Obrienp

My experience with the two band EQ Ibby preamp is that it is horrible! Far too aggressive and it will amp up any single coil buzz. Shielding always helps with jazz pickups but I reckon it is worth spending about £100 on a Glockenlang two band replacement. It is much more civilised, transparent, has a passive mode, is pre-wired and is pretty well a drop in replacement for the Ibby OEM junk. Otherwise go passive but by the time you have bought 4 decent pots, caps, etc and paid to have them wired up, you will be well on your way to the price of a Glockenlang preamp. Other two band replacement preamps are available of course.

You guys are making me feel even older! 70 this year and I don’t remember whether we had Vim in Oz back then. Probably had another name if we did.

No probs here and they stock stuff you can’t buy in the UK. They are not the cheapest for everything but normally very competitive.

Looks good and you don’t have to shield it as it is already conductive. Just need a couple of bits of conductive tape from the graphite paint in the control cavity to a screw hole on either side and you should have really good shielding. 👍

Think I would be inclined to plug those holes with short lengths of toothpick and wood glue. It won’t make them entirely invisible but they won’t be quite that obvious. P.S. Those Gotohs must have cost about half what the bass cost!

Thanks for the reassurance. I’ve basically been doing that for more than 3 years. Unfortunately, he seems to be moving in the opposite direction politically but that is his prerogative. Of course, there is always the possibility that he is right and I am wrong🤔. As far as I am aware he doesn’t actually participate in physical acts against immigrants. I think that might be my red line.

Just came across this thread and it is actually a situation I have on my mind. No names, no pack drills: a bandmate in one of the bands I play in expresses very anti-immigrant views, given the chance. He is a radical Reform supporter and reposts some really poorly researched, utterly false claims on Facebook. He seems to be a sucker for far-right conspiracy theory. I am OK with people holding opposing views to me but I lose sympathy when they are based on the most transparent misinformation and involve little to no critical thinking. Trouble is, this apart, he is a really nice person. The only person in the band who expressed any real concern, or interest when I was in hospital for 10 days a couple of years ago. The only person who visited me at home, to see how I was doing, once I was discharged. He is also very generous and willing to help friends out. I can’t reconcile his political views with the rest of his character. I think he has realised that I don’t share his views (I am not sure about the others, equally divided I suspect). Consequently, we just don’t discuss politics at all in the band. I once pointed out to him that, although I hold British nationality, I am a dual national and an immigrant myself, as is my other half. Apparently, that doesn’t count. I suspect because we are both white and not Muslim. Apart from that instance, subjects that could cause contention are avoided and I never acknowledge, or mention his Facebook posts. Am I being a coward, should I leave the band on principle, or is this respecting other peoples’ right to hold opposing views? I am inclined towards the latter position: there is too much polarisation in our society. However, it still troubles me.

All this talk of GR Bass gear made me look at Bass Direct. Now I’ve seen the Dual 800 head I have serious GAS. Wow! What a lot of bang for the buck! Returning to the subject in hand. The One 350 does seem to be a good fit for @andyhaines requirements and much better value for money than the Mini One, which is only about £70 less but has much fewer features. I guess the only reason you would choose the Mini over the One 350, is if you absolutely needed to fit it in a gig bag pocket but then it is a lot more expensive than the Gnome, Elf, BAM, etc.

My main gigging amp: Blackstar U700 has some built in effects as well as pre and power amp modelling (character settings). I occasionally use some of the drive settings and definitely the character options. After that, I sometimes use the compressor and very occasionally chorus. This is often because we are covering certain songs where the bass was processed in that way. The only pedals I use with it are a tuner and an envelope filter for some funk numbers. I am sure I could get by with the amp models and the drive. Everything else is fluff really (except the tuner). Chorus is nice for fretless but not all the time. My accuracy is poor enough to provide a chorus effect most of the time 😏.

Fender high mass bridge: good choice and pretty good value as high mass bridges go. 👍

Sorry I may be a bit behind the curve here (I tried to read all the posts above but my other half was insistent on telling me about somebody, whom I have never met, kids latest news, despite the fact I was clearly reading something). I see @Phil Starr stepped in about the Warwick Gnome. I think they are far from transparent in the EQ sense. I have owned the basic 200 watt version and now own the iPro 280 watt. I also have two LFSys Monzas and the first time I tried the iPro through a Monza it sounded horrible to my ears. Fortunately, @Phil Starr clued me in about the Gnome’s baked in EQ profile and I now have the weirdest looking settings, which make it sound good through the Monza. Conversely it sounds OK through my Barefaced Two10S without the tweaking but that is because it is unravelling the Two10S’ default vintage colouring. It is definitely the antidote to vintage; does that make it HiFi? I have never found the jack out on the Gnome a problem and all my cabinets have speakon sockets. Just get a jack to speakon loudspeaker cable, available for very little on fleaBay and the like. If you want an effects loop, pre-post DI out and speakon sockets on a Gnome, you are going to have to go for the iPro 600 watt v2. It is still within your budget but is a bit bigger and heavier than the lower powered versions. It may still fit in a gig bag pocket though and it also benefits from 4 band EQ. I have no idea whether the baked in EQ is different from the original.

