Passinwind

My luthier friend dropped this in my lap last week. Part gift, part barter for preamp design work I've done for him. Purpleheart fingerboard, custom neo sidewinder pickups optimized for slide bass. The bottom knobs are a temporary set I put on so I could get started on the electronics package. I'll probably go with something blond to complement the pickup covers and headstock.

Marco Bass Guitars MV fretless build in progress. I won't decide on control config and electronics package until I get a chance to hear the proprietary neodymium sidewinder pickups Marco has wound specifically for this bass. That's a purpleheart fingerboard, maple neck, maple top wings, and not sure on  the core wood.

At one time or another: Willie Nelson, Talking Heads, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, and Victor Wooten's band.

One of the toniest gigs I ever played was a 50th wedding anniversary party at a very posh cliff side hotel overlooking the Columbia River. The "host" wanted to sing a set and insisted that only I could play bass, which was problematic since I was a dep in that band. No problem; he hired the other guy too, for full wage, and we split the night. I had to scramble to find the right clothes but it worked.

So when we got there the rules were set out: band eats outside, cold processed cheese product on white bread. Don't go near the appetizers or the seated and served food spread. Stay away from the good wine. And whatever you do, don't engage with the  lovely couple's daughter -- poor dear is recently divorced and tres triste. Plus the usual show up very early, set up, and wait a few hours before starting. Just play the charts, minimal improv or soloing. Above all else, make the host look good, it's all about him.

Naturally it played out a bit differently. The maitre d' was an old friend and he came by personally with a tray of bacon wrapped scallops and  offered anything else we fancied as long as it fit on an appetizer tray . He then broke out the very nice private reserve Cab, maybe a little too gleefully. I played a quote from Smoke On The Water during Autumn Leaves, and managed to offload almost the entire host's set to the other bassist, who was just bored to tears and happy to have something to do. And of course I had a long conversation with the daughter during that set, who was quite beautiful, a very intelligent MD, and anything but a sad panda. Would to be single again! At the end of the night the blessed couple came by to personally thank me for taking care of their daughter and adding a little color to a rather staid evening. Predictably, the host got bombed and never noticed any of our shenanigans. I think this all fits into "don't try this at home", but I've always despised playing weddings and function gigs, and of course I already had a dep onsite if needed.

On 19/11/2018 at 08:19, stewblack said:

Thoughts?

For me studying music performance and actually enjoying it are two very different things. I think a lot of that outlook stems from decades spent either mixing live shows or repairing and modifying amps and other related gear. So I tend to try to give respect to many things I don't particularly like. No need to elaborate more specifically, all that can come of that is giving offense to a few or many, IMO and IME.

On 16/11/2018 at 01:40, itu said:

By the way, went to see this "kilowatt amp". Its backplate clearly states, that the unit's input power is 200 W and 200 watts only! How could they explain this kilowatt if not using the word "peak"? Funny stuff.

https://www.trickfishamps.com/amplifiers/bullhead-1k/

In the US the unit's power consumption from the wall  figure is typically spec'ed at 1/8th duty cycle, although 1/4-1/3 is generally more realistic for rock or hard rock with some signal compression. You can easily confirm the relevance of this by recording some actual bass guitar playing and analyzing the crest factor.

4 hours ago, Bluewine said:

I'm still getting home at 2AM & 3 AM. It goes with the territory.

Blue

Sure, gotta so what you gotta do. When I was mixing rock shows seeing the sun rise before I got home was not all that unusual.

19 hours ago, Bluewine said:

Worthwhile opportunities are rarely publically advertised even at the local level in my neck of the woods.

 

Same here. The nearest Craigslist is for Portland,  which is an hour or more from me and not somewhere I've ever gigged much.

I should clarify that I have nothing against rock, I just have much higher potential value to people in other genres, and rock gigs are pretty much the only ones that start and end late out here these days. I very rarely play past 10PM or so any more.

22 hours ago, Bluewine said:

We haven't done this fun exercise in a while.

