Beer of the Bass

In fairness to Carlsbro, the older valve amps are good - up there with some of the more sought-after brands of that time, but I agree about the Stingray.

[quote name='Spoombung' timestamp='1359582644' post='1957168'] Basschatters: if you go to another Basschatter's gig stand up and introduce yourself. Or wear a red carnation at least. [/quote] I must admit, I'm guilty of having seen other Basschatter's bands and just standing quietly in the audience. Mind you, I play in a band with another Basschatter, and we almost never mention Basschat, as though it were Fight Club or something! Possibly out of a fear that the rest of the band would giggle at us...

Antique Electronic Supply in the US have a load of Peavey parts, but by the time they've shipped from the states it won't be all that cheap; [url="http://www.tubesandmore.com/products/potentiometers_0?sort=recommended&page=0&filters=Brand%3DPeavey"]http://www.tubesandm...=Brand%3DPeavey[/url] I replaced a volume pot on a friend's Peavey practice amp (can't remember the model) and the 16mm pots from bitsbox fitted the holes on the PCB well enough, though I don't know if yours uses the same pots. The one I used was one of these; [url="http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/resistors/potentiometers.html#16pot"]http://www.bitsbox.c...ters.html#16pot[/url] The original Peavey knob didn't fit on them, but if you're going for cheap and functional, that may not be an issue.

Do the bigger pickup companies like Seymour Duncan do custom spacing? Since Shuker builds to order, I'd guess the customer specifically asked for these particular pickups and this was the way to make them fit. I'm sure the various options will have been discussed with the customer. I get the impression that luthiers often end up compromising from an "ideal" design philosophy in order to accomodate customer requests and this is likely to be what has happened here.

I suspect the neck pickup in the bass in the OP has been slanted to match up the polepieces with the string spacing. Since the bass has a Musicman style bridge pickup and a Fender style neck pickup, and Fender five strings use a wider string spacing, it's going to look a bit odd with exposed poles unless the neck pickup is slanted. Ideally you would have pickups made in the correct spacing, but custom parts are out of the reach of many smaller makers. I have put together a bass myself using Fender style pickups with MM spacing, and chose to slant the pickups. In my case I felt it went well with the lines of the body and I haven't noticed any unevenness across the strings. [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/137533-swamp-ash-5-string/page__view__findpost__p__1336777"]http://basschat.co.u...ost__p__1336777[/url]

The OC-2 works nicely with bass, but as it's monophonic, it needs clean playing to track well. It's quite limited, but cops the slightly synthy sounding Tony Levin/Pino Palladino thing perfectly, as I think that's what they both used. I haven't used the OC-3 - it looks more versatile but the OC-2 is the archetype.

An OC-2 would be a great choice for the empty spot IMO, visually and sonically. OK, it's not the Bass series, but it's 80s Boss and a bit of a classic. I must pick up another one myself some time!

Do you mean the extra plug on your daisy-chain cable? You should be able to leave that unconnected - I would just roll it up and tape it down to the board. The plugs on a daisy-chain cable are in parallel with one another rather than in series, so having one fewer device to power won't cause any problems. It's not like removing one bulb from a string of fairy lights.

It looks appealing, but I'm kind of surprised they've gone for a full-on MS20 recreation rather than taking the approach of the newer Moogs, i.e making a more modern instrument but with an analogue signal path and some key features of the old ones. Mini keys are going to put off a few players too. The price puts it in close competition with things like the Moog Minitaur and the Arturia Minibrute, which could be a tough choice. Having said that, I used to love playing around with my mate's knackered MS10 and the Korg filter has its own flavour, plus the signal processing could be a lot of fun on this one.

Cheers for the thoughts. I'll see if any local shops have more than just the Dunlops. Buying online is a bit of a pain while I'm still trying to find the right one, as don't want to buy them in quantity before I've tried them on. I'm not sure if I fancy trying Dave's reshaping trick on the ones I've got, as they're the celluloid tortoiseshell sort which are really impressively flammable, but I might experiment with dunking them in hot water instead.

I'm sure someone here will be interested - last time I looked, 12 working GEC KT88s on their own would sell for more than the starting price of the amp. I'm guessing from the location and appearance that it'll be part of an old dub reggae sound system!

I've been getting into playing acoustic with a thumb pick, but I can't find quite the right one. Dunlop mediums make the end of my thumb go purple, Dunlop larges slip around and the pick is too long on both of them. Filing the pick part shorter helps a little, but I'd be interested to hear what anyone else uses. Are the perfect thumb picks out there?

I'm still trying to figure out my cutoff point with Zappa. Stuff like the King Kong 1968 clip posted above, and albums like Uncle Meat and Weasels Ripped my Flesh through to the Grand Wazoo are sublime IMO, but some of the later stuff I almost can't bear to listen to. On the late 60s material, there's a real sense of the band trying to play slightly beyond their abilities, which is something I always enjoy hearing. Later on, it seems like he'd got a little too used to having musicians who could play anything, and the resulting sound is a bit too slick for my tastes. I also like the absurdist humour of the early material more than the later smutty stuff. None of this is intended as a dig at Mr Zappa, but when someone is prolific as he was, it's inevitable that not every album will please every listener.