Matter of interest: how many people on here are still using an Acinonyx? There was a great deal of enthusiasm for it when it first came out but quite a few got sold in the BC classifieds. For a while it was my main gigging bass with my blues band but I got so fed up with the buttons, I left it at home after the first flush of enthusiasm. I’m probably going to play it more now that I have done the mods above but I am favouring medium scale at the moment.

Two very different views on the Satellite: Not everybody likes the Satellite.

G4M have just knocked a few quid off it and they have sunburst lefties in stock.

For a bit of balance, not everyone likes the Hartwood Satellite. I have to admit the sound is probably a bit marmite but then he seems to have only tried it with the horrible OEM strings:

Link to my NBD report on the Hartwood Satellite:

This is a slightly delayed new bass day report on the Hartwood Satellite bass. Hartwood is a new house brand of Gear 4 Music. Here is a link to their website for the colour I have gone for: https://www.gear4music.com/Guitar-and-Bass/Hartwood-Satellite-Bass-Guitar-Metallic-Blue/6TIG. However, some of the specs are incorrect, so I will correct them below. This is a medium scale (32”) budget bass. It comes in at just under £200, so I guess the nearest competition is the Squier Affinity Jaguar HB, which comes in at about £40 more. They have quite a lot in common in that they are both single pickup basses with jazz style necks and offset bodies. On the whole I feel the Hartwood is slightly better made (based on my memory of owning the Jag). The best feature of the Satellite is the neck: claimed to be roasted maple. It might be but it has clearly been stained to emphasise the toffee colour, so the jury is out on that. It was carved from a single billet, rather than having a scarf joint at the headstock. Time will tell if this is susceptible to cracking if bashed but it seems pretty strong at the moment. The frets on my example are really well finished but quite shallow. There are no sprouting, or high frets and they are cut a little back from the edge of the fretboard, so it was easy to roll the edges by running a sanding block along them. That is not to say that it was sharp or rough to start off but I prefer the feel of rolled edges. The fretboard wood is laurel which seems a bit softer than rosewood and it was quite dry but was easily revived with some lemon oil. The nut, which is 38mm (not 40mm as claimed in the specs) was a bit too high and not that well cut. Easily remedied as well. Really nice touches are the fretboard markers that roll round to the edge of the board, so can be seen easily from above and the wheel truss rod adjustment at the heel. An adjustment bar comes with the bass and the correct size Allen key for the saddles. Sticking with the neck, the headstock is reminiscent of the the Sire shape but smaller and not as fuggly. It looks pretty good IMO. The machine heads look like standard pattern vintage Fenderish items in the photo on the website but in reality are tiny (see photo below). The shafts are just under 10mm and the baseplates only 35mm long, even smaller than the smallest Gotoh Resolites. It may be difficult to find replacements that drop in but that said, they seem pretty robust, operate smoothly and seem to hold their tuning. They can’t be heavy either, which must contribute to the reasonably good balance on a strap. The body is an interesting shape. A bit like an extended, offset Tele. It has the weirdest shaped scratchplate but it grows on you and does fit the vibe of the bass, which is a bit 60s throwback. It is quite a big body, which also contributes to the balance. I haven’t weighed it but the website claims the average weight is 3.75kg, which seems about right. It’s not as light as say a Nordstrand Acinonyx but not a boat anchor. I don’t think it would cause much discomfort on a long gig and unlike a lot of shorter scale basses, it has decent body contours for both belly and forearm. On the back the neck is retained by 4 individual screws (a bit more upmarket than the standard 4 screw plate) and the lower edge is cut away a bit to give better access to the upper frets. The Precision bass style pickup is set quite close to the neck (more about the sound anon) and has simple P style controls of vol and tone. The jack socket is mounted on an oval plate on the side of the lower bout, like a Tele, or 51 Precision bass. The bridge is BBOT style but is more substantial than some I have seen on cheap offerings. It has rudimentary grooves in the baseplate to keep the saddles pointing in the right direction. Spacing is 20mm. I took the Satellite to a blues jam the evening it arrived (but after fixing the nut, neck relief and intonation). It seemed to