NickA

Buy another bass. Over the years I've spent £100s on my "project" bass in a vain attempt to get a fantastic bass on the cheap, but it's never been as good as the basses I've bought complete and it's residual value is ziltch. Not that it hasn't been fun. And there are some great second hand bargains, especially if you don't need something fashionable or collectable.

Some weird modern classical music doesn't have bar lines ... difficult to play. Without bar lines I think you're going to get lost; it's kind of a sync pulse that lets you get back in time every few beats. In any kind of band everyone is playing different length notes (unless it's folk music!) so you need that sync to stay together, and if you have a conductor then they need to convey that sync to everyone to keep them in time. Yes, you could all count 1,1,1,1,1,1 but once you are out then you will never get back in again .. It works. As for the five line stave... I feel your pain. But if you are playing a non fretted instrument then, in fact, C# and Dflat (for instance) are different notes (though it is debatable which one is sharper than the other under any given circumstance) so you would need a very wide stave indeed and it would be hard to follow. Of course it was never designed, it just evolved so it isn't perfect - and like the keyboard I'm typing on it could be better. CLEFS meanwhile are a pain as learning different instruments one tends to automate the process of "that dot means that finger on that string", so whilst I can read the treble clef on an alto recorder, the bass recorder (which is written for in the bass clef) proved difficult; although the fingering to get a particular note is the the same as a treble recorder, the dots are in different places for the same note and your subconcious brain sends your fingers to the wrong place. Having taught myself to read the treble clef on the bass guitar, I now have trouble switching back to the bass clef!!!! If you are really musical then I guess the transfer from dot to note to finger position becomes fast enough that you can read any clef on any instrument and even transpose on the fly!!!! My brother (a pro) can do it, I ( a rank amateur) can hardly do it at all. My dad (also a pro) took up the bass viol as a retirement project, but was defeated by the uneven tuning and because the music is written in the ALTO clef. No one said it was easy .. but it will keep senility at bay.

like the word "Cool" that disappeared from about 1974 until 1998 and was only spoken by Austin Powers .... it's back .....it's been back for longer than it was here before. So with Fender: through the 80s everyone wanted a bootique wooden "sideboard" bass (me included) and mainstream music was allowed to have interesting bass parts - hell, even really super dull Paul Young had Pino playing the bass line. Japan was considered POP, Funk was hip and JD's, Stingrays, G&L2000s, and Wals were everywhere and hot on their heels came Warwicks with lovely tropical woods and enormous price tags. Then came electronica, bass synths, and low frequency sine wave generators and out went actual instrument playing. And suddenly someone re-invented guitar bands with buzzy old valve amps, flat wound thuddy strings and FENDER PRECISION basses. A decade (and counting) of dullness ensued. Unless, of course, you like Jazz and Fusion where Foderas and other exotica rule the roost and bass players may still, now and then, get a tune! PS: yes I know, Pino plays a Fender these days - but he never sounds boring! ... rant over

my first bass was ply (soft centre blocks with hard wood facings) it was pretty awful, no sustain and a dull sort of sound. I guess it depends on the quality of the ply, as dense fully hardwood ply is as stiff as any solid wood. Thinking about it, my Wal is ply ... it's just that the centre of the ply is inch thick mahogany!

Well I may have fixed it .. improved it anyway. Took it off the Warwick, ran it back and forth between my fingers, then gave it a good boiling in a pot of soapy water on the stove (which is what I used to do with old rotosounds and elites that had got clogged and dull). I didn't expect it to work, but it's definitely improved it. I guess the heat let the string "relax" again. Now fitted back on the Warwick and sounds fine ... though the dolphin is a bright sounding bass anyway. NB, I gave up cutting my strings to fit the bass as I then couldn't cascade from the Wal to the Jazz Bass; just poke the end down the hole in the tuner, one turn through the slot then round and round the tuner. Shall take care with twisting the string in future though.

I have a great love of "sideboard" instruments. I guess it comes from owning a double bass then being bombarded with Wals and Warwicks in my yoof. All 4 of my basses (5 inc DB) are well worth a good polish :¬). One day though, I will buy a Stingray, and it will be painted, preferably stealth BLACK with a black pick guard (and black gear)! It's all a bit pervy, I know, but each to his own ;¬) :¬)

UNIQUE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-) Re: what the heck do all these controls do? Top Neck end is volume: obviously. But pull it out and it boosts very high frequencies, gives a bit more "pick attack" Top Bridge end is balance between the two pickups: also obvious. The two bottom knobs are individual low pass filters for the two pickups, knob position sets the low pass frequency - so you can have bass only from the neck and full range from the bridge pickup (which is a popular Wal sound). Pull out the filter knobs and it boosts the volume at the low pass frequency - and a bit below - also messing with the phase of the pickup so that some frequencies add and some subtract, all kinds of weirdness there; to be used with caution and discretion. I only discovered recently, from a fellow Wal player, that setting the LP filter to 10 (full range) and pulling it out does boost the high frequencies a bit - should you need more twang.

