Passinwind

3 hours ago, ClassicVibes said:

Are there any 9V batteries that tend to be slightly bigger than normal and thus stretch the insides of battery boxes? I know this can lead to other, smaller 9V batteries not being able to reach the terminals and shorting out. 

Yes. The Energizer Industrial batteries are a classic example of being at the high end of the standard, but I've never observed that latter result personally.

14 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

Well the postman came and I now have almost all the parts I need. I will send pictures tomorrow but I now just need  to connect about 26  wires.  I hope I can get some sound out tomorrow. 

Outstanding. I still have a couple of preamps with that first generation board of mine in them kicking around. One is about to get replaced by the second gen one any day now, but the differences are pretty minimal. Hope it goes smoothly for you from here on out!

BTW, did the I/O cabling for the power module come with it, or did you have to do the usual aftermarket route to get it done?

6 hours ago, Misdee said:

 Could I just point out that I certainly would not count Marcus Miller as a trade show bass player, not in a million years. Marcus is as good as it gets in my opinion. He has it all, taste, feel,  chops, and the nous to know how to use it all to great effect. And when it comes to slap, he is the best in the business. And he has played with too many great artists to list. 

 

 

True that, but Marcus was right up there with anyone I saw at NAMM as far as "show chops"  this year too. Difference was that he was playing actual self contained music the whole time,  stuff that needed no visual component or constraint to portrait view on a stoopid phone,  until some other guy joined him 15 minutes in anyway.

I did see a few other really great show demo sets too. Anyone with disdain for pick playing might want to check out Cody Wright, for instance.

At the booth I "worked" in it wasn't quite all slap all the time, probably only 85-90%. My crankiness is rock steady these days, no worries. What technique produces good music isn't all that important to me, as long as it happens.

On 10/05/2020 at 14:24, Stub Mandrel said:

I did one experiment with heating a board up under the grill for a chip whose pads were totally under the chip. It actually worked! But you need to  treat all the pads with solder paste using a cocktail stick, luckily it only had about six pads.

I think a good way to do large chips would be solder paste and a rework gun.

More than one person has actually made their own reflow oven.

My friend who runs an audio gear repair shop just down the street is a certified teacher for SMT soldering, and has extensive experience with computer motherboards and all sorts of other arcane stuff. We've discussed a barter arrangment to get me some  scary knowledge but it's hasn't happened yet. He' s repurposed a toaster oven, among other things. 

2 hours ago, ClassicVibes said:

I preferred SIT Silencers to be honest. 

Sound wise I lke Silencers, GHS Pressurewounds, and EB Cobalt Flats about equally for fretless duty, which is by far my main thing. Out of those only the CFs really feel like flats texture wise though, IMO. Unfortunately that works against my current obsession, slide bass. 

1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

I used to do surface mount electronics back in the day for a living, but don't have the tools for it at home, so I tend to avoid it

Heh! I've been avoiding getting the right tooling, as I really don't savor going deeper down this rabbit hole. It seems unavoidable these days though.

Another DIY onboard preamp, a two bander that is meant to be mounted to a Noll/MEC concentric tone pot:

While I wait for the pots to show up I can at least test the rest of the build, so I've hardwired in external pots and mounted this one in stomp box for the moment. I may well throw this into my open source design stew along with a few more things I;ve been working up while on house arrest. I'm curious as to how many of my fellow DIY'ers are comfortable in building with surface mount parts? For those who are, how fine pitch do you go with hand soldering? Many of my newer designs use 1210, 1206, and a few 0805 pieces, and SO-8 opamps. The 0805 ones make me a little cranky on a bad day, but for the most part they're no real problem even without using a magnifier. The board above is ~1.6" by 1".

I'll finally have some pedal builds to show soon as well. I've been playing with some old DSP boards that came in a grab bag along with all kinds of other goodies. Finally got around to listening to one the other day and was very pleasantly surprised by how good it sounds.

