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alittlebitrobot

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Posts posted by alittlebitrobot

    Rewiring active to passive

    in Repairs and Technical

    Posted

    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.

    Feedback for KiOgon

    in Feedback

    Posted

    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.

    Rewiring active to passive

    in Repairs and Technical

    Posted

    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.

    The Illusion of Vintage Fender Value

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted

    [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.

    Rewiring active to passive

    in Repairs and Technical

    Posted

    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 :D

    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 :)

    Strings that didn't impress you.

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted

    I just got a new Ibanez that came with Elixirs. I don't know what model(?) of strings but all Elixirs are expensive as far as I can tell, and I just don't see why. They don't feel nice at all to me. I took them off after a couple of days. I'm keeping them as a stand-in set if I somehow break the set I have on the bass but that's it.

    [sub]...Set of lightly-used Elixirs for 34" 6 string bass for sale...[/sub]
    :D

    Vintage V950 Experience?

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted

    I have the V940FL and I think it's great. A similarly priced fretless bass is the Squier VM Jazz but I could never get on with Fender/Squier basses, either P or J. They feel uncomfortable and clunky to me so I was really happy to find a V940 in a music shop here about six years ago.
    I still have it, I play it every day and have never had a single problem with it, as some people have mentioned earlier in the thread. Maybe they are inconsistent and I got lucky, so try before you buy, I suppose. I find the range of tones available to be quite broad too.

    NBD! Ibanez SR506M

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted

    This thread kinda makes me seem like I care more about the look of a bass than anything else. Far from it, but I so rarely buy new guitars, it's important to me that I like everything about it.

    Yeah, that change in scale has made a monkey of me a few times. If I look at my left hand it's ok, but if I look away or if I'm playing a riff I know well, my muscle memory kicks in and my fingers go out of position. Only slightly, but it's enough to make some horrible bum notes :D
    The thing with the B is that the fretted notes are fine, it's just that open note that reminds me of an electric guitar going through an octave pedal. Technically, it's the right frequency and all that but the note just lacks that real weight. I'm sure there are great 34" B strings out there but the 506 has such a light and slim body, it's probably a lost cause from the start. Still, not a big deal at all. I love it.

    NBD! Ibanez SR506M

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted · Edited by alittlebitrobot

    Hello,

    I just thought I'd make a little New Bass Day post. I don't expect (m)any of you to be interested in the texty bit but I'd like it to be here because it's the kind of thing that would've answered a lot of questions for me a couple of months ago.

    [b]The pictures are underneath. Feel free to skip to the end.[/b]

    So, briefly, I was on Denmark street in September and played an Ibanez SR506 in a shop there for a very short time but I really loved it. When I got home (Ireland), I started reading about it and shopping around for one. The only thing I didn't like was the finish but when I saw a photo of the maple fretboard 506, it looked [b]so[/b] much better and I've never had a maple board bass before.
    Then I realised that there were a few 506s for sale but I couldn't find any with the maple board. I posted here to see if I could find out why they were unavailable and somebody explained that it's a deliberate move by Ibanez to keep some models available only in the US [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/215709-bass-models-and-geographic-limitations/"]http://basschat.co.u...ic-limitations/[/url]
    I found one guy selling one on eBay so I emailed him to see if he'd ship internationally. He wasn't willing to but he did tell me that Sam Ash will do it. I emailed them, got a quote for the bass, a hardshell case and shipping. After going through dutycalculator.com and figuring out what the import would cost me, the price still worked out nicely. So, it was 700 dollars for the bass, 70 for the case and 80 for the shipping. The bass was posted (with a tracking number) on a Monday, arrived in customs on Friday and was in my house on Monday.
    ...not bad at all.
    Anyway, I love it. It came with a new set of Elixirs on it but nuts to that. I swapped them out straight away for a set of Fodera strings. I slightly regret it, though because I'm finding it hard to tell how different the strings are. I should've lived with the Elixers for a while and then changed them.

    The 6 string I have been playing for about 5 years now is the Peavey Grind. It's poorly named, though. It's actually quite a mellow bass and there were two reasons for wanting to switch to a 506; the active electronics because my taste in tone is going that way for some reason and the 34" scale. I have to admit, my little hands are [i]much[/i] happier now with the [i]slightly[/i] smaller scale.
    On that point, there is one area where the Peavey wins without question, and it's the low B. Not sure if it's because it's a heavier body or the longer scale but the B on the Grind is fantastic. An open B on the 506 is a bit... hollow.. or something. It's a bit like a bass doing an impression of a low B.

    Ok, that's all. Here's yer pics.
    The box:
    [attachment=145961:1.jpg]
    The case:
    [attachment=145960:2.jpg]
    The bass:
    [attachment=145962:3.jpg]
    [attachment=145963:5.jpg]

    Advice needed on a Tacoma Thunderchief 5 String Fretless

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted

    Well, here's one going for 900 buckaroos [url="http://www.ebay.com/itm/Tocoma-Thunderchief-5-string-bass-guitar-/290987702666?pt=Guitar&hash=item43c037f98a"]http://www.ebay.com/itm/Tocoma-Thunderchief-5-string-bass-guitar-/290987702666?pt=Guitar&hash=item43c037f98a[/url] (that's about £550/€650) but the seller mentions a repair job and, therefore, a low reserve. I'm not sure about that "$1900" but philw's right, there may be someone so desperate to own one that they'd pay double that. I suppose you could put it up for sale and overvalue it, to see what kind of offers you get.

    What to do? don't play my fretless

    in Bass Guitars

    Posted

    Permit a non bass-related anecdote:
    I had a nice guitar and a crappy old mis-shapen Squier telecaster. (ok, the nice guitar was only an Epiphone but it was a very good one). This sounds silly but I just didn't feel like the Epi had any music in it for me. When I'd pick it up, I'd enjoy the feel and the tone but I never wrote anything on it. Every time I pick up the tele something new comes out. So, like you, I took the notion of selling the Epi but I wasn't sure because it was such a nice guitar. I put it in it's case and put it downstairs where my guitars aren't. Just to see if I'd miss it. Well, out of sight, out of mind. Not once in about two months did I go downstairs to get it. So, I sold it. The guy that bought it loves it, which makes me so happy AND I used the money to buy a midi keyboard and a little Zoom digital 8-track, both of which I'm having a whale of a time with.

    Sell it.

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