Max Normal

Copy of an early Yamaha BB perhaps? There is a PJ BB that looks very similar to this. Might be why its familiar looking.

I reckon with about 10 minutes work this should be worth a lot more than this guy expects. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251039789617?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2648 It's good and "Roadworn", so he's put it up for "spares or repair" I suppose he doesn't know that its trendy to artificially batter your guitar at the moment. I quite fancy it, I love old MIJ's and these were supposed to be almost as good as the real thing. What do you think? £100.00 if he sells it as a damaged old bat, or £300.00 if it sells as "roadworn and dripping with mojo"?

Blimey, if you had dissed the Badass on BC a couple of years back, you would have got pooed on from a great height by the BC Mafia! I think they still have a shrine forum to it pinned somewhere....... I asked Bernie Goodfellow to tweak the neck on my last frankenbass. when he saw I had put a Babicz bridge on it. He said, "Oh no not another new bloody bridge design, none of them make any bloody difference!" (To be fair, when I got it back he said he really liked the Babicz after all because it was nice to set up). But that says it all really..... The best pickups i have are on my Lakland Glaub (Fralins), they are grindy, growly, full and cut through. My Wizard Thumpers come a close second, and at only £50.00 are amazing. BTW, +1 on the Willpower pup, I have a Model one in my frankenbass and it sounds amazing. No more Seymour Duncans for me though. I'd buy the Wizards if I was you, you won't regret it.

Turqoise Tokai Jazz with a brass pickguard. I was a 17 yo lead guitarist and had to gig it straight away in a Free/Rory Gallegher type blues rock outfit in the mid '80s. It sounded and played great even if I didn't (btw, have been a bassist ever since, never looked back). Really, really ugly colour scheme. But I'd give every bass I own to have her back.

This guy is in Manchester and ships it all over. some great online tutorials of how to use it too. Not sure if it's cheap, but its made for guitars. http://www.manchesterguitartech.co.uk/

And you did too, I just read your reply. Sorry about that, I went off and bought the thing and didn't check back. For the record, thanks for the advice and I agree with you 100%!

Hi, I posted a few weeks back asking if anyone had experience of Warmoths new "Slim Taper" neck option. Nobody did, but I went ahead anyway and promised to give my opinion to anyone thinking of buying one (Warmoth bass necks seemed to have a bit of a rep for being baseball batty on the talkbass forums). I got this one in standard maple, but with a macassar ebony fretboard. Nut is P-width, finish is satin nitro. Well it is slim, but not unusually so for a high-class instrument, I expect they are comparing it as "slim" with fat vintage Fender-style necks. Anyone used to playing a Lakland or a Warwick lightning fast neck will be familiar with this kind of profile. In fact with the fast satin nitro finish, it feels very like my Lakland Bob Glaub. The finish and workmanship is as perfect as you would expect, and these come with strengthening rods like USA Fenders, but did not feel heavy at all (another stigma of Warmoth bass necks apparently), so hopefully neck-dive won't be an issue. I have to say that although I had to sell my partner into slavery to get one, I'm absolutley chuffed to bits with it. If you are thinking of getting a slim-taper Warmoth, you won't be dissapointed. BTW Machine heads were from Axesrus, and are really nice for £8.00 each (beautiful machining on the gears), great service too. [attachment=103675:028.JPG][attachment=103674:027.JPG][attachment=103672:025.JPG][attachment=103673:026.JPG]

Learning DEFINATELY NOT EVER to work with all the "puffed up w***ers" mentioned in earlier posts. Most of them can't hang on to a decent band anyway, no matter how "f***ing amazing" they ostensibly are. There are just as many truly nice superb musicans out there who are decent to work with, they are the bands that will work out and last long. Seek them out and stay with them, ignore the rest no matter how attractive they may seem. Do not be tempted to bask in anothers glory, be confident and proud in yourself.

I have the money to pay for one ready, but I think things can have an intrinsic value based on workmanship, playability, sound, customer service etc, so not sure i agree. I don't want to waste my money on a baseball bat. It's hard to make that judgement without the opinions of people like you who already own Warmoth necks, as I don't have access to one to try it out, and I have never had to deal with Warmoth. Thanks for your opinion on the profile though, that was one of the most important parts for me. As far as the slim taper profile goes, nobody seems to know about them so I assume it's a fairly new option. I think I'll get it made anyway. I'll stick a brief review of it up on BC once I get it if anyone is interested.

For my latest frankenbass, I want to put a Warmoth P-bass neck onto a Fender body with some Wizard thumper pickups that i have. The neck specs i want are: Maple neck, Macassar ebony fingerboard, unlined fretless, "Slim taper" neck profile. I do have a few worries though: My biggest worry is that I have heard that Warmoth bass necks are a bit thick and "baseball batty". I really like a slim neck, so I wonder if anyone has experience of their "Slim Taper" profile. I have also heard that the steel reinforcing rods in the neck affect the sound (I assume brighten it up) and make the necks quite heavy. Anyone know about this? Also, and I know that this is quite a subjective question, but do you think that the £350.00 odd (including shipping and customs) that this is about to cost me is justified for a Warmoth Fretless neck and the earache I am going to get from my missus? Are they really that good? I'm also wondering if I should approach a luthier over here, but I like the fact that a Warmoth neck holds its value, while a British one-off might not, and I really want the funky macassar fingerboard. Any advice much appreciated! Cheers Mark

[quote name='thepurpleblob' timestamp='1329670207' post='1545602'] You could be overthinking it [/quote] Lol! wondered if it might be a dry subject for some. It's all well researched stuff, but I had always wondered about it. I'm a science geek so I found it interesting.

