Stub Mandrel

See the thread linked below. Recently a member has posted concerns about an apparently well set up bass being 'out of tune' when played near the nut or beyond the twelfth fret. I'm thinking the culprit may well be the new Korg Pitchblack Custom Strobe Tuner. This is 'accurate to 0.1 cent.' The ear is sensitive to tone differences of about 4-5 cents "the interval of one cent is too small to be perceived between successive notes." A typical tuner has a precision of 1 cent. 0.1 cent is 1/1000 of a tone (let's ignore the logarithmic nature as we are looking at tiny errors). That's a distance of about 1.5 thousandths of an inch at the first fret. To be accurate to 0.1 cent, the first fret would need to be placed to an accuracy of about 1.5% of its width. For the last fret, it would need to be placed with an accuracy of less than 0.5% of its width. Basses are generally made of wood not metal and working to such accuracy is almost impossible to achieve. Even the way someone frets a note can differ between players (or styles of playing) enough to shift the tone by a cent or more. Most strings drift by a cent from when they are struck to once the note has settled. I forecast two impacts of these new 'super accurate' tuners: People taking ages to tune up and never being satisfied because they drift out of tune after every song. More and more people reporting that they can't set up their instruments to be in tune all along the fretboard. It's a regular issue in engineering that nothing waste more time and effort than trying to work to an accuracy greater than is needed simply because the measuring equipment offers greater precision than the jobs requires. That's why the concept of 'tolerances' was developed, and I suspect we need to cultivate the concept of a tolerance of 'within one cent' as the gold standard when tuning and setting up instruments.

The question that has to be asked is - how flat/sharp? The Westone I have next to me, when tuned so E is in tune open and at 12th fret, but the first fret (F) is a tiny bit flat (in tune indicator and the one to the left both lit) and the 20th fret (C) is tiny bit sharp. A Squier Jag SS is spot on. That's with a Snark Super Tight. But you are the second person to report this issue in a few days with a Korg Pitchblack Strobe. "the new Pitchblack Custom has an incredible +/- 0.1 cent accuracy". Bearing in mind that the ear can typically detect errors of around 2 cents, and most tuners are sensitive to 1 cent, what this really means is that "the new pitchblack custom magnifies any tiny tuning errors making you paranoid".

Sorry, I miss-typed. If the nut is cut high, fretting lower notes means you have to overstretch the strings making the notes sharper the closer you get to the nut. Combined with excessive neck bow this could cause the symptoms you describe.

"Now to lay to rest any ugly rumours that John Glascock is a kinky bastard who like being thrashed severely across the bum, we'll do it only very slightly in the next song."

I suspect you mean that bit right of the bridge. It's down to the way the grain goes there, it's a big patch all of similar orientation. I realised this morning that I needed to stain inside the lower pickup rout as it's not under the scratchplate - I did actually rub come extra stain into that area, but I'm not sure it made much difference.

Light, 4 ohm and very loud.

But you could go to Tandy and buy a box with a 15" woofer in it 'for bass you can really feel' (and almost certainly, a tweeter with the dome punched in.) 🙂 I've got a pair of Phillips 'w00x' speakers with a tuned resonant passive radiator. For their size (about the same as my Kef Coda 7s) they have remarkable bass handling capability, although I guess they are less efficient than typical bass cabs. Is there any strong reason why passive radiators aren't used for bass cabs?

There's one obvious name forever associated with Jaydee basses... https://www.jaydeecustomguitars.co.uk/mark_king.html

If the nut isn't cut deep enough, you stretch the higher strings when fretting them, making them sharp.

Two or three fingers plucking together.

Why? Sorry- that seems very abrupt! Bot meant to be rude, I genuinely ask why? I don't want it to go any darker and I think more stain will just obscure the quilting.

I don't want to attempt the jack in the side as it's too easy to screw up, plus really you need a special bit to open up the hole from inside. I have three (four!) matching knobs to use, so I took inspiration from a surprising source:

Third pot so I can have VVT. The scratchplate I have is already drilled for standard VT and I wanted to keep the same spacing.

I have used Northwest Guitars' water-based denim blue stain. They suggest waiting 'a few weeks' for it to dry before over spraying with nitro lacquer. This seems excessive to me - I had no issues overspraying a body I first sprayed using blue ink with polyurethane after just a day or two. I realise the stain (applied with a sponge) will take a bit longer to dry as it soaks in deeper, but do I really need to wait that long? The stain works really well, BTW:

At the time, it felt like Nirvana had saved rock music.

Dubba Dubba Dubba Cha!

Hi! Just saying hello as a fellow grumpy git of a bass player from Barry 🙂

Must be honest, I have considered fitting bigger feet and would like bigger corner protectors. I would say they are pretty transparent sounding, they let you explore the full range of dojnds from your bass.

Kind of defeats the point of a kit but I jhave replaced the knobs with used ones and added nickle plated tuners and vintage bridge. Now I've gone and got a quilted maple body (a second, but I can't see the fault). Stained it blue today. Waiting for a Wilkinson j pup, and will be able to use the aged mint green scratchplate that wouldn't fit the original body.

Is it good for metal? : : : Yes, glam metal.

I've gone for a single 4-ohm 212. It's loud enough, I couldn't see any benefit in going for 8 ohms so I could double up or use it with another cab (plus I couldn't afford two). At 28lbs it's a one-hand carry, so easier to move around than two 112s. I can carry the amp in a shoulder bag, bass in one hand, cab in the other.

Every bass amp has a first order high pass filter (6dB/octave) constituting its input capacitor (to block DC offsets) and input resistance, unless it has something more sophisticated built in. Often the input resistance is high enough and the capacitor large enough for the corner frequency to be well below 30 Hz. A thought out example might be 10,000 R and 1.0 uF giving 16 Hz. My Laney Pro Bass has a first order LPF at 338 kHz followed by an LPF at 6Hz. Clearly it's just intended to stop RF and DC inputs and have no impact on the audio frequency response. The frequency response is likely to be further limited by later sections of the amp, but clearly this design is vulnerable to'thump' saturating the preamp as a minimum. A 'proper' HPF is usually at least second order (12bD/octave) so it can have a sharp 'knee' (-3dB) point as close to the lowest desired audio frequency as possible (which is more important than the steepness of the drop off, but they go together). I can better appreciate the value of a variable HP filter after reading comments above. When compensating for room acoustics being able to vary the steepness as well as the cutoff point is clearly valuable as you may, for example, just want to control the deep bottom end, rather than eliminate it. In the digital domain, virtually any filter behaviour can be modelled with little latency, which is, I suppose, why all in one pedals are so good at this.

Most musicians probably... But hearing the difference between two notes one after the other is not the same as detecting a difference in an interval or detecting one instrument out of tune with another. It's rather like comparing colour swatches, you can discriminate small differences between two adjacent colours, but not if they are separated by any distance.