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Obrienp

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Everything posted by Obrienp

  1. Obrienp
    I wasn’t that impressed with the side markers on my EHB1000S at first but I got used to them and it didn’t cause me problems gigging it. Admittedly I tend to play pub gigs rather than dark stages. I never really tested the effectiveness of the luminous markers. I thought the locking jack socket was great. It was a little tricky to operate when I first got it but after a few weeks I was releasing the cable one handed without even looking at it. Perhaps it eased a bit with use, or I just got used to it. I think it is a great little bass that you can play for hours. It balances well on a strap, is ergonomically contoured and light weight. I only sold mine because I had a long term order for a Nordstrand Acinonyx about to come to fruition (as it happens it still hasn’t arrived) and I am having to operate a one-in, one-out policy.
  2. Obrienp
    Thanks. That looks promising.
  3. Obrienp
    Thanks Mate! That sounds really interesting. Yes, I was wondering about having to enlarge the hole if I sleeved the threaded collar. I really don’t want to have to do that. I have put the project to one side for the while as it is my main gigging bass and I have a few coming up. Once the Acinonyx, that I ordered months ago, finally arrives, I will have an alternative solid bass to use and I will be able to crack on with it. I was kind of resigned to having the control cavity routed out a bit more. It’s got to go back to the luthier anyway because it has some fret sprout. Apparently the woods available to luthiers these days are not what they used to be: not seasoned enough and consequently subject to shrinkage but he thought this was one of the better blanks. Anyway, if there is away of avoiding routing it would be great.
  4. Obrienp
    Wish I had browsed earlier! If per chance it falls through, and I hope it doesn’t, give me a ping. I’m in Fakenham so can do cash on collection.
  5. Obrienp
    Tone is very subjective isn’t it. All my short scale basses have heavier gauges than 40-90/95 and all sound fine to me, wherever I am fretting. My custom P/J has Labella standard tension flats 45-105. It sounds great all the way up the neck and incidentally that is the gauge it came supplied with from the luthier who made it. I have Labella Beatle Bass flats 50-100 on my violin bass and they are perfect for the bass IMO. My fretless acoustic has Labella black nylon flats 50-105 (or is it 110) and they really work on it all over the neck. That came with 45-105, so I assume Guild thought that was the ideal gauge for the instrument. I had 40-95 gauge round wounds on a Squier SS Jaguar and I thought they sounded really boingy. I changed them for 45-105 and it sounded much better IMO. On the other hand I kept the 40-95s on a Bronco, even after I had put a precision pickup in it. They just seemed to suit the bass. I don’t know if fundamentals and harmonics are better or worse with my choice of strings but they work for me, and the instruments concerned. My conclusion has to be that you can’t make a hard and fast rule about string gauges that will suit every instrument and every player.
  6. Obrienp
    Sure, no worries. PM me, if you need them. Thanks for your interest.
  7. Obrienp
    Hi, Yes, these are still available.
  8. Obrienp
    I had a black Jaguar and it was a great bass but as has already been said, it did neck dive badly. I did change the pickups for the D’Addario matched P/J set and it sounded great with those. Although, like every P/J set I have tried, the Jazz bridge sounded weak in comparison to the P and putting both on full volume was like flicking a pad switch. I put a push/pull pot in the neck volume position and wired it to give me both pickups in series when pulled. Now that had cojones! I also took the opportunity to shield the the cavities with copper tape; not really necessary with the D’Addarios as the Jazz has stacked coils to quieten it and Ps are humbucking by their nature. The shielding came in useful when I put the original pickups back in it to sell it. I remember it being a bit noisy out of the box. I also put a high mass bridge on it, which helped a bit with the neck dive and improved tone/sustain. Yours already has that, which is a big plus IMO. Good call to change from the standard 40-95s, they really didn’t do it justice IMO. They were super easy to play but they sounded boingy: a bit like playing with giant rubber bands. Anyway, enjoy it. I regret selling mine because they seem to have become sought after now they are out of production.
