NickA

It is very silly, (especially as I can play it on a cello) but a challenge and an education as you say; and some things writ for 'cello sound much better on a bass .. Rachmaninov's Vocalise for one. So, had a go at the Suite No1 in G prelude yesterday (the transposed to C version) . not a hope on the double bass, but just about do-able on a fretted bass guitar using all 4 fingers. Think Arthritis will set in long before I can play it on my db. You keep trying tho!

Thanks for the offer. Very busy at the moment (work intruding on bass playing hobby) but will certainly bare in mind (I'm in Derby btw).

"you simply install a new bridge with appropriate proportions." indeed, new bridge fitted to bass by top notch luthier = £200 + and two round trips to Stone. 30 minutes in the garage with a fretsaw = FREE! But I guess if you get too close to the cut-outs it isn't good (I didn't) on the other hand what are those cutouts for anyway? Strikes me that a solid bit of wood (or better a plain carbon fibre arch) would do a fine job! But I'm an engineer not a luthier. (feel a retirement project coming on).

yeah DON'T SMOKE !!!! Whilst an ash body is sometimes nice, a body burned to ash is not!

My bass if full size 4/4 (it was cheaper than a 3/4!) tuning THAT in fifths is NOT an option. Fourths in half position is uncomfortable. What is this Bach 'cello concerto .. do you mean the first 'cello suite? That's not too hard on a 'cello, but goes down to a C (extension of 5-string time). I have a transcription for Bass in C but can't hack any of it apart from the Menuet movements. Way beyond grad 8 methinks. Good luck with that!

you've played with Birelli Lagrene!!!!? I'm stunned. He's one of my all time favourite guitarists and a pretty mean electric bass player too!. Wow. May swallow my pride and try some Fender rumbles (you can even buy them at my local guitar shop).

I have some d'addario "hybrid" strings on my double bass which are OK for pizz (plenty of sustain) and OK for bowing. My bass teacher says they are the worst of both worlds! He uses arco strings and has a lovely orchestral tone, but frankly his pizz sounds awful (dead). I would say don't go too far down the "strings for bowing" road as you will lose all your sustain! I also have a set of Tomastic Spirocore which are what a lot lof Jazz players use, they have great sustain but are very high tension. They can be bowed just fiine, it just takes a little more time for them to speak and there is more pressure required to hold the strings down on the finger board (so they need a lower action). I stopped using them as I was having trouble playing fast passages and they made my fingers hurt. A bloke at Thwaites Bass shoppe recommended me to go back to spirocores, get an adjustable bridge and raise the action a bit for bowing .... (beats me) What I'm trying to say is that you can bow pizz strings but pizz on pure arco strings sounds crap. Try some stickier rosin (Nyman or Hidersine "winter") then work on drawing the sound out the strings; you need a bit more pressure to get the sound started and then ease off to keep it flowing. Press too hard and the strings stick to the bow, too light and you get weird harmonics instead of the full note and yes the E-string is the hardest one! Practice practice practice and no easy short cuts I'm afraid!

I just BOUGHT a bass from Stance (aka Alex / Carlos). A very nice Warwick Dolphin, bought on a whim as I'd always wanted one. Stance was really helpful, I asked a whole bunch of questions about the bass and all were answered quickly and in detail. A couple of worrying days when the money had gone across and the bass didn't get shipped .. but he's a busy guy and once suitable packing had been found (he does do good thorough packing for sure!) it was with me in 4-5 working days (dispatched Thursday with me on Wednesday lunchtime). Buy with confidence.

You are quite right Mr Spangles! Lugged my Trace out last night (which is totally reliable) but found I'd brought a dodgy extension lead (crackle, crackle, silence, crackle, thud). Hey ho. That 2nd hand AI Clarus is tempting; ugly tho it is, it's probably better and also a little cheaper than a new MB-500 or PJB d400.

