Passinwind

9 hours ago, PunkPonyPrincess said:

I’m planning a new bass at the moment and I was going to get some stickers made but I thought it might be more fun to actually have a scratch plate laser cut and with stencil text and a logo so that the colour underneath the instrument comes out through the pickguard

Before I begin this process has anybody tried this?

My buddy Marco Cortes at Marco Bass Guitars has done lots of laser cut scratch plates, control plates, and truss rod covers, including some clear ones. You do need to pay extra attention to the materials you use, but your idea should be totally do-able.

12 minutes ago, Merton said:

Remind me, @Passinwind, did you do a build thread or similar for your amp? V intrigued by it

Here's some back story: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/a-diy-1-2-rack-bass-preamp.1135423/#post-16982343

And the earlier 500 watt one, which uses the same preamp boards: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/a-diy-500-watt-bass-head.1061473/#post-15624273

There are quite a few sound clips floating around on Facebook from NAMM in 2017 and 2018, when two different versions were in a luthier friend's booth. But I'm no longer on FB, so I suppose I should post them on my website or somewhere. But since I'm not selling them, it seems easier to just be a slacker!

Home practice rig: DIY 15/6/1 cab, DIY 600 watt head.

7 hours ago, Bluewine said:

Fortune and Fame has passed by many of us. That's not a big deal, occasionally we're out and about and someone recognizes you. YAY!

Share your brief brush with fame where someone local recognizes you when your not performing.

 

Local? Dozens, at least. Many know me from my years mixing club sound, others usually from seeing me in fairly high profile local winery or festival gigs on bass, and then a whole lot more from when I was running open mics.

I had a German guy I'd never seen before come up to me one time on the sidewalk in my home town and start singing one of my old original tunes.

I've also had quite a few strangers at NAMM recognize my face and/or my name, mostly folks who hang on Talkbass, but the last time around also from Facebook users.

2 hours ago, stevie said:

Composing pm now......

Back at you. Pretty sure we could make this work, but how quickly is an open question.

24 minutes ago, stevie said:

It's fine, guys. I didn't want to post anything until I had something worth posting about. There has been a bit of a deadly silence over the past weeks, I admit.

Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff that remains to be done depends on having a finished box, and the delays and pink torpedo-ups made by my CNC supplier has made that impossible until now.

Still, I'm hoping to pull all the threads together next week. Watch this space. I do appreciate everyone's patience.

Hey Stevie,

 I have a luthier friend here in The Colonies with a big CNC cutter sitting idle. I think it'd be an easy sell to get him to do a few test runs for fab file verification, if that's of interest. My friend just needs to start making sawdust at this point, and I would be happy to play middleman as much as needed. I usually get over there at least once a month, it's a couple of hours away from my place. Closer for me than you though!

In  any case, good on you, and it'll be done when it's done.

16 minutes ago, Beer of the Bass said:

I have a particular soft spot for John McLaughlin's electric playing in the few years before the MO - the spots with Miles Davis, Lifetime, Carla Bley etc.  For me, there's something compelling about that era when he was beginning to bring in rock elements but just cranking up through whatever combo he had around, rather than the pre-meditated wall of Marshalls. 

Me too. My Goal's Beyond (sic) and Spaces were huge favorites amongst my crew back in the day as well.

9 hours ago, Jus Lukin said:

When did the electric guitar become such a pariah?

It didn't. Once the damaging SPLs required to fill a big room with rock distortion from the stage in the late 60's were no longer needed, guitarists who insisted on cranking 100watt Marshalls where informed that such behaviour was not necessary any more... and to this day some of them can't accept it.

All the eye witness reports I've heard of Hendrix live onstage are that the sound was abysmal- a squall of unintelligible guitar and everything else inaudible. I wasn't there so can't confirm it, but the notion that all bands sounded glorious when all they had were coily cables and volume knobs is very likely myth. Iconic, but myth.

I'd say plenty of people still love the electric guitar- it's a shame to lose those glorious tones (and the rest of the band) to sheer, damaging, and unpleasant volume.

Yep. I saw the original Mahavishnu Orchestra lineup a few times. Great band, but only really tolerable volume-wise in a hockey arena, far far away from the squalor onstage. Bands like Grand Funk, Mountain, and even Jefferson Airplane were even worse though.

9 hours ago, Beer of the Bass said:

It's odd, just after seeing Mr Bonamassa explain that electric guitarists must use all of the amps, turned all of the way up, all of the time, I pottered over to another forum where double bassists were bragging about using no amp and supposedly never needing one even with drums.  And both were equally absolute about it!  

When I saw Charlie Mingus play he used no amp. He also told everyone to sit down and shut up, or else he was gonna clock 'em. Too bad Mingus is gone, we could've had a proper cage match between those two.

