MartinB

The price of those adapters was already something of a joke. I use strips of veneer to reduce the hole size, same as @neepheid and Gerry Hayes.

These are worth considering as a Hipshot alternative:

How about some radioactive side dots?

https://www.reidtimber.co.uk/edc/luminous-tritium-side-dot-markers

Another vote for TC Electronic Spark Booster - the budget king of this sort of thing

Covers on a Precision look cool, and I never found that they got in the way - I just don't currently have a suitable bass to put them on. I can imagine the Jazz ones could be annoying due to the much larger footprint of the bridge cover though.

In the bits box, screws attached with masking tape

Out of curiosity, I picked up a very cheap second-hand mini electric:

Which is one of these, minus the amp and accessories: https://www.smythstoys.com/uk/en-gb/toys/arts-crafts-and-music/musical-instruments-and-karaoke/musical-instruments/80cm-electric-guitar-with-amp/p/110724.

19 3/4" scale, which makes it somewhere around 80% sized. The bridge was not only off-centre, but also too way close to the neck - hopelessly out of tune with itself, and impossible to intonate. I feel sorry for any child that owned this before me, and for anyone who had to listen to  them attempting to get a tune out of it!

So I moved the bridge position to the correct spot, and also shortened some of the intonation screws so that the saddles could be moved back far enough without the screws blocking the path of the strings. Put some 11-49 strings on to compensate for the short scale, and it tunes up and plays okay. It needs to be fretted with a light touch due to the low string tension; it's possible these things were intended to be tuned higher than E standard, although there's no mention of that on the product page. The nut is definitely a bit tall, but it's not glued in so that should be easy enough to fix when I get round to it.

The neck was unfinished and fairly rough, so that got a good sanding. The frets needed polishing, and although there were no protruding sharp ends, they were  a bit blocky and needed a rub down.

Paintwork is fine. Tuners are slightly stiff but perfectly functional. The volume pot works. I fully expected the bridge to have no ground wire, but I was wrong. No shielding paint inside. The pickup was probably ok, but I swapped it for a cheap rail humbucker to head off any noise.

I've played plenty of cheap Squiers and the like, and they've all been great - this thing is in another category altogether. The fact that there's a cut-out for the bridge in the scratchplate that is even further away from where it's supposed to be tells you something about the attention to detail. But attempting to rescue it was a fun, low-stakes project - and my nephew had a blast bashing away at it through a cranked amp! 😁

I wouldn't recommend buying one of these unless you can find one dirt cheap and you're prepared to work to make it playable. 

32 minutes ago, Cat Burrito said:

Raising money for our local hospice in a couple of weeks.

 

Heh, the Talbot! We used to go there as teenagers because they weren't too fussy about asking for ID 😁
I've made a small donation to Dorothy House in exchange for this unexpected trip down memory lane!

Spirit of Vintage now £44 (+ £10 postage) at Thomann

It it feels good, looks good, and makes you feel cool, then the Ibanez is the right bass for you 👍

54 minutes ago, Ducky said:

Last weekend I happened to stumble into a high-end guitar shop and tried playing a fender bass with a fender amp, and it sounded incredible. I don’t think my playing has ever sounded so clean, which led me to realise that it wasn’t me / my technique that’s the issue.

Take your own bass to the shop and try it through the same Fender amp. If it still sounds bad, then you'll know that a new amp is not the solution.

10 hours ago, Bankai said:

The Digbeth range has been around for a few years now and included a combo and a couple of heads, all hybrid with a tube pre-amp alongside a solidstate one and Class D power section. 

[...]

the ‘tube’ channel of the normal Digbeth models (which will remain in production) is renamed/replaced on foundry models with a footswitchable solidstate ‘drive’ channel instead.

There's no tube in the original Digbeth models - the second channel has tube-style drive but is solid state. This isn't a criticism though - they sound really good!

You could probably get someone to 3D-print you something similar for a lot less

e.g.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4876428

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4184813

48 minutes ago, wavemaker said:

What’s that bridge? Looks just like my cup of tea. 

It's a bit of a mystery! It came from ebay seller musicinternational and was listed as "4 String Electric J Bass or P Bass Bridge for Jazz/Precision Bass Guitar", but I haven't seen another one like it since.

Rays and skates can be hard to tell apart. Mine's not a StingRay - it's a CheapSkate! 😁

Squier Sonic Precision
Warman MM4 pickup

Retrovibe Stinger pre-amp

Custom scratchplate by earlpilanz (because I hacked out the pickup cavity by hand and it's not pretty 🙈)

Nice! That's like AliExpress prices but presumably with much better QC. The edges of that fretboard look seriously rolled!

Really enjoying Turnstile's set, aside from the pointless synth interludes.
Olivia Rodrigo was a lot of fun when the whole band were involved - proper 90s sounding. It's a shame that the production on her recordings is so bland in comparison.

17 hours ago, Sibob said:

what the HX Stomp then receives in the way of phantom power isn’t damaging, although I’ve heard it ruins the tone/signal. All that to say that you’ll HEAR that PP is on before you do any damage

I've read the the same thing here and there, and always along the lines of "it degrades the sound" but with no specifics. I've just tested my Stomp with phantom power from my audio interface, and it sounded the same to me either way 🤷‍♂️. It also didn't explode, which was nice!

Depending on stage layout and who's providing the bass amp, I sometimes use a short TRS - XLR cable, and other times an Orchid Electronics DI box

20 hours ago, Downunderwonder said:

Work around round 2: install a switch to cut out the speaker.

Plugging anything into the headphone socket on the rear panel should disable the speaker - even just a dummy plug

14 minutes ago, Wolfram said:

Yes but then you lose the preamp and tone stack colour. 

Yep, that's why it's an unhelpful design. You could do something daft like a DI box in the effects loop followed by a clean boost that would act as your master volume, but (a) it could introduce noise, and (b) you shouldn't have to go to these lengths

10 hours ago, Cosmo Valdemar said:

they're charging another tenner on top of the advertised price for "service fees" 😡

Well that's made the decision for me

8 hours ago, Downunderwonder said:

Use the fx send to another DI.

The fun thing about these amps is that the FX loop also comes after the master volume 🙃
Really the only option is to stick a DI box between the bass and the amp

Quote

The notion of Stadium having forty new effects that you don't get in HX doesn't really make sense, because HX should have those effects as well. So no, there aren't any new effects in 1.0 for Helix Stadium. There clearly WILL be more effects, and the goal is, the plan is, is that those effects, if appropriate, if they're not completely insane DSP-wise, those would also end up in existing Helix and HX products as well.
 

We're building the effects library not to somehow sunset Helix - that's never been the plan. But we've been building this effects library so that we have a platform to build off of with Stadium

Obviously he'd be mad to say "everythng is definitely being added to the old Helixes forever, 100% guaranteed". But given their track record, I'd personally be surprised if they immediately started acting like the current models no longer exist. Whereas I'll be _very_ surprised if the Darkglass Anagram is still getting updates 10 years down the line...

Yep, same problem

They've said that any new effects that they add to the Stadium will also be added to the rest of the Helix line where possible:

12 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

Anything mangled by YouTube's compression then played through little phone, laptop or PC speakers is unlikely to sound anything like it does IRL.

Crap speakers are going to cause problems for sure. But other than that, things that sound bad on Youtube are more likely to be down to a bad recording than anything to do with data compression: https://jimlillmusic.com/does-youtube-mangle-audio/