Beer of the Bass

My band Jen and the Gents are heavily capo reliant, as while our singer has the singing and songwriting thing down pretty well, her guitar playing is kind of simplistic. Personally I wouldn't dream of criticising a player for using a capo, especially if the guitar isn't the main focus of what they're doing - there's a lot to be said for just getting out there and playing. I would hate it if all those singer/songwriter types who play just enough guitar to flesh out the songs stayed at home because someone deemed that their guitar playing didn't meet some arbitrary standard.

I've seen it mentioned that some of the existing cabs labelled as transmission lines (like Euphonic Audio) are too short to be true transmission lines and behave more like ported cabs. What does the port stuffing do in these cabs? Subjectively, the cabs "work" but it would be interesting to know what's going on with this design.

[quote name='steve' timestamp='1370893231' post='2107127'] you could always pick up some hide glue and a couple of clamps and have a go yourself? [/quote] This is what I've done - a couple of these clamps [url="http://www.mehr-als-werkzeug.de/product/705708/Boxwood-Gluing-Clamp-Bass.htm"]http://www.mehr-als-werkzeug.de/product/705708/Boxwood-Gluing-Clamp-Bass.htm[/url] and some hide glue I cadged off my brother (who is a guitar builder) and I'm set up to reglue my seams any time I need to. I play an older bass, and the occasional popped seam seems to be part of the package. It wouldn't be hard to devise your own clamps with some threaded rod either.

Not sure about "best ever", but this was a bit of a revelation for me when I first heard it. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hypFSAKxC8[/media]

At this stage, you don't have much to lose by replacing the capacitor with one of the same rating and seeing what happens. I'd try that first.

[quote name='burno70' timestamp='1370732274' post='2105052'] Got the Little Bastard today - brilliant, brilliant amp, genuinely blown away by it. Got band praccy tomorrow and dying to try it with the super 12T but I remember speaking with Alex about amp recommendations and I thought he said a full valve amp wouldn't work well with the cab - unless I'm completely mistaken as this was over a year ago. Any thoughts as to why this might be? Would there be any danger of harming either amp or cab? (Sorry to the OP for the derail) [/quote] I'm sure Alex will chime in and clear this up, but I wonder if it's about the impedance curve? Ported cabs have spikes in the impedance either side of the porting frequency, and if one of these falls in a region where the signal has a lot of energy, it can be hard on the amp as it is seeing too high an impedance at that frequency. In practice, lots of people drive valve amps hard into ported cabs without problems, but this is why sealed cabinets are often considered ideal for valve amps.

[quote name='squire5' timestamp='1370261399' post='2098175'] This comes after he was seen riding a dog round a pub,claiming "its what rock stars do!" [/quote] I hope the dog was OK. Liam's lucky he didn't get a chunk taken out of him!

[quote name='mickster' timestamp='1370532520' post='2102324'] I expected this world to be much more full of creative slacker types who get really really passionate about which is the best Fall album or whether Soft Machine actually got better after Hugh Hopper was replaced by Ken Bebbington etc. [/quote] The Hugh Hopper/Robert Wyatt era of Soft Machine is clearly the best IMO, though the first album with Kevin Ayers is not without its charms. Have I missed the point of this thread or what?

You too? Jen and the Gents have popped up a couple of times in the background of scenes. I think Jen punted a CD at somebody. We were paid the princely sum of five pounds for the privilege! I haven't watched it since 1997, so I'm taking the rest of the bands word for it.

I'm just back from a nice outdoor gig with Jen and the Gents at the Meadow Festival in Edinburgh. Despite showers, it went really well, a few folk danced and lots bought CDs to take home. Supplied backline was a surprisingly good sounding TC BC500 2x10" combo, and my only real gripe was an excessively loud and trebly guitar in the monitors. I'm not used to stages with some room to move around - I kept striding up and down just so I felt like I was using the space a bit...

As an aside, does anyone have an idea how much the output of a typical valve amp is reduced when running into an impedance mismatch? I've been looking into the subject in relation to my guitar amp, and found plenty of sources saying that the amp may not achieve it's rated power, but no actual measurements of how large an effect this is. Although I appreciate it will vary between amps, and with different speaker impedance curves...

[quote name='iiipopes' timestamp='1369939603' post='2094789'] Finally, use 12-gauge strings. 10's and 11's are too flimsy to hold a good balance of tension to keep it in tune. As for me, too high maintenance, too little use. I don't have whammys on my guitars. No, I don't own a Strat, either. [/quote] I wouldn't say that 12 gauge strings are essential with a Bigsby, although they may help. Mine is stable enough with 11-49 or 10-52 sets that I don't consider it a problem. I have friends with non-trem guitars who have to tune between songs more often than I do.