I've been very busy doing DIY board layouts lately. More like onboard preamps and a bass amp board retrofit than effects per se, but this thread seems the closest in spirit, I think. So:

New three band preamp that went into my Marco Bass MV fretless a week or so ago:

And the new main preamp board for my 500 watt DIY bass amp build from 2015:

Which is waiting on an opamp shootout tomorrow before completion and installation, which I hope to have done by week's end. There's a new daughtercard  containing a one band full parametric EQ and a variable high pass filter as well.

On 03/05/2020 at 10:42, FinnDave said:

I don't think there's 10% of that that I understand!

The cool thing about the Rane is that you can add or subtract blocks at will, and put them in any order you like. You can also make blocks switchable on a pedal, and even use an expression pedal for some parameters. So you could turn off a tweeter  in your "dirty cab" when using distortion, or add different EQ and compression settings to the dirty signal, and so on. There's a good Windows GUI and lots of memory for presets, all of which makes it a lot more user friendly than you'd think at first look. But to be honest, I use it more for testing crossover alignments before building passive ones than anything else. Burning an hour or three on the computer is much cheaper than buying box loads of big inductors! 

On 30/04/2020 at 08:12, stewblack said:

OK, so.... I was so pleased with the warm and heart-felt response this post got that I thought I'd come back and give you all an update. I bet you can't wait 😁

 

But, but...I needed time to come back with a quality post to really show the love.  Yeah, that's the ticket!

Here's one of my many multiamping follies: http://passinwind.com/RaneRPM26zBassRig.html

And for those who prefer to avoid clickbait in these troubled times:

On 19/04/2020 at 12:39, TheGreek said:

So what is the favoured skinny stringed weapon of choice amongst Bassists?

 

I've had this oddball Heritage from the old Gibson factory in Kalamazoo for quite a few years now:

1 hour ago, Bluewine said:

I was just thinking about a few people I know that worked in restaurants. Will people go back to dining out and crowding into restaurants if not ,I doubt those jobs will last long. I'm talking about bands, cooks, waitresses, bartenders and dish washers.

Blue

I pretty much stopped eating out and going to live shows more than once a month or so at the same time I retired from gigging. Gig money was my play money, so no play = no pay. But this could just be a phase for me, wouldn't be the first time! 

For me it'll be a much bigger loss if my weekly house jam down the street goes away. The host and many of the players already had plenty of health issues, and the jam space is quite small and often crowded. So I think it will have to evolve to only being three or four people, when a dozen plus over the course of a night used to be pretty common. But I will find a way to keep jamming, no two ways about that.

I have a lot of friends on the production side of live music too, and a lot of local club and restaurant owners are good friends as well. There's so much uncertainty for all of them right now, yeesh.

On 19/04/2020 at 11:16, Bluewine said:

Depending on where you live when we start gigging will be different 

Wisconsin will remain on lockdown  until May 26th.

I'm a senior with some health issues. I don't want gig until I'm confident it's safe.

 

Same here, so the odds are pretty good I'm done with regular gigging. I actually already made that decision a couple of years ago though. These recent developments just mean I may well be done with attending live music shows in clubs too, unfortunately.

On 15/04/2020 at 14:57, BassmanPaul said:

The now defunct Bass Gear magazine tested them both and these were the results. Over here this subject ran rampant for quite a while.

Say what? BGM was still very much alive as of last week, what happened?

1 hour ago, Kiwi said:

Funnily enough, this is exactly what I've been looking for in a para eq...a notch filter with a super narrow bandwidth for boosting around 250Hz.  Are you suggesting the narrow bandwidth isn't a good idea?

Pedants 'R Us: a notch filter won't boost at the center frequency, so it's probably not the right tool here. If you can describe the problerm you're trying to fix maybe we can  collectively work through it?

With a full PEQ it's a tricky deal, because using much boost with a narrow bandwidth tends to promote ringing (oscillation), something you may see on an oscillosope well before you can hear it, and unfortunately a potential speaker killer. The area around 250Hz is a very important range, it can equate to "mud", room resonance, what some people think of as "punch", and so on. FWIW, the PEQ design in my amps can get as narrow as 1/20th of an octave. I can't recall ever using that setting with bass guitar though. 1/3rd or even 1/6th octave, maybe.