sound pretty precision like through the house rig (Ashdown ABM 600 EVO head and a custom made 2 x 10 cab). At home I played it through my FRFR rig of Markbass LMIII and LFSys Monza, which really gives you a pretty uncoloured reproduction of the sound of the bass. I found it a little disappointing with EQ set at equality. A bit too clanky and low mid focused and a little lacking in outright lows on the E string. This seemed counterintuitive given the placement of the pickup up but at least it wasn’t muddy and indistinct. This was probably largely due to the OEM strings which are pretty horrible. Very rough feeling and incidentally 45-100, not 40-95 as claimed in the spec. It was also very noisy with hands off the strings. I always expect to change the strings on cheap basses and normally change the pickup and electrics as well. I also prefer the look of higher mass bridges (even if the jury is out on how it changes tone). Consequently I set about putting a Tone Rider Duke in it with CTS pots and a Pure Tone jack socket. It was harder to find a cheap drop in replacement bridge because of the two front, two back retaining screw pattern. I eventually found something for about £14 which is a bit beefier and had the 4 retaining screw pattern. It would have been much easier if Hartwood had used the ubiquitous 5 hole Fender pattern. On opening the thing up I discovered why it was so noisy: no shielding at all, apart from a bit of tin foil under the pots (see photo). This is pretty much what I have found with the Squier Jaguar, Ibanez Talman etc. Graphite paint would obviously break the budget! Anyway easily cured with copper tape. It’s now as quiet as a church mouse. The control cavity is massive, so no problem fitting in full sized CTS pots (unlike the Squier Jag that barely takes mini-pots). In fact you could easily fit an active pre-amp and battery in, should you want to. Pot spacing seems to be pretty standard Precision bass pattern, so you could use a pre-wired harness, if you don’t want to solder yourself but you will need to have a long wire run to the jack and be prepared to solder that yourself (because of the placement). An indication of the speed of assembly came when I changed the bridge. The original retaining screws had been forced in at an angle. Obviously not pre-drilled because the finish was chipped off around the holes. I had to fill the holes and drill them straight to get the replacement bridge to align properly. These things are made to a price and I guess a lot of the budget had gone into the quality of the neck and body. Now that I have done these mods the bass sounds really good. It’s like a Precision with a bit more bottom and top. It has plenty of punch and definition. TBH I reckon I could have got a lot of this just from changing the strings to something decent. I have put D’Addario nickel rounds 45-100 on it but I think it would work really well with some chrome flats as well. I don’t regret changing the pickups, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary. The OEMs look pretty cheap: bar magnets fixed along the bottom, instead of magnetised pole pieces. Tone Rider Dukes (or SP1 Classic) are only £35 and punch well above their price point, so almost a no-brainier upgrade for cheap Precision style basses. Conclusion after all this waffle: a very nice playable and good value addition to the medium scale market. The neck could be off a much more expensive instrument and the body shape is interesting. It balances pretty well and it’s not too heavy. Change the strings for something decent and it sounds pretty good OEM. Spend £35 on a Tone Rider pickup and it sounds excellent. Incidentally, G4M do a Hartwood full size gig bag for £30, which the Satellite fits into pretty well. The body is quite long, so there isn’t a huge amount of bag flopping around above the headstock and it has a neck retainer pad and strap, plus pretty thick padding. Finished article with replacement chunkier bridge.

Pure Tone are great and that’s what I meant. For some reason I keep calling them True Tone. I only opened a packet the other day, doh!

Well, a Tone Rider SP1 (classic) , or the SP2 (Duke) P pickup set, depending on what I am after tonally. After that CTS, or Alpha full sized 250 K pots (if they will fit in the cavity), a decent 0.047uf capacitor (TBH Mylar is fine but orange drop if you must) and Pure Tone jack socket. If the cavity is too tight for full sized, Alpha mini-pots are a good alternative. I wire it up with cloth covered wire, simply because it is easier to work with. Sticky backed copper tape to shield the cavities and the back of the pickguard. Remember to have a bit of overlap from cavity to the top so that you get continuity with the shielding on the back of the pickguard. Job done😀.

