Passinwind

I mostly enjoy that fact that all my basses, amps, and cabs were built either by personal friends or by myself. And the fact that most of those pieces are one-offs is all the better.

Yep, I understand that apparent contradiction.

Very interesting and caters to an oft requested niche, hope he follows through with the necessary FCC certs so we can use these legally in the US.

Sure. Space Is The Place, with pretty much any incarnation of Sun Ra's band.

If you just want a very simple, good sounding gain stage with no fluff, the Tillman FET preamp is pretty swell: http://www.till.com/articles/GuitarPreamp/ You can find many variations on this theme online with a few few minutes of search time.

Not at all surprising, it's all obscure and/or one off stuff. L-R: Marco Bass Guitars SC5 prototype, Crescent Moon fretless, BSX Model 2000 EUB. I've personally organized quite a few Talkbass "Get-Togethers" over the years, and traveled as far as 2500 miles to attend others. Most of ours are free for the attendees, with varying degrees of vendor and "rock star" player participation. The picture I posted is from last year's Seattle event, which I think drew around 60-70 players. One had the option of catered food and beer, or not. And that beer in cans is not even available at the brewpub the event was held in, BTW.

In the US we have a pretty strict ratio requirement for beer/basses: But since I am a senior member I was allowed to slide a little last year. I'll bring more beer next time, I promise.

You might find it worthwhile to play around with a ramp, which makes digging in pretty much physically impossible. In my case it hardly made any difference though, since I've always played with an extremely light touch anyway.

I really enjoy helping other DIY'ers work through Spice modeling, and that's actually a big part of how I came to do this open source thing. Essentially, a friend dropped a working model in my lap, and I revised and adapted it to a DIY friendly format. There are links in my Talkbass thread to some interesting prior art as well: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/the-passinwind-open-source-preamp.1259692/#post-19536322

I think that's a good call. If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at my (non commercial, completely free) open source onboard preamp design on Talkbass. I'd be happy to send you the LTSpice model to play around with, but the schematic is already available in the project WIKI over there. Here are max treble cut curves for one particular build: But I've found that how you set up resonant overshoot/damping at the response knee makes a great deal of difference in play feel, and there are quite a few other interesting nuances to dive into. Looking forward to seeing and hearing what you come up with.

At what slope? I once started in on a standalone variable HPF design, which I gave to a German friend to develop as he saw fit. That was years ago though, not sure if I can even remember who it was. All my DIY amp builds over the last few years have had one, but it has always been tightly integrated with all the pre-existing rolloffs of various other stages in the amps. LTSpice is great for modeling that sort of thing.

Nice. Duke provided a new prototype TC112 NAMM cab for the Marco Bass Guitar booth I was in this year. It used the same Celestion compression driver he uses in his TC115 and TC118 cabs. The TC118 has always been among my very favorite bass cabs, and that compression driver plays a big part in that. There was also a secondary top-firing tweeter, meant to spill around the amp sitting over it. Seemed very far fetched, but it actually worked quite well. Very much looking forward to seeing you new iteration come to fruition!

Same here, but oddly enough the luthier I've been working with lately wanted nothing more than a decent Jazz Bass preamp that can fit under a stock control plate, so I guess I am learning to love them now! I never got the appeal of singlecuts at all until I actually tried the right one. Last thing in the world I expected to ever own. I almost never play sitting down, but the SC I own balances superbly while standing and even though it's a 5, it's actually lighter than any 4s I've owned in the last few decades. I absolutely love the initial look on the old country players' faces when I bring it out to jams, but many of them have warmed up to the look and especially the sound in time. And yes, it's full hippie sandwich/coffee table, all the time. Wouldn't have it any other way...

Anything with a plastic pickguard. Don't generally like painted ones either. But as with most everything to do with music, it just depends. Mostly on my mood at any given time.

Those amps are infamous for the power stage bias drifting and creating distortion. If that is the case you should be able to hear the same symptom through other cabs. The fix is not terribly difficult, but is generally best left to a qualified technician since getting it wrong makes for a pretty expensive episode of releasing the magic smoke.

What amp, specifically?

Just turn down your hearing aids and play dumb. Works for me.

It was a four banger though.

Many people around here just use a tablet these days. But yeah, I've been using a stand on most of my gigs for the last 15 years or so. For instance, I can't think of anyone in the big band I play in who can memorize all the charts in our book, or even probably more than a few at most.

10 or so. The number has been on a steady decline for several years (~100 a decade ago), and I am quite content with that. I only did the ten as favors to a few old and new friends. Many of my friends have ported to weekly jams at one person or another's house, so I still get out and play somewhere at least a couple of times a week, typically. Highlights? Various open mikes with former bandmates, and two big band hits as a sub in the community band I was in full time last year. I tend to sound much better and enjoy gigs much more when they're sporadic and don't feel so much like work. Next year: shooting for one a month on upright with the top players from my Friday night bluegrass jam crew, who did pretty well in their last gigging iteration a few years ago. Then hopefully a few jazz sub gigs and a few duo or trio hits with a singer-songwriter friend. Things are blowing up for me on the technical side, which historically has always been my "professional" side in the music business. If that means zero gigs, no worries at all.

The top box holds the amp section and one set of transformers (outputs, I think), the other one holds the other (power) transformers. The builder posted a full schematic on DIYAudio.com, and also participated in a thread I posted on Talkbass. He did a "cute" little mono 500 watter before this one as well.

Sure, I grew up working on tube stuff and have always greatly appreciated the aesthetics of Big Iron. And I love using them for guitar, just not bass. Same as for so many other music production tools: great for others, not so much for myself. Vive la difference.

The biggest one I've personally played through is this 2 X 500 watt build a friend of mine did:

Yep. I saw one of the concerts on that tour and it literally had 12,000 people on their feet. Not an easy ask for a jazz fusion band. Don't like it? Vote with your wallet. And vive la difference.

AFAIK they both have authorized builder networks for those who prefer to buy a pre-built cab. In Dave Green's case: Gigmaster Soundworks: http://www.gigmaster.biz/ Scabbey Road: http://scabbeyroad.com/ Greenboy Audio: http://greenboyaudio.com/ Speaker Hardware: http://www.speakerhardware.com/ Tricky Audio: http://trickyaudio.wix.com/trickyaudio Perhaps Bill Fitzmaurice will jump in with links to his authorized builders, I don't have that information handy. And finally, a few more US builders: RevSound: https://revsound.myshopify.com/ Boom Bass Cabinets: http://www.boombasscabinets.com/