Beer of the Bass

Some of the 80s Hondo stuff was nice enough, I have a Hondo Revival 335 style guitar which is well built and IMO better than some of the current Epiphone offerings.

Their product naming gets confusing. The older "250 watt" Reidmar had the reputation of being loud for it's rating, and I have no idea if this is intended to be the same output as that was or more...

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1488360464' post='3248152'] good to know, thanks. I've heard only good things of this place by Haymarket, where Colorsound Studios are, by the Thrifty Car Rental shop, I forget the name... something about time travel (???). That's what I intend to use next time I need anything done. [/quote] Those guys have since moved.... to Leith! Not certain if Krispn is talking about the same place, but there aren't a lot of repairers in town who are working from their own premises like that.

FWIW I think most of the wooden based archtop bridges are intended to sit rather higher than the stud-mounted tune-o-matic found on an ES335 does. So fitting a floating wooden bridge might require making one from scratch or cutting it down quite extensively.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1488367932' post='3248262'] [Pedant alert] The WEM Westminster was never a bass combo - I reckon you're confusing it with the WEM Dominator. The standard Dommie with a 12" speaker could just about be used for bass, but the Dominator 25 with a 15" speaker was actually designed to handle bass. [/ Pedant alert]. [/quote] There was a Westminster Bass model, one of the black 70s ones. Not much of a bass amp, but it was called one.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1488367780' post='3248257'] How anyone can remember what bloody lead they used is quite beyond me! [/quote] I think I can only remember because it's still around and working, though it's relegated to being a spare now.

[quote name='radiophonic' timestamp='1488366824' post='3248249'] Laney Linebackers, Peavy TNTs, Carlsboro, Westone. HH. Seems like yesterday. Jumpers as goalposts eh? Old starter gear was [i]so[/i] heavy even when it was terrible. [/quote] I used to put my Selmer head in a big rucksack and lug it down to the bus stop, 10 mile bus journey then over the Cal Mac ferry to Gourock each weekend to rehearse. Fortunately the drummer had an old PA cab that I could plug it into, though I did take the cab over a couple of times. I would have loved some of the compact setups that are around now!

[quote name='radiophonic' timestamp='1488354701' post='3248086'] I'm wearing some absolutely terrible surf shorts and I'm easily the least 'metal' person in the room. [/quote] We need to expand this to what people wore for their first gig! I suspect for most of us that would provide as good a snapshot of the times as the bass setup does. For me (in 1996) it was a pair of those African dyed cotton trousers they used to sell to climbers at Tiso and an almost fluoro green t-shirt. I can't remember what the shoes were, but I wore Doc Martens a lot. Long hair tied back, no facial hair because I was 15.

I think it would have been 1996, Queens Hotel in Dunoon and a couple of bars in Gourock and Greenock that I was several years too young to be in. I had a fretless Hohner Jazz copy (white with a tortoiseshell guard), a Selmer Treble n' Bass 50 SV and a really bad 1x15" made out of the shell of an HH guitar combo with a new baffle and the cheapest 15" driver from Maplin. Also a Zoom 506 for a while. The only part of that I have today is a green Klotz cable which is still going.

K&K have a demo of their Definity pickup slipped under an ordinary tune-o-matic on a 335 type guitar; kksound.com/products/definity.php If you want a piezo sound out of your 335, that might be a lot less work than fitting a wooden bridge. Plus, there was one in the double bass section of the classifieds for a good price.

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1488213004' post='3246848'] Sensitivity can be compensated for with EQ. The point of four drivers is low frequency capacity. Above 500Hz or so even a single ten can cover a good sized room. [/quote] That makes sense. That 500Hz-1K range is usually easy to adjust with EQ without compromising headroom (unlike the low end).

It was a few years ago, but I didn't find Stringers particularly welcoming when enquiring about double bass repairs. The last time I needed any work on my bass I went to Bill Kelday near Stirling who seems very good, but if anything that's a little more of a drive than Glasgow. It's a nice bit of the country to drive through on a sunny spring day though!

Having the A and D higher than the E doesn't seem right for a jazz setup - usually there would be a gradual increase in height from G to E. Other than this, 8-10mm is not outrageously high but many jazzers prefer it a little lower, especially if you're using Spirocores or similar high tension steel strings. There might be other parts of the setup that make it feel like hard work, like the nut height and fingerboard scoop, which the luthier should be able to sort out.

Is sensitivity an issue with this type of design? It seems like with two columns of speakers doing the lows and only one column working above 800Hz, those frequencies might be less loud when listening from in front of the cab. Though I guess there are plenty of speakers with rising sensitivity through the mids that would probably work well.

