NickA

Bridge. Do it. I was on the verge of spending £10k on a replacement bass when I spent £500 on new strings and a bridge refitting ( add adjusters and reshape feet). New bass. No way I'd sell it now. Always worth getting the full potential out of the instrument you have.

That will do. Bass bags don't sell any total rubbish. It is always easier to play with a better bow though and there's a world of difference between my £300 one and my £1000 one. Either get over to Derby and try a few at bass bags or get them to send you three or four up to £150 or so. Hold and play with them without looking at the prices... might be the cheapest that you like best. NB the composite bows at the bottom end of the market are not great, best stick with wood.

The route from bridge to nut contains a lot more neck than body...stands to reason that it makes more difference. The neck joint is also important as it's potentially lossy (pedants may also claim the impedance mismatch from neck wood to body wood will change the acoustic qualities).

I had a £450 pallisander wood alto from the early music shop. Sounded lovely but it was never quite in tune and was really hard to get the bottom note out of. Sold intending to get a Rosewood Moek Rottenburgh. Never did. Still have the placky yammy. I'm told the zen-on bressan plastics are very good too.

The Aulos ones are a bit warmer sounding but seem to need a lot of puff. The Yamaha's have a nice narrow air way so use less breath, more like decent wooden recorders ( you have to spend £400 or more to better the yammy imo) though they do clog with spit more than the Aulos. I have one of each knocking about (alto/treble not tenor mind). Go keyed I'd say .. just easier to cover the hole properly.

They dropped that a long time ago. You might have to go back to the pro bass to find a carbon layer. The resonant peak on a Wal is a fixed amount of extra Q from the pull switch. As the acg has an infinitely variable Q, it should be possible to exactly match the Wal. Still, I hardly ever use the pull switches on my Wals ( except when messing about) and can still get that "chorus like" effect. I think that without the pull switch out, the filter is just a regular 2 pole LP fillter. So I guess it's the phase difference between the two pickups that makes that sound. Bear in mind that a lot of those classic 80s Wal sounds were played through a chorus or phaser, so not all the bass.

Worry not, I'm enjoying it too. But my personal solution only cost £850 which was a lot less than I was heading towards in experimentation. Different today.

Until you fret a note! Don't know if the Wal pre is flat. There is nothing in there to boost mids especially, but a bit of input capacitance can interact with pickup inductance to make a big difference to frequency response ( a mid / high bulge followed by a steep higher frequency roll off) and the Wal pre does have a bank of RC before the buffer/coil summation op amp. Net effect is a bass with lots of mids, but short of dismantling one of my basses and slapping an LCR meter on it, don't really know why. My solution to this whole conundrum was ...just buy a Wal!

Outdoors? Unless you put your amp facing right onto the bass, you'd need to play silly loud to get feedback.

..which even on my tinny speakered android tablet tells me that the Wal sounds best. Shall listen again through "the big hifi". Though really that's not a sound I'd try to get out of a Wal ... they being, as you say, quite dark by nature. Beats me why flea would choose one to get a brash twangy noise .. just use the Modulus or a Stingray?

Two basses worth >£5k and one around £2k. Why buy cheap basses when I'm fortunate / got lucky enough to own some posh ones. On the other hand, there are things even a Mk2 Wal will not do ..... an expensive bass sounds like an expensive bass and sometimes a cheap one is what you need .. I guess. Should never have sold the BB2000 that cost me £200, probably the funkiest thing I ever played.

If it's not causing the strings to buzz, just leave it. A little wear improves the sound of a fretless imo. My best fretless did start to buzz (30 years of round wounds) so it went to the original makers for a "shooting"; when it gets that bad it would be hard to fix yourself. The Ebony is now rather thin but if it lasts another 30 years it will see me out.

Neil and I can argue wood Vs carbon till the cows come home! See previous threads 😂 I think he's probably right if you spend enough, but in my budget (£1000 for the bass bow, £1500 for the cello bow) I couldn't find a wood bow I liked as much as the arcus ones. Plus they feel nice, look amazing and are largely indestructible. The arcus bows are as hand made as wooden bows, they lay up the carbon tubes on a former and then grade the resulting sticks from 4 to 9 before fitting them out with hand made frogs and metalwork. I asked the owner, Mr Muesing, what happened to 1 to 3 and the 10 and he said all their sticks are now good enough to be at least grade 4 but they haven't made a 10 yet! An S9 violin bow will cost you £7000, and how THAT compares to bowspeed's finest I really couldn't say. I do note though, that.. it didn't cost them more to make an S9 ( gold trimmings aside ) than an S4 ... you're paying for rarity... so there's his mark up!

