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Beer of the Bass

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Everything posted by Beer of the Bass

  1. Beer of the Bass
    [quote name='Soloshchenko' post='1194236' date='Apr 10 2011, 02:17 AM']cheers. What did you attach the red and white to on yours then?[/quote] First I connected the bare and red wires together and connected them to earth via the pot casing and used the white as the signal lead (i.e. going to the switch on your bass). This was out of phase with my other pickup, so what worked for me was bare & white going to earth (pot casing) and the red as the signal lead. You'll hear it if the pickups are out of phase, as the two pickup sound will be thin and very quiet. So some trial and error may be necessary to get the red and white wires the right way round, but the bare wire will always be earthed to the pot casing.
  2. Beer of the Bass
    On my KA toaster, the bare wire was the casing ground, and the red and white were the two ends of the coil. I mention this as mine was out of phase with my other pickup when wired as per the diagram, and I had to switch the red and white around to get the phase right.
  3. Beer of the Bass
    Cool, it sounds like they'll do the job. I was a bit concerned from the "warmer, fuller" etc. in the blurb that they might be overly dark sounding, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
  4. Beer of the Bass
    On my home built bass I have a single coil Kent Armstrong toaster pickup up by the end of the neck. It's a 24th fret neck though, so the centre of the pickup is about 18cm from the bridge saddles. It has slightly deeper bottom end than a typical Jazz neck pickup, but has plenty of highs and articulation. If you click on the Jen & the Gents link in my sig, you can hear it on "Disappear" and "Can't look back". I reckon as long as you have a sufficiently clear sounding pickup, it won't sound muddy.
  5. Beer of the Bass
    Would you say they were brighter or mellower than the stock highway 1 pickups? I had a H1 jazz for a while, so it could be a useful reference point.
  6. Beer of the Bass
    I'm thinking about using a pair of [url="http://www.wdmusic.co.uk/product/SPLIT_TUBE_JAZZ_PU_CHROME_REAR_JBLR-1"]these[/url] for a bass I'm putting together, and I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with them? They're great visually, but the description of how they sound is a bit on the vague side. They'd be going in a 5 string, but with narrow 16mm string spacing, so the fact they don't have individual polepieces is a bonus.
  7. Beer of the Bass
    A Kent Armstrong toaster might not be far off that size. It's nominally a guitar pickup, but so are the Rickenbacker toasters. I have one in my bass and it sounds really good. It's a single coil with a fairly high output. WD music have them - [url="http://www.wdmusic.co.uk/product/Replacement_%22Toaster%22_Pickup_Front_SRK1F"]Kent Armstrong Toaster[/url]
  8. Beer of the Bass
    "Bumped" strings would be lower tension than solos at standard pitch, since they're tuned a fourth below the pitch they were intended for, while the solos are only detuned by a whole tone. I've not tried it, but would you really get much acoustic volume from steels at such low tension?
  9. Beer of the Bass
    Thomastik Dominants worked fine with a Kent Armstrong mag pickup for me, and those have a synthetic core with steel windings, so it's probably hard to predict without trying them. As chrkelly said though, its a costly experiment...
  10. Beer of the Bass
    I think a piezo into a proper high impedence output can can produce a fundamental that is much stronger (in proportion to the harmonics) than the bass actually projects acoustically. Also, the response from a bridge piezo can go down right into sub-sonic frequencies if left unchecked. If I have the HPF on my amp turned off and depress a string with my right hand (without plucking it), I can actually see the cone move! So I reckon a bit of low end roll-off on a piezo signal actually gets you closer to what you'd hear acoustically. Though this is just my guess at why HPFs help - I'm not an engineer or anything!
  11. Beer of the Bass
    I love his sound on the first solo record, Black Market and that early Pat Metheny one ( which I forget the name of). It's a great expressive, focussed sound which just works. Something happens to his tone on later things like the Word of Mouth band which I quite heartily dislike though. I'm kind of ambivalent about Black Market too - I've listened to it a lot, but it just gets a bit too smooth for my tastes when compared with older Weather Report. Not just Jaco, but Shorter and Zawinul too. It's still good, just not what does it for me.
  12. Beer of the Bass
    Gilles bought my Dave Hall DI EQ, and I'd cheerfully deal with him again!
  13. Beer of the Bass
    Mine was from an eBay seller called solsound_limited. It was a pre-cut piece though, so I don't know if they do big enough pieces for a 2x15" cab.
