Fraktal

[url="http://www.cheapguitardeals.co.uk/shop/item.asp?itemid=974"]http://www.cheapguitardeals.co.uk/shop/item.asp?itemid=974[/url] Cheapest markbass I have seen, apart from the 12" combo wich is not as loud as this one apparently Basically a 500w combo with 1x15" in a cube 46x48x48cm and 18kg weight. I would have bought one if only they shipped to Spain, unfortunately they sell to UK lucky bastards exclusively.

Thats the reason I said dont take my word for it ^^

Warwick necks are thick, REALLY THICK!!! On the other hand, if you can deal with a thick neck or dare to do some sanding, the Warwick/Rockbass Streamer Standard 5 strings has a sound you wouldnt believe until you try one of them. Yes, I know they are passive, but very few active basses match these ones sound.

Well, I would recommend you to use an optical compressor, they tend to sound much more transparent and responsive than classical compressors. I think I have seen some enthusiastic reviews of APHEX 1404 Punch Factory, wich is a pedal... If you prefer a rack, there are dozens of optocompressors with that format! PS: Do you really miss a compressor? I havent used one for more than 7 years and I found I love to play with the dinamic to boost my expresivity, also Im pretty sure the bass defines a lot better through the PA since I give it some time to "breathe" between notes and release some burden from the subwoofer power amps.

If you are gonna replace your Pbass bridge, why dont you go for a pure bass bridge? Not to bash Fender brand, but all their bridges look crappy to me. Damn, I cant remember the name of a bass hardware brand web i visited yesterday... argh, very sorry! I'll try to find that web.

[quote name='BigRedX' post='251332' date='Jul 30 2008, 02:56 PM']Why thank you kindly... I do like Chopthebass's instruments, but I'm not sure they're quite unusual enough for inclusion in this thread. Also one of my criteria for inclusion in this thread is that the instruments shown have to be available to buy or order/commission. The only exception to this so far has been the Reverend Rumblefish, but that's available in sufficient quantities that picking up a second hand one isn't too difficult (I managed it) plus at the time of posting there was a rumour flying around that production might be re-started this year. I'm not sure that the Sirius basses fit this requirement, although I could be wrong...[/quote] I sent a PM to Ian 'Chopthebass' and he confirmed that he accepts orders, would be great to know how much he asks for one of his Sirius basses! Does he classify for this thread now? UPDATE: I asked Ian 'Chopthebass' about pricing for one of his Sirius basses and Im still shocked... about half the price I was expecting!!! If you, like me, love the perfect balance of a headless bass and like the looks, you better PM him!!!

A few years ago I connected the power output of a 3000w+ top of the line QSC power amplifier feeded with a 1k signal at full power and bridged to a... cheap sennheiser headphones!!! I was expecting it to blow up and throw the little speaker inside the headphones a few meters away, but to our surprise the headphones kept working for 2 hours approximately. The following day the headphones worked flawlessly with my walkman. I have heard QSC power amps have some circuitry to control the excursion/movement of the speakers and avoid damage to them and distortion, so this might not be a good thing to try with other brands of power amps... A sound engineer told me that as long as you dont feed a speaker with square signal, the chances of burning it are banishing low, and that the opposite experiment was also true, feeding a high power speaker with a low power amp distorting like crazy would possibly screw the speaker relatively fast. Dont take my word for it though cos this is all speculation and the only experiment we did was with a top of the line QSC, although I trust this guy's word up to a certain point since he was a very experienced and skilled PA sound engineer.

I just discovered this thread and I gotta say: BigRedThanX!!! Best thread ever!!! Also, may I suggest something? I vote for a few pics of Ian's 'Chopthebass' Sirius basses. IMHO those are aesthetically gorgeous and ergonomically perfect basses, crafted by a long time basschatter.