13 hours ago, FinnDave said:

Never heard the term 'bass drop' before, but kind of get the idea now someone's used something I recognise as an example.

The band I'm in is 100% Grateful Dead, and the Other One is always popular with us and our audiences.

Cool. I attended one of the shows that made it onto that album; I believe the Not Fade/Going Down The Road/Not Fade medley is from the show I saw in New York, my first one actually. This is pre-Wall Of Sound, but I saw that in action a number of times as well.

The bass intro which starts at just after 5:00 in this version often featured the biggest Phil Bombs, especially during the Wall Of Sound era. Always loved playing this myself in various hippie bands I played in over the 70s and 80s.

8 hours ago, franzbassist said:

Morning all

I just picked up a used ML-112 and absolutely love it.  Anyone else in the Baer club?

Don't own any myself, but IMO they're great cabs and Roger and Linda Baer are hard working,  top shelf people.

5 hours ago, B.Flat said:

However my main question is what, if any, does anyone think the audible difference is  between applying PEQ at the initial signal (instrument) or at the preamp stage of the amp.

 

 

Mostly the same as applying any form of EQ - it depends. One immediate problem is that true PEQ requires at least three or four gain stages, and that means a fair bit of current consumption. So right off, putting it off the bass is mostly a better choice IMO and IME.

Gain staging is critically important and  in my own designs I prefer to have gain controls both pre and post any EQ blocks that might actually get set with a lot of gain or cut. In most of my DIY amps I have a single band full parametric stage after bass and mids, but before the treble section. That minimizes how many stages boosted treble signal goes through, which helps signal to noise ratio a lot. For bass guitar I tend to use it more like a tilt control than a surgical boost/cut with a narrow bandwidth. For something like upright bass just the opposite though, and putting the PEQ after bass and mids lets me massge unwanted interactions between those controls.

PEQ can be a tweaky thing and for most people using it on the fly is apparently  just overwhelming. Hence the dumbed down semi- PEQ we see in many  implementations. As a long time sound provider I am very used to quick on the fly tweaks, especially for feedback suppression. As a bass player I tend to set it once for room correction and call it done. Horses for courses.

I owned a Tri 112L for a while. For me a decent pairing was with a Euphonic Audio CxL-112 that I already had. A fEARful 12/6 worked pretty well too. But having heard many multi-AG rigs, I'd recommend just going that route if at all possible.

On 17/03/2020 at 09:00, cetera said:

So, a  lot of us are seeing our gigs cancelled by venues or clients due to Corona virus....

But what about any gigs in the near future (next 8-12 weeks) that are NOT being cancelled? How do you feel about them? Do you want to pull them yourself? Are you in a band with people who want to pull them? SHOULD we pull them and make an executive decision? Would you refuse to play?

With Govt 'advice' being so wishy-washy are you feeling like YOU need to make a decision... even if that decision for yourself causes friction within your band or with a venue/client?

Interested to see how we all feel about this strange situation we all find ourselves in.....

Nothing to think about over here; everything for a while has been cancelled by government mandate. Some venues are just closing permanently right off, but so far it seems to be more restaurants than music venues doing that.

20 hours ago, SH73 said:

If you had to pick one bass to play during self isolation , which one would you choose and why.

 

 

The same one I play 90+ percent of the time anyway. 😎

20 hours ago, E sharp said:

I don't understand how a pub gig can be cancelled , whilst the said pub , decides to stay open .

Around here before virtually all gigs were verboten there were a few venues limiting attendance, such as running at 1/3rd legal capacity in one case. So in that case I'd assume that they'd just dispense with the bands completely if they could already fill that many seats on a given night.

On 14/02/2020 at 16:00, binky_bass said:

On a hideous drink fueled listening binge... curious to know what songs you consider to be absolute staples of your youth. 

There are many of course, so let's say 3 per head.

 

Dark Star - Grateful Dead

In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed -- Allman Brothers Band

Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin

Here's one I'm working on for my friends at Marco Bass, and starting to contemplate keeping. The neck is roasted maple and actually brings even more bling than the flake finish.