Beer of the Bass

[quote name='timmo' timestamp='1366979475' post='2059782'] Well, that is what i was thinking. If it was a big rig, i could understand someone wanting it, if the story was substantiated.It would be good to do gigs through his amps.But a 30w, you would never be able to show it off properly [/quote] It seems counterintuitive when you're used to high powered bass amps, but this is a guitar amp. Despite being "only" 30 watts, an AC30 is definitely a big-gig amp, and could easily be way too loud on the club circuit.

Unfortunately, Edinburgh council is clamping down on them, even though the ones have been to haven't really caused any bother to anyone (or less than your average student saturday night flat party, anyway).

If the gear side of things is all sorted, I'd be looking at all those other things which could help a band, like doing a bit of recording, getting a backdrop made, pressing up CDs, shooting a video etc.

My eight string is a dodgily converted precision copy, but I've found that the ready-made sets of strings are heavier than I'd like. I've got a .040 to .100" set on the low strings and my octave strings are .016, .025, .035 and .045" bought as singles. The slightly lowered tension makes things that bit more comfortable. I rarely take mine out on a gig, but it's great with some overdrive for a different texture when we record.

I reckon nylon is only the way to go if both daughter and teacher want to go the classical route. A well set up steel string isn't really any harder to play and fits in to most forms of popular music rather more readily. Having said that, I started on nylon string, took classical lessons through my teens and now don't even feel the urge to own a nylon string, so this is very much a personal viewpoint. The reading side of those lessons was very useful though.

If we're talking about the same "clank", the action and your right hand technique are a big part of it, but a big EQ boost around 2KHz really brings it out too. The classic (Fender, Alembic et.al) mid-scoop EQ has the scoop centred about 500Hz, so if used judiciously, it can indeed help you to hear the upper mid clanky region more clearly.

When I used to use an EUB, I had a Boss OC2 and a homebuilt envelope filter (from the circuits in Craig Andertons Electronic Projects for Musicians book). The filter along with the bow could create a sound akin to a goose being strangled, which I quite enjoyed from time to time.

I think the most elegant solution will either be a different tuner or the diago isolator adaptor [url="http://www.diago.co.uk/adaptors/isolator.html"]http://www.diago.co....s/isolator.html[/url] If I was to go the different tuner route, I'd have to bring my pedalboard to the shop and try the tuners together with my setup to be certain it'll do the job, which might be a bit of a faff. I think part of the issue is that the Super Fuzz is so gainy that it's particularly sensitive to power supply mankiness. I could also sell the Johnny Shredfreak PSU and get one of these with isolated outputs; [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_powerplant_junior.htm"]http://www.thomann.d...lant_junior.htm[/url]

[quote name='paul_5' timestamp='1366643046' post='2055337'] I'd recommend powering the valve pedal with its own supply. It won't solve your noise issue, but those bad boys draw MASSIVE amounts of current! [/quote] The valve pedal is mains powered, so no worries there. It occurs me that if I was going to abandon pedal tuners entirely and have the fuzz as the only 9v powered box, I'd almost be as well sticking with ye olde PP3s for the fuzz...

Ah, googling around, it's apparently quite common when daisy-chaining tuners or other digital pedals with analogue pedals, especially gainy ones. People have reported the same thing with the Boss TU-2 or TC Polytune. So the HB may not be unique in having this problem. It's still a pain though!

I'm re-jigging my pedal board, which is going to consist of just my home built valve overdrive (which can be found in the build diaries section), my Univox Super Fuzz clone and a tuner pedal. My power supply for the fuzz and tuner is one of the discontinued Johnny Shredfreak ones, with a daisy chain cable. At the moment my tuner is a Harley Benton TU100 cheapie from Thomann which works very well by itself. However, I thought people might like a heads-up that this tuner does not behave well when the power supply daisy chained with other pedals, either using a daisy chain cable or the power-through socket. It seems like the tuner is dumping a load of noise on the power supply ground, causing a layer of really nasty noise when the fuzz is switched on. If I run them both off the same battery using the tuner's power-through socket (ruling out the PSU), I still get the noise, but if I run one or both of them off a battery without the daisy chain, the noise stops, suggesting that the power supply link between the two is causing the problem. I'm not about to fork out on an isolated power supply just to make my £20 tuner work, so I just thought I'd make it known; don't buy this tuner if you want to daisy chain your power supply! Are there any cheap-ish tuners known to work OK with daisy-chained supplies?

In my smaller builds like preamps, I like using those small pre-made tagboards like Burman used (ampmaker sell them), but some larger caps don't fit the spacing too well. Personally I found eyelets to be a bit of a pain in the bum on the one amp I built using them, and another one I've repaired. They're easy enough to assemble and work with, but if you need to re-work them, getting under the board to remove excess solder from the underside of the holes is a hassle. I'd love to do a big bass amp like this myself some day, but the cost of iron is putting me off!

[quote name='bobbass4k' timestamp='1366562682' post='2054085'] And to be perfectly frank, that isn't helped by mixed signals from the mod team. I have seen many mods contribute jokes and other comments that contribute to or propagate the discussion in threads that are ultimately locked by a mod (sometimes the same mod), occasionally with a citation of the "try and avoid religion, politics, and anything sexist please" "rule". I appreciate that the mods are also users and want to participate in threads but it can sometimes appear that they are operating on a double standard, or that the judgement of a thread becoming unacceptable is made on a whim rather than by an established set of rules. [/quote] This is very true. Although it's their site and their call, a little consistency on this would be appreciated. As an example, there was that thread a couple of days ago, essentially mocking a trans woman. This is a form of sexism and not something I'm comfortable seeing on here (which I believe you pointed out on the thread, Bob), but I noticed a member of the mod team blithely joining in the "banter". I know mods/admins are only human and all that, but I think the role does come with an increased responsibility to think carefully before posting.

