alittlebitrobot

...well.... the tuners look decent..

I'm far from an expert on this.. very far. But I've seen videos and read advice about truss adjustment that basically boils down to this; the truss rod isn't there to do any heavy lifting, it just holds the neck in a particular position. So, the advice is to loosen the truss rod, bend the neck yourself to the required relief (trying to allow for subsequent string tension) and then tighten up the rod again to hold the neck in that relief. I have to say, I saw this more in discussions by luthiers/techs fixing quite badly bowed necks.

Interesting idea all right, but it looks incredibly awkward to play and, more importantly, it sounds awful.

Thanks for taking a look/listen I just had the actual songs on mixed into my headphones but I had the volume too low so I was mostly drowning it out... but I just ploughed on anyway. Thanks for the tip, Bilbo. I think I just need to play slow for a while. It's all too tense and in a hurry. Need to caaaalm down. I also need to find a way of accidentally recording myself so I don't get all self-conscious and tense up.

Hi, I just threw up (I use the phrase advisedly) this video on youtube. For two reasons really. First, on the off-chance that somebody gets some enjoyment out of it but second, and more importantly, I [b]always[/b] play worse when I'm recording. I'm not in a band and I don't want to join one so this isn't really a [i]big [/i]deal, but I do want to record my own stuff and I don't want to be constantly punching in and out to correct errors the whole time. I want to be able to do one good take from beginning to end so I thought doing this might help to make me relax a bit. And it's not just that listening to the recording means I'm picking up mistakes I didn't realise at the time. Just knowing I'm recording myself makes me fluff notes and, on the fretless, my intonation goes wonky in a way that I can detect even while I'm playing. Anyway, with all that in mind.. [media]http://youtu.be/gf-eF46kmQE[/media]

I'm going to add to the chorus of 'Embrace it. It's a good thing. Better to use it than to wrap it in cotton wool and lock it away.' but some day, soon, my currently pristine new bass will get a dent or a scratch and I'll be so angry at my own clumsiness... for about...oh, a minute or so. That moment in that famous, tragic fairy tale that Billy Apple told earlier is so annoying because it's just a silly moment of clumsiness and, looking back, it seems so avoidable. It doesn't matter, though. Some day, maybe ten years or so from now, I want to get a custom-made bass but I'm worried that, if I do, I'll be insanely protective and careful with it in a way that I'm really not with my current basses. I wonder if anybody here has experienced this?

[quote name='Ghost_Bass' timestamp='1383923745' post='2270894'] You got those wirings wrong. If you can post some pics of both the Peavey's wires and the EQ you got from your V490 we can try to help you hook it up the right way. Cheers [/quote] Thanks! It looks like a mess in photos so I made a diagram, as unambiguous as I could, for both basses. The Peavey is a passive 6 string with soapbars. The V940 is (was) an active 4 string with PJ pickups. I'm not sure if you'll actually be able to tell from this what I should do. If you can, that'd be AMAZING. If not, no big deal. I'm pretty happy with the sound of all my basses now, I just wanted to learn a little bit more about modification and how tone circuits work. Cheers.

It made a sound but it was a weird sound. It was very quiet but also... hard to describe. It was what you might get if you just pressed a microphone against the body and played unplugged, rather than the pickups doing their thing. It was hard to compare the two basses. The Peavey has a volume and tone for each pickup. The V940 had both pickups wired to the 'blend' knob. The V940 pickups had two wires each, a ground and output. The Peavey had 5(!). A ground wire, a thin black one, a thin red one and then a thin green and thin white wire that were soldered to each other and then taped back out of the way. I didn't understand that at all, but that left me with three wires in play; the ground, the black and the red. I treated the ground and thin black as two grounds (because they're both black) and the red as signal. That's when I plugged it in and it made the sound I described earlier. So, I just panicked and ran away. Then I returned and resoldered the old Peavey eq into place.

Having said that, I then took the old active EQ and put it into my old Peavey 6 string. That did NOT work. So it's back it's old Peavey self. Still, it was an educational failure.

It was [b]less than a week[/b] between contacting John for a quote and having the new circuit in my bass. John is great to deal with, he helped me with deciding on what components to use and had the thing made almost as soon as I paid him. It all went super smooth from the start. I may be contacting him again before the year's out. HIGHLY recommended.

Ok, so my once-active V940fl is now passive, thanks to KiOgon. ..and thanks to the previous posters in this thread for pointing me that way. It's taught me a bit about electronics too. The new passive eq hasn't fundamentally altered the sound. The guitar still has the tone I really liked, but it's even a bit nicer. Well happy.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1383579809' post='2266119'] Of course they were. At that time in bass history, mojo was not yet a scarce resource so they tended to use much more of it in general production. These days, mojo is so rare that it only get used in Custom Shop instruments. [/quote] That Korean mojo is actually passable if you play in a fairly crap band. I'd never use it on a recording but it'll get you by on a pub gig.

Basses with more than 4 strings. (Currently own two 6-strings)

Thanks, Ghostie. In that case, they're definitely passive. update: currently in talks with KiOgon. Thanks for the tip, LiamPodmore.

Ok, nice one. That all sounds pretty sensible, then. Thanks very much for your replies!

Hi, I've got a [url="http://www.dv247.com/assets/products/51326_l.jpg"]V940FL[/url]. It's active but I never boost the tone. I like active on fretted basses but not fretless.The tone knobs have a centre detente and that's exactly where I keep them, which raises some questions. Q1: Are the pickups themselves active? If you look at the attached image, the pickups (thick white and thick purple) come to the balance pot (bottom left) first and then a couple of smaller wires go to the preamp so I assume the pickups will work without a battery. Is that right? [attachment=147227:940wiring.jpg] Q2: With so many wires in such a small space, it's difficult to know exactly what each wire is doing. I know there's no standardised wiring diagram really but, in theory, how does one "de-active" an active Eq? What I mean is, what's the least amount I can do to disengage the battery but still have the bass work? I'm just worried that if I desolder every wire associated with the preamp, it'd be a pain to reinstall if I need to one day. Having said that, I really like this bass but they don't sell for much second hand so I'm not too worried if this is effectively a permanent change, as long as it works Q3: This might be the most important one. Will doing this [i]necessarily [/i]leave me with that tone that I like? It seems reasonable to me that if I have the knobs set to zero, I'm bypassing the preamp (although it's still using the battery), so rewiring the battery out of the system should leave me with that tone. .....yes? ...I could well be wrong. ANY help is appreciated. I will gladly accept links to old threads where this is dealt with instead of new replies, I just couldn't find any that were useful to me. If more photos would help, I'll take more tomorrow with my SLR instead of my crappy phone cam. thanks