SubsonicSimpleton

Best to listen first if you can - a while back I visited the production room in Leeds to check out headphones, the sales staff were very keen to sell me some KRK cans, I wondered how much crack they'd been smoking to consider such a monstrously hyped voicing as 'neutral' or remotely useful for use in a studio. I hated them, but some people swear by them, so depends greatly on individual taste and the genre(s) of music you want to listen to and work on.

Holy sh*t, you've stumbled across an ultra rare vintage pre-CBS Fender SG prototype manufactered at the legendary Matsumoko factory- get thee to gumtree/ebay immediately, or convert it to a short scale three string bass for sausage fingered gentlemen.

What if the intention is to let the open A string ring?

The most efficient band leader (for direct booking non-local gigs) I've worked with used to take advantage of his day job as a sales rep, and make personal calls at venues while on his travels. Making a positive personal impression carries a lot of weight when you are asking someone to take a risk and invest in you - imagine you are a venue manager or promoter, are you more likely to consider booking a band that took the trouble to visit your establishment and find out how your business works, or someone who sent an email?

Roy Johnston (RMJ Loudspeakers) is also worth a call.

Wow nice work Douglas I'll treasure it, Feels like I just won the internet - thanks very much to everyone who made the effort to participate, vote, and moderate.

[quote name='MacDaddy' timestamp='1457196473' post='2996282'] Or go very cheap with plugs that work [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/161224332150?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&var=460275025651&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT"]http://www.ebay.co.u...K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT[/url] Yup I've got some [/quote] How cheap are a new set of ears? I would happily blow my lifesavings and pay £10,000+ for a working treatment that would remove my tinnitus, unfortunately no such treatment is available, but I would have happily paid for custom moulded plugs from the minute I started performing 25 years ago if I knew then what I know now. Deafness isn't treatable, but it is 100% preventable.

Custom moulded plugs, mine are ACS, but there are other companies with similar products. Wish I'd known how big a step up from generic plugs the moulded ones are years ago, best money you can spend as a performing musician IMHO.

You can't do that, you have to either edit the text of your advert to clearly show the amended price, or edit the title of your add to show the new price. The initial price on all ads is set in stone due to forum software reasons.

What amps have you tried your pickup with? I'm no expert in amps or amplifying upright, but I recently bought an inexpensive bridge wing pickup(j-tone bassmax lookalike) for my upright, and I was quite suprised to find that it worked quite happily with my ashdown mag 1x15 combo even without an impedance buffer (I was suprised that the fdeck preamp I bought had a more noticeable affect on my p-bass than the piezo on the upright). Comparing the sound of the piezo pickup direct into mixer->headphones, amp fx send->mixer->phones, mixer->fx return->speaker, and amp input->speaker, it sounds to my ear like the majority of the problems that need EQ compensation to make the sound usable are caused by the cab/driver. When I started on upright I had a couple of lessons with a jobbing jazz pro, and he was using a realist copperhead pickup plugged straight into his markbass cmd121 combo with nothing inbetween, and swore by it, and one of the busiest upright players on the local folk/roots scene uses a piezo into fishman preamp into a Hartke HA3500 with 1x10 cab for quieter acoustic stuff and schaller mag straight into the same Hartke and a 4x10 for the louder rockabilly stuff. Try what you can get your hands and ears on easily if your budget is restricted.

Where do you draw the line about what is a copy? Leo's first guitar and bass designs were heavily driven by the practicalities of pushing down production cost, and the vast majority of instruments produced in the last 50 years have followed Leo's basic construction recipe of bolting two bits of wood together, with minor variations in cosmetics and hardware.

Voted, tough job due to the high standard as my initial shortlist was 8 compositions, but very enjoyable. Thanks to all who took part for making the effort and sharing.

