Beer of the Bass

The insurance valuation of mine makes some sense as a figure I could dependably source a functional replacement for - it's a good sounding old flatback depreciated somewhat by having had a rough life, some bad-old-days repairs and a remarkably bad over-varnish.

I'm not sure about the correlation between insurance valuations and realistic sale prices. My bass came with a valuation written in the late 90s for £2750, and I feel that even ignoring inflation and that it's had a good new fingerboard fitted since, that would be an ambitious price if I were to try and sell it.

It always bothers me that there's a modelling amp company called Positive Grid, when usually the grid being positive means something is about to be on fire!

I feel like the bass sounds that typically get called "HiFi" aren't really about flat, uncoloured response at all, they're usually hyped at some point in the signal chain to emphasise the deep lows and high end, increasing the impression of a broad frequency spectrum.

You still need to run a speaker with your amp when using a speaker level DI - the DI has a relatively high impedance and places essentially no load on the amp on its own, which is a quick way to damage a valve amp. So it's more of a solution for live use without the potential bleed of a mic, not a method for quiet home recording. If you are considering other heads, the Ampeg PF50T has a speaker level DI output and (unusually) a dummy load that allows you to run it with no speaker. But having done this, I think the magic for recording is in the mic'ed speaker sound - the DI sound doesn't really have the same feel as that.

Ceramic pickups though - not always a bad thing, but it's a step away from the classic strat pickup recipe.

Cheers, sounds like they'll probably work OK for me. I find sometimes when I go for a less bright string type that the B can be dead sounding even if the other four are doing what I want, so I just wanted to check the Platinums don't suffer too much from that.

Has anyone here tried the Platinum strings on a five string? I'm wondering what the B string is like. I was on flatwounds for years, then made the jump to rounds last year looking for a bit more clank out of my bass. I found I enjoy my current Rotosound nickels once they've been played for a few months, but the rough feel still annoys me. So the notion of a smoother feeling string with a "played-in rounds" sound might be just the job.

There was a similarly hacked P Bass in Kevin Ayers' old Whole World band. It gets passed back and forth between Ayers and a very young Mike Oldfield, so I don't know whose bass it was. But it does seem to be a thing that people did!

I've known people use bits of saxophone reed to shim pickups too, they're handy if you need to fill a tapered gap.

He does appear to know his stuff and have a lot of experience with fine basses and serious players, but I always get the feeling his opinions are heavily coloured by how his particular shop runs. So "this bass has no value" mostly means he wouldn't be able to turn a profit on it with his business model and clientele. But any Talkbass posts of his would have to be a few years old, I think he was a little much for them too.

I've been seeing a few people say similar things about the 801, and it does look a handy size. If I end up doing more jazz volume double bass gigs I'd definitely want to try one. My GK MB200 and homebuilt 1x10" does fine for those, but an absolutely tiny combo seems appealing!

I'd be struggling with my double bass at about 41 1/2 inches!

This is all so much more sophisticated than the pickup winding setup I cobbled together a few years ago. I can't find the pictures, but it was a little hobby drill lashed to a plank with cable ties, a speed controller board off ebay, hand fed wire and a couple of chunks of wine cork over a dowel on the side of the plank to set the limits of the wire travel. I'm still using a couple of the pickups I did, on my fretless bass and a electric guitar, so I guess it got me there!

Ah, makes sense, I guess the standardised bass as a catalogue item wouldn't really have existed until the German "shop basses" came in. Which would be, what, late 19th century maybe?

Just a quick post a few weeks on - I'm still liking these strings. They feel closer to Spirocore weich than mittel, but I don't feel they lose volume compared to the mittels on my bass. I've had them out for a local free improv night and an afternoon gypsy jazz set so far - the latter probably not the ideal setting for new, growly steel strings, but they did ok. Even after the initial settling and playing in, they're a bright, articulate string. They have a quick, crisp quality to the attack that seems fairly unique - possibly a step further in that direction than Spirocores. My bass leans towards being quite dark sounding so this is a good combination for me, though they might be too much if you wanted to warm up a bright sounding bass. I feel like I can coax a fair bit of volume and fullness from them without cranking up the string height, and they have a clarity that makes it easy to hear the pitches. With the flexible feel it is possible to overplay them pizz, but it's getting plenty loud at that point and they don't really need to be pushed that way to get the sound out. I'm getting used to them with the bow too - if you're used to bowing Spiros then these are quite friendly, though the quickness and pitch clarity keep me on my toes. My bass has a wolf tone around the A (at the octave on the A string, or other positions of the same note), I had to use a brass weight with the Spiro mittels but the Prestoflex set don't set it off so badly.

I bought Laurie's Baggs Gigpro preamp. It was simple and quick, and it does the job nicely.

White vinegar does soften PVA type glues more effectively than water alone, I tried it in a guitar repair. Though that was more at the stage of encouraging the joint to let go in the first place than cleaning up the residue, which still needed to be scraped.

Is there some international variation in the bass sizes conventionally used by orchestras? I'm sure I've seen more discussion of large older basses having their shoulders cut down and scale length reduced from the US than from the UK and Europe. That might be a factor in why Talkbass gives a different impression.

I haven't really played many basses larger than my current old flatback, which I guess would be classed as 3/4. It's bigger than the other old flatback I owned before, also considered 3/4. Though I've noticed that with some modern student basses like the Stentors, their 3/4 tends towards the smaller end of the range, so If I were looking at those I might be inclined to investigate the 4/4.

I dabbled with DIY piezo pickups a few years ago using piezo film elements. They sounded surprisingly good under the bridge foot, but making something neat looking and physically robust enough to last was the tricky part that I never quite cracked.

Re the Pianet chat, I own a Pianet N and have previously owned a T. The N has some Wurly-esque properties, but with a kind of mushy feel in the bass and an interesting plucky snap up high. The T is a lot mellower, somewhat Rhodes-like but with a narrower dynamic range and different overtones. If I had to guess what the patch used in the video above is modelling, I'd guess at an early model Rhodes, like the silver top, pre Mark I era. Hard to tell once it's been tweaked a little and gone through the signal chain though. We used my N on a couple of tracks on my band's last record.

I got into large triangle picks because they're popular with mandolin players, but found I preferred that shape for everything. With the larger surface area I find I can use a more relaxed grip, and having three interchangeable corners reduces fiddling about when changing between fingers and pick. I don't use the same gauge and type across everything though - I like the 0.88mm Ultex triangles on bass guitar and thicker Wegen and Hawk triangle picks on acoustic guitar and mandolin family instruments.

I've tried both playing guitar through a full bass rig, and playing guitar heads through cabs intended for bass. I feel like it can work if you're either going for a clean, warm jazz tone, or conversely if you're stacking up a lot of gain and EQing heavily. It's the stuff in between where I've struggled to get something I like. A tweeterless modern bass cab will be warm but a little polite feeling (lacking the cone breakup of classic guitar drivers) and tweeters just sound odd with electric guitar IMO.

Roto flats are really quite stiff feeling and TI are soft verging on floppy. That may help with making an educated guess.