itu

Use two frontwo/men, and they keep the competing, or quarreling.

But it totally lacks the fun of making music. I love to go to rehearsals!

Without knowing what fx are used, it is pretty hard to suggest, could you really left someting out from the board for those Town gigs. Like if you need a comp every now and then, a tiny Spectra would surely do the job.

There was a test in an acoustic lab, when I studied, so this was long ago. There was a set of hifi stuff, one CD, and three sets of speaker grilles: black, brown, and white. The listeners had a short break between "changing speakers", while only the grilles were changed.

Guess what? White was slightly aggressive, brown pretty dull, and black most balanced.

Aluminium! Shiny aluminium! Therefore Hartke has to be aggressive, and what were their words in the advertisements? Transient attack!

(The question remains, what does it mean?)

Niels-Henning Ørsted-Pedersen (while listening to him, from the name you may believe there are two persons - jazz)

Stanley Clarke (I started listening to him as a youngster, and his playing led me to play bass seriously, well, sort of) 

Mark King (slapping fun)

Pekka Pohjola (composer)

Jeff Berlin (attitude)

Tom Kennedy (what a sideman!)

Abraham Laboriel (sessions)

Tommy Shannon (lays down that feel)

James Jamerson (The Sideman)

g-word players...

Barney Kessel (jazz)

Paco de Lucia (flamenco, incredible!)

Allan Holdsworth (different)

Al Di Meola (flashy)

Wayne Krantz (jazz)

Oz Noy (jazz and effects)

This started a while ago. A guy named "MPU" had built a headless/fretless for himself. He got bored with it, and decided to sell. I happened to see the bass and suggested that he should put frets to it. He did - and I was sold.

This bass had VBT which I didn't like. I was considering making the circuitry myself (and got some very interesting ideas from these pages, thank you!), but because of my earlier experience with Mixpot, and a certain urge to get this ready right now, I contacted Mr. Noll.

body: cherry

neck: alder + CF

HW: brass, custom made

pickups: side by side humbucking Status singlecoils

electronics: vol + Noll Mixpot + 2 band pre & a custom eq pot

I did not want to make more holes to the bass. I asked Mr. Noll to use one double pot for B&T tilt adjustment. He actually went much further: the pot has a switch. In normal mode turning the pot CW bass is boosted and treble is cut. Pulling up the pot, both B&T are boosted for smiley eq.

80's, welcome back.

I bought my SCF in the early 90's, and it was already a second hand unit. Still going strong.

The reason for low noise is that it has a compander circuitry in it: the input signal is compressed before the processing, and expanded after. Noise floor is super low. And everything is analog.

The input is also special, because it can handle a raw piezo easily.

Please take a look at the prices of quality double basses and bows. Expecting to hear about you soon.

One of my all time favourites is Flamenco by Carlos Saura. 100 minutes of incredible music and musicians.

8 hours ago, MacDaddy said:

There's a documentary about an old British heavy metal band that's quite good.

 

But... wasn't that a rockumentary?

I think the biggest thing here is to make people doubt, and that easily leads to nonsense, and conspiracy theories = theories created by the uneducated people.

Here uneducated means someone who does not know the area s/he tries to explain.

If I lived closer, I'd be happy to check the circuitry. If only the pots, and 9 V lines are defect, the repairing takes maybe two, three hours: removing the preamp, some analysis, soldering... As said, this bass is special and should be fixed to its glory.

This guy wrote BS about time, but one single part of the western tuning is pretty well documented there.

Many tuners have 415 Hz as an option, because it has been thought as a Baroque A. Several bands that play old music tend to tune higher (like 441 - 445 Hz) to sound "clearer".

As you can see from the history, absolute hearing is learnt from the music heard around us. It is not (and cannot be) something truly absolute. Some people just have a better memory of pitches. 432 Hz is as good as 442 Hz.

Eastern music may divide an octave to, say 31 pitches, which leads us to understand, that pitches, and their relative distances are just an agreement.

You can record something and then play it faster to reach 440. It sounds different.

It is pretty hard to add an acoustic piano to your band.

If the bass is nice, electronics should be replaceable. Do you think Rob would help you with 300-series electronics, maybe?

I make mistakes quite often. If (and only if) I remember to check my faults at home, my right hand fingering is the main reason for mistakes. Even relatively slow song become much better (read: tighter) sounding when my plucking hand does less unnecessary movements. 1-2, 2-1, 1-2 is usually much worse than 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 even while doing string hopping.

If strange is in need, in a 1986 GP magazine Billy Gibbons is playing one very different creation. I do not remember the luthier's name.

A mail to Carey might be helpful, no?

8 hours ago, paul_5 said:

...wiped out and apply fresh silicone grease, but if the carbon tracks are worn or cracked...

Silicon grease? But not to the carbon track. Use some deoxit or similar, but nothing silicon based.

1 hour ago, joel406 said:

Yes... It can.

Fine, please describe your rig in detail. I am also interested.

To the original question: SCF, like the Danish used to say.

6 hours ago, tauzero said:

I'm not sure that any of my active basses with passive pickups (all of them except the Warwicks) have buffers prior to the blend.

True. There only few preamps that mix pickups: John East, EMG, Audere. Noll Mixpot is an active mixing component. Most of the other systems use simple blend pot which loads both pickups, and cuts high end.

pickups - blend - vol - tone stack - output

As I have said countless times, any part of this signal path can use battery powered buffers producing lo-Z ("active") signal. But any does not mean that every part is lo-Z.

@Woodinblack wrote:

"...active pickups were created so that you could use a smaller magnetic field which would have less drag on the strings, giving you a more pure sound of what the strings were doing..."

The main point is, that with lower inductance (less windings in the coil, and weaker magnet) you get wider frequency response. Very high output pickups have stronger magnets, more wire, and narrow f response.

@Woodinblack:
"...active preamp (on passive pickups, like most basses) was made so that you could control the output impedance of the bass..."

I think you are partially on the right track here. Yes, lo-Z output is good while transferring signal through the cable. If Z and noise were the most important things, we would have balanced line outputs in our basses. But I have seen just few balanced output systems in basses, like in Wal, Sei and Vigier.

Alembic did quite many trials with preamps during 70's (they weren't the first, but very visible). As they used very low impedance (power hungry and high quality) opamps (NE5532/4 family) they needed external PSUs. I do think their main goal was to make a functional preamp with powerful tone tweaking options. On top of that the result had a lo-Z output.

I would suggest a looper with a headphone output + aux in. It's the ultimate training unit: you can hear your own playing instantly. The red one I have is probably an older Valeton looking like a Dapper.

A different gig today - Monday! Government evening party. We weren't in the best shape, although we had lots of rehearsals, and the setlist was ready two or three weeks ago. It wasn't the easiest place, somewhat reverbing, but the worst was that I couldn't hear others on the other side of the stage.

Two long sets, quite some people. There was too much light, and people were a bit shy to get to the floor. But our singers were in very good mood, and made the evening.

Green is the basic colour that glows longest. While I worked in a watch factory, we tried to laminate up to 4 layers of strontium based luminous material to a plate. After UV activation the material glew around 75 hours (+3 days) in a completely dark room.

That powder was even better than Super Luminova.