Beer of the Bass

Certainly, you're entitled to reservations about buying Chinese goods. That still doesn't give you any basis for claiming that they're made in labour camps in North Korea, when there is no evidence for that. The parent company behind Behringer and Bugera have their own plant in Guangdong Province which does not appear to be a labour camp.

[quote name='spacey' timestamp='1390736966' post='2348744'] On quality control, if makers are manufacturing in North Korea as most do now in the slave labour camps, how much pride would you have in your work if you had just been given 25 years hard labour for failing to name 20 current party officials when questioned. Not a Fking lot would be mine. [/quote] Which companies are manufacturing music gear in North Korea? I'm not aware of any so far. All of the Behringer and Bugera gear I've come across has been labelled "Made in China".

On a lesser budget, the Kent Armstrong toasters are good sounding pickups for the neck position. They're intended as guitar pickups, but Ric use the same toaster pickups on guitar and bass. WD music have them. [url="http://www.wdmusic.co.uk/replacement-toaster-pickup-front-2687-p.asp"]http://www.wdmusic.co.uk/replacement-toaster-pickup-front-2687-p.asp[/url]

The valve preamp one does look rather nice. I wonder if they were waiting for Genz to cease trading to avoid litigation? It does look like they've got LEDs behind the valves to make them look brighter though, which always looks naff IMO. Why do they do that? ECC83s don't usually glow as much as that! Although it could just be that the picture is a computer rendering...

The littler amp of the new Peaveys looks quite elegant really, with no flashy lights or knobs labelled "Kosmos", so I think they're aware that not everyone will love the one with the lights.

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1390667326' post='2348145'] Well, a Barefaced Big Baby 2 has been ordered... If it lives up to expectations, I can see two of these in my future, we will see. [/quote] Ooh, I look forward to hearing that one. I wonder how many gigs you'll really need both cabs for? Although I guess with three guitarists plus brass in SBK, you do need quite a bit of onstage volume at some gigs, especially with a dancing audience.

I do enjoy his playing, though I haven't always been a massive fan of his tone. Having said that, I liked his sound much better on this clip from 2013 than some of the other material I've heard. Not a trace of noodling either, which is great. And Carla Bley is always awesome!

I haven't done this, but if you've no intention of reusing the rosewood fingerboard, I'd be tempted to simply plane it off.

I wasn't very taken by it on acoustic, but on electric it reminded me of a Hohner Clavinet. That could be fun for certain kinds of part. It's not going to revolutionize the instrument, but it could be a fun thing to pull out for an overdub.

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1390258462' post='2343377'] You can tell by the color. Speakon 1/4" combination jacks are green. [/quote] This is true. They also have the word "combo" moulded into the plastic.

I've often idly wondered how low-powered a valve amp I could get away with in my band, given that I have a fairly efficient cab and a drummer whose volume tends towards the moderate. Certainly when I was using a 100 watter I never got it to the point of sounding gritty, though I've no experience with the LB.

I don't see it working for the meat and potatoes stuff, but there are a few high-end instruments I would be very curious to experience playing that I'm not in a financial position to consider buying. I'm not in the habit of trying out things in shops unless I'm considering a purchase - I'm a polite sort of chap (or try to be) and it just feels a bit cheeky. So I'd be quite open to the idea, in certain cases.

Thinking about it a little more, I'm going to bite the bullet and build a new neck. It's probably overkill, but it'll change the bass from being a bitsa with a homemade body to being a bass I built. Also, if I make it nice and stiff with a double action rod and CF reinforcement, it may help my B-string response, which isn't the greatest on this bass. I have a couple of metres of Fender sized fretwire knocking about already, and I think I can find a friend to borrow a router from. Now I need to source woods. The body blank was from David Dyke, and they were quite helpful so I may try them again.

I still have enough range on the bridge saddles for a string height I can live with, but necks with slightly less relief just seem a little more pleasant to play. As far as I can gather, the "normal" range of relief would be about half what I have.

I have a bass I built using an OLP 5 string neck, which is my main gigging instrument with one of my bands. While it's not obviously broken, the truss rod is unable to bring the neck straight enough, even when trying washers on the nut to give me more adjustment range. I have around 0.7mm of relief at the moment, which is playable but I'd like a bit less. The neck still has some relief with the strings off and truss rod slackened, and the rod doesn't change the relief even with the strings off. If it was a Fender sized neck, I'd just try a new neck, but there are almost no MM sized 5-string necks on the market (barring Status, but I can't afford those!). I have no back-up for this bass and very little budget to sort anything out. I'm loath to buy a different bass as I spent quite a while making the body for this one and it does sound good. As far as I can see, my options are as follows; -Live with it as is. It not unplayable, but it could be a lot better -Experiment with heat and clamping to straighten it out -If the rod is still ineffective, I could attempt surgery as per this thread; [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/160580-olp-mm3-broken-truss-rod-update/page__hl__olp"]http://basschat.co.u...e/page__hl__olp[/url] -Alternatively, I could think about building a new neck. I've done it once before, and I'm sure the tools I don't have I could borrow. What would anyone else do in this situation?