Plus one to that!!! EUBs are nice and easy to play and a good amplified sound can be had with ease (and Eberhard Weber plays one, so they can't be all bad), I doubt anyone at a Jazz session would be concerned (they're usually so glad to have any bass players in to balance all the saxaphones and guitars) but your local symphony orchestra might be less keen!

Real shame about the paint job ... there may be lovely tropical hardwood beneath the banana milk! Does it have facings or is it "just" solid Mahogany? Anyway, the sound IS THE THING and I'm sure it will sound fantastic. Setup is a simple matter of turning screws and there isn't much to go wrong with the electronics. Truss rod adjusted to give you about a business card thickness of relief. Bridge height to get a nice low action according to taste. Pick up height low enough to stop the strings buzzing the pole pieces but high enough to give some punch. You can tweak the individual pole pieces of the (16!) pickups - to follow the curve of the finger board - but I'm dubious about the worth. Certainly squirt some switch cleaner into the pots; take off all the brown plastic connectors that join the pcbs together and give them a squirt too before reconnecing. Have a twiddle with the little blue "pre-set" pots that you can only get at with the cover removed - one changes the "pick attack" setting and the other sets the overall volume - but moving back and forth will clean them up. And fit a new battery. Oh ... some (particularly US based) Wal players reckon the electrolytic capacitors can start to leak and that not only spoils the sound it can damage the circuit boards; so have a look at the little black cylinderical capacitors and see if they are either bulging or leading sticky stuff .... if so, get the circuit boards off to Electric Wood ASAP. .. and enjoy! :¬) Welcome to planet Wal.

Yup, I think MOSCOWBASS has a good point there. I'm a bit slap handed winding on new strings and may have put a twist in. No excuse on the Wal as there is no threading required, the ball end just drops into a slot in the bridge. It's never happened before, but have buy a new one I guess. PS HUGEHANDS, I've had that on 'cello strings, especially gut cored ones, the whole thing goes floppy and unravels! A major pain mid gig :¬(

I am quite suddenly a huge convert to EB Cobalt Flats. Silky smooth, lively sound (for a flat) and no coloured ball ends. They do have dark purple silks, but I guess you could remove them if it really bothered you. Frankly, it is the sound that counts ;¬) and these do sound good.

I bought a nice set of D'Addario NYXL strings for one of my basses (the Wal) a few months back; they are/were quite good. Not super lively, but a nice tone and seem well made. BUT, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the E-string was sounding really DEAD, all the twang had gone, the sustain wasn't there and it sounded kind of "Thuddy". Not a sound you want from a Wal. After worrying about the bass, tweaking the pickup heights, checking the relief and action ... I decided to swap it for one of the (near) identical strings I had on another bass. Problem solved. Now that same string fitted to the Warwick sounds a bit thuddy; so definitely the string not the bass. What would kill a string? I mean I've had round wounds (notably rotosounds) go slowly less zingggy over a period of months, but this one changed over night. Expensive strings too. Anyone else experienced this ... particularly with D'Addario NYXLs? If it's a one off then I might replace it, if a known issue then not.

PS: What I love about basschat ... never heard Michael Manring or Steve Lawson before; now lying in bed with my headphones on!! Thanks for the recommendation. Quite totally different sounds achieving a similar kind of music! Don't think even COBALT flats will get us Manring's tone!

I've two fretless basses, that I've always used round wound strings on. Both are over 20yrs old, both have round wound score marks on them but neither has needed the fingerboard more than lightly resanded. So long as you don't use "side to side" vibrato or note bends (no need on a fretless) it's not a huge issue. The Wal (30 years old) actually has slight furrows under the strings .. which I read somewhere improve the sound a bit, so have never sanded out (plus Wal fingerboards are quite thin and very expensive to replace!). If your fingerboard is NOT ebony (or this semi synthetic ebonum stuff) then probably use flats, get the board epoxied or put up with re-planing / sanding now and then. Fingerboard wear aside I've always reckoned you can get a wider range of tones from rounds than flats, giving more scope for shaping a particular sound - and in particular lots of mid tones that accentuate the way the tonal content changes through the note (aka Mwwaaahhh) HOWEVER, only today, I acquired a set of EB Cobalt Flats and put them on my franken-bass (a self designed jazz bass) and am knocked away by the lovely rich tone .. and they feel nice under the fingers too; spookily silent shifting! They are not (as the blurb says) flats that sound like rounds; more a mid-way between the two. Such a long long way from the tonally indistinct and thuddy Rotosound "Jazz Bass 99s" I learned on and which put me off flats forever. It's made such an improvement to the franken bass (which previously had rotosould "swing 66" rounds on) I'm wondering if I should try them on the Wal (currently running D'Addario NYXT rounds and with more punch and fretless Mwahh than anyone needs). Mind, the new strings OUGHT to be good at the price!! £40 from Bass Direct.

