Lfalex v1.1

"n+1" is the correct scientific terminology, where n is the number of basses currently owned. 🤣 This is a common assertion among cyclists, also.

There are considerably worse things to spend your disposable income on. In 25 years, I've only had one bass actually break irreparably, and that only cost £80. The greatest maintenance expenses most basses rack up are strings, 9v batteries and a refret one in a blue moon. I had to sell some (and amps and effects, hi fi and record collection) to fund a house move due to a divorce, but managed to keep the really good / irreplaceable one plus two spares. Once finances improve, I'll likely expand the collection again. They all get used, and look quite nice hanging on the wall when not in use. I don't smoke, drive an expensive car, drink much, take drugs or have any other expensive hobbies. I've effectively stopped gigging for the same reason I don't play online video games; I have to work with lots of people/joe public. I don't really want to engage with them outside of the work arena. That I enjoy playing bass is reason enough to own more than one.

I'd have a Tokai Talbo in an instant, but they're the other way around; Alu body and wooden neck.

The difference is that the 4x10 Combo (mk10?) has 4 drivers and a slotted port. I'm unsure how the drivers will function in half the volume. They'll need re-wiring, too. Assuming the overall impedance of the cab to be 8ohm (they usually are) I'd guess that the drivers are 8ohm, wired in series pairs and then in parallel with each other to get back to the 8ohm load. If they are 8ohm drivers, getting 2 x standalone 8ohm cabs from that 4x10 is going to be hard.

Good work. Looks wonderful!

Or "Giant" rats 🤣 I liked my '90 SR5 fretless. It was black (Poplar) bodied with a B/W/B scratchplate and black knobs and a black pickup cover. The scratchplate really didn't show much against that colour combo, and the white ply went nicely with the way the light caught the ridges of the body contours...

Interesting set of compromises between the SRF700 and SRH500f; The former is neck through, has magnetic pickups and a more flexible EQ. I think the key to the SRH500f might well be the fact that it's semi-hollow. It'd be interesting to try them out together.

Almost per Downunderwonder, my H122SMX became a head and a 2x10- a slimmer version of a 2103H with a different horn tweeter and no attenuator. I even managed to save the carpet covering and fold the excess over the new form factor. I also fitted a recessed connector plate for the speaker cable. Used the end result for years, one way or another until divorce/ house downsizing forced me to sell it along with my 1153 and 1048h.

You can have a second master volume for instruments with a mixed pickup set- 1 for magnetic (and the pan pot that goes with it) and one for the piezo. Works perfectly on the Ibanez. You can have all or nothing of either or your preferred blend of both. Only issue might be on-the-fly changes when playing live.

That's just as good. The piezo cables could go through that hole instead, and then into the control cavity via the cable run from the bridge pickup. Failing that, grab a S/H SRH500f as Hellzero suggested or even an Ibanez EDA900/905 (or Afirma!) and get it defretted. The various options cost about £400, £200-£300 and rather a lot respectively! Edit- or a SpectorCore fretless.

That'll help! One more thought; how is the bridge earthed? (I've never dismantled any of my Warwicks to that degree) can the cables from the piezo saddles be run through the hole that carries the earth lead? Presumably that goes from the bridge to the control cavity?

https://shop.warwick.de/en/parts-for-instruments/warwick-spare-parts/bass-bridges-tailpieces/19320/warwick-piezo-saddles-for-2-piece-3d-bridge x4, naturally. You may need to swap the bridge unit out, and maybe get someone to drill a hole (with a Forstner bit?) Between the bridge recess and bridge pick-up rout. Then the wires can run through to the control cavity. Edit- is your Warwick fretted? You'll not get very close to the Ibanez SRH500f tone, as a good chunk of that is "fretlessness"

I did it! Without a clue! 🤣 In all seriousness, it should be straightforward. There's four plastic plugs in the top. Prise them out to expose the bolts that hold the chassis of the amp in the box. Undo & remove these. Check around the back for the cable that connects the amplifier to the speakers. It should be a mono (TR) ¼inch jack. Unplug this, and the amplifier ought to slide free (out the front is best) All you have to do then is fabricate a new sleeve for the amp section and drill the top of this to match the location of the 4 bolt holes in the original top panel. Slot it in and bolt it up. Took me an afternoon.