[quote name='warwickhunt' timestamp='1366542472' post='2053682'] The matter of complaints, grief, shyte flying about (not that I have encountered it) is likely as not simply related to the number of members now registered. Where in the early days there weren't so many of us, you'd statistically have had few instances for grief but as numbers have grown, it would seem obvious that the quantity of incidents will increase. With more people communicating with 'more people' you've got a greater potential for friction and a greater variety of reasons to get fractious. No idea how you resolve it mind! [/quote] I think you're on to something there. In the several years I've been on here, there are at least a couple of members who I've had disagreements with in OT, yet after reading their posts on other topics, I come to realise that they're OK people who I'm actually glad we have around on the forum. I still hold a different set of views from them, but that's not such a problem. As the number of members increases, it gets harder to reach that level of understanding of where individual members are coming from, so the spats increase.

I've got some old Germanium diodes that look a lot like the top photo, and I've used a couple of them in a Superfuzz clone. They work well as clipping diodes in pedals, as they seem to clip in a softer way than silicone diodes, though you end up with lower output due to the lower forward voltage. Also, I wonder if the ones with the 91 might be OA91?

[quote name='Dave Vader' timestamp='1366277590' post='2050340'] Yeah, but they won't let me have an in phase middle pickup for my strats, so i had to go expensive custom bulldogs (which are lovely btw) can't be doing with that pansy out of phase middle pickup mush. ironically i sold some lovely old hohner standards that were in phase and sounded great because I thought they were cheap crap. I was young, and stupid. [/quote] I am confused. Most modern strat pickups have a reverse wired, reverse magnetic polarity middle pickup so it cancels hum when used with the neck or bridge, but the output should still be in phase if they're installed correctly. An RWRP middle pickup shouldn't sound any different other than cancelling hum in the 2 and 4 positions. If your middle pickup is truly out of phase with the other two, could you not just reverse the two wires from the middle pickup?

[quote name='MiltyG565' timestamp='1366216175' post='2049750'] Nope, when I touch my plastic plectrum against my strat pickup, it does make a noise through the amp. It's definitely not invisible to it. [/quote] Almost all magnetic pickups are at least slightly microphonic, depending on how well potted they are. Unless it's extremely loosely wound and unpotted (to the point where you could talk into it), it's not going to get very much at all from a thin sheet of vibrating plastic which is not even touching it. Try putting a classical guitar high E string on your strat and see how much output you get! I just popped up in this thread to share an instance which I found interesting, so i'm not really interested in going back and forth on this...

[quote name='MiltyG565' timestamp='1366215194' post='2049733'] But he had the pickup below the skin of the banjo, so it would obviously pick up a different sound. Also not to mention scale length and strings. I don't know much about banjos but I wouldn't think they use guitar strings. [/quote] The skin is not magnetic or conductive, so would be "invisible" to a magnetic pickup, and the pickup was mounted to the relatively rigid dowel rod. Other than having loop ends instead of ball ends, typical banjo strings are made in the same way, from the same materials as electric guitar strings and tenor banjo scale length is usually around 23" for a long scale, again not very different from guitar. Short of mocking up something in a workshop, it's about as good an example as I've experienced of mechanical differences in an instrument affecting the sound obtained from a magnetic pickup.

[quote name='MiltyG565' timestamp='1366211633' post='2049676'] Well yes, but that's why the difference between an acoustic instrument and an electric instrument is so different, and I only ever referred to electric instruments here when talking about tonewoods. Acoustic instruments are a completely different ball game. [/quote] Yeah, that was a bit of an extreme example, but I found it interesting. If you are listening to an instrument solely using a magnetic pickup under the strings, it is not an acoustic instrument in that application - it's just a mechanical structure which can affect the string movement the pickup sees, depending on how much energy it absorbs and disperses from the strings at various frequencies. If attaching strings to a wildly different structure can produce a wildly different sound through a magnetic pickup, then surely smaller differences in that structure (like changes in material) could make some difference, it's just a question of how significant we judge that difference to be. Since music is an art form, subjective judgements are where all the good stuff happens! FWIW, on the two basses I've built, I chose the woods on the basis of appearance and availabilty. Of course, none of this really adds anything new to the discussion - it's all there in the first couple of pages, but hey, what else are bass forums for? I suppose thinking about the nature of our instruments is useful to some extent though...

[quote name='MiltyG565' timestamp='1366209690' post='2049636'] 2 different acoustics with the same electro-magnetic pickup will sound more of less the same, but it's a completely different ball game. [/quote] Just to throw a (friendly) spanner in the works, I was at a gig last night where the headliner was playing an old open-backed banjo amplified using a Strat pickup attached to the dowel rod, just under the skin. It sounded like a banjo and not in the slightest like my bandmate's Strat. Both instruments have a similar scale length, nickel roundwound and plain strings and necks built similarly from similar materials. To me this suggests that the vibration of the string as "heard" by a magnetic pickup is strongly affected by the mechanical properties of whatever the bridge and neck are attached to. So, while two different lumps of hardwood will probably have a smaller difference in sound than comparing a tensioned skin to a lump of hardwood in the above example, I'm not sure I could say that there can be no difference. Ultimately, it's up to the player and listener to decide how significant these properties are to them, making it one of these subjective discussions which can run and run...

[quote name='Cosmo Valdemar' timestamp='1366140647' post='2048936'] Ooh! Make me one! [/quote] Not sure I'd want to offer that, being busy with various other things including sorting out my marriage next month. You could get a kit from www.pedalparts.co.uk though, I reckon the Superfuzz goodness is worth the effort!