[quote name='Phil Starr' timestamp='1389617661' post='2336098'] It's more likely we will come up with a 1x8 design for this purpose, but it won't handle quite that much! [/quote] Would that be using the Faital 8" drivers that a couple of the US builders are using? I think my interest was piqued when I saw that the displacement should allow them to get as loud as many 10"s. Given that a 1x10" does me for a lot of my playing, and I use buses a lot, this could be very much of interest to me.

I've mentioned this here before, but I love Hugh Hopper's fuzz use on the Soft Machine stuff. I'm fairly sure he used a Shaftesbury Duo Fuzz, which was the same circuit as the Univox Superfuzz and Shin Ei FY6. I always wondered if this album might have been an influence on the Ben Folds five, with its fuzz bass and energetic piano. [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zvlOu4kT2Y"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zvlOu4kT2Y[/url]

I play guitar in a band which has had two basschatters on bass. When I joined, it was LawrenceH, and when he moved down south he was replaced by McNach. That's not a huge sample of the forum, but both are nice dudes and good bassists. I'm pretty sure basschatters have a higher throughput of basses and gear than other bassists though, as most of the non forum using bassists I know are one-bass guys.

The 1x12" seems like a good place to start which would cover a lot of different needs. Other things that might be interesting; -Something genuinely tiny for small rooms, practicing or as a personal monitor would be very cool, like a high quality 1x8". I could certainly use something like that for double bass in my acoustic project. -As others have suggested, a cab to get that heavily coloured, guitar driver sound that people like about the older 8x10" cabs would be interesting to a lot of players, and not catered for by many existing designs. Sort of like a smaller cab in a similar vein to the Barefaced 69er.

Some of the switch cleaning products leave a lubricant behind, which you don't want. I've successfully used plain Isopropyl alcohol on Spirocores and bass guitar strings, but I'd avoid using it on any sort of synthetic string. I had thought it would be fine on nylon, but it turned a set of black nylon (bass guitar) tapewounds charcoal coloured and killed them dead. If you do want to try Isopropyl, it's available in Maplins.

I have never been able to figure out how Dima has enough breath left to play trumpet after bouncing around like that!

Interesting handover shot there - was I trying to stab you with it? And that Fender Rumble combo is probably not the finest backline the bass has seen. It didn't exactly sound bad, but it was rather buried by the other things onstage. I had fun playing the bass though. I would have played it for more than one song, but the end of our set crept up on me..

I'm surprised that some of my home built bits of valve gear have never been an issue with pernickety venues, but then I'm not doing functions. While I'm perfectly happy that they're earthed and fused correctly and built to good standards regarding insulation, cable strain relief etc., there is nothing official to say that. I wonder if PAT testing them might be a good idea?

[quote name='dannybuoy' timestamp='1389210471' post='2331479'] Sounds cool, make it adjustable though if you can! Other alternative pedals with a built in high end roll off I know of are the Tonehammer (with AGS engaged), Diamond Compressor (controlled by a jumper inside the pedal), and the Markbass Super Booster (using the VLE control). I always ended up using a VT Bass set as flat as possible with low gain when running fuzz through a PA. [/quote] Adjusting the frequency would be a challenge with this filter topology, as it would involve changing four resistances simultaneously. A 4 pole, 3 way rotary switch would work though. I think I'll try the circuit on a breadboard to find the values I like best and then build it with no controls in the smallest box I can stuff it in.

I only use two pedals with my band (not counting a tuner), and one of them is a Univox Superfuzz clone which sounds great through my own amp but has evil high end fizz through a PA or any cab with a tweeter. With limited soundcheck time, sound guys will either just leave the unbearable fizz in the FOH sound, or cut so much treble that my clean signal has no definition. One solution to this would be to insist on a mic for my cab, but at most of the gigs I do that isn't a sensible option. A full amp simulator like a Sansamp might work, but I had the Behringer BDI121 for a while and really didn't get on with the core tone of it at all. In a minor brainwave I decided that all I really need is a box with a steep lowpass filter set at somewhere around 3-4KHz in order to cut the highs to something close to the response I'd get from a tweeterless cab but not mess with anything below that. Being DIY inclined, I looked at designs for guitar cab simulators. Most of these have the high end response I'm looking for, but also simulate the bass roll-off and mid scoop of a typical guitar cab, which I don't want. So what I'm going to try is basing my circuit on the Runoffgroove Condor circuit ([url="http://www.runoffgroove.com/condor.html"]http://www.runoffgroove.com/condor.html[/url]), but taking out the bridged-T and highpass filters to leave just the input buffer and lowpass filter. If I put this in a box with a parallel link on the input, I should be able to send a full-range signal to the backline and a lowpassed signal to the PA via a DI box. I'll post back when I've tried this out...