Take a look at the ads as if you were actually looking. Let us know why or why you wouldn't be interested.

If you could, share how long you've been playing and a little about your band experience.

I've been playing  for just under 50 years, and have no interest in gigging in any rock band at this point. But in general I've always been recruited into every working band I ever played in. The only "start up" was my very first band, with my brother and my best friend. If a band needs to advertise for a bass player I'm not interested, plain and simple.

18 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

I guess. I had never heard it before and actually, it was hard finding a version of it on youtube or other streaming services, so I wasn't sure it was the right one. Luckily all these sort of things are pretty easy but makes me realise the term standard is fairly subjective.

It was #5 on the US Billboard Top 100 in this version, and #11 in the original one, roughly 50 years ago. So a more recent standard by many people's reckoning ;^}. I had to nail down the Buddy Rich big band arrangement a few years ago and found quite a few YouTube vids of that arrangement (mostly high school bands), and plenty more like the Jaco one.

Here's the one that went to #5:

And Will Lee playing it with the Buddy Rich legacy band, with Phil Collins on drums:

On 22/10/2018 at 03:58, Chienmortbb said:

I was surmising that once prices fall. stock is low and the expected date does out to months rather than weeks, a product has ceased manufacture. However I have no proof.

Behringer recently knocked prices down across their lines by up to 40%, FWIW: https://sonicstate.com/news/2018/10/22/behringer-price-drops-across-the-board/

6 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

The DIY build is almost complete but I blew the power amp when testing it. If I cannot get it fixed, I will have to redesign mechanically to take a new power module. My own stupid fault. I bought the Bugera on a whim and I am glad I did so far.

Bench testing Class D amps is often pretty tricky. I really need to pick up a big isolation transformer for that myself. Best of luck, and email me if I might be of assistance.

On 06/10/2018 at 04:03, Chienmortbb said:

The debate over the power output of this and TC amps have been had on other threads but there seems to be plenty of power on tap. 2000 watts it is not but it is much louder than I can stand in my front room and seems effortless.

 

No need for debate, independent techs have tested it at around 750 watts RMS and Behringer tech support have mentioned that they don't rate by that method, which is often the case these days. Plenty to melt a single 12 no matter how you slice it. I played through one at NAMM briefly a few years ago and was favorably impressed.

Whatever became of your DIY amp build BTW?

On 24/09/2018 at 04:44, Hellzero said:

Here you can have it made to measure : https://www.banzaimusic.com/Custom-Pot-Duplo.html

Noll offers custom MEC pots like that as well. They are far from cheap.

My favorite exercise is playing octaves up and down the neck, all of it. Extra credit for going microtonal.

Here's an overview pic of the Emerald City BassCon last Sunday, held just south of Seattle. It originally started as a Talkbass oriented get together, but it definitely taken on a life of its own over the last decade or so.

On 30/08/2018 at 09:55, ianrendall said:

What would you get that’s not Fender? I’m talking classic setup - two single coils, 34”, no fancy tops. I’m saving hard for a dream bass and I am solidly set on a classic American built J type. I’m thinking Sadowsky NYC, Lull, anything that isn’t ‘factory’ built. 

I'll put in a word for one of my customers, Marco Cortes, www.marcobassguitars.com. Many of his jazz variants are 34.5" scale (TFL line, which are more the "super jazzes) and have pretty blingy tops, but his newer N1 line are 34 inch, generally more understated, and more traditional in terms of the parts appointments. In the US $1200 gets you into an N1. He winds his own pickups, makes his own finishes, and does the majority of the build work himself. There's at least one dealer in the UK: Great British Bass Lounge. My involvement is with bespoke onboard preamp designs, which he is licensing and ultimately will be producing on his own. Not sure how many used ones show up in the UK, but I've met quite a few European endorsers the last couple of years at NAMM.

I have many friends with Sadowsky, Lull, or Lakland basses. Can't go wrong with any of those, in my experience. Best of luck with whatever you decide on.