I took my bass all the way to bass-bags (a whole 4 miles away!) to see what bag fitted my odd shaped bass (it's 4/4 but not very deep and I'd expected to need a made to measure). The Westbury 4/4 is a slightly baggy but basically perfect fit; they're very good bags, quite roomy, lots of handles and I don't really see the point in spending more. Of the four bass players in my orchestra, three of us have the same bag (tho the oldest of us has the one with wheels as he was finding carrying hard work). https://www.bassbags.co.uk/product/westbury-double-bass-bag-11mm-padding/ The man at bass bags reckoned the extra padding in the 22mm version made no real difference except it doesn't fold as flat. My previous bag didn't fold well and got stored in the garage ... where the mice ate great chunks out of the 20mm padding!

Ha! The standard passive precision that people rave about and which I normally find rather dull ... in this case was spot on.

Shame the pickups are switched rather than blendable ... but having a bridge pickup will surely help get that fretless growl. Meanwhile a bit of experimentation shows that mid lift helps my fretless jazz bass a-like, especially if using the neck pickup. But the Wal has so much mid range anyway, that any boost is over-kill. Mick Kahn and Percy Jones are two of my favorite bass players btw .. and reasons why I own a Wal! For fretless, IMHO, active usually beats passive as you're trying to squeeze out all the tone you can; but there are still notable exceptions (ie Jaco!)

This is nice. Do PJB make combos you can actually gig with? That are still tiny? Not really. The Pjb compact suitcase is a great combo, but quite heavy. I've a flightcase that is much lighter, and a bit smaller, but it isn't loud and still won't quite hide behind the sofa. It is giggable for quiet / acoustic stuff but needs a pb300 beneath it to he heard over loud drummers and guitarists. A double 4 or bass cub plugged into a PB 300 is a good modular solution .. but I guess so is a gk mb200 combined with a small and a large cab To the OP I'd say Roland micro cube.

So that was you on the last leg the other week? Bass sounded great; I've been trying to find that tone ever since :-). Think my basses may be too complicated !

The wal has tone controls like a passive fender, ie low pass with an adjustable cut frequency. But it has one per pickup and the option of boosting the volume at (and just below) the cut frequency. Active yes, but does what a passive does with extras. I'm usually turning the mids DOWN on mine, so the concept of boosting the mids to get a more "fretlessly" sound is a bit foreign to me. With the response curve shown above (similar to what my Warwick has) you can still boost the mids (quite close to 800Hz in fact) by cutting the bass and treble then turning up the volume. Never quite saw the point of a mid boost / cut unless it's a "parametric" one with an adjustable centre frequency. Plus there are always the amp EQ controls .. so unless you change tone a lot whilst playing (or can adjust the pickup frequency responses individually .. as per modern Wals and some Alembics) tone controls actually on the bass are probably not that important. Of course, some of the best fretless playing ever was on a passive fender jazz (plus two expensive amps and a bit of chorus).

I thought double basses and cellos were arched to stop the tension of the strings driving the bridge clean through the table. If you built a flat tabled instrument with a bridge, bass-bar and sound post wouldn't it just collapse, rather than merely be too bassy? My double bass and cello are much louder than my acoustic bass even when played pizz ... but run far higher tension strings and have much bigger surface areas too, and that I reckon is the thing. But I'm an engineer not an instrument maker, so probably wrong. Off topic anyway ... it's a great looking instrument and even if it doesn't sound quite as intended it must be a lovely thing to own.

... and the 2nd hand ones don't cost much less (http://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Wal_MKI_Fretless_1983.html). I guess they keep their value tho, so you can always sell to fund yr retirement; however, I reckon there's a bubble going on right now, possibly fuelled by collectors from the US who want gold plated hardware and fancy colour finishes on the back of the falling pound; so you could end up in negative equity ... best wait for the crash, and buy only then! :¬) Back in 1998, mine cost £650 and a Yamaha BB2000 in px (wish I'd kept the Yamaha and paid the balance) Anyway Wals are active and you want a passive .. could do worse than that Fender MIM jazz TBH.

" Is there something I've missed? " What you need my friend.... is a Mk1 4-string wal custom fretless :¬)

POINT!! I'm still learning to use all four strings all the way up the neck instead of ploughing up and down the G-string (it's easier on the double bass than oh the electric because your thumb hits the heel of the neck just as your first finger hits D on the G string; hence a nice easy marker for "I'm an octave up on the string below"... the neck on my dolphin seems to go on for ever without any way of knowing where your are) ... so I may not be ready for an extra one. But yes. Meahwhile listeing to that Dave Grossman on youtoob ... he's not exactly Rachael Podger, but it's impressive none the less.

I saw somewhere that a lot of show music is written on the assumption of 5-strings, so if yr a session bassist, you just have to play 5. I love the IDEA of a 5-string for access to EXTRA deep notes - and access to lots of 'cello / baroque music that goes down to C or D, and a low Eflat might be useful for jazz. But when I hatched a plan to buy a 5 string Thumb NT or Dolphin and started a search ... I went and saw/bought my 4-string dolphin, so still stuck with 3x 4-stringers (and a 4-string double bass and a 4-string acoustic) ... still Gassing about a wal mk2 5 or a broadneck dolphin ... or a 5-string musicman .. but just can't quite make the switch; and after playing 4-strings for nearly 50 years (!) that extra one is CONFUSING. Old dogs new tricks etc. PS: yes indeed, Bach flute partitas on an electric bass, sounds great!