Well, I feel I am just chucking this out into the ether but I finally got round to doing the modifications to the Acinonyx that I described in my last post. It turned out to be quite challenging for me and Tony (the luthier) but it is finally done. Yeh! The challenge for Tony was getting hold of blanks large enough to accommodate the Acinonyx scratchplate in one piece. It took a couple of passes on the CNC machine because a bit slipped and caused a gouge in one plate. Prior to that there had been a scaling issue with the CAD/CAM software that caused a perfect but scaled down version of the scratchplate to be cut: about 90% of the full sized plate. 4 blanks later we finally got the finished plate but in a slightly thinner material, although still 3ply. It took me quite a long time to get round to wiring it up and at that point I discovered that the control cavity wasn’t quite deep enough to accommodate the depth of the Oak-Grigsby 4 position Tele switch, or the varitone. Eek! The original cavity is 30mm deep and the body is 40mm thick. I needed about 3mm more depth but I also had to allow for a layer of copper tape shielding, plus insulating tape on top of that to prevent the possibility of anything shorting out in contact with the shielding. I very carefully created a 5mm trench along the centre of the control cavity with a very sharp chisel. One slip and I could have gone through the back. Fortunately I didn’t and there is no give in the back: phew! I slo had to scallop some of the bracing in the body route to accommodate the edge of the volume pot. Again a sharp chisel and a steady hand required. Once that was done I was able to squeeze everything into the control cavity and screw the plate down flush with the top. The first time round squeezing all the wiring in caused a wire to come away and only the front pickup to work but after re-soldering, I was more careful second time round. Anyway the final article is below. I think the perl plate looks much better than the original. The chicken head knob is for the varitone switch that has 6 positions ranging from 0.010 to 0.1 uf. I am toying with the idea of putting the OEM chicken head knob back on the volume control. I am also considering making up a circular plate to go round the varitone with position markings on it. I would use one of the prototype plates for the material. The Tele switch has 4 positions: 1 bridge pickup, 2 both pickups in parallel, 3 neck pickup, 4 both pickups in series (“all-in”). I am pleased with finished article: it is much easier to get the “all-in” setting than messing with the original buttons. The varitone has more tone variations than the original buttons and they are easier to select. There are no buttons in the way of my picking arm. If anybody is interested in getting a custom plate, now the outline has been digitised, Tony can do one to your specs. https://tonyedwardsguitars.co.uk.

Great that you are happy with the sound and tonal options. The first thing I did with Squiers in the past was replace all the electronics: pickups, pots, capacitor, jack socket and shield the cavities with copper tape. Good that they have improved in that area. Of course, I would still do it but that is because I like tinkering and for £35 Tone Rider SP1, or2 blows everything else out of the water. 😀

If that video is anything to go by, they are definitely trying to move away from their Radio 2 image! Seriously though, apart from a JMJ, using a pick and Fender Bassman gear, it is hard to tell from that what is going on in his signal chain. The camera rarely lands on the bass player, let alone their pedal board. Guessing is fun but why don’t you message them on instagram, or TikTok to ask? P.S. For people as old as me: remember when you used to be able to write to Melody Maker to ask stuff like this and they would get onto the artist/band’s management?

Are they still in business? They seem to come and go, moving production around. Wasn’t it meant to be coming back to the UK? Perhaps that is why there is a 12 week delivery time. I imagine that is going to be quite heavy given the neck through design but always good to have another medium scale on the block. This one is serious money though, so I would definitely want to try it before buying.

I am so tempted to buy another Chinese neck of fleaBay but at the moment I can’t play due to bursitis in my left elbow, so I am putting it off to see if I recover. I turn 70 shortly so recovery is not a given: arthritis seems to be getting its claws into me. If/when I am ready to jump, it’s going to be a fretless jazz. Bizarrely these seem to sell for about £20 more than the fretted ones, so it would be somewhere around £110. Prior to the bursitis, I had been enjoying playing my Sire U5 fretless shortie and was wondering whether I could manage a full scale fretless but didn’t want to lash out on a new bass (like a Sire P7). I have a couple of bitsas I have put together, so one would provide the body. I have to say that putting these basses together is very addictive and with the quality of these “cheap” necks, it can be done for less than the price of a Squier Affinity but with much better hardware. Is this an addiction?

Personally, if I could only keep one, I would keep the U5. I had the Jaguar SS a few years back and I don’t recall it being as well made and I also recall the Jag being a real neck diver but I might be confusing it with the 32” humbucker version I also owned for a while. I love the rolled edges on the U5 neck, the flamed maple top (unless you have the green one), the lack of hum and the serrated saddles. I guess in the Jag’s favour: it is easier to upgrade things like the bridge and machine heads (standard Fender pattern) and it has more conventional contouring (belly and arm cuts). However, the U5 is the first “cheap” bass that I have not felt the need to upgrade. The bridge pickup could be stronger but I remember the Jag’s being even more pathetic and the P not being that great either. Each to their own though. It will be interesting to hear where you land. BTW what’s wrong with having two shorties?