[quote]that would probably rule out my local shop then - nothing over £350 in stock! But I take your point about active/passive. It's finding somewhere inside a reasonable traveling distance where I can try a decent bass.[/quote] You might suffer a shock if you hear some modern basses under 350 pounds. I have a Warwick Rockbass Streamer Standard, completely passive with 2 MEC humbucker pickups and its one of the best basses I have ever tried (sound wise). It was fun when I bought it cos I badly needed a relatively cheap bass to save my other expensive basses from intensive road gigging, and to make completely sure I wouldnt fool myself with personal brand preferences and look styles, I went into my local shop and used a cloth to blind myself, then the shopkeeper handed me all the basses in stock, around 25 of them, anywhere between 300 and 1200 pounds. This was by far the better sounding one, then I was shocked when I removed the cloth from my eyes... A cheap line warwick around 300 pounds? I couldnt believe it, I dont even like warwicks much sound wise. I would have never tried this bass if I werent blinded. Of course, this one could be a particularly good one and I suppose the quality checks for such a cheap line of basses might end up with some horrible basses reaching the shop stocks, but in my experience they are worth a try. Also, people speak highly about Vintage Modified Fender Squier jazzbasses, fretted and fretless, and these are even cheaper and passive too! Too bad I havent tried one of those yet. Certain OLP models have also very good comments, but Im afraid those are mostly the active ones.

You should really try a good bass with 100% passive electronics. There is virtually no limits to your dynamics and sound headroom on one of those. MEC brand crafts some incredibly nice passive pickups. Full of detail, whole frequency spectrum, superb dynamics and you can listen to the slightest nuance of your playstyle.

Thats one of the reasons I hate active basses. Active electronics have a certain headroom and if you reach the ceiling, you either distort or limit the sound. Of course you can also limit the sound physically, if you set a fairly low action, the string vibration could be limited, but then you would hear a lot of fret buzz. You say you play hard with your fingers, mind if I ask you where exactly you hit the strings? Usually, the closer to the bridge you pluck the strings, the less the string vibrates, helping to prevent fret buzz/string vibration limits. Anyway, if you dont notice a lot of fret buzz while playing your bass (unplugged) that means your electronics may have a limiter circuit. I sold all my active basses because of several reasons. One of them was that limiting effect you might be noticing, but there were several others, such as high frequency hiss, sound coloration and sound degradation. It doesnt really matter how good a built-in preamp is, whenever the pickup signal passes through an electronic circuit, and specially through chips, something is lost. Thats why I try to limit integrated circuits as much as I can, usually relying exclusively on the bass amplifier or PA.

I had a Jack bass long ago (actually I had 2 of them LOL) back in those days when the internet was a rarity, and since it was almost impossible to buy double ball strings from my local retailer, I modded my Hohner to be able to install any standard set of strings. I contacted a professional. I dont have a clue whats the english name for this profession, but in spanish they are called "Torneros" and basically they manually craft custom screws, the pieces where the screws fit with their tiny spiral grooves, and all related stuff. As I said, I just contacted one of these professionals and asked him to craft a little and very simple piece for my bass. I made a very crappy schematic with MS Paint, attached to this post. Its a .jpg image at the bottom of the post, please click it. The piece is meant to be a rectangular prism (made of bell brass to improve tone and sustain) with 4 horizontal holes to pass your strings through, and 4 allen screws holes in the top to be able to press against the strings and force them to stay in place. I placed this piece at the "headstock" of my Jack bass, and since the metal piece up there has a slight angle, the tension of the strings just forced the piece to stay in place very firmly, I really had to hit the head of the bass very very hard to detune the strings. A few tips though: The horizontal holes to pass the strings through are meant to have a very similar caliber to your strings, so they dont move inside and you wont have tuning problems. The vertical holes for the allen screws MUST NOT pass through the whole piece vertically, only until they reach the horizontal strings holes, or else you will cut your strings when pressing them hard with the allen screws to fix them in place and allow tuning. If the professional lacks the tools for doing a "half hole" and he needs to perforate the piece completely for the vertical holes, then he will have to fill the bottom of the hole with soldering metal, or make a bottom plate or whatever. I just hope you can understand what I mean with all this crap! It was very nice to use any string set/brand with my Hohner!

