Passinwind

7 minutes ago, paul_5 said:

Nice! There's always room for one more filter...

These are more like the Alembic/Wal/ACG thing than your usual auto wah or whatever. Just a different take on a treble control section, basically. 😉

Latest version of my open source hybrid filter pedal:

And then I lost my mind and ordered a couple of new enclosures with the sort of cartoonish graphics that are not typically my cuppa at all:

1 hour ago, wateroftyne said:

 

16 minutes and 8 seconds of people smelling each other's farts.

Yep, isn't it glorious? 😎

New boards for the next gen open source preamp pedals:

And various old and new enclosures the test builds will be going into:

19 hours ago, Piers_Williamson said:

One of my favourite albums of all time is Shadows and Light.  It also made me a life long fan of Pat Methingy and Lyle Mays (the latter now sadly RIP)

Saw a date on that tour. I was already a huge fan of everyone involved and was lucky enough to have seen Metheny and Mays in small clubs for small money many times, which was easy if you lived around Boston or pretty much anywhere in New England in the mid 70s. Seeing Pat play in a sold out hockey arena and eschewing the rock star persona was just uber cool.  The spotlight suited Jaco perfectly though of course.

On 30/07/2022 at 08:21, Kinkh said:

I remember that there was a way to take a .wav file as an input in LTSpice, pass it through the circuit, and record the output as a .wav.
I may have done that once more than 10 years ago, so I currently have no clue how to do that anymore... But, it might be the "best" way to see how something sounds when passed through one of these circuits.

I've done that many times, on my computer the render time is extremely slow. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/ltspice-simulation-using-wav-files/

15mm bush length is a huge ask outside of the usual Les Paul type, even 12mm takes a custom order in most cases. If you can make 10mm work Noll sells one, 6mm shaft diameter though: https://www.noll-electronic.de/potentiometer/

I've used a lot of other similar Alpha variants from Noll with no drama, FWIW.

On 28/07/2022 at 00:49, Richard Jinman said:

Anyone own or know anything about these? One for sale and seems to be the original model… my understanding is that it’s a more powerful version of the older AI bass amps, but can’t find a great deal of info online. 

 Really? Is it not the 2R Series III: https://acousticimg.com/assets/docs/Manual-amp heads sIII.pdf ? The original Focus was part of the Series II line IIRC: https://acousticimg.com/assets/docs/manual_amp_head.pdf .

If it's the 600 watt Series III, I owned the one channel version without reverb for a few years and used it for gigging on my BSX EUB quite happily. For bass guitar it was a bit less satisfying, but an external preamp helped quite  a bit.  It was really great for acoustic upright too, I'd highly recommend it for that.

20 hours ago, BillyBass said:

Am I being unrealistic?  Should I just be grateful I am in a band and not take it so seriously?

 

I've invested a lot of time in this band and walking away would be a big step but I don't seem to be on the same page as the guitarist and singer.

 

Any advice from you seasoned band members would be welcome.

 

 

 

 

IMO it's generally not realistic to expect people to change just to meet your particular wants and needs. And in my experience that works both ways, I don't see you changing your wants and needs either. 😉

8 hours ago, Rich said:

 

I've downloaded KiCAD and have been having a play. Drawing a schematic was very straightforward, but it's going to take me a while to work out how to untangle the resulting rats-nest on the PCB

There's an "expand" or "explode" function that'll more or less take care of that for you.

While drawing a schematic is pretty simple, there are some less than obvious things needed to make it all work properly. You need power ports connected to various supply voltages, for starters. Be sure to run the design rules checker, it will generally catch that sort of stuff. 😉

And as with many of these tools, library management makes a big difference in ease of use. I do many component footprints myself and a logical set of naming conventions when I started out would have saved a lot of later grief.

10 hours ago, bartelby said:

I really like KiCAD
https://www.kicad.org

 

Bit of a learning curve, but then there is with all stuff like this...

I settled on KiCAD quite a while ago, it is immensely better and easier to deal with these days.

For board fabrication in the US I tend to use OSHPark or Digikey, but JLCPCB works fine for less critical stuff for me and for bigger boards it saves a ton of money.

On 01/07/2022 at 09:31, LukeFRC said:

I'm not sure that's right - Alembic I always though was a fender tonestack? 

Yep, and the Acoustic 360 did not even use valves. 😉

On 02/07/2022 at 17:03, paul_5 said:

Low current drain and high fidelity is difficult to achieve!

Easier these days than ever before though, at least when the needed modern SMT parts are in stock. 😉

New LeCompte Triple Threat single coil pickups in my Crescent Moon bass (front left), and two new cabs to boot. Marco Bass MV4 on right.

Working my way up to Bill Wyman territory, the challenge is real.

Finished up three different versions of my hybrid filter preamp pedals over the last few weeks:

The latter two have some tweaks to enhance use with mandolin or acoustic guitar, but both still work well for bass too. The graphics on the last one came back from Tayda a bit dodgy, but live and learn...😉

3 hours ago, Ultima2876 said:

Thread title! What does everyone think now that they've had a (pretty dramatic - £180 so 20% on the Big Baby 2) price increase? As their email says:

 

 

Not something that can be helped really, but regardless it'd be interesting to hear what people think generally and whether the consensus is that they are still a good value proposition?

Not a problem, as gig pay historically always tracks inflation anyway.

Oh, wait...

I think one of those was the first or second fretless bass I ever played, ca. 1972. And yeah, heavy would be an understatement, and I owned a Travis Bean for 40 years.

My good friend Marco Cortes had this one in his NAMM booth last week:

1 minute ago, tegs07 said:

Im not sure Warmouth offer either of those but a luthier certainly would…

Yep, I have two Marco Bass builds with cedar cores.

18 hours ago, fretmeister said:

I realise this is a bit nuts, but as I’ve also discovered swapping 4 heavy knurled knobs for plastic ones can sometimes save 100g ( quarter of a pound) it all makes a difference.

Wood knobs, no brass inserts. Even lighter than many plastic ones, and IMO often much nicer looking if done right.

3 hours ago, nilorius said:

Interesting - how much You would be ready to pay if some one would offer You the authentic Jaco's bass of doom ?

Zero, I already have two much nicer fretless basses.

6 minutes ago, tegs07 said:

Alternatively it’s the quick production and low fi instruments and recording that that made early Motown so exciting.

I grew up listening to that stuff on a tiny transistor radio under my pillow late at night, never heard a hint of bass content ever. Same with my Mom's car radio back then. Exciting? Nah. Maybe once boom boxes came on the scene around the time the Jackson Five became the big thing, but IMO the production aesthetic started changing in a pretty big way around that time too. 

Most of the Motown hits would've sounded much better if Jamerson et al played an Alembic. Or better yet, an upright.

If it has a good beat and you can dance to it I'm mostly not interested. Give me "sit down and shut up" any day.

But Yelling At Clouds is a great band, even though they're  popular as all get out with my set.