Beer of the Bass

[quote name='Huge Hands' timestamp='1420632474' post='2651491'] I know as a drummer myself, I would have never been happy to take a stanley knife to my drum skin but I did take mine off a few times! [/quote] Taking the skin off for those gigs could maybe be a good middle ground. I might suggest that!

OK, so it's very much a personal preference thing for drummers. It's a small Gretsch kit and seems fairly lively sounding to my ears - not really a rock setup. I think it's the tone of some of the sound guys and this promoter that I'm finding odd, really. If they want to have a quiet grumble about it I can understand that, but expecting the drummer to modify his gear to suit them seems a bit off.

I'd be interested to here from drummers and sound guys on this one. I play with a drummer who prefers not to have a hole in his kick drum skin. This keeps meeting with the disapproval of sound guys, to the point that we've had a message from the promoter of our next gig asking "has your drummer put a hole in his bass drum yet?". I'm just wondering, why the pressure? Are kick drums particularly tough to mic up without the hole? Is hole versus no hole like the drummers version of pick versus fingers or something?

I'd hope it didn't leave the factory that way, but I can just about picture the scenario. 5pm Friday; assembly worker sticks a screwdriver through the cone, is fully aware they should get a new driver from the storeroom and fill in a form, but sod it, they want to get home and the glue gun is already warmed up... I've worked with people with that sort of attitude, so I reckon it's not impossible!

[quote name='Mikey R' timestamp='1420546326' post='2650430'] Thats one sweet looking homebrew! What voltage do you run the plates of the 6V6s at? [/quote] I stayed very close to the original AA1164 schematic and layout, so the plate voltage runs fairly high. It's around 420v at present, though it varies a little with the bias setting. I like it biased conservatively to maximise the tremolo depth. I'm using JJ 6v6s which seem to handle the high voltage well enough.

I'm happy enough with the basic voice of the amp that I don't want to move away from the blackface tone stack, though I've read about increased value mid-pot and that could be interesting to try some time. I imagine it would work well in conjunction with a master volume to get an alternative more rocky voice out of the amp. While that's not what I want most of the time, it could provide some useful versatility when recording parts. I'm going to try putting the new master volume after the third preamp triode (just before the phase inverter) using a 1M pot with a coupling cap on either side of it, much the same way as the MV in the 80s Super Champ is implemented. I'll put it on the back panel initially just to try it out. If I decide to keep it, I'll make a new faceplate for the amp and move the tremolo speed and intensity controls one space to the right. That would work best in terms of layout inside the chassis. The front of the amp looks like this at the moment;

I didn't know they made pure nickel strings for bass. I use John Pearse pure nickel roundwounds on an archtop guitar, and they're a bit mellower and thicker sounding than nickel plated electric strings.

I haven't done this, but I'd want to look at the impedance graphs too. The power distribution between the two cabs at a given frequency could be uneven if they have peaks in different places, working one driver harder than the other.

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1420316714' post='2648068'] there may be 101 reasons why this wouldn't work.... what would happen if you fed the signal after the drive pedal into a passive low pass filter (i.e. a tone knob) to roll the top end off? [/quote] It can work to some extent and the older BSS DI boxes had a switch to do this at either 4 or 8 KHz. A passive filter gives you a much shallower slope than the natural roll-off of a speaker though, so it's not going to be quite the same.

There's not much available off the shelf to do this job without also simulating the low cut and mid dip of a guitar cab, but I wonder if some of the more flexible filter pedals could pull it off. A fairly steep lowpass filter set at the right frequency (2-5KHz depending on the speaker you're trying to emulate) with no envelope control and minimum resonance might get you close. I've thought about DIYing something to do this job but never got round to it as I'm currently between bands.

I guess Ernie Ball flatwounds would be the logical choice, though they're also fairly stiff feeling compared to rounds of the same gauge. They keep a bit of brightness for a long time and have a little less old-school thump than some flats, so they may suit it.

[quote name='Bassnut62' timestamp='1420235696' post='2647113'] Valve pre and SS power just doesn't work in my book.... [/quote] I'm not so sure, as putting something like an Alembic F2B (based on the Fender Showman preamp stage) in front of a powerful SS power amp is a bit of a classic setup. If you wanted it to sound like a Fender Showman you'd be disappointed, but this sort of rig can be great in a cleaner, more modern sounding way.

[quote name='Mikey R' timestamp='1420144647' post='2646146'] Hey, did you manage to resolve your problem? Did you go master volume, or attenuator? [/quote] My bands gigging schedule is kind of patchy, so I haven't done anything about it yet. I think a simple master volume might be the first thing to try though, installed on the back panel so that if I don't like it I haven't left an ugly hole in the front of the amp! Come to think of it, I've got a gig on the 10th. I may get round to trying it before then...

