bnt

Ooh, that’s lovely. This is the design that Harley Benton was “inspired by” for their Enhanced MP series, the one I got because I was cheap and looking for something I could mod. If I ever get gigging again, I can definitely see one of these in my future, maybe a 5-er in Greenburst. 😎

A Harley Benton bass back in April, a guitar a couple of months ago, and just today I finally placed an order I've been meaning to place for months now: a proper pedalboard, a few more pedals, and some strings & bits, all from Gear4Music. Funding courtesy of a gift debit card from my employer, which has been really nice to have. It's got to do double duty as a guitar pedalboard too, since I'm getting in to that too, so I got some inexpensive guitar pedals at the same time (compressor, fuzz and phaser), all mini size from their house "SubZero" line. It seems that the "bass versions" of pedals seem to cost more, but the fears that guitar effects suck the life out of bass are kind-of overblown and don't apply to all effects types e.g. I rarely hear it about compressors or phasers. Distortion pedals, maybe, which is why I specifically chose a fuzz with a dry blend control. These will all feed in to my existing tc electronics SpectraDrive, which can act as a DI and headphone practice amp evev if i don't need its own compressor & drive facilities at the time.

I have the almost cheapest one from Thomann and am generally happy with it. I don't expect miracles, and prefer to tune with harmonics. But I agree it's a bad idea to leave it on all the time, and would take it off if playing live.

I did it a few months ago on an old inexpensive bass. Even after heating, there was some flaking of the wood around the frets. I thought about veneers or plastic, but decided to use a dark wood filler that dried slightly lighter in colour than the fretboard. The fret slots don’t reach the edges of the fretboard, which complicated things but meant that I didn’t have to worry about the edges when it came to sanding. I haven’t sanded it down as much as I could have, so it’s a bit steampunk if you look closely, and the nut needs more filing down, but so far it’s rather playable.

The bridge is actually pretty straightforward, it just came with no instructions. Each bridgepiece has a height adjustment screw and a locking screw. It's possible to unscrew the adjustment screw too far, so that the bridgepiece can't be raised by the screw, but all you need to do is lift it a little by hand and tighten the screw again. I was playing the guitar again last night, and I can't get over just how light it is. I bet a guitar purist would find fault with the pickups, and I think it could benefit from more shielding, but very playable. PS - mods, when I started this thread I didn't realise that the forum has a Guitars section. It's kind-of hidden away at the bottom of the page which is understandable, I suppose.

That pic wasn't there when I ordered the guitar. They changed the guitar during production, they added some extra string clamps on the headstock as in the "living room" pictures. I've been very busy at work and haven't played much, but so far I like it. The little tool is an Allen key, you can use a standard Allen key if one is handy. Fingers work on some strings if they're strong enough, but the tuners are tight and close together.

Browsing ads here in Ireland, spotted this for sale. The seller might be open to shipping, it appears. It’s a Warwick Thumb JD Bass from 1987.

DV247? I remember when they were Digital Village, then kind-of forgot about them after I moved to Dublin. I'm out of the cheap Tele market for the foreseeable, though, since I went in a different direction, as per the "Headless Guitars" thread.

I’ve had a wide DiMarzio ClipLock in red since 1990, and it looks nearly brand new. I haven’t used it non-stop, but it hasn’t let me down. This is what Steve Vai uses with his JEM guitars, which are not light, and he does the throw around the body thing.

Ordered Thursday night, arrived from the UK on Saturday morning, which is quite amazing considering how cheap the shipping was. First impressions are good. Neck is very lightly finished, no thick lacquer there. I'm playing it through my old Korg AmpWorks box for starters, but want to put together a combined bass / guitar pedalboard at some point. The bridge ... I think you need an Engineering degree to figure out how it works, so it's a good thing I have one. 😎

About an hour after I posted in the "I want a cheap Telecaster" thread last night, I basically went in the opposite direction and ordered one of these: It's a kind-of Strandberg clone, but with some major differences. The headstock is where the ball-ends go, and the string ends attach at the bridge. At first I thought the bridge was going to be like the NS Design basses, but instead there appears to be some kind of clamping system inside the bridge. My first decent bass was a headless Hohner B2V, and my step-brother was inspired by that to get the equivalent Hohner guitar, the G2T. The Steinberger Spirit guitars today are basically the same. I've never stopped liking headless instruments, and have been pleased to see them come back in to fashion, but they cost more than I wanted to spend. Harley Benton (Thomann) have their Dullahan models, named after the headless horseman of Irish folklore that inspired the legend of Sleepy Hollow, but they're quite expensive and have some quirks (I hear), such as fiddly bits of metal that can fall off and get lost. There are also many Strandberg clones from Chinese sellers - Chandbergs? - and if you start spending real money the other main competitor is Kiesel (the company formerly known as Carvin). I'm a pretty bad guitarist, as guitarists go, and Plini has nothing to fear from me. I was seriously considering a Telecaster, which is also a compact instrument, but this jumped out at me and looks like good value, so one will be here with me early next week. I know we have headless bass fans here, but do we have headless guitar fans too?

