Jay2U

Oh, wait! Every other year I attempt to play guitar. London Dungeon - Misfits.

My son on guitar. He mostly plays Iron Maiden like stuff, but made an exception for his dad.

I still didn't properly introduce myself, so here we go. I was born in 1960, in The Netherlands. My father was a multi-instrumentalist. As far as I remember he played organ, piano, violin, harmonica, trombone and accordion. In my teens I played keyboard, but nothing special. Later, in my early twenties I was responsible for a youth bar, where I organised quite a few gigs. In the early 80's we had a few punk bands playing at our venue. Every time I saw a band playing, I thought if I had to choose an instrument, it would be the bass. Many years passed, without playing any instrument at all. At the age of 36 I became father. Eight years later my son wanted to play guitar, so I bought him a cheap acoustic guitar. A few years later he wanted an electric guitar and lessons. We went to a music store to buy him a guitar, a combo and some small stuff. There it happened! I saw many basses on display... At home I tried his guitar when he was asleep. I found out that I really wanted a bass. I didn't even know what GAS was, but I did experience a severe GAS-attack. So I bought my first bass, an Ibanez GSR200EX. I still have it. I modified it to accommodate B, E, A and D strings, plus I removed the pre-amp and optimised a few details. In real life I'm responsible for a thermo-physical calibration and research lab. I'm living in the direct vicinity of the lowest place in The Netherlands. That's about it.

They loose some sustain and clearly some harmonics. In my opinion a broken in flatwound isn't bad at all.

A Happy, Healthy and Musical New Year, Friends!

At least four times a year I perform several check-ups and clean the board. As my fingers are dry as a desert, fretboards don't get dirty. On the G&L I change strings about every eight weeks, so I don't save all old string sets. I've got a few used sets, of course. Regarding stabilizing, I press the strings over the nut and saddles to set the break angle. Normally that's enough to get things stable. Retune the next day and I'm good to go.

Quickly swapping and tuning strings, just for fun. The strings were of the same brand and gauges, so intonation wasn't required.

Suddenly I remembered having posted a comparison of broken in Flatwounds and new ones, three and a half years ago on my YouTube channel. Here's a link...

I've got a clear message to Santa! Happy holidays to all!

I can, after having them dug out. They're on another PC, so maybe tonight...

No I don't. For further analysis I should have arrays with numerical data, which I don't have. The graphs were made directly from the wav-files.

Rounder usually means more sine wave shaped, so less harmonics.

I don't think so! A fatter string requires more tension in order to make it's higher mass resonate at a given frequency. More mass and tension require more energy for the same amplitude. Apart from the fundamental tone, harmonics appear along the string. The more energy, the more harmonics. As those harmonics are multiples of the fundamental frequency, the result will be a richer tone, not a fatter tone. As the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I analysed the waveforms produced by both, thin and fat strings. It can be clearly seen that the percentage of harmonics versus the fundamental frequency depends on string gauge. In other words: Thinner strings produce more boom. In the graph tone, gauge and tension are listed.

Motörhead's version of this Sex Pistols oldie

Some more upright fun

Some more ZZ Top...

D'addario flats is a safe option, as is Ernie Ball. There's no real difference between both. I was told D'addario used to produce Ernie Ball's flats till a few years ago. A few years ago I tried the Cobalts, but I'm not a fan of those. They lost their semi-brightness rather quickly, the most frequently played strings first.

A video about upgrading and modifying my cheap Chinese P-Bass copy, with some serious metal jamming at the end. Enjoy!

I suddenly remembered the Chromes on my P-Bass copy. Here's an example with compression only.

You're right. To me it's the mix that counts. I try to fill the spectrum from 30 to 200 Hz.