design features of Overwater basses. Nice to see that Overwater are still prepared to make basses that shape though.

For more info on the Atlansia pickups have a look at their [url="http://www.atlansia.jp/PAT.1.html"]patents page[/url]. It seems there are two pole-pieces in each coil and they can be rotated. My guess this acts as a mechanical string volume balance. Now I want more than ever to try one of these basses out!

In fact there's 13 pages of patents to check out! Some fascinating pictures and some unexpected features on some instruments - hollow bodies with sound holes exiting at the sides!

I've just tried my VMJ and 4mm seems to be the best fit, the closest imperial key is 5/32 but that has a bit more play in it that the 4mm. 4.5mm is too big to fit.

HTH

Tuesdays selection comes from the very wonderful [url="http://www.bas-extravaganza.nl"]Bas Extravaganza[/url].

Here's the Parelmoer (Mother Of Pearl)


and the Waaier (Fanned)


All created by Bas Wittenberg in Holland. These two are my particular favouites, but there's all sorts of instruments on the site; basses made of corrian, covered in fur, there's even one or two vagually conventional J-bass types...

I made some enquireies about a few of the instruments about a year ago and very nearly bought the Waaier, but procrastinated for too long and someone else got there. Still there's plenty more where that came from...

It depends on the bass as to how much, but it does have an impact on the tone. Later in this series you'll see some basses with movable pickups (not going to show my hand just yet...) Whether than's a good thing or not is personal preference. I've played several basses with angled and P-type pickups where the D and G strings sound weedier than the A and E, and IIRC one of the Fender Signature P-Basses has the pickup with the halves reversed. Personally I find a lot of basses with angled J-type pickups to be uncomfortable to play if you use the pickup to rest your thumb on.

Ta for the link!

Pity they all seem to be sold except the Concord Bass.

I have various contacts in Japan who are musically inclined so hopefully I'll know where to look in order to find these basses...

[quote name='ped' post='58699' date='Sep 11 2007, 01:34 PM']I really like the Stealth bass too - I came close to buying a Stealth Deluxe from Japan a while back.[/quote]


That's a nice looking Stealth! Was that a private sale or from a Japanese music store? Other than the Atlansia site there seems to be very little info or pics available. Aparently one came up on ebay last year and that seems to be about it...

I'll definitely be looking for one next time I'm in Japan.

There are even weirder pickups on some of the other models including ones that look like individual magnets/coils for each string. You can see details in the [url="http://www.atlansia.jp/PARTS%20SHOP.html"]Parts Shop[/url] although the pickups themselves as spares/replacement no longer seem to be sold.

Here's Mondays choice from [url="http://www.atlansia.jp/"]Atlansia[/url].

Designed by N. Hayashi, better known to all those late 70s Aria Pro II fans as H. Noble we have a Galaxy and a Stealth



In many ways these are two of the more convetional designs available, although check out the convoluted "back-to-front" tuner arrangement on the Stealth - that would probably take some getting used to and I'd love to know what the rationale was behind it, but overall a good mix of weird shapes and practical features. I particularly like the recesses around the pickups and above the neck which I suppose offers more area to rest your thumb, if that's your playing style.

The site is rather poorly designed (something a lot of Japanese musical instruments sites suffer from) but for what seems to be a smallish company there's a massive range of models listed. Does anyone here have one? - I've not seen any pictures of Atlansia instruments other than on their site, and no-one in any of the J-pop or J-rock bands I follow uses one.

Hopefully I'll be finding out more when I go to Japan next year, in the mean time it does appear to be possible to buy on line from the Net shop and E Shop (in the left hand frame) The two shown here are about £1300; a single string bass will set you back about £400 and the bonkers 48 quarter tone fret Victoria bass is about £1500.

I've set the dots so the centre point is directly up (ie at 6 o'clock). That seemed to make the most sense after fiddling about with positioning for a while. I think in the end though I'll only be using the volume and balance controls on stage.

Great shape - I imagine the bass version may be a bit neck-divey

I remember the shape being described (in the late 70s when weird shapes were a lot less common) as the bastard ofspring of a Gibson Firebird and a left-handed Rickenbacker Bass.

If you play unlined you really need to be play along with something otherwise you (or at least I do) slowly slide out of tune and all of a sudden you're a quarter-tone out from where you should be. I don't have any problems with the looks of lined fretless basses, but the dots on the fingerboard of the Lightwave are a good compromise between useful markings that keep you in tune and a clean look to the bass. I'm still suffering from parallex problems in the higer registers on the Gus where all I've got is the side markings.

Ta!

The gold isn't quite the same colour in some lighting conditions as the existing Pedulla hardware (which seems darker/greener?) but it's close enough for it not to be a problem for me. I'll be adding my review to the review thread and some sound clips just as soon as I've found my ideal settings.