Bit last minute this but I thought I'd support Twincam's idea and represent the dark side of the forum. This isn't an original composition, just mucking around with a classic tune and attempting to approximate the drums and bass. Track was recorded direct into my zoom H2N and is unprocessed bar editing to length. I noticed when listening back a siren in the background, so that part got kept, and bollocks to trying to isolate the better playing later on. https://soundcloud.com/user-623375481/upright-gumbo-noodle

When I bought my bow, rather than buying a Yita direct from china, I found a UK (Stockport) based retailer who imports bows from China to the UK and then sells them on ebay & amazon, I contacted him by email and he was happy to weigh his stock, and send me a selection of carbon fibre french bows to try at the weights I requested, the quality of the hair on the bows was good, and my classical teacher didn't flag up anything about any of them that indicated that they would be a bad purchase. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dmi&field-keywords=Violins4you+double+bass+bow

You could try imslp.org, there is a humongous amount of public domain scores to be had in pdf format.

Has anyone tried running the preamp signal from an amp with perceived lack of heft into the power section of an amp with heft, and vice versa to isolate whether the issue lies in the preamp or power amp or both? In studio equipment, there are preamp designs that are well known to add colouration and 'fatness' to signals run through them (neve 1073 is a good example), so maybe the preamp implementation plays an important role.

If you really believe that an instrument old or new is special, then you'll play better on that instrument than one you dislike or feel indifferent about. Sometime back there was a blind test conducted with old violins (including a couple of strads) vs newly made ones, and although the sample size was small, the new instruments came out ahead of the antiques - one luthier was quoted along the lines of "players will go to great lengths to work around any shortcomings of older instruments that are perceived to be special, but if a new instrument presented similar faults it would just be discarded."

If I already had a bunch of basses that I liked, I'd be looking at getting a classy home/studio amp to enjoy them through, like a nice B15 fliptop rather than adding another plank to the collection.

Before you decide that you need extra amps/cabs etc, it's worth taking a look at your EQ settings - the EQ on the MAG amps offers a lot of cut/boost, and my experience with the MAG-115 is that if you cut the bass, you won't be working the amp and speaker so hard, which gives a decent headroom boost and cleans the mush out of the mix. The MAG 115 combo will fart out really obviously if you are overworking the low end.

Can't really give any sort of answer about how long a set of spiros can last, my set of weichs have been on the bass for a bit over a year now and are starting to mellow pleasantly and now sound better to my ear both pizz and arco than they did when new. I suspect that personal taste is more valuable than other peoples opinions - if very new zingy spiros [u]works for you on your bass[/u], then swap em out, but you might want to record the dead ones before you swap them and then decide whether they might be useful as an alternative tonally for certain situations, or whether you want to sell them on. I don't think that it's a particularly big risk to try a new set - if the DB string section on talkbass is representative, lots of players try the various altrernatives and end up coming back to spiros, so finding a buyer for a dead or nearly new set shouldn't be difficult.

I was under the impression that regulations regarding dog food used to be very lax, which led to certain pet food manufacturers using all sorts of material as filler to bulk out the content, much the same way that butchers use breadcrumbs/cereal in sausages. I may well be wrong about this, but there used to be a very cheap dogmeat that was rumoured to use incinerator ashes to pad out the mechanically reclaimed meat - the phenomenon of white dogshit disappeared quite suddenly where I live, so it's given much stronger credence to the petfood filler theory than having anything to do with butchers and bones (in my mind anyhoo).

Listen to some of the recordings that Django Rheinhardt made back in the day, and maybe read a little of his life story - his left hand was badly mangled in a fire, and he still managed to become an acknowledged master of his instrument and the main icon of gypsy jazz.

With the exception of the tuners, your bass looks very similar to my Strunal 50/4, take a look at the pics here http://www.thomann.de/gb/thomann_double_bass_europe_1e_bd_34.htm and see if you can see the resemblance. It would be interesting to make a direct comparison with the two basses next to each other in the same room.

Have you tried them with your upright yet?

You could offer up the plain shank end of some different diameter drillbits to find the correct diameter for a replacement endpin, as far as the retaining bolt goes, you'll have to do that by trial and error, the bolt on my strunal is M8, the most likely sizes to try would be M8,M6,1/4",5/16" I would think, just dont force anything.