lemmywinks

Depending on the type of plastic I've been using small (and very carefully applied) amounts of solvents for repairs, making sure any excess is immediately cleaned off. More like chemical plastic welding  than glueing, I've mainly used it for old retro laptop parts but also for other bits around the house, seems to create a very strong bond which doesn't have the typical glue line.

8 hours ago, Yoshka123 said:

I've just bought a Hohner Pro JJ from 1988 and it looks like the pre amp and switch are faulty.

 

These pics that you have posted lemmywinks will help me loads!

 

Thanks!

Can just send you the preamp if you want, I have always either used the bass passive or with a Bartolini buffer pre when I had a piezo bridge installed so have no use for it.

Great restoration, looks really smart.

1 hour ago, SteveXFR said:

To be honest, I associate Rex more with Spector than a Thunderbird 

Seems to be Gibson's MO over the last couple of years, endorsig big name artists at the end of their careers despite them having used other brands throughout their heyday. The Dave Mustaine sigs had some terrible reviews when they came out as both the Gibson and the £1k+ Epi were full of flaws, obviously the artists' instruments don't come off the same production line ours would but they just looked sub standard at any price point.

On 16/01/2024 at 20:50, Cato said:

 

Seems to be the way Gibson are going with the brand.

 

The recent Epiphone Korina Flying Vee and Explorer models were only a couple of hundred quid cheaper than the equivalent Gibson models.

 

There's been a few Epiphone models over the last year or so at 1k plus.

 

I reckon the Epiphone brand is being repositioned into the upper mid range price bracket while US Gibsons are undergoing corresponding dramatic price increases.

 

It'll be interesting to see what happens to the more budget end of the range, whether they keep the Epiphone branding across the range or introduce something new to seperate the cheaper models from the 1k+ models.

People are paying the money for them though although it does seem to be sigs and short runs mostly. A mate of mine is currently looking for a single pickup Firebird and made an £800 offer on a Joe Bonermaster sig he saw on eBay, it eventually sold for £1.1k. Another mate has his LP sig which now goes for a couple of hundred more than he paid new for it, I've played it and it's no better than a Korean LP Epi you can pick up any day of the week.

It's weird and I don't like it.

11 hours ago, tauzero said:

The EHBs only seem to have had a few different finish options added, and that's almost all for the 150x series. No fretless options than the 1005 - no 4-string, no 150x fretless. The 126x remains a single-bass range when it could be expanded to effectively allow the 100x range to have nicer finishes while keeping the lower cost Bart pickups. It seems like a bit of an opportunity missed.

I think part of the issue is that when you do standard and multiscale options there has to be a narrower range, especially as these are already pretty niche being headless and when you add fretless into the mix they can't go wild with different finishes. It's frustrating but understandable, they're gonna sell way more SR basses than EHB although I would like to see the fretless with the 1265 finish.

It would be good if they brought some of the lower cost (but still nice) stained finishes over from the SR range like the SVM on the 300, TSU on the 400 or black stained burst on the 600 series. Couple that with the CND, T1 or Powerspans to further keep costs down and they could probably still hit that ~£900 price point or even lower if they use a veneer on a slab body with no chambering.

The Antique Brown 6er is nice, not available as a 5 though.

There's a guy on TB who stripped his blue EHB 1505MS, kinda want that finish really as it's the best looking EHB I've seen.

RIght I want this but stained a little darker:

1 minute ago, Al Krow said:

 

Very true!

 

The one surprise to me came at a recent corporate gig with a younger audience than we're normally in front of (mostly 21 to 23 y/o's). I was concerned how relevant our set list was going to be for them, but they really seemed to love it and I was actually a bit shocked that the song requests from the floor, given their ages, was for more Blondie, ABBA and Queen! And they seemed to know all the words as well as we did!

 

LA Mixtrax (@lamixtrax) • Instagram photos and videos

 

Maybe we, and the great tunes of the 60s to '00s, aren't quite as obsolete as we might be fearing just yet?

My daughter is 13 and loves Abba, Queen and Bowie.

On 07/01/2024 at 18:15, TimR said:

 

 

I had a car for 2 months recently. My insurance alone was over £50 a month. The VED - £15 a month. MoTs are close on £50 a year now.

 

An oil and filter change, even if you do it yourself is going to be close on £200 a year. 

 

Then you are losing money on depreciation that you need to put away into savings ready to buy your next car. 

 

I really don't think people realise how much they're spending on their cars. It's one of those slow drip things.

 

HMRCC allow 45p a mile for a reason. 

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

13 hours ago, tauzero said:

 

They're great little things. Life is even easier if you create patches using the (free!) Tonelib-Zoom program.

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.

6 hours ago, sandy_r said:

 

That's interesting - let us know how you get on with the Sinsonido -> MS60B

 

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!

2 hours ago, Maude said:

I confused as to how they're all Marcus Miller signatures. 

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.

7 hours ago, AndyTravis said:

Not sure vintage/sx/tanglewood would harm the SUB/Sterling sales as much as Sire…

 

and vintage/tanglewood are much more a UK concern.

 

Mind you, looking more like Nemo than a Stingray may keep these on the shelf rather than harming anyone else’s sales.

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.

7 hours ago, AndyTravis said:

I think Ernie Ball will pull the plug on the 3+1

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.