Stub Mandrel

When I bought it, it had flats on. The only 6-string I have ever played that had flats on it. Incidentally, my Maya fretless has a blockboard body. Two layers of blocks with thin layers between and top and bottom.

@skankdelvar may take a dim view of you comparing the immaculate Dorothy to a rugby player...

Re-read with care 🙂

'Motor boating' is usually caused by power supply issues, probably the power amp causing the preamp supply voltage to drop creating a slow feedback loop and low frequency oscillation that depends on volume. See if you can isolate the preamp power supply better, perhaps add a sizeable electrolytic capacitor near the preamp and large inductor in the power amp supply. Ideally wire them 'star' style rather than daisy chaining them.

Invision Community's indexing can get slow when threads grow beyond around 1000 pages. The answer is not to ban off-topic subjects (one forum I was on had terrible repercussions from doing this including a breakaway forum being set up). A solution is to (with due notofication/advice beforehand) close some long threads and move their recent postings to a new one.

Phew! I thought Gilbert and Sullivan had split up.

I demoed one of these and it was brilliant. I still regret not buying it. The fridge magnet, not the actual bass obv. 😉

Yes those are the ones.

I've got two drumsticks from gigs. I think one was from UFO,, can't remember the other, might have been the Stranglers. They were both 'name' bands. Hmm.

My Maya fretless has a blockboard body, my squier tele is plywood. This has hideously cheap pickups with terrible microphony. It's a Kay and a cheap as you can imagine a guitar could be constructed. It sounds amazing:

I've always played SS strings. But my Jazz came with Fender nickels on it and they suit it down to the ground. I find different basses make different music, different strings is part of that.

I can play loads of instruments - if you set the bar as "can you play a recognisable tune on...?" I hope I play bass to a decent standard, guitar to a 'good enough to have fun playing along standard' but other instruments are pretty much just to have fun on my own or learn a part for a home recording. I did play mandolin in front of an audience in 2019 🙂 Fretted string instruments are all much of a muchness in terms of chords and melodies. Just be able to 'swap' chords/scales between fourth and fifth interval tunings. Get guitar and mandolin and you can play something on almost any fretted instrument. For example, you can tune an 8-string bozouki like the any four strings on a guitar and have great fun with something that sounds and looks very different without really learning any new skills.Strumsticks are good, diatonic ones are impossible to play out of tune 🙂 Ukes, have re-entrant tunings designed by people who hate musicians, learn a few chords and chug... Banjos are unusual you can learn a few plucking patterns and otherwise ignore the fifth string, but mine needs major repair. Keyboards are easy to plonk out a basic melody or chords but need skills beyond me to do both at the same time. I used to be a whiz on the Stylophone... Blowing things, the fingering of basic recorder/pennywhistle/mini sax is fairly easy to get. Some are easier to make sound nice than others. I count do squat with a flute despite borrowing one for a fortnight. A proper sax or clarinet is hell - be pleased if you can make it honk one good note. Things like harmonicas and drums are deceiving. Easy to get a very basic result but they have their own skill sets that make it hard to go past the very basics. Fretless stringed instruments are different. Violin is so hard to get a nice, consistent tone. Fretless bass I can play fine, but feel it should be classed as a different instrument to the fretted bass just as the double bass is unique. It benefits from a different left-hand technique to fretted bass and rewards you improving your ear. Then there's spoons...

Barbapapa Basses...

I had Todd Campbells (it was a ninja-like catch, left-handed, just flipped my hand up to shoulder level as a distance on no more than six feet) 🙂 But I lost it.

Everyone knows that the look, scarcity and cost of timber are what influence the tone and playability of an instrument more than anything else. If stiffness, rigidity, strength to weight ratio and consistency were important characteristics for electric instrument bodies they would all be made out of plywood. 🙂

Dakota = Sex on Fire in Wales...

This, or anything else that causes the supply rail voltages to 'collapse' at different rates.

Far from it! My divorce has been the best thing ever for my bass playing 🙂

Some may find this interesting... I'm getting divorced and have been spending most of my time in the workshop that has become my office, a detached single garage, concrete and dry lined with insulation behind plasterboard. For the last couple of months I've had my TE combo in here with the gain well up and the output on two clicks (which is quite loud). I'm now just left with orange practice amp, for the first time I've been told to turn down. My guess is that I'm pumping out a lot more mid-range, which is travelling further.

Perhaps re-update the first post? 🙂 Are there any recommendations for accommodation on Saturday night if I decide to make a weekend?

I've been looking for them for ages, and while packing up my workshop contents a few days ago I finally found some cans of pipe freezer spray. These are just compressed air, so no nasty solvents. I've already made some tweaks to the relicing on my Flea bass to make it a bit more natural looking, essentially carefully blending some of the more obviously artificial marks together to get rid of patterns and without greatly increasing the amount of relicing. Armed with a precision heat gun (actually a temperature controlled solder rework gun) set to 300C and the freezer spray I had a go at checking the nitro finish. The main challenge was spotting any missed bits, not helped by the fact that applying hot air makes the pattern disappear! I brought out the pattern in two ways - I attacked it with the dirty brush I use to clean machine tools, and I wiped over dark oak stain and then wiped it off again. This has also brouht out some opf teh otehr relicing a bit and dulled a few spots where my 'tuning' revealed bare wood. I'm happy with the result by I know many people won't, it's such a 'marmite' topic. All I can say is since getting this bass it's the one I always come back to and for the next nine days it's the only one (of ten) I have with me 🙂

Leading by example?

If they "Want more attack" whack them over the head with your bass 🙂