Has the top on that bass been replaced? The f-holes look quite crudely done and it's unusual to have purfling on the back and not the top - I wonder if someone has replaced a damaged top with a fairly rough looking bit of plywood? As said above, I suspect it would cost more to have it sorted by a luthier than the end result would be worth, but a DIYer might get it going well enough to play, so don't skip it!

Those Adeson pickups do look the part. If you went for the solid topped version, I suspect no-one but the most diehard Vox collector would notice any difference in appearance.

Just to go back to the earlier digression, the double bass tailpieces with variable or compensated length aren't about adjusting either the pitch of the playing part of the string or it's compliance. The afterlengths behind the tailpiece on a double bass vibrate a surprising amount when playing, and their tuning affects the sound of the bass, especially with the bow. On my own double bass, I had a terrible wolf-tone on one note, which was almost entirely tamed when I added a small weight on the A string afterlength, tuning it so that the afterlength resonated at the pitch of the dodgy note when bowed. I don't pretend to understand these interactions in great depth, but I'd guess that this acted to absorb some energy at that frequency to even out the response of the bass.

[quote name='Kev' timestamp='1369854038' post='2093605'] If you remember how cheap these were when they were sold new, you probably wouldn't be surprised at all! [/quote] This is true, I remember seeing them in Victor Morris in Glasgow in the 90s. I was thinking more of the price they fetch nowadays!

Rickenbacker toasters are six pole pickups originally intended for guitar, and they sound very good indeed, so it's quite possible that the right guitar pickup could do a fine job. It looks like your mounting screws are further apart than on a single coil guitar pickup, so you might need some ingenuity to mount guitar pickups in there without also making a new pickguard.

If you're coming from another branch of electronics, looking at magnetic guitar pickups may require an adjustment in outlook as there is no single ideal to aim for. A full set of electronic, magnetic and physical measurements of the pickup could certainly give you a good idea of how high the output might be, where the resonant peak is when connected to a given impedence, whether any treble frequencies are lost to eddy currents and whether the sensing window is wide enough to cause cancellation of the higher harmonics of the string. This would put you in a good position to predict the various characteristics of the sound, or to understand why different pickups sound the way they do, but "good" or "bad" are solely in the head of the listener. There are a great many cheaply made and haphazardly designed pickups which have become highly sought after for their particular unique sound, like Danelectro lipsticks or Teisco gold foils, so the distinction between "Good Branded" or "Cheap Crappy" is not always a useful one.

The one thing I always do when amp sharing is to put a bit of tape across the top with "NO DRINKS ON THE AMP, THANKS" written in big black marker pen.

The trouble is, quite a few aspects of pickup construction which can affect the sound can't be measured just by looking at the resistance and inductance of the coil. I have two sets of strat pickups which sound quite different but have the same DC resistance and (as far as I can tell without a micrometer) likely have the same gauge wire and approximate number of windings. The two sets sound quite different. Why? One set is scatter-wound on weaker alnico II magnets and constructed using flatwork so the inner windings are closer to the magnets, the other set is regularly wound, with alnico V magnets and a plastic bobbin which leaves a gap between the magnets and coil. The former (expensive) set is mellower sounding than the latter (cheap) set and has a different character to the highs, but to be quite honest, the cheap ones don't sound worse, just a bit different. The differences in coil winding pattern and magnetic structure would certainly be measurable with the right equipment, and there's quite a bit of discussion of this over at the ampage pickup makers forum if this is a topic that interests you.

I repaired a green Russian Muff for a friend which had more than one bad solder joint, so it's definitely a weak spot on these. Actually I was surprised how shonky the insides looked for something which is considered such a holy grail of fuzz! It did sound good though...

Once the setup is dialled in, mine is pretty stable. I have a modified three saddle telecaster bridge with notches at the back for the strings to pass over, and apply a little bit of lubricant at the saddles when I change strings (I'm currently using woodwind cork grease, just because I had some handy). When used for vibrato, it's spot-on but as mentioned above, you need to tweak the arm to get it to settle again after a dive bomb. I really enjoy the bigsby - at home I like to crank up the tremolo and reverb on my amp, hit a minor chord with some bigsby wobble and pretend I'm soundtracking a David Lynch film!

Just in case you're inclined towards a bit of DIY, Mr Deck has published the schematic for the series 2 HPF pre. He unambiguously states he's happy for people to use the schematic to build their own. Its a simple but elegant design, and I reckon anyone who builds their own stomp boxes could knock one up easily enough. I intend to build one for myself some time. The link to the schematics is here; [url="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxocGZ0ZWNobGxjfGd4OjQyNGJhOWE3YzdjMDY0ODg"]https://docs.google....OWE3YzdjMDY0ODg[/url]

I'm entertained that even Musicman's official distributor keep misspelling Stingray as "Stringray"!

Is that video some kind of joke I'm not getting?