  9. Obrienp
    I’ll probably do it myself anyway. I think risk was minimal but I wanted a cheap approach rather than his more thorough but more costly method. No doubts about his ability. He is extremely proficient but also extremely busy. I guess the one follows the other in that trade but it does mean having to wait until he has a slot. I’m just being lazy regarding the shielding. It took a while to get it as quiet as it is now and I don’t want to mess that up.
  10. Obrienp
    The luthier that built it did offer to do this but at my risk. Also the whole thing is shielded to blazes, so it will mean destroying a lot of that in the process and redoing it. However, I think you are right: it is my only option if I want a blend pot. My bad for opting for through body controls. I just assumed there would be long threaded blend pots like there are for standard pots. They do seem to refer to these as long shaft in the catalogues but yes, it is really the depth of threaded portion that is important.
  11. Obrienp
    I have had these thoughts myself. The same with tone/sound of the bass (and the same applies to guitars). We like the look and feel of the “classic” instruments because that is what we have grown up with: the sound of blues, Jazz, rock and roll, etc. The trailblazers played what they could get hold of/was available at the time and that has become the “classic” accepted tone and by extension, the instruments (amps, etc) that produced it.
  12. Obrienp
    Thanks for the referral to higher authority.
  13. Obrienp
    I did wonder about that. I might give that a try if all else fails. I would need to sleeve the thread and extend it, which would mean having a larger dimension retaining nut. Knowing my luck it would come off mid-gig with the blend 100% bridge pickup!
  14. Obrienp
    Hi. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve tried an Alpha and unfortunately the shaft isn’t long enough for the nut to bite on the thread. None of the usual suspects list a long shaft 250k blend pot.
  15. Obrienp
    Hoping to tap into the collective knowledge of the forum here. I have a custom made P/J with controls mounted through body. It currently has VVT controls but I always wanted volume/blend/tone. At the time of the build, the luthier was unable to source a long shaft blend pot and not wanting to delay things even more, I compromised on CTS long shaft pots in VVT. I looked around for ages trying to find a blend pot that might do the job. There seemed to be a shortage of this kind of stuff in the UK during lockdown. I got hold of an Alpha blend pot but it just didn’t quite make it through the body far enough to get the nut to engage with the thread. The luthier offered to take some wood out of the control cavity to make the top thinner but at my risk and I decided I didn’t want to risk weakening it. Now that supplies are coming back into the the UK, I decided to renew my search but I haven’t been able to find a suitable long shaft blend pot with the dealers I know of. Does anybody out there know if a long shaft blend pot is made and where I can get hold of it in the UK?
  16. Obrienp
    Well, it all worked fine, so thank you folks for the advice. The new Schaller S Lock buttons (with the Allen screw, instead of the cross-head) have a slightly larger gauge screw than the original OEM buttons. I had to enlarge the hole a tadge to get the thread to start to bite. Better than them being loose, so all good.
  17. Obrienp
    You will never recover anything like the money you put into upgrading the G2220, if you decide to sell it. Obviously, that is no problem if you think you are going to hold onto it for a long time. A bass that might be worth a look at is the Ibanez EHB1000S. It is light (chambered), extremely ergonomically designed and it doesn’t have single coil pickups. It comes in at around £800. A lot of people, including me, find the OEM Bartolini pickups a little too old school sounding and change them for Aguilar, or Nordstrand equivalents (approx £215). Otherwise it comes with just about everything you could possibly want on a bass IMO. The headless design might not be for everybody but it is very practical from the perspective of string choice: you use standard gauge strings and cut off the excess once clamped. Therefore, you have a much greater choice of string types and gauges, which are readily available and you don’t have to pay the short scale premium. I only sold my EHB because I have ordered a Nordstrand Acinonyx and I operate a strict one-in, one-out policy. Incidentally the Acinonyx might have been one for you to consider but it is very definitely single coil equipped and quite noisy, according to posts on TalkBass.