More Purple, this time in the Squier Classic Vibe range:

If all else fails, you could order a PB Shorty from Thomann, under £100 and you’d get a free bass body with the neck. ☺️

Um ... sandblasted Teles at a nice price? There's a green one too. Be still, my beating wallet:

Here's a bloke who dropped some Aguilar pickups in to the EHB1005MS, and he seems pretty happy with the results:

Yeah - the best comparison I can think of is with classical music. TfTO is like four short Romantic / Impressionist symphonies, and you don’t tend to listen to several of those in a row. The post above got me wanting to listen to the album again, which I just did: only the first album (two tracks) today.

TfTO is a lot, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there. You should try it, but my advice is to pace yourself. Reviewers treated it like a standard album and tried to listen to the whole shebang in one sitting, which isn’t a good idea in my opinion. For example, The Remembering features some of Rick Wakeman’s all time best work.

Well, if I think about sustain and tone, I hark back to my previous reply that mentioned how energy is lost, absorbed in to the body etc., and the properties of the material means that it doesn't happen evenly across all frequencies. Some frequencies sustain more than others -> there's your effect on tone.

Case in point:

I was always under the impression he used the Mouradian on Owner Of A Lonely Heart, and articles like this seem to support that. I think I can hear it on Big Generator tracks like I’m Running.

If I take a geeky engineer-type view, than (like most things) it all comes down to energy. You put energy in to the strings when you hit them, and it's dissipated in various ways: starting with the acoustic sound coming off the bass. I could go on in too much detail, but something like a Steinberger, or neck-through Status or Modulus Graphite, would be my ideal configuration, because they are the most stiff (carbon fibre composite) and have no neck joint. I still agree with the Modulus Graphite folks, who started the whole carbon fibre bass thing, that stiffness translates to less energy loss and therefore more sustain. We talk about "high mass" bridges, but if you had one made of lead, it would probably suck the life out of the sound. So it's not about weight as such, but more about stiffness. Energy can also be lost in the connections too, which is why I would prefer no neck joint at all. The energy loss is not uniform across the frequency spectrum either: a structure has one or more resonant frequencies, which depend on the mass and the stiffness of the material as well as its dimensions. Lower and stiffer mean higher resonant frequencies, so (as I understand it) something like a Steinberger XL (being so light and stiff) has resonant peaks well above the bass range, meaning it doesn't absorb bass frequencies as much. But that evenness may be why a Steinberger bass sound has less "character" than e.g. a Fender Jazz.

I wouldn't say I'm obsessed, but I felt I wasn't getting enough and I wanted more when I was looking at a bass about six months ago. The one I bought, the Harley Benton MP-4 Enhanced (this but blue) has a couple of features that work towards that end: heavy bridge with through-body stringing, a zero fret, and chunky construction that means it's happy with quite heavy strings (EXL160BT, 50-120). I didn't know what the pickup would be like, but it's powerful, which means I have it further from the strings than usual, which also helps. Why? I don't always want it, but I have control e.g. muting is an option. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

The thing about Progressive is that there can be huge variations in the music, not just between albums, but even between songs on the same album. So you can't take one album, never mind one song, and think you've heard Yes. You mentioned the song Going For The One, the title track of an album that also includes the very different Awaken and Turn Of The Century. Many have praised Awaken as their finest work, but I would disagree and go back six years to The Yes Album and its opening song Yours Is No Disgrace. The lyrics are more on point (anti-war) and the music is fresher, particularly the middle solo section. which is just a great composition, musically. It's in songs like this where we can more clearly hear what Chris was doing: he had a musical background as a chorister, and used counterpoint very effectively: more exciting than just sitting on the root, but more focused and relevant than walking bass in jazz. He developed a reputation for spending huge amounts of time in the studio, fussing over every note, but it got us results like the section after the 5 minute mark. The bass is loud, doing its own thing, yet still locked with the drums and supporting the music. Chris is doing this while singing complicated harmonies too. I'd never heard anything like it, and it's still something I aspire to. Oh, and 90125 is a great album too, I don't care who disagrees. 😝

The tall bloke with the long guitar is 70 today. I honestly thought he was older, it means he co-founded Genesis when he just was 16-17. Now he's one of the richest (and nicest) people in Surrey. 🎂

I like that idea - I have some weird synth apps on my iPad, such as Synclavier Go, a recreation of the Synclavier II digital synth that was in all the top studios in the 1980s but cost as much as a house. Tony Banks even took one on the road with Genesis and it's all over their 1980s albums. One of the presets, "Galactic Cymbal", is the weird sound at the start of Michael Jackson's Beat It. About Behringer - over the last few years they've been on a mission to recreate some classic analogue synths at much lower prices and with some modern features added. Sometimes their recreations are too good and replicate some of their flaws too, such as the quirks of the MiniMoog interface. Their Pro-1 is a version of the Sequential Circuits synth that e.g. Vince Clarke used heavily with Yazoo and early Depeche Mode, which was more flexible and usable, I thought. But their most impressive synth so far, I think, is the DeepMind, which started as an attempt to recreate the Roland Juno-60, but they kept going and added capabilities that are far more up-to-date. So it became its own thing and left the original far behind. The 6-voice model is a bargain, which I hope to get at some point.