HowieBass

She claims it was made for her and originally cost £950 hahahaha. Oh dear...

Looking at the other items they have for sale I'm guessing Shazzidy is a she... and from someone who DOES know something about art I have to say she's nowhere near an 'upcoming huge artist' and it's nothing like 'professionally painted'.

Will somebody wealthy please buy it and destroy it so we don't have to keep seeing it?

There's a map here http://www.fablabsuk.co.uk/category/maker-places/

You won me over at 2 minutes in! Great advice and thank you! Edit: Thanks for adding the PDF - these exercises are certainly something I'll be doing regularly and they're so simple too!

My Spectrum LX has the same switch configuration as the pictured Thunder IIIA Mk2. The active tone boosts bass in one direction from the centre detente and boosts treble in the other direction (sweeps the boost through a range of frequencies). I think the tone selection switch on mine is a genuine coil tap rather than a series parallel switch - the pickup impedance measured across the jack changes (as expected) and that's where the tone change comes from. The layout seems to match the Super Headless but I've no idea if the wiring is the same.

[quote name='Marc S' timestamp='1409743797' post='2542826'] Anyone know how good the "Entwistle" NXB pickups are? Anyone had experience of them? They look a good value for money upgrade depending of course, on how good they are....... [/quote] The Entwistles get good reviews from BCers, the PBXN/JBXN use neodymium magnets so are hotter than the equivalent PBX/JBX.

If you do try flats (everyone should at least once) you'll likely notice a higher tension for the same gauge as the roundwounds you're used to. If you do go down the flats route and like them enough to keep using them you should get far more life out of them compared to rounds; because they're naturally less bright and don't change as markedly in tone from new to old. Have you thought about gettting say a nice Squier P bass and putting flats on that?

I'd forgotten how much I liked 'Evil'

Looks like one of those inflatable guitars and the positioning of the knobs (fnarr, fnarr) looks odd. So therefore an entirely appropriate name...

Will the website suffer reduced traffic because of the inclusion of 'sex' in the name due to over zealous blocking - bear in mind lots of ISPs are now offering filtering. Remember the Scunthorpe problem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

I bought an old bass off eBay the other year and it had a fair bit of corrosion on the bridge/saddles, control knobs and tuners (no visible pole pieces with the soapbar pup). I ended up using metal polish with an old toothbrush for the milled serrated knobs (poured metal polish onto an old saucer and dipped the tips of the bristles into that) and cotton buds for the smooth surfaces (so use one end with polish on it then the other end to clean off the residue) and it got rid of the worst of it. Once a metal surface has been attacked you'll never get it back completely smooth as it was when new but it'll do a lot to improve the appearance.

I'm betting it doesn't with the Arturia Microbrute and just stores the sequence of notes/rests - it has physical switches involved in creating a sound patch and that means you cannot involve a switch position in some memory slot - it'd be different with a synth that employs 'soft' switches (buttons and rotary encoders). Looks like you can transpose the sequence on the fly by pressing whatever key you like - this becomes the root note of the sequence. Looks like you can tap tempo for the beat as well. The Microbrute has a lot of connectivity so you can probably drive it with an external clock (like a drum machine or a sequencer). By the way when you set patches up on these kinds of synth it helps if you take a photo of the top panel switch settings with a smartphone and refer to that for future reference - the old method would be making a paper copy patch card where you wrote all the settings down - some synths had a card template you could drop over the actual knobs and switches and you'd make a note where they were all set.

Great looking bass! Manchester PMT (assume it's from there) is a real Aladdin's cave isn't it?!

Handily collapses into itself when not in use... and also when played.

You mean you don't have a secret signal for "Debs you take the beat 'cos I've got cramp in my balls"?

Is it any good for metal?

What threw me, as mentioned, was the fact the cable was giving me what I expected with my active basses so I'd no reason to think it was defective... of course now I know, my cables are the first thing to check for any sound/tone issues. As for the inherent capacitance, I'd say that would be associated more with poor contact between the jack plug and the conductors in the cable.

I'm surprised that it's noisy in the way you've described because the Lakland Skylines are built by Cort (in Indonesia these days, used to be Korea) and they'll very likely be using exactly the same components as the many other instruments they build (including their own line and Squier and Ibanez basses) - I've got four Cort built basses and none of them has any kind of noise issue - the closest in configuration to yours is my Cort B4FL which has the same pickups and preamp as your Skyline and mine's fine. However, I've seen that a few people have decided to replace Cort electronics with something more advanced than the licensed Bartolini Mk-1 preamp and John East products are very well respected and I think you'd be very happy with the sound. I'd suggest your first mod would be to check and improve the shielding first (conductive paint or better the proper copper foil) and I also suggest you check the ground wire that runs under the bridge and make sure that's in good metal to metal contact as well.

When I first started playing bass I thought that the two pickup Jazz would be somehow better than the single pickup Precision so my first bass was a J copy... but I then ended up with an active PJ (my Westone) so was getting closer to the traditional passive split coil P bass sound... but I really didn't know how good the old Fender design is until I got my Squier VM P bass - I've probably developed my appreciation for the different tonalities of single coil and humbucker pickups and the differing positions within the body. Now I've played a few different instruments I've a better idea of what I'm hearing on a record. I've still to satisfy my desire for a Stingray though...

Before you take the bass to a luthier you might be able to release some of the twist yourself. I just had a look online about this problem and apparently Gibsons (they're often set necks aren't they?) can develop a twist, so with yours being a neck through... "Gibsons often suffer from truss-rod twist BTW - it produces a twist where the headstock is rotated counterclockwise relative to the body, when looking down the neck from the head end. You can often tell if it's this by slackening the truss-rod entirely and leaving the guitar to settle down for a few days - if the twist goes away, it's this. You can often help it by lubing the truss-rod adjuster before retightening it, since the twisting force is caused by unreleased friction between the nut and the D-plate, not the compression force itself." http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=155121

Yeah I spotted you'd changed the battery and done a visual inspection of the wiring; I just wondered if there was some oxidation somewhere causing an issue. I've read on here that somebody found they had a new battery that was faulty and that had clouded the issue when trying to diagnose a problem. If it's been a sudden volume drop then I suppose that's more likely an electronics/preamp thing. Hopefully somebody more knowledgable will be able to help.

I'm pleased to see that the string through ferrules all seem to line up correctly with the multi-laminate neck/body plies (that always bugs me when I see lack of care in that sort of thing). 18 volt preamp as well - I'm sure you'll be able to coax some nice sounds out of that. Happy NBD!

Wow and more congratulations from me too! You've done well on both counts!

Another one here who thinks the vocals are too shouty which is a shame because you can tell that during the first song where there's a chance to hear the vocals not fighting the instruments, a cappella, it's not that bad a voice (is it the main vocalist here or not?). In fact the more strident the vocal, the worse it sounds... sounds like a bad cross between Rod Stewart and Noddy Holder and the inter song banter is awful and makes me wince. Do people really care what every song is about? And it isn't my type of band, Brits doing faux American rock'n'roll.