[size=4]I was reading a forum by a guy who designed the optical pickup and the physics of how it works. One of the questions was whether it would not work if it was placed on a node (part of a string that vibrates at a different frequency to the fundamental), and he replied that it worked anywhere due to the movement of the fundamental and of the harmonics along the string. I’m a bit too hungover to go out and do something useful, so I spent the afternoon researching the science of why our guitars sound the way they do, and why they all seem to sound different, and why wood matters when the pickup is basically just sensing the vibration of the string. This is what I came up with, and I think it raises some interesting questions.[/size] [size=4]Every now and then the same question pops up. We know that different tonewoods and bass guitar construction materials affect tone but some of us (including me until recently) do not know exactly how. Frustratingly, somebody just usually pipes up with a list of the tonal qualities of various tonewoods, and does not actually answer the question.[/size] [size=4]For those that don’t know, the answer is fairly simple if you think about it. Once plucked, the string vibrates in a wave pattern dependent on its length. The frequency of this wave pattern determines the pitch of the note and the fundamental note is released (the “main” note that you expect to hear).[/size] [size=4]This is not necessarily however a “standing wave”. The waves of vibration retain their frequency, but travel along the length of the string. This is illustrated brilliantly here:[/size] [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AWTUN6RD1c&feature=related"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AWTUN6RD1c&feature=related[/url] [size=4]and here:[/size] [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X72on6CSL0"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X72on6CSL0[/url] [size=4]When the string rebounds, the various partials called harmonics and overtones are released. Partials are vibrations that are integer multiples of the fundamental (i.e. higher pitched notes), and these also travel as waves along the string. When you hear the note, you are not just hearing the fundamental, you are also hearing all of the harmonics and overtones layered on top of it and adding to its tonal character (you might notice that some of the string waves being produced by the hairy guy with the acoustic bass are quite asymmetrical, showing the pattern of overtones on the string).[/size] [size=4]Naturally the sting is anchored at each end to the instrument, so when these vibrational waves reach the ends of the strings they continue to travel through the body and neck of the instrument. A vibrating string is a fairly pure and simple system, however a bass guitar is not. The body (including the neck) of a guitar can be thought of a filter for specific frequencies.[/size] [size=4]When the string vibrations return from the body material (in the case of wood, principally via the biopolymer lignin), certain harmonic frequencies will have been lost, while some will have been retained and are transferred back into the string to be collected by the pickup.[/size] [size=4]In its simplest form, this explains why a softer, less lignin-dense wood such as basswood gives a softer mellower tone than a wood with a tight lignin structure like maple, as the higher frequency partials have been absorbed by the wood (the individual fibres in the wood are less well connected can move more freely, and convert the vibration into heat rather than transferring it along between the fibres), and only the lower frequency partials are transferred back into the string. Conversely, more of the original partials are returned to the string in the case of maple, giving the appearance of a “brighter” tone.[/size] [size=4]But lignin itself has a different structure as well as density in different woods. There is not a simple sequential dampening of partials from high to low frequencies as the lignin density within the wood decreases, more that a range of specific partials are “selected” for transmittance back into the harmonic characteristics of the vibrating string, while the rest are absorbed by the body of the instrument and lost. Moreover, it’s not just the lignin density. Seasoned wood also contains cellulose and the lignin: cellulose ratios will vary between different types of wood, or even different cuts of the same wood.[/size] [size=4]Undoubtedly the grain of the wood also has an effect. Rosewood is a fairly dense and hard wood (which is why we can use it for fretboards), but has a far more open grain structure than maple or ebony. The open grain structure of rosewood can be thought of as a series of dampening chambers that filter out certain partials from the specific resonance of the string, again giving the tone a warmer, softer character. Wood sawing angles change the grain structure, and neck joints and joinery between multiple body pieces also act as dampeners of specific frequencies. [/size] [size=4]This is far from the end of the story though. After the body of the instrument has decided which partials it will transmit back to the string, certain remaining partials may cancel each other out as they travel along the string, or combine and create new, amplified partials, and this will all add to the overtone spectrum of each specific instrument.[/size] [size=4]Obviously the method in which the strings are anchored to the body of the guitar also makes a difference, a dense metal bridge and a metal nut transferring more high-frequency partials than softer materials, and perhaps selecting others, Dead skin particles stuck between the windings of your string, the type of winding, and overstretched un-elastic old strings will select for particular partials, all contributing towards the overall tone of the instrument.[/size] [size=4]I’m wondering how easy it would be to measure the relative partial/overtone profile of a really great sounding bass, and try and replicate it by predicting what the partial profile of a new bass would be. Also, it would be interesting to use this to see exactly relatively how much each component (bodywood, fingerboard material, badass bridge etc) contributes towards the tonal characteristics of a bass so we know which component to spend more of our lucre on. Also, is there a consensus partial profile for each instrument (i.e. is there one for “the perfect Jazz bass” or “the perfect Stingray”) that we can aspire to and maybe modify our instruments to achieve?[/size]

Just got my powerbrick from Samuel, no problems and great comms and honesty. Cheers!