Passinwind

All four that I own leave the house regularly. I'm not currently gigging, but each band or act typically had a preference for one or another. When I go to my weekly jam or an open mic I often try to figure out which one has been sitting at home the longest, or in the very rare case that I have something new I'll concnetrate on that one for at least several months. I also frequently have a bass around that I'm working on for my luthier friend, doing custom preamp installs, and I always try to take those out in public at least once before I bring them back to his shop. I almost never bring more than one bass along, just every once in a while if I'm doing my originals duo thing with just a drummer and myself. In that case I usually bring a guitar too.

Up to 4 now, the most ever in 47+ years of playing. 2 fretless fours, one fretted five, and an EUB. I really only have the time to keep up on two regularly, but two BGs and one upright would be my ideal if I could make room for an acoustic upright. I despise selling stuff so I'll probably just stick with things as they are in any case.

It's a real mess, even if you deal with a sympathetic and competent agent as I did. In my case the bass was old enough to be exempt from the Appendix II regulations, but I still needed two different permits from completely different entities to document that exempt status, which took a couple of months to come through in one case. And the bass still got impounded in Europe, since the guy on the other end hadn't realized he needed his own importer's permit. Fortunately he was able to procure that permit very quickly, but that seems to vary wildly country by country.

At least in the case of the US Fish and Wildlife senior inspector I met and dealt with when exporting an old bass, he was extremely well versed in identifying wood, and fully capable of taking a core sample and using an electron microscope and other relevant tools. But at the same time, he was very friendly and respectful and the last thing he wanted to do was molest my 40 year old bass. I brought along extensive documentation and he went online to verify it on the spot, FWIW. The process was very onerous and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I was lucky enough for it to only take a 13 hour day to drive to the nearest of the dozen or so specialist inspection stations in the US, get it shipped out from the same city (which was highly recommended), and drive back home.

Brazilian rosewood apparently will still not be exempt, as it is explicitly listed in Appendix I and the new legislation applies to Appendix II species.

I got a minute into the 2 1/2 minute commercial at the front end. Nope, that's a fail. And I do believe that consuming music via videos rather than in audio format is the Debbil's Work. But beyond that, what's on the charts stopped mattering when I hit puberty and gained the ability to buy whatever music I wanted to listen to. From my perspective, I still have acccess to all the old stuff (if it was recorded it's modern in my book) plus whatever new things I happen to find today or tomorrow or next week. I just don't see how that can be construed as being worse.

Hate is a bit too strong a word in my case, but I haven't played a single gig yet this year and that doesn't bother me in the least. I did two last year, both sub gigs I got calls for on the day of the show. I've always preferred working on the technical/production side as far as live music, but I stopped doing that several years ago and don't really miss that either. Any and all of that could change tomorrow, or not. But the important thing is that I'm enjoying playing bass more these days than ever before, either by myself or in a few different regular jams I'm involved in.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Source, please?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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