Beer of the Bass

It's kind of Ric-flavoured, but that's as far as it goes, as they're otherwise very different basses. It does provide a good snarly pick sound which is quite different from the usual mid-scooped blend sounds on a jazz though. i don't have a diagram, but it should be fairly simple to work out - the cap goes in line with the hot wire from the bridge pickup, using the switch to short across the cap in the "down" position.

The B7 is longer than the space behind the bridge on a tele! There is a photograph here; [url="http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-technical/122010-bigsby-b7-tele.html"]http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-technical/122010-bigsby-b7-tele.htm[/url][url="http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-technical/122010-bigsby-b7-tele.html"]l[/url] I hope you haven't ordered one yet!

Once I've got some daylight, I might have to take a picture of my flute. It's a one-key Clementi, from somewhere between 1802 and 1830, which I found in a secondhand shop for £20. My flute playing is not up to much, but it's a great sounding instrument, although hard to play in tune.

I've just tried something different with my bass wiring, and I thought I'd start a thread about it. I have a home built 5-string with Jazz pickups. When I put the bass together, I used a push-pull pot to switch the pickups between series and parallel, but found I didn't like the series sound much and never used it. I've just tried re-wiring the switch to put a 4.7nF cap in series with the bridge pickup, like the Rickenbacker "Vintage Tone Control". This cuts all of the bass and most of the mids from the bridge pickup, which is nearly unusable with the bridge pickup soloed, but does really interesting things when blending the pickups. I can run the neck pickup on 10, and as I bring up the bridge pickup, it seems to add extra highs without scooping the low-mids as much as the usual setup. With both controls on 10, it gets really bright and clanky but not thinned out in the mids. It opens up some useful sounds, especially for pick playing, and I like it better than the series/parallel switching. Has anyone else experimented with this? Obviously, anyone with a 4003 will be familiar with the idea, but it was interesting to hear the results on a very different bass.

I can't imagine it harming anything, especially with a solid state amp. I think reverb pans are designed to be used a particular way up though, as one of the letters in the Accutronics parts numbers is for orientation. So your reverb might not behave as it's meant to.

[attachment=96569:101_0365_edited.jpg] Here's my favourite; it's a 1936 Kalamazoo KG21 archtop. Kalamazoo were a budget line made by Gibson during the depression when few people could afford the fancier models. It's very plain, but made from good spruce and mahogany, and I'd never have had the money for an actual 30's Gibson. It has the biggest v-neck I've ever played, so much so that it took me ages to find a capo to fit! I've got 13 gauge strings on and it sounds great, quite strident and midrangey. I've also got a beautiful little parlour guitar built by my brother Pete Beer and an oddball Kay LP synth electric, but I don't have decent pictures of those just now...

A lot of players seem to use the 1,2,4 Simandl fingering lower down, but change to one finger per semitone further up the neck where the span fits the hand better. Given that you're playing a half size bass, you might make that change at a lower position than most, but it's still going to be worth using 1,2,4 in the lower couple of positions for better intonation and less fatigue. Mind you, I use Simandl type fingering at the low end of my bass guitar too.

I'd agree, that sounds like a valve gone microphonic.

A four string P-bass neck will handle 5 strings if you're happy with narrow spacing; see the bottom of this guy's web page. [url="http://www.3dentourage.com/425/425.htm"]http://www.3dentourage.com/425/425.htm[/url] I'd do it with a replacement neck though, and I wonder how the A-string would sound going over both pickup halves.

One other thing worth a look; a lot of old valve amps have unused taps on the output transformer, so there might even be a 7.5ohm tap which could just be wired up to a socket. It might be worth either you or a tech checking it out to see if this is the case here.

[quote name='Amazoman' timestamp='1325204640' post='1481050'] The gain control does have an effect on the hum BB but not as much as the master knob. What does this signify? [/quote] Figuring out which controls affect the noise is a simple way to identify which stage of the amp the noise might be coming from. If turning down a volume or gain control can silence the noise, it's reasonable to guess that the noise is happening at an earlier stage in the circuit. But the interaction between the gain and master volume controls suggests that there might be noise from more than one stage. Swapping preamp valves is about as far as you can safely go to diagnose a problem like this if you're not familiar with working on amps - if that doesn't help, it's a tech job. Chances are, if it's not a preamp valve, it'll be something small like a bad capacitor, or a ground connection needing re-soldering, so it probably won't be an expensive repair. I think there are some other AD200 users on here - they could confirm whether some hum is normal, but I expect they're normally quieter than you describe, as most healthy amps are.