[quote name='Passinwind' timestamp='1488175983' post='3246449'] I built one using an ICEpower 700ASC module. I used a sufficiently large heatsink to negate the need for a fan (which I will not tolerate) and the onboard limiter works just fine for my purposes. Most of my preamps do have an adjustable HPF, but the ones that don't still work OK for me. But the build ended up being 2RU high by 1/2 rack width, and is not small or light weigh enough to be commercially attractive, I think. By my calculations I would have to build and sell 100 of them just to start to make it worthwhile anyway, and there are potentially profound liability issues, so no thanks! [/quote] I must get round to re-visiting that project; I bought modules from Connex about four years ago, then my electric bass gigs dried up for a while, I lost all sense of urgency about it and put them in the back of a cupboard. Connex were quite frustrating to deal with, and I think that blunted my enthusiasm a little too. They had very good documentation for the SMPS I bought, but didn't have it on their website for the amp module I went for. I presumed the manual would be sent after purchase, but after multiple emails it never was, and they still don't appear to have written one. So I have a power amp module with almost no information about it - I know what it needs in terms of power supply but I don't know what the input sensitivity is or whether it has a limiter on board. The SMPS and amp module would fit in a 1U height case, though that will probably need a fan. At some point I'll get round to hooking it up with a dummy load and signal generator to measure the gain and calculate the input sensitivity, and then put it in a case, probably with a simple soft-clip circuit on the input, perhaps an op-amp HPF. My intention was to build a simple valve preamp in a separate box, which is the bit of the project I'm rather more confident about.

[quote name='fleabag' timestamp='1488137792' post='3246240'] Some for oddball reason, i figured that the small 6 " drivers in my cabs would not suffer so badly as 10's side by side [/quote] While the dispersion is affected by the same phenomenon as applies to any cab, you'd expect the beaming to begin at a higher frequency with horizontally arranged 6" speakers than it would with 10" speakers, since the overall width of the array is narrower.

I'm aware of a couple of places; DM audio in Leith are a backline hire company who have at least one double bass listed for rental, though I don't know what standard of instrument they have. Or there's Stevenson Violins, a small violin shop. They keep a bass for hire and loan purposes, the one I've seen was a very basic Chinese plywood job, but he might have a better one available.

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1488064316' post='3245615'] I will take that as a no then. I am genuinely interested in whether this is a stupid idea or not. [/quote] It's not a stupid idea, and it's something I've looked into myself (I have a Connex amp module and SMPS that I picked up a couple of years ago waiting to be put to use). But to be really effective for bass amp use you would need to sort out cooling fans and some sort of limiter, and ideally an HPF on the input too. And the price works out at a point where you could pick up a fairly nice rack power amp secondhand.

[quote name='blue' timestamp='1488023396' post='3245095'] No, IMO, I think it's more like, " they don't make them like they use to." Blue [/quote] I've read that they've changed the speakers in them several times over the years, and some are much darker sounding than the old ones were. So there may well be a lot of them out there as hire stock that don't sound like your old one. The last time I had the chance to use an SVT/8x10 setup I had to cut the lows and boost the highs way more than I expected, but it was a lot of fun to play through once I'd done that.

[quote name='Meddle' timestamp='1487974426' post='3244818'] I see Shaftesbury is back as well! A lot of their models look suspiciously like Stagg instruments, but with the pickups upgraded to full-fat US Seymour Duncans. Seems an odd decision to basically up-spec one corner of an otherwise budget instrument. The Shaftesbury link is a bit lost on me, either way. [/quote] Arguably those could be considered truer to the old Shaftesbury line than the new Shergold guitars are to the old ones. AFAIK Shaftesbury was a name used by Rose Morris for fairly generic but decent quality copies they sold, which is more or less what's going on now.

I thought R&B had always been used to refer to present-day black American pop music, partly to do with the Billboard charts needing a name for it? I may be way off the mark with that.

[quote name='SH73' timestamp='1487528265' post='3240486'] I need to get a bag of popcorn before I read this :-) [/quote] Is that popcorn out of a heat-sealed plastic bag or a cardboard poke?

[quote name='skankdelvar' timestamp='1487476053' post='3240074'] I imagine many young people might be deterred by the frequent references to 1960's TV shows and discontinued lines of confectionery, not to mention the steady drip of RIP threads. [/quote] So if Basschat was a pub, it'd be one of those with knackered carpets, cheap pints of 80 shilling and bags of pork scratchings behind the bar. I presume the bass playing youth can be found on some Reddit sub-forum or other, rather than older style sites like this.

Why do Fender nitro finishes age so heavily? I have a well-played archtop guitar made in 1936 with nitro lacquer; it has some light checking, pick scratches and a bare spot on the back of the neck, but still looks nothing like the way many 60s Fenders already looked in the 70s and 80s.

Is 9.5lbs considered heavy for a Fenderish bass? I thought it was a fairly typical weight.