The matter now closed by purchase of a nice coda bow. Still.... Imo, the problem with Thwaites, Turner's etc is they don't stock carbon bows, so you can't easily compare them. Reason being, I think, arcus and codabow publish the actual price of actual bows and numerous outlets can sell the exact same article; so the dealers lose the chance of the massive mark ups they can make on "antique" wooden bows. If you can afford a better bow than the really good carbon ones, probably best going to an actual bow maker and buying new, direct from the maker. That or spend a day at bow speed, trying everything and bargaining like mad.

If you coul tap these pickups, do they still humbuck? I think the twin jazz bridge pickup on my Warwick must be two humbuckers in series beacuse it's still silent when tapped... But some won't be ( hence I think, the limited options on an HH Stingray ...it will never allow a single pickup single coiled )

Nice. Carbon bows are amazing value at this price point I think. Waterproof and almost unbreakable too. Love my Arcus S3 but inevitably wondering if an S4 would be nicer still 🙂 Adict.

1&2 what a shame. Sorry if I gave you a bum steer there. They were great with my cello bow. But whilst in their shop I did notice their double bass stock wasn't exactly top class. 3 What did you go for? Crack cocaine indeed. Bowspeed's stock goes to £7500!!

It's just normal. Shows you're playing in tune anyway 🙂. Bit of left hand damping will fix it. Had helucore hybrids for years, now switched to Eva pirazzi. Much the same vibration wise.

Giblins Zon Legacy had lines but there are photos of him playing unlined too. What did he use on babooska? Unlined Wal I think. I don't think Nigel Kennedy has lines on his violin either, and his intonation is not so bad ;-). Personally I'm not bothered either way. Being a cellist before a bassist, had music to read and no way to see my fingers. Then in the 80s, when I first got a bass guitar, fretless basses were rare; had to buy fretted and rip the frets (a la Jaco!) and fill the holes ( with plastic wood!), but they always buzzed and wore un-evenly. I gave up and had a new ebony board fitted to my jazz; fret lines cost extra so I did without - after all, the cello had none. When an unlined Wal came up in my local guitar shop the lack of lines was no obstacle. Percy Jones, Pino, Michael Manring, Mick Kahn... some of my favourite bassists playing unlined (yes Mick's tuning was dodgy to say the least .. but that was part of his sound). Each to his own. 🙂 You likely have a better memory than me and don't need to look at a chord chart or sheet music. Rarely get a chance to look at my left hand. And the unlined Wal does look nice hanging on the wall.

Doesn't cost much to get an unlined board fitted to a standard neck... you get to choose the wood (!or wood substitute) too.

Well you can . Ryan Martinie does it too and you can find Jonas Helborg and Michael Manring using slap techniques on a fretless .. but they never get the twang of Mark King, Stan Clarke, Marcus Miller or Ryan on his fretted thumb basses. I spent much time and money trying to configure a slappable fretless .. ( bright strings, slap plates, brass plate under the bridge, active electronics) but now admit that frets work better! Anyway slapping is so out of fashion it's almost illegal, I don't dare in public, So not really an issue. Makes sense now. 😁

That fretless is rather nice too 🙂 Natural stingrays = my favourite kind.

Bass bags is very close to me. I bought my Arcus bass bow from them ... had it on trial for a week then bought it. They don't have a huge range and had to send out for the bow they recommended. Caswells have a huge stock and will post you 4 to try out. Choose a price range or a bow you fancy and they'll send several of similar cost. I got a cello bow from them. Beware, if you try a more expensive one you'll probably buy it! I went £400 over budget by "just trying the next one up, for comparison". Not tried bowspeed. https://www.thestringzone.co.uk/categories/double-bass-bows do the same as caswells, but the range looks a bit thin, I didn't try them as they didn't stock the bow I wanted to try.