7 hours ago, Al Krow said:

And I guess the important thing with all of this discussion around Q is not to get overly concerned / bogged down (as I am rapidly in danger of doing myself - haha!).

A key point is that a "surgical Q" in the context of bass tone doesn't necessarily imply a better tone. In fact a broader and smoother Q could well be the better sounding option. 

Yep. And boosting and cutting often benefit from different bandwidths. Then there's the factor of how many bands we are using, because interactivity comes into play. I've measured and/or designed and built quite a few bass preamps, and to me this yet another "just depends" kind of a thing.

13 minutes ago, Chienmortbb said:

No it’s an ICEPOWER 700AS1 I BELIEVE pure class d

According to Pat Quilter it's a modified Class D module from the QSC K Series powered cabinet line, built on the QSC production line in California. QSC originally = Quilter Sound Company.

5 hours ago, la bam said:

Looks like the Quilter might be class B.

Source, please?

On 19/04/2019 at 02:37, Chienmortbb said:

I have had a response fro Hypex and they will only supply if I am a Limited Company. So it looks like ICEpower for now. I have ordered some for the pre-amp but I think maybe we should start a new thread. What do others think?

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with John. I'm not a fan of powered cabs or combo amps as a DIY thing at all, so it'll be fun to watch someone else suffer through the engineering challenges this time!

On 20/03/2019 at 09:50, four/five said:

Has anyone put together a pre amp with any of the Class D modules now available?

Yep, I've built around half a dozen. For starters, I assume you are OK with the fact that to do it right this will cost you more than a commercial solution?

You can see an brief overview of most of my builds here:  http://passinwind.com/DIY.html

I've also posted build threads on Talkbass, including:

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/a-diy-500-watt-bass-head.1061473/#post-15624273

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/a-diy-1-2-rack-bass-preamp.1135423/#post-16982343

The latter thread morphs from preamp to  matching power amp to a couple of all in one bass amp builds.

I've done a couple of separate tube preamps as well.

7 hours ago, itu said:

Have to say, that I love your work. The idea of having a fully parametric EQ in the preamp section is top! Many times I have had issues with different places: some frequency is dead or even worse, the other way around. On the other hand P-EQ gives many possibilities to tweak the sound of the bass. My Glockenklang Soul has very functional EQ - but it lacks parametric. I have a cheap para by Artec and it can save the place related issues. Quality it is not but can be a temporary help in need.

Thank you. I used to gig a lot on electric upright bass and, as it is for acoustic upright, killing wolf tones is often a dire need. I've been using PEQs for decades as a sound provider, so that is a very intuitive format for me, especially for dealing with room issues.

32 minutes ago, itu said:

Is your signal route active from the blend to tone or just tone? I am interested in the buffered mixing to prevent load issues with the pickups. Passive carbon pots are something I downright hate. I built few step attenuators with metal film resistors. I tried few different alternatives of how many dBs one step is and the total resistance. Simple maths.

Now I have a Noll Mixpot before a bartolini NTMB in my Modulus Graphite. Sound got an upgrade.

Cool. My friend uses a fair amount of Noll stuff and I'll ask him to get a Mixpot for us to play with.

So far I've just been using a standard passive front end control set into the preamp inputs. Personally, I generally prefer two volume controls to vol-blend, and these days I tend to embrace pickup loading as a natural and often good sounding deal. But as usual, that just depends. In some builds I use conductive plastic or cermet pots, and I have used stepped attenuators in some tube preamps where signal/noise was well better than 110dB. Yep, pots continue to be a major thorn in the paw, no doubt. I've also looked at using digital encoders, which may not please purists but do offer some tangible advantages.

My friend has asked me about active blends and I'll probably get around to that soon. On my new fretless I'm looking at trying discrete signal paths all the way from the pickups to two amps, and also at a clean/dirty split with a blend function for that instead. I'm always interested to hear what does or doesn't work for others though, as my wants and needs are far from typical.

57 minutes ago, itu said:

This is very good point. If that bass preamp can give as good a performance as that amplifier's preamp, fine. Think about Anthony Jackson's choice in his Foderas: a pickup, a wire and a Neutrik output jack. No preamp, no lousy pots. Maybe those mixing desks have somewhat better performance...

@Passinwind: Please tell me about your setup in greater detail.

All of my preamps have signal/noise ratio and distortion specs comparable to most good commercial bass amps. Headroom is sometimes not as good, mostly due to 9V powering, but still more than good enough IMHO. Job one is a vanishingly low noise floor and anything that fails that is not going into my builds in the long term.