On my full sized double bass with my little hands ... not a hope below 4th position, beyond which thumb, 1, 2, 3 works better anyway. Pivots make up for the missing finger on occasion tho. I learned the 'cello as a child: always all 4 fingers with all kinds of back and forth extensions - and translated that to bass guitar long before learning the db. Now play three different instruments with three totally different sets of fingerings! Tempted to re-tune the guitars in fifths, but (apart from making my hands hurt) it just feels wrong somehow (fourths, fifths and octaves dont flow so easily from first finger). My double bass teacher claims to use strict 3 finger technique on double and guitar ... but he's a bit of a simandl man.

EA .. never heard of them 'till now. But ouch, £750 just for the amp, then another £400 - £600 for a cab. Silly to balk at it really as we spend £1000s on basses (especially double ones) and I just spent £800 on a bow. I do have the feeling that basses keep their value better than amps tho. Anyone tried a PJB d400 with a double bass? Looks nice and solid and simple (though also not exactly cheap).

cause guitarists etc just want a deep thud thud thud sound underneath their lovely imaginative solo work. It's an ego thing I reckon. I get "can you make it sound more fretted?" (luckily my Wal has a switch for that). There is a kind of fix for a J-bass which is to put in a switch that puts the pickups in series (they add rather than cancelling any harmonics) I put one on my Frankenbass. Makes it sound louder, fatter and less "interesting". A P switch in fact - then you sneak the pickups back to parallel when no-one's watching ;¬)

We're certainly all different and she certainly grabs different people different ways! The Dreaming and Aerial for me. Fantastic. .. 50 words for snow leaves me cold, never got hounds of love either. Only took her seriously after a mate sent me a tape of "all the love" because "it has Eberhardt Weber on it" .. it's Del Palmer or course! EW is on Houdini (on my stereo right now)

Like Jaywalker says, you shouldn't really be plucking where you are bowing so rosin residue should not be an issue. Bowing only between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge. Plucking only above the end of the fingerboard .. the higher you go the softer the tone. Of course I'm all Jazz and Classical and maybe for a really loud rockabilly twang you need to pluck lower .. though I've not seen it done. I clean my strings and fingerboard now and then using that citrus solvent stuff you get for bicycles and an old facecloth .. white spirit works well too. Just don't spill it on the varnish ;¬)

The trace combos are indeed VERY middy; I think they are trying to reproduce everything rather than simply sounding "nice"; worth dialing in a bit of a smiley to get back to a flat response and cut the "clatter". I find pre-shape 2 useless and pre-shape 1 only useful if you want to make people laugh by doing an OTT slap impression; that "Classic Trace Sound". Never use them. I have two bits of cardboard, one labelled WAL and the other DB, cut to the shapes of two different smileys. Insert appropriate bit of card below 12 band eq and push gently up. Otherwise you can spend your whole life pushing the little sliders up and down and up and down trying to find that perfect sound that was so good yesterday .. and getting no practice done. Of course you can really go to town and use a smiley AND a pre-shape, plus lots of compression and a bit of bass tilt! There is a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNQclaAmyX8 in which John Pattitucci explains how to set up the EQ with a Double Bass pickup - trying to get as flat a frequency response as possible (double bass obsession with getting " a double bass only louder " out of the speaker). OK it's a double bass and it's not a trace amp, but he still ends up with a smiley!

plus One for the Big Head. Lovely build quality, great sound. What's more, you can mix in an "aux" source to play along with, you can use it as a pre-amp for a Power Amp (or your stereo) and it's ALSO a USB sound card that lets you record to and play back from a PC. Admitted, I haven't tried the others.

The action on my DB became too high (after major repair work which ended up raising the belly!). I fussed about this for years and asked the luthier at Tim Toft what could be done. She wanted to alter the neck angle, bringing it up to the strings and lower the nut a little (few £100s) and told me that reducing the bridge height wasn't a great idea as it would leave too little wood at the top of the bridge (??? no I don't understand). Anyway, at risk of needing a whole new bridge, I very carefully fret-sawed 0.5cm off the top edge of the bridge and re-filed the grooves for the strings. Now it sounds great to me and the lowered action means I can actually play those Grade 8 classical pieces I'd struggled with for years (the discomfort of thumb position greatly eased). Can anyone explain that thing about the amount of wood at the bridge top? Strikes me that the shape of the bridge is more tradition than science - but no-one seems interested in changing it.

