lemmywinks

I feel sorry for young drivers now, a mate is looking for insurance for his lad and quotes are around £2.5k with a black box. A small economical car will be cheaper to run (my little diesel MPV van is around £30 a year VED and gets in excess of 50mpg) but that insurance is crippling. It's a no win as if they want a cheaper car it's either something with crazy mileage (and likely an uneconomical repair somewhere down the line) or will be too big and expensive to insure and will drink fuel. It's a world away from when I was young (42 now so not a million years ago!) and you could just pick up a small car for very little money, loads of people I know were running £100-£200 cars or just got given one by relatives which lasted them a few years. Our first van was given to us by a friend of the band, needed a new clutch and it lasted years, we ran it on Chef's Pride cooking oil from Morrisons and used to fill it up in the car park. Funnily enough I've just had my oil and air filters replaced today and a few other little bits and bobs, cost me £135.63, I'm not using Chef's Pride in it before anybody asks.

Audere also cater for a wide variety of hole numbers, their pots are tiny and the preamp board is seperate so may be a better option, cheaper too if you just want their classic pre. Can have the mid freq as a switch or a two different controls for high/low. These look like they might fit: https://www.audereaudio.com/classic-vb-4b-4h-none.html https://www.audereaudio.com/classic-vb-3bsw-4h-none.html More expensive https://www.audereaudio.com/pro-z-vb-4b-4h-none.html

East 3 knob might be a good option if you can fit the boards in the cavity as they're pretty big and connected to the pots.

Do kinda regret not incorporating "fingerblast" in my username now.

It depends how you shape your sound and what you want from it, lots of people are happy with stock preamps and are just looking to send a good sounding, clean signal to their amp, external preamp or desk. I do most of my tone shaping on the bass so need the onboard pre to cut/boost at frequencies my ears find pleasing. For me that usually means being able to cut excess treble without sounding too dull and maybe boost bass a tiny bit without sounding muddy. The annoying thing is when you find a preamp with features or a baked in sound you really like it's sometimes hard to switch to a different one, it's only a minority that are finding the Korean MTD preamps underwhelming and that's probably because they had an East or something in their previous basss and really liked it. At least we're not stuck in the 90s and early 2000s where cheaper onboard preamps sounded almost universally awful with harsh, noisy treble controls, just about everything is giggable these days. Modern problems eh?

That's a bargain. I ordered one of these a while ago but unfortunately it arrived completely dead, shame as it looked a neat little home practice combo.

We've used these guys for repairs before, fixed our old Mackie desk when Mackie themselves told us it was scrap: https://www.arranpaul.co.uk/service-repair/

Oof

Active pickups with a passive harness isn't a popular configuration but it does work well, I had active SD Lightnin' rods in my old fretless with regular passive wiring, sounded great. https://www.seymourduncan.com/resources/pickup/wiring-diagrams

The Android app is well outdated now by the looks of things, I use a Windows tablet anyway so will download it on that. Looks very useful thanks.

Say yes, sit back and have a pint and a laugh.

I did buy it for my daughter to use but she's not gonna learn how to set it up so it's down to me to read the manual and put a nice chain together for her. I don't usually like multi FX but it's a brilliant little thing, I'm gonna try the envelope filters out later and will probably grab one for myself if I like them. She needed a decent tuner pedal anyway so might as well get the whole shebang in a simiar sized box!

The idea behind the original Marcus Miller collaboration was for an affordable yet high quality bass with a great preamp that students could gig and record with, Marcus uses one every now and then (the other bassist in his band uses one regularly) but still gigs with his Fender sig most of the time, however IIRC he did spec the preamp and may have had some input into the pickup voicing. Essentially they were a bog standard Dame with in house hardware and different electronics, I assume these new basses are just a different flavour of the same ethos rather than being a lower tier copy of an artist's instrument. I think it's quite a novel way to do a sig, definitely better than the lower tier ones that an artist will never use (how many gigs have Troy Sanders or james Johnston done with their Squier sigs?) which are just standard cheapies with a bumped price tag. I'm not a fan of signature basses really but I can see the value in getting a prominent recording artist to spec things like preamp eq points and board radius etc. I think Marcus Miller also did the same for his Markbass head and people thought that was a big improvement over the stock eq.

I think the companies still have to be seen as protecting their trademarks and not abandoning them regardless of how they're affecting sales, I think they're registered over here as well. At the time Tanglewood etc would have been competing with OLP basses. Tbh the real shots of the Sire Z which show contouring look fine to me, certainly less like a toilet seat that a real MM 4 string.

Tanglewood and Vintage have been doing 3+1 (and 4+1 on the 5) for donkeys' years. Westfield, J&D and SX also did 3+1.

The noise is a little offputting and even if you're very careful with your technique it's still present, I'm going to see if I can lessen it with the 5khz brilliance control on my Fishman Platinum Pro. I've just received a Zoom MS60b today and briefly tried it with my Sinsonido, using the Fishman and Punch Factory patches (AcBsPre and OptComp) gets good results.

The next string I'm going to try are black nylons but ideally I'd be looking at no more heavier than 50-115, not sure how feasible thicker gauges would be with the Sinsonido headstock. Prices are off-putting though, looking at £70+£100 for Labella, D'addario or GHS.

I'll try an cobble something together after these strings have bedded in, being a nylon core they take a bit of playing in to hold their tuning, also why they don't work with magnetic pickups! I have similar strings on my little Ibanez Artcore parlour bass (D'Addario EXPPBB190GS) which is my most fun bass to play around the house. I think I got quite lucky fitting Aliexpress sources bridge/piezo arrangement as string balance seems to be fine whatever strings I use and the intonation is much better with the angled saddle which I tried to place as far back as possible, always an issue on the fretted Sinsonido as they tend to go a fair bit sharp up the neck.

That's probably more use to me than a volume control tbh, great idea.

Bought some Thomastik strings, arrived quickly and great guy to deal with!

Just got my Sinsonido strung up with Thomastik Acousticore strings designed for piezo equipped basses - they really suit the bass and are ideal if you want something quite lively but still retaining that mellow/acoustic vibe. Mine has a piezo bridge/analog workshop preamp but I imagine they'd work fine with the standard configuration. What strings are you guys using on the fretless version?

These don't do anything for me but I don't get the reactions, that sparkle one looks fine to me and the other pics just look like flat renders which don't show contouring and rounded edges. Ripping MM off a lot, Lakland off a bit but still looking different enough. Will most likely be a much better option than the financially comparable offering from Musicman.

I'll be redoing the wiring at the same time, got a box full of random pots and caps so I should be able to conjure up a P bass harness.