22 hours ago, Bluewine said:

Have you identified what you are good at, your strengths and where you fall short, your weaknesses.

Please comment 

 

Sure. My sight reading sucks and I'm bad at pretending to enjoy playing stuff that I actually don't. I can solo and improvise and keep an audience engaged and I can pull off a gig with no practice and without ever even meeting the other players  beforehand as long as there are chord charts or it's something with no expectation of "like the record." Just got a call for a big band sub gig tonight and the regular bass player has all the charts and is on the other side of the country. So I'll have to read off the keyboard charts for the ones I don't already have (probably about half), which will be half dots and half chords. It's jazz, but there is very little real improv in most big bands. I've been told many times that my biggest strength is fearlessness, and I'm not the slightest bit nervous, so maybe there's some truth in that.

4 hours ago, Silvia Bluejay said:

I think there's a difference between playing covers for an audience who mostly wants to sing along, dance and have fun, say at a private party or in a pub, and recording cover versions for an audience who is more interested in the music, such as fans of a band buying their CDs or going to their shows. I'd say the former should try and sound as much like the original as is feasible, depending on the number of musicians available, while the latter should offer their own take on the song. There are, obviously, limits to how much you can make a song your own without ruining it...

 I can go along with all that, but how about the very frequent cases in my world where the original band never had a definitive arrangement or maybe even played the song the same way twice themselves? I know of Grateful Dead tribute bands that cover a whole live show learned from the Archive recordings, but to me that pretty much misses the whole point of what the band was about. And I never ever want to hear any jazz band play anything just like the record, ever. Did I mention never, ever?

Ughh, I posted my last screed before getting to the punchline. I go to every live show with the hope and expectation of hearing something new, even on the most familiar tunes a band may have been famous for over decades. And I try not to play anything the same way twice myself if at all feasible. Needless to say, studio work is not part of my agenda.

65 years old, but pretty much stopped listening to much rock music by the mid 1970s. I'll play it myself from time to time in order to hang with friends, but in any case, Grunge is "oldies" in my world and Classic Rap is Old School. I frequently bust on my friends' bands by asking if they even play a single tune from this century, many don't. That's fine, a lot of the jazz I play and like is at least 70-80 years old. But for inspiration I've always generally preferred to listen to live performances rather than recordings. Haven't paid to see a cover band in probably at least a decade. My misguided youth wasn't all that much fun, no need to relive it.

19 hours ago, Beer of the Bass said:

That would make sense, since since the Series 2 is the one that Francis published the schematic for! 

Myself, I'm going to pick up a Schalltechnik Vong Filterung kit (snappy name!) when they're back in stock.  They have a fixed and a variable HPF in a similar configuration to the Series 3, plus a switchable lowpass filter and boost and a DI output. 

The v3 schematic is finally up on fdeck's site now. The Vong unit looks really good too though.

2 hours ago, Marc S said:

@Happy Jack - just found the website. They do seem a tad heavier than I would have expected, for a small cab
They list the C8 as 14 - 17 lbs, and the C88 as 25 - 30 lbs (I assume the variation is down to finish / grille? - I'm not sure)

It's also due to the sort of plywood used in many cases, but I'm not sure which builder's website you're referring to.

2 hours ago, The59Sound said:

I suppose they would be more 'roundwound' sounding than TIs though? 

Yes, for sure. And T-Is are not especially "classic flatwound" sounding in the first place. I used them pretty happily for many years on this particular bass, but the EBCs suit me much much better.

1 hour ago, paul_5 said:

At rehearsal now and loving them; tight, punchy and lovely mid-tension (drop tuned a tone on each string though). I think they might be a bit too high tension at concert, but for what I’m using them for they’re brilliant. Tons of top end too with the right amp setting.

I've had  the lighter gauge set on my standard tuned fretless for a few years now. Those are just a bit stiffer feeling than T-I Jazz Flats, but still very supple.