A lot of amps (though not all) still use the same input jack wiring as the old Fender amps. I would expect that the LH500 does, as the preamp is derived from the Fender Showman/Alembic F2b design. In that case the high input is both high impedance and higher gain, while the low input has a lower impedance and is padded down. There's a good explanation of how the two inputs work here: [url="http://www.tdpri.com/forum/amp-central-station/287285-input-1-vs-input-2-blackface-amps.html#post3511035"]http://www.tdpri.com/forum/amp-central-station/287285-input-1-vs-input-2-blackface-amps.html#post3511035[/url] So the low input is primarily used to prevent instruments with a hot output from overdriving the preamp, but will also have a different tone with a passive bass due to the lower impedance. On guitar amps I've sometimes found this useful to mellow out the high end from an overly bright instrument.

I also had one of the early MAG200 combos, mine was the tilt-back 1x12" version. I liked the sound at lower volumes and it was dependable, but the sound didn't hold together very well when it was turned up. It had an Eminence Alpha 12 in a small sealed box. Years later, I simulated the cab in a speaker design program out of curiosity and found out that not only did it have a huge midbass hump of around 4dB, it was excursion limited to less than 30 watts at 100Hz. It does seem like rather an odd design decision! I paid £499 new in the late 90s, so it wasn't a cheap bit of kit either.

I think the one time that I've actually found Facebook likes to be a useful indicator was in figuring out just how many bands cheat in online battle-of-the-band votes! A couple of times I've noticed that certain local bands get substantially more votes in these things than they have Facebook likes, without doing any promotion that I could see.

I've done worse with mine and usually got away with it. AFAIK the situations to avoid are sudden changes in climate or unusually low humidity. Trying to get it into the marquee a while before you play is your best bet. Even if there's no harm done to the bass, warm tents are usually pretty humid and your hands will leave condensation all over a cold bass which can be annoying.

There's a passing resemblance to some of the early Aria and Japanese Epiphone basses. It's not quite the same as either, but could potentially be related. I'm thinking of some of the ones pictured here: [url="http://bassoutpost.com/index.php?topic=4573.msg72672#msg72672"]http://bassoutpost.com/index.php?topic=4573.msg72672#msg72672[/url] It looks like someone has gone to town on yours with a pot of household gloss paint though!

I haven't had any basses in or out this year, though I did build a new neck for my homebuilt five string and put a set of Sadowsky flatwounds on. It's not that I'm particularly non-materialistic or anything like that, just that I don't really have the disposable income to do much about it!

I've converted one the other way (from metal grille to cloth), though mine was a prototype cab and I don't know if it is identical to the later S12s. The metal grille version is constructed differently from the cloth version as it has a raised wooden section around the edge of the baffle to support the grille. On mine this was glued with a fairly soft adhesive and could be carefully pried off to make room for mounting a cloth grille and frame, but if they later changed adhesive I can see why converting metal grille to a cloth grille might not be possible. Converting a cloth grille cab to a metal grille ought to be possible, but you'd need to add that wooden section around the edge of the baffle to support it.

I'm in a funny place in terms of bands. This year I left the band I'd played in for several years and I'm starting to wonder whether I should fill the gap. I have two projects on the go currently, one where I'm playing double bass in an acoustic setting and one in which I play guitar. Both of those bands gig fairly sparsely so they don't leave me feeling overly stretched. What I'm not doing in either of those is playing bass with a drummer, which is something I miss. So I guess my goal for the coming year is to find a band or project to play bass in. It's been a while since I've had to actively look for people to play with (people have usually asked me), so I've almost forgotten how to go about it...

I like the headstock re-shape, as the HB headstock is a little inelegant. I wouldn't have bothered with the Fender decal myself, but it's your bass not mine!

I've noticed Rae McIntosh in Edinburgh has Chromes, they seem to have a pretty good choice of strings. Before the internet retailers took off I always had trouble finding flatwounds. Lots of places would have Rotosounds but they're a bit of an acquired taste, and a couple more told me they could order Ernie Balls but only if I committed to buying a box of six sets at full retail!

[quote name='chriswareham' timestamp='1419274634' post='2638265'] Now I have a dilemma. I don't know how to cut a neat round hole for the speaker in the baffle. I also don't know the correct tool for rounding off the edges of the cabinet. Any advice gratefully appreciated! [/quote] A router is good for both jobs, with a circle cutting jig for the baffle and a round-over bit for the edges.

Pushing the preamp with a clean boost works on most valve amps. It's not the same sound as turning the amp up but can be good for a little grit. The two channels on the Heritage might respond differently, as I think the 1964 channel has two gain stages and the tone controls before the volume control, while the volume control in the 1966 channel comes after the first gain stage. (I don't have a B15 myself but I'm building a preamp based on one, so I've spent a bit of time looking at the schematics)