Hum in valve amps is often caused by capacitors in the power supply going leaky, this is less likely with a newer amp, though not impossible. If the treble control is quietening the hum, then most of the noise is coming from an earlier stage in the circuit. Does the gain control affect the hum too? You could try swapping a new ECC83 into both ECC83 positions in turn and see if one reduces the hum - it'd be cheaper than replacing both. Valve amps can be very low in noise, but it depends on the design and layout, so some are better than others. It's worth talking to the tech who replaced the power valves. If he had it up and running through a speaker and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, then it's probably the nature of the beast, although he may have just done a quick job using a dummy load.

I saw this linked from Talkbass - a luthier in France is working on a Bisonic based pickup. There are some design drawings in his gallery. They're a bit slimmer than the Darkstars, as the poles adjust by being threaded into a baseplate - no extra adjusting screws. [url="http://www.daguetguitars.com/index.php"]http://www.daguetguitars.com/index.php[/url]

My favourite Mclaughlin stuff is from before Mahavishnu; Extrapolation, all of the Miles Davis records, Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill and the Lifetime albums. The earlier material sounds like a jazz guitarist cranked up and letting rip, and I find it somehow more exciting than the premeditated loudness of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I like the weird jaggedness of his sound, the mad skittery runs and the out of tune bends on the early stuff! Does that make any sense, or is it just me?

I find the later stuff with vocals pretty offputting, but enjoy the older lineup on Birds of Fire and Inner Mounting Flame. All of the Mahavishnu albums are of their time, but Visions of the Emerald Beyond has dated especially badly in my opinion.

From my experience of them, Picato are firmly at the thumpy end of things, though not bad if that's what you want. They're actually too dark and thuddy for me - I much prefer D'Addario Chromes, or Ernie Balls, which I suspect may be Chromes in a different packet.

From what I can recall (I don't have mine anymore), the laminated steel core sits between the two magnets, rather than passing through the coil. Personally, I wouldn't bother with the adjustable poles - they're necessary on the Darkstar as the overall height is not adjustable, but fixed poles plus overall height adjustment works fine for the vast majority of bass pickups. Good luck getting something together - a design like this is probably not the easiest way to get started in pickup making, as there are few manufactured parts available, but that's not to say it would be impossible

If Hammon's website is still up, there was a picture of the individual parts laid out. Basically, the centre of the pickup is made of a number of thin layers of steel stacked up. The laminations are parallel to the face of the pickup and each layer has four holes for the polepieces to pass through. I think it's much like the material transformer cores are made from. So still a bit more going on than most pickups...

One of the bits that makes them particularly complex and expensive to make is the polepiece adjustment mechanism, which doesn't really affect the sound AFAIK. Otherwise they're arranged like a guitar P90, except with a laminated steel core through which the polepieces pass. I wouldn't be surprised if someone started making a functional equivalent without necessarily copying the adjuster mechanism and cosmetics. They wouldn't have any problem shifting them if they did, especially if they were sized to fit in existing soapbar routes.

While we're on the topic of five string flats, has anyone tried the Rotosounds on a five string? I'm thinking of going back to flats, and I like strings at the clankier end of flatwounds, so it's those or the Chromes.

The neck through ones are not bad - I think they were made in Korea. A friend of mine had a very similar bass which I think came from the same factory, and I remember quite liking it. I wouldn't pay a huge amount though...

I think it was just a distributors badge, attached to various grades of Japanese, and possibly Korean copies. I've seen a couple that were not bad, and some atrocious ones. Sorry, that's probably not much help!

Can that price be right? They'll be struggling to keep up with demand if so.

The E on mine seemed to improve in the first couple of weeks. I'm not sure if the sound changes as the core stretches out, or if I adjusted my technique without noticing.

Preamp valves can last a very long time. I'm playing a 1969 amp with original Brimar ECC83s which are in good health, but the power amp valves were long gone. Regarding warming it up, it will take 20-30 seconds or so for the valves to reach their operating temperature, but you'll hear that, as they don't pass any signal when cold. Other than not chucking it around while it's still hot, there really isn't much to worry about.