Not enough gentle force to get the string moving. Getting a big heavy string to start vibrating back and forth from an excitation force at one end of it is hard to do. The bow excites the harmonics of the string rather than the fundamental (ie the actual note you want), ie it vibrates with one or more spots not moving at all ("nodes"); exactly as if you are playing a deliberate harmonic by lightly placing a finger on a "node" (eg put your finger lightly on D on the G-string and bow gently - you will get D but an octave up from what you'd get if you push your finger right down on the finger board). It happens by accident if you are using high tension strings (or hybrids - as I do) and bowing too near the bridge and/or with insufficient pressure or rosin. To do it on purpose use gentle pressure near the bridge. It's something bass players normally try to avoid! It's an interesting sound, but not sure it's repeatable enough to be used in music; who knows what note will come out! Learn some deliberate harmonics instead :¬)

for the money (£36 on e-bay!) it sounds like the J Tone won't be beat. Further up the scale, I used a Shadow one for years it was always rather thumpy and then buzzed in the bridge when playing without an amp. I'd pretty much decided to buy a realist "under the bridge" pickup but the dealer showed me the realist sound clip which clamps onto the bridge like a litte G-Clamp: 1. It's expensive 2. It takes a fair bit of fiddling to get setup correctly (best position and clamp force) 3. On my Trace 1215 amp (not really suited to double bass) you have to knock out a lot of mid frequencies to get a nice tone 4. Through a GK MB110 amp it sounds "like a double bass only louder", lots of nice woody tones and none of that piezo clunk. BASSically, very good indeed. You could probably better it with a microphone .. and all the fuss that entails. And it did once drop off the bridge mid tune ... but that was mostly my own fault.

[quote name='AdamWoodBass' timestamp='1478180065' post='3167323'] Mine is a Legend Jazz copy in 2 tone sunburst. After I discovered Jaco ....... [/quote] Ha! My original ailment exactly. Bought Joni Mitchel's Hejira on spec and was blown away by the bass playing .. just as a friend bought Heavy Weather. It was too much. Went out and got a sunburst jazz bass whilst my mate got a Wurlitzer electric piano ... we WERE Jaco and Zawinul (for about 10 minutes, till we actually tried to play birdland)

Still have PARTS of my first bass. Bought from Carlsbro in Nottingham in 1980: A Grant Jazz Bass copy with a softwood body with a sunburst finish and crappy single magnet pickups. First to go were the frets, then the sunburst finish, then the pickups (replaced with pretty good EPS ones), then the rosewood fingerboard - with plastic inlays - (replaced with plain ebony by Andy's Guitar Worshop). Then I filled it full of electronics which eventually overflowed into an off-board (belt clip) box; then moved the pickups around to sharpen the sound up. At which point it needed a new body so the softwood one went on the fire and a new Padauk one was commissioned from Northworthy to fit the refurbished neck. BUT I damaged the neck fitting it to the new body and Northworthy had to make me a new neck to fit the new body (stupid - I could have had a complete new through neck bass by this point). New electronics that finally fitted inside the bass again. Then I bought a Wal and the franken bass spent 10 years languishing in a back bedroom before I pulled it out, ripped out the electronics and bought it a new pair of Delano humbucking pickups. Being impatient I just wired up the pickups direct to see how they sounded - GREAT. So I now have a passive bass again with standard Jazz Bass wiring plus a series parallel switch (and several spare knobs and switches). Of the original Grant Jazz Bass the Frankenbass still has the original machine heads and the plate that holds the neck on - which amusingly says "made in Japan" where it should say "made in Derbyshire". The plan was to make something on a budget that was a bit like a Warwick (the hard wood body), a bit like a Wal (the electronics) and a bit like a Jazz Bass (the pickups) ... what I have is something that is a bit like all those things but not quite as good as any of them!

Thanks Phil, that's really helpful .. and glad to know it wasn't just me or my bass that rendered the Aer a bit dull. I did find the colour and boost buttons improved things, but frankly, endless knob twiddling to get the perfect time is one reason my trace Elliott is facing replacement. Need to find an AI showroom!