I have had around 20+ effect and multieffect units with chorus including the boss CEB2 and the CEB3 and in my opinion the CEB2 (brown) was the best of them all, despite it being older than the CEB3 (blue).

Heheh, thank you, WalMan, but if things go as I expect, I might end up at UK soon. Got a brother who moved to Watford (near London) 3 years ago and Im sick tired of this place. Dont get me wrong, Spain is a very nice place for a holiday trip, having fun, drink some horrible beers or excelent wines, taste some wonderful food, meet very beautiful troublemaking girls and generally waste your time... But when it comes to seriousness, reliability, commitment or anything related to responsible teamworking... You better look for somewhere else! I attended Guitarcraft international courses and it was very easy for me to notice a radical change of mentality between spanish musicians and their attitude and that of people from other coutries. Also, I live at the south of Spain wich traditionally was a very rich area regarding culture, but lately I cant see that at all. My career and my development as a musician is suffering greatly, the circumstances here in spain are so unfriendly for a musician that lately I have doubts about me being one. Right now im finishing some studies and most likely I will move to UK as soon as Im done. That is, unless one of the friendly guys in this forum needs a bassist for a serious, professional band full of commited and responsible members AND theres a chance to earn a living out of it. I have been big band director for the last 4 years and bassist for 16 years. Ah well, I better stop dreaming

Hello P-T-P, I was eager to see your comments, Thank you very much! You seem to confirm what I suspect, though I wasnt expecting the 12incher to have better lowend than the 10incher... Very useful info.

Some time around 10 years ago or so, I built a tube preamp with the help of Craig Anderton's book "Projects for guitarists". He has a very nice schematic there for a tube preamp, very clear and lots of info, plus you can easily modify it by reading also the rest of the schemes of the book and adding new sections to the schematic or customizing the ones already present on it. The book is 100% worth. One of the weirdest charasteristics of his tube preamp schematic is that it uses a "bridge of diodes" to rectify voltage up to around 45 volts to feed the tube without the need of a bulky and heavy power supply unit. While this is not the common operational voltage for a valve (they usually work with much higher voltages) Craig says this lower-than-average-voltage design saves weight, space, and more important: It forces the valve on his preamp to overdrive earlier and to boost the even harmonics characteristically coming out of valve gear. His aim was to provide a valve preamp that sounds "more tuby than the tubes", I hope you can get what Im saying cos english is not my first language and the electrophysics of sound are hard to explain without images. I donno what happened to this preamp since I made it for a friend in need and havent seen him for years now, but if I remember right, it had a very warm sound.

I cant express my gratitude enough for all your comments, its sooooo nice to see so many replys!!! @redstripper: Wow, nice! Great that you tried them all, and sounds like you really care about lowend... Well, I have never played a reggae theme, believe it or not, here in spain doesnt seem to be a very popular style... Dont blame me! I love it! Too bad spaniards only love football and car tuning and so there isnt much public demand of proper music @machinehead: That 12" cabinet to match the 121p sounds very interesting, lets hope we can see it soon. @phsycoandy: Im sincerely grateful for your PM, though Im more interested on a compact, smalller combo. Still, thanks a bunch @Walman: I live at Spain right now, though that will hopefully change relatively soon. I play almost everything (rock, pop, funk, folk, jazz...). About feeding the PA, well, that depends. Sometimes we go to play at a gig and we find a small pub with very basic audio systems so we only amplify voices and acoustic guitar. Some other times we find a large scenario with plenty of audience and huge line array systems, so then, of course, we all get amplified. Basically, I feed the PA whenever its possible and needed, heh. @xgsjx: Thank you!

More comments about your experiences with these combos are MOST WELCOME!!! Thanks!

@yorks5stringer: Thank you! That would be a very nice solution, but I prefer a combo since its more compact and easier to carry than a 2 piece or 3 piece system, also cheaper. @mikeh: Your offer sounds VERY tempting, I will consider it carefully. Can you post a few pics of it? @moran: Thanks a lot! Ive sent a private message to P-T-P, lets hope he sees it soon