Each bass has a different onboard preamp format and my main two players came from a luthier who explicitly wants me to experiment a lot. So right now I have my DIY'er oriented open source "filter" one in my fretted 5 string bass, and my modular 2 + 1 band boards in my new fretless. The fretless features outboard power and can easily be configured to a Ric-O-Sound sort of format since I used a 4 pin XLR output.

Most of my amps have variable high pass filters and a single band full parametric EQ. I see those as mostly tools for room correction, but the HPF interacts greatly with my onboard bass control and allows bass peaking at a wide variety of frequencies, which can have other useful applications than just avoiding room nodes, aka unwanted boom or dead zones. Bass, mid, and treble controls are all crafted to interact in musically beneficial ways. Neither the onboard set or the ones in the amp are "better", and the idea is that the sum of the parts is greater than the individual bits might suggest.

At this point I'm just s retired tech/hobbiest, but I have done a couple of commercial designs for my luthier friend. Right now they only are available in his basses, but he expects that to change sooner than later. I have nothing to do with the marketing, and am wrapping up pre-production building after having done several runs of around ten boards at a time. The most popular format at NAMM over the last couple of years has proven to be active bass and mids coupled with a standard passive treble control - this is my friend's standard offering for his Jazz Bass oriented active bass builds these days. When you switch into passive mode the tone control is just like a stock Fender format, more or less. We're currently working on at least three different active treble control modules, some of which may keep the passive one in play as well.

Most of the amp builds are detailed over on Talkbass, and there is also a brief overview here: http://passinwind.com/DIY.html

On 30/03/2019 at 02:31, Al Krow said:

Aguilar OBP-3?

John East?

Sadowsky?

Something else?

If you've replaced your 'standard' onboard bass EQ - what did you go for and what 'more' are you finding from having shelled out another £150 to £300?

I'm guessing most of you who have swapped out are playing your basses actively rather than passively, or is this not the case?

All three of my basses are always active, with no bypass switch even installed. As usual, I roll my own preamps. What they do better for me is interact well with my amps (which I also built, naturally). I design the whole ball of wax as an integrated system, as much as possible.

8 hours ago, jacko said:

Many of my favourites in there and I'll add CSN, James Taylor's all star band, Van Halen, Bon Jovi,  David Lee Roth, Mr Big, Dream Theater, Alice Cooper Vs Yes, John McLaughlin's bands, Led Zeppelin and the Who.  

Personally, I think we all lose in a very real sense when music becomes a ".vs" thing. But I'm still enjoying many of the responses to this thread, as I so often do on Basschat.

On 30/03/2019 at 16:26, shoulderpet said:

Can anyone recommend a flatwouand that is close to TIs in feel, I am thinking of maybe Labella 760fx but maybe the 

Labella low tension flexible flats would feel looser? Thanks

I used T-I JFs on my fretless for a dozen years. When I replaced them with Ernie Ball Cobalt Flats in the lightest gauge I did need to do a pretty small neck relief tweak due to higher tension, but the overall play feel is fairly similar and the Cobalt Flats sound much much better to me on that particular bass.

On 30/03/2019 at 06:57, Al Krow said:

Bit of (hopefully!) interesting fun for this weekend:

So you're allowed just one bass to keep. What pup set up would it have?

 

A custom set of neo sidewinder humbuckers. There's a huge range of humbucker formats outside of MusicMan and the P-Bass.

3 hours ago, TheGreek said:

Hoping for an interesting debate and, possibly, pick up on some bands I may have missed...I've tried to compress 60 odd years of music into a couple of paragraphs so please be kind with your comments..."you numpty, you forgot about..."

 

So, where is the power station for music? Is it the UK or the US

 

 

Well, you missed every single one of my favorite US bands, so...

Just for starters: Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Santana, Allman Bros. Band, Frank Zappa, Talking Heads, Ornette Coleman, Pat Metheny Band, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Buddy Rich, The Supremes, Johnny Cash, and the MC5.

I'm a very happy user of the Pure Blues strings. I briefly tried Sunbeams on the same bass but the gauges were too small for the way the nut is cut. Preferred the feel and sound of the PB in the next size up, but this was certainly not a fair fight. In any case, the PB last a good year or so on my fretted fiver, with very little tonal changes after the first week or three.

3 hours ago, BigRedX said:

I've also come to the conclusion that these bits of music (Vulfpeck, Snarky Puppy, Dirty Loops etc.) are done as videos because if it was audio only 99% of the audience would be looking something to listen to after less than 30 seconds, as the music on its own isn't enough to hold most people's attention.

I like this tune much better than anything I've heard from those three bands. Vive la difference!

But OTOH, I very rarely watch the video portion of YouTube music clips. Good music takes my mental imagery to much different places than cheesy vids, at least hopefully.