This has Fishman monorail bridges, which sound great. These are rebated into the body, but could be surface-mounted. Fishman also do an all-in-one unit as used in the Spectorcore, a well-liked bass in these parts. Having recently acquired the Ibanez, I can see the appeal of full-range piezos. They're also good in my NS5CR EUB.

My SMX and 1048H were good. Bear in mind; 1) That the 1048h is an 8ohm cab, and you'll only get about half of the rated power of the SMX into it. 2) The 1048h is properly old school and hefty with it. They are tough, though.

Thanks. Can't see that they'd be different given that the two most likely to be in play at the same time are the Zoom B3 and MS60b.

As per the title, really. Supposing I might want to control the (tap) tempo of two separate pedals or multi fx at the same time, would it be possible to use a mono to 2 mono splitter cable from my Boss FS5U into the 2 fx units? That way, for example, I can preserve the integrity of the delay on both halves of the Chapman Stick without re-combining the signals. Means I can use separate amp models and EQs, too whilst keeping things like Flangers etc. in sync. Has anyone else done this? (Surely they have?!) Thanks in advance Alex.

I could never get the AX7 in my Trace SMX to even vaguely distort, no matter how hard I tried. All it did was soften the sound and made it slightly warmer sounding. The SMX was awesome otherwise, just lacking in power against the QSC PLX1202. The aforementioned SVP Pro, however had a dedicated Overdrive valve/circuit which did exactly what you'd expect. Want more? Overload the gain tube and it'd do a wall of distortion.

Valve pre and Solid State power amp? I had an Ampeg SVP-Pro pre which I used with a QSC PLX1202 power amp. That was quite a good combination, but both together in a 4u case with a rackmount tuner and cables was neither small nor light.

Re: recording, yes, the options are useful. The Stingray 5's implementation of coil switching (plus the phantom coil) made it good enough to use live due to the built-in level matching. Come to think of it, my Warwick Infinty has a coil tap on the twin jazz that doesn't affect the level, and nor does the vintage sc / modern sc / attack coil switch on the Ibanez EDC715. The Status version of events was so skewed that if you ran the bridge pickup in series and the neck in parallel, the blend pot could barely even the two out- Nor could the eq find a way to tame the series pickup's harshness.

Spot on. I didn't realise the differences (detailed above) would be so pronounced on my Status Streamline , which I specced with Series/Parallel on both pickups. There was no way to accurately compensate for the level change, so it made the custom order pointless. The reality of the matter was that my previously owned Stingray 5 fretless had spoiled me; Musicman put a resistor in the signal path for Series and Parallel to bring the level down to match the single coil option. The Ray also had a phantom coil so the single coil mode was noiseless. This could be done in your case with a trim pot/s (inside the cavity) to adjust the hotter signals to match the lowest output option. As you have TWO humbuckers, you could use the two opposing polarity coils in each unit as the S/C to hum-cancel each other... Have a look at a schematic of how the Warwick $$ does it... that's quite instructive.

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll be super-careful when I change the strings. Shame you missed out on the Triple-coiled EDC, it can be a bit of a monster! That pickup was good in its ATK application, too. It's the EDC 700/705 that's escaping me at the moment. I'm watching one (an EDC700) on Ebay, but I'm not sure on the condition. If I can find another EDA, there's a danger that I might de-fret it or have it made into a fretless with a 'board change. I get the feeling they'd make a good fretless. I believe that EDA900/905 "F"s exist, but I don't think I've seen one in the flesh.

Once (and only once!) a band I was in played locally to us. It was my second gig with them. Determined to do better than my previous outing, I ultimately played right out of my shoes, and I think it raised the whole band's game somewhat. The rest of the band knew a lot more people than I did (I don't really do the scene thing), and just about everyone said; "Wow! The new bassist is really good!" Next day, I was sacked. No reason given. At the time, I had 4 basses and a cat.

Definitely this. My 300w head was barely enough into 4ohms (2 cabs) into 8, it was only just enough for practice. When I started using a 600Wrms power amp I had more headroom to play with, despite using the same cabinet/s. Edit- Perhaps I shouldn't mention that the 300w head was a Trace SMX/1153 & 2103H cabs!

For the amount that they cost, I'd want SOLID GOLD polepieces... except that probably wouldn't work.