  14. Beer of the Bass
    No longer available.
  15. Beer of the Bass
    You could always dispense with the metal grille and make a wooden frame to stretch the cloth over like the old Fenders etc. I made a frame and installed silver grille cloth on my old Peavey 1x15", it wasn't too hard and the results look good.
  16. Beer of the Bass
    I never quite understood why AI claim to offer 300 watts output (at 2 ohms) from an amp where the rated power consumption is 250 watts. My Clarus does this too...
  17. Beer of the Bass
    Thought I'd stick this up here, as other bassists are always curious about it. It's my late 60's Carlsbro CS100 valve PA, atop an old Peavey 1x15" fitted with an Eminence Kappa driver, new side handles and sparkly grille cloth. One channel of the amp has been modded to a Fender style tone stack (with the mid control effectively pre-set to 10 with a fixed resistor in place of the pot). I like to overdrive the front end of it with a DHA DI-EQ box when I want a bit of grit, as otherwise it's a surprisingly clean amp at my normal gigging or rehearsing volume. I had this up for sale a while ago, but I'm glad I hung on to it, as it suits the vibe of my current band well.
  18. Beer of the Bass
    It took me a while to realise that the biggest difference in sound between 10" and 15" cabs at the low end of the market (peavey etc.) is that most manufacturers 2x10" or 4x10" cabs have a tweeter and most 1x15" cabs don't. This is a bit of a sweeping generalisation, but is true for most of the cheaper cabs that are knocking about at the kind of gigs I do. And it has nothing to do with the driver diameter!
  19. Beer of the Bass
    I think my home made bass guitar is a keeper, partly because I love the way it sounds, but mostly because it's quite crudely built and weighs 12 1/2 lbs, and is thus unsellable! I put it together in my parents back room when I was 18 (12 years ago) and have slowly improved bits of it since, adding better pickups and bridge, re-shaping the neck and dressing the frets. Most of my other instruments, including my double bass (late 19th century German) I would move on quite happily if something I liked better came along.
  20. Beer of the Bass
    There were some pictures on Talkbass of Herbie Flowers at the O2 arena playing a Squier affinity...
  21. Beer of the Bass
    [quote name='simon1964' post='1105315' date='Jan 27 2011, 05:43 PM']Agree with your comments on the bridge, but I'm not sure what you mean by the neck collapsing into the pocket. Rics are through neck, so I don't follow?[/quote] There's a big, deep rout for the neck pickup which leaves a very small area of glue joint where the body wings meet the neck. The neck can flex forward as the glue joint creeps, and the action creeps up and up. I don't think it's fixable without major surgery. This happened to an Ibanez rick copy I used to have
  22. Beer of the Bass
    For general practice and playing I try not to look at the fingerboard excessively, but I've used pencil marks on the upper positions during recording sessions. It's a bit of a crutch, but my logic is that anything which gets the part down in fewer takes is justified when in the studio.
  23. Beer of the Bass
    OK, question for the sound guys. I'm getting in to using some overdriven valve amp sounds with my current band, so I feel I'm justified in wanting some of that sound in the FOH (though I'm not averse to running a clean DI in conjunction with that). Is it worth either carrying a speaker level DI box around, or getting my own mic to minimise hassle for the sound person?
  24. Beer of the Bass
    My band Jen and the Gents recorded some tracks last weekend, at the Depot Studio in Edinburgh with Garry from CP productions. Our drummer had a camera running through one of the tunes and has put together a wee montage with the finished track. Here it is:
  25. Beer of the Bass
    I have a Dave Hall DI/EQ box, in fantastic green/yellow splatter finish. Possibly the best way to describe it is to link to Dave's eBay auction for the same box. [url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DHA-DI-EQ-balanced-XLR-DI-and-3-band-EQ-Q-pre-amp-/310287008723?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item483e8c03d3"]DHA DI-EQ[/url] It looks identical to the one pictured and is in great condition. It's useful as a DI box, or stuck in front of my old valve amp to overdrive the input and add some EQ, and even does a good job as a preamp for piezo pickups on double bass. But what I really need for my particular setup is a good basic DI box, either passive or one which can be phantom powered, with a switchable pad. Not a Behringer please. The current price for a new DI/EQ is £69.99, so it would ideally be a DI which retails for a similar amount, or with a cash adjustment. Anyone got something suitable?
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