Stub Mandrel

I suppose a high point for me was being in PMT trying out acoustic bass and beings ask 'do you want to try it plugged in' and then 'do you want to try another one' - I assume I wasn't scaring away customers! Maybe it was just because I wasn't slapping...

Matter of priority...

Reading that I'm not alone with babywipes and mineral oil!

LOL! Have you ever seen the Hamster's live? 'Snail's Pace Slim' ( Barry Martin) sprayed his fingerboard with WD40 between every song although (a) I suspect a degree of showmanship and (b) he's a guitarist anyway...

I find learning complex stuff harder than playing it, if that makes sense? The fingers are faster than the brain...

I will no doubt be slated for this... but I clean using baby wipes and oil with sewing machine oil (which is essentially lemon oil without the smell).

Well it shows you just how long ago it was...

That's not bad!

I'm sure their are whole websites dedicated to the topic...

Trace Elliot could give Cuadrilla run for their money... who needs fracking?

According to the pedia of Wik (which tends to be unreliable or apocryphal on such details) he came in at MK6. I think I'm sorted now, just gagging to get the extra FETs fitted and test it out (especially as I now have some decent earplugs...).

Gah! Searched eBay for TO3 mounting kit and bough the cheapest that came up - should have looked properly, I ended up with TO3P sets! None on CPC, but plenty on Farnell. Weird.

Hah! Me getting my brain in a knot - it was Yellow Pearl not Black Pearl!

You remind me, I once saw Baron Rojo supporting Hawkwind at Hammy Odeon <mumble> years ago...

Black Pearl? Two Phil Lynott tribute basses in two days?

Well I took the 5-string to last night's rehearsal, having gone through all the songs on our list looking for ways to use it. For some it's just adding a couple of low notes, others you can add a bit more depth - doing the dum-dum-dum bits of Crazy Little Thing Called Love an octave down made them satisfyingly thumpy 🙂 The song that befitted most is Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting, with an assortment of riffs all of which can be played an octave down from time to time and this seemed to work well. Finding that with practice it's becoming more natural - but not all rosey - at one point I found my right and left hands were playing different strings and I had a major panic trying to work out which hand was in the right key... But the best thing was that last night we revisited songs we hadn't done for a while, and (a) they went well and (b) best of all a couple of times when we did get a bit lost we improvised and it worked.

What music are you into? They have changed a lot over the years, walking a strange zig-zag line from heavy rock, to fanstasy/scifi, to prog and to pop-rock. Single songs? Something like Spirit of Radio, Closer to the Heart or Bastille Day are good examples of their straight rock songs, Tom Sawyer or Red Barchetta are good, as is Countdown. YYZ if you like an all time classic bass riff. I'm afraid Working Man and The Trees are my two favourite tracks. Big Money is very accessible to listen too but the video will make you squirm. The more recent stuff tends to be less 'accessible'?

The replacement transistors have come. And... the output offset voltage is now 0.22V, a bit higher than I hoped, but now no visible displacement of the speaker cones. I will replace the pair of BF422s and adjust the bias current when I fit the two extra FETS, but I need to wait for the mounting kits to arrive. Neil PS I've had some advice from Agedhorse and it seems my amp is fitted with a 200/300 into 4R PSU.

A whole air band, well, cardboard...

Digging a bit it seems I have an amp with a 200W/300W into 4 ohm PSU and a 150W power amp (with fan), such things were not unknown back in the day. Amps like that could be the origin of the 'TE Watts' legend. Well please because I'm now only 2 fets short of a 300W TE combo. Who needs walls?

The TE board already has the gate resistors in place. 🤣 Unfortunately no holes in the heatsink or I could probably do it without taking the board out of the case!

I've discovered the amp is running of +/-50V ac not 40V. I suspect it's an early 250W one rather than 150W. This could explain why there were no external extension cab sockets. I'm going to fit an extra pair of mosfets - the PCB is ready for them, I just need to drill the heatsink. This should give greater reliability and safety margin if running at 4 ohms. Also, I found a thread, in Dutch, about someone with the same problem, except their DC offset was only 127mV. Much discussion and debate until in the last post they replaced TR201/2 with a matched pair and the offset came down to 5mV, then replaced TR203/4 as well and it came down to 3mV. I have high hopes swapping these transistors will cure my problem... There should be a translated version of the thread here: Thread on Dutch forum

Jamming with the guitarist from Impaler (gebuine signed band who had just put out their LP, guess the genre)and afterwards him telling the band I was a 'def' bassist. Probably had more to do with my HM2 pedal and sheer volume than any talent... 🙂

Old (analogue) Trace amps are conservatively rated for RMS not 'music power' or any other such misleading calculation, and have big hefty transformers with reasonable regulation. They also use a design for the power amps that gives hi-fi levels of quality, so you get maximum headroom with minimal distortion, possibly less than 0.1% at rated output. <Just looked carefully at my amp and see I've been talking bollocks so I'm editing this> I'd assumed it was a 150W amp because (1) everyone knows the 1110 combo was 150W and (2) the transformer is marked 39V 0 39V - the later AH150 was rated as 40-0-40 AC input. But I was just musing at how big the transformer is when I noticed the amp isn't actually powered from the 39V terminals, but from a pair marked 50V. That explains why the DC rails are at 69 - 0 - 69V. This probably also explains why a 150 watt amp is so loud... So... this amp is a very early 1110 combo, it has a MPB2 PCB marked 'Issue 2', with two mosfets and a fan. The issue 4 AH150 board has FOUR mosfets, 40-0-40V supply and no fan. The Issue 4 AH250 board has four mosfets, 46-0-46V supply and a fan. At the least I am tempted to add another pair of mosfets... they can drop straight into the board.

I think the PRS use a system based on a sample of venues that ensures the vast majority of royalties go to 'popular' artists. BTW you should be covered by the venue's licence.