The winter before last was a ridiculously cold one, and I was busking outside regularly with a carved bass. I didn't have a thermometer, but it was a good few degrees below zero most of the time as there was much ice underfoot. I had no problems at all with the bass, but it's really hard to keep your hands working. The left hand is the worst as it's raised up most of the time and doesn't get much blood circulation. I was wearing two pair of socks, army boots, longjohns, several jumpers, a big coat, scarf, hat and fingerless gloves but still couldn't keep my hands warm enough! I was careful about slowing down the changes between warm and cold by leaving the bass in its bag for a while as suggested above. In an ideal world I'd have a second bass for this sort of playing, but I don't have the space to keep one.

Leaving out any copyright concerns, I absolutely won't consider buying something something if I spot that the pictures are not the seller's. This is not so much for intellectual property reasons, but because he's just as likely to be a scammer selling a non-existent item with pictures taken off google images. This tends to be more of an issue on Gumtree than eBay though.

[quote name='the hand of john curley' timestamp='1358622657' post='1942456'] ....ahhhh.....that'll have been this then!!!! [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261083127110"]http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261083127110[/url] [/quote] I do wonder why he bothers. He's paid just short of £140 including delivery and is trying to sell it for £167. Subtract eBay and paypal fees from that and he can't be making much.

I wonder if they're any good? I've been put off tools from Lidl since buying a staple gun which no brand or size of staples I can find works with, though the supplied ones worked fine.

[quote name='oggiesnr' timestamp='1358710844' post='1943874'] In day gone by one of the sights of the folk scene was Martin Carthy obsessively tuning his guitar between songs, sometimes it took longer than the songs! Steve [/quote] I saw him on Thursday and he still does much the same, with nary a tuner in sight. I didn't feel it took anything away from his set, as he's mastered the knack of chatting to the audience while he tunes.

I like the white pickguard best against the orange. It's a great colour - sort of Glasgow Underground orange!

I had a brand-new Korean Squier strat in 1992, and it wasn't very good, to be quite honest. It had a plywood body, unpotted ceramic pickups, nasty tuners and pots that died. A new Classic Vibe would wipe the floor with it! It could probably have been upgraded and set up to play OK, but I wouldn't pay any more for one than you would pay for an Affinity or similar.

[quote name='silddx' timestamp='1358441496' post='1939269'] You have had too much beer my friend [/quote] In an uncharacteristically pedantic moment, I've just looked it up. If Wikipedia is to be believed, in the late 60s there were only large mechanical strobe tuners like the Peterson which were unlikely to be adopted by touring bands. The needle type electronic tuners appeared in the 80s and the clip-on tuners not until the mid 90s. So, "no tuners" was a fair assessment of what was going on here.

Are you sure that's a tuner? I'm only 31, but I've been playing since I was 8 and I can only remember seeing clip-on tuners in the last 10 years or so. When I was a kid, my mum took me to the local music shop to look at tuners, and the only electric tuners were those chunky ones with the needle display and the built-in microphone. Other than that the choice was pitch pipes or a tuning fork, and that was in 1990. I don't think they had clip-on tuners in 1969 - would any veterans care to confirm this? I think it's a flower he tucked under his strings because he liked it!

I find the original recording to be an interesting work as an indicator of what Coltrane was up to at the time, although A Love Supreme does a lot more for me aesthetically. However, I do agree with Bilbo that Giant Steps is mostly played as a tiresome excercise in cleverness nowadays. I've been at at least one jazz jam where the tune has been called by one of the regulars expressly to humiliate less experienced musicians. This is the sort of thing that puts people off getting involved in the Jazz scene!

The accordionist in my old band used to really struggle with feedback, but I suspect his frankly crazy setup was the main contributor. He used a home-made internal mic system, which was mixed together using the inputs of a WEM copicat (also running a slap-back echo). This then went into a 100 watt Laney valve amp feeding a JMI cabinet with a 15" bass driver and a rotating treble horn, Leslie style. This used to be turned up so loud that my bass would be drowned out at some gigs. The resulting sound was halfway inbetween Zydeco accordion and an overdriven Hammond. It was an interesting sound, but we were all pleased when he ditched the huge amp!

I do my own, using a similar process, except my fret levelling beam is a 500mm hardwood turning blank, planed true on one side with 240 grit abrasive stuck to it. After levelling, I do my crowning with a triangular file with the corners ground off (like this one; [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AxeMasters-LARGE-SIZE-FRET-CROWNING-FILE-3-Corner-Luthier-Guitar-/350667278683?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item51a566095b"]http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AxeMasters-LARGE-SIZE-FRET-CROWNING-FILE-3-Corner-Luthier-Guitar-/350667278683?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item51a566095b[/url]) and protect the fingerboard from the file with one of those flexible metal guards. For the crowning, I mark the top of the fret with a permanent marker. then round off each side with the file until I'm left with a very thin line in the centre. I then polish with various grades of abrasive as above. This takes me several hours, but then I haven't done it more than a handful of times as I just do my own instruments. I'm pretty sure it's one of these things that gets quicker with experience!