  18. Obrienp
    Many thanks @James Nadaand @Maude. That was what I was hoping. I will take some tension off the strings but not so much that I mess up the intonation: I actually payed a luthier to set this one up as I have struggled with floating bridges in the past.
  19. Obrienp
    Hoping somebody will read this. Has anybody tried putting alternative strap buttons on their Ignition Violin bass? I put Schaller S locks on all my basses and I want to do the same with my Violin bass. The neck button is obviously not going to be an issue but I am wondering if the button at the bottom is an integral part of the tailpiece anchorage? There are also two small screws attaching the tailpiece to the body but they don’t look very substantial. If I unscrew the strap button to replace it, is the string tension going to pull the tailpiece off the body, or are those two screws enough to hold it?
  20. Obrienp
    You have reminded me that I changed the electrics for Switchcraft and CTS but I am an inveterate tinkerer. I remember the switch being a bit loose but actually the Switchcraft unit I replaced it with wasn’t an enormous improvement. If I were going to do it again, I think I would go for a blend pot. Oh and general warning, if you replace the pots for solid shaft CTS you will need new knobs and the genuine US Gretsch ones are expensive. I just thought the bridge was a bit ticky-tacky, not necessarily that it didn’t do the job. I wondered how long it would last.
  21. Obrienp
    Wow, the debate is getting a little heated here. I thought the pickups in my G2220 sounded pretty good: not like anything else I had tried. I seem to recall they were very hot and I assumed that was the cause of some of the hum. Now I know they are single coil, it explains it. There is a lot of comment on TB about how noisy these basses are and quite a lot of that predates Lobster’s “revelation”. I guess it is a bit underhand of Gretsch/Fender to claim they are humbuckers when they aren’t but I don’t really understand why they did that. Funnily, the pickups are the last thing about this bass that I would have wanted to change. The bridge was the weakest link IMO but easily changed for modern Fender style 5 hole design. The machine heads were a bit vague but functional. I did change mine for Gotohs but it wasn’t really essential. Generally, it is a good little bass for not a lot of money. The fellow BassChatter who bought mine found he didn’t get on with the slab body and moved it on but if you can cope with that (and neck dive), I wouldn’t let the type of pickup put you off. A bit of copper tape shielding should calm the noise down.
  22. Obrienp
    Why didn’t it pick up the first pic for a thumbnail?
  23. Obrienp
    I think you must be talking about the Variax bass there. Look how quickly they discontinued that. I can only assume that was because us bassists actually like owning multiple instruments, or was the modelling bad? I doubt the latter, if my Variax guitar was anything to go by: most of the models were brilliant. The weird thing was that the Variax may have sounded like multiple different guitar models but it didn’t feel like them. Maybe that’s why we like to own multiple instruments: they don’t just sound different, they feel different too. I think the difference in feel affects the way you play and that in turn probably affects tone as well.
  24. Obrienp
    I’ve just put 50-100 LaBella Beatle Bass flats on my Ignition Violin bass. It might not be possible to say your much better built Contemporary Club will be the same but the slots in the nut were wide enough for the heavier gauge LaBellas out of the box. The nut still needed tidying up because the strings weren’t breaking at a good angle but the slots were wide enough. This will probably attract lots of criticism but where I have been going up a gauge and found the nut too tight, I have used a round wound string (of the correct size) as a nut file. I have found this effective even on proper bone nuts but you have to use a gentle touch and don’t press down hard unless you are sure you want to lower the string height at the nut. I have to agree with scrumpymike: I’m not sure you are going to get the sound you want out of a Club, even with the centre block in the Contemporary model and especially with flats. Good luck though. I hope it works.
  25. Obrienp
    A used pair of Bartolini BH2 pickups removed from my Ibanez EHB1000S. In very good used condition. Price includes P&P but you are welcome to collect from Fakenham, Norfolk. Would trade for quality 4 conductor MM 4 string pickup, like Bartolini MMC4, or Nordstrand/Aguilar equivalent, with cash top up as required.
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