Al Heeley

I hate tying a strap at the nut, its the weakest point of the guitar and it doesn't take much leverage to get the neck flexing. Makes me wince when i see guitars like this. I screw strap buttons in the neck heel, safe, secure, unobtrusive and yes, I don't know why manufacturers don't do this as standard.

We had to buy cover for a wedding gig in a posh hotel, as part of the agreement, cost us £120 one-off for 12 months cover (no choice) and another £60 for all the gear to be PAT-tested, plus we had 2 hour drive to get there. Nice place though, gig went well, we all made about 70p. Gotta love wedding gigs

OP said he (over)paid £400 so I would assume its actually a bit over-priced. It's frustrating and stressful to be left in a situation like this, hope you get it resolved quickly. I think payiong return postage is only fair but its not like he conned you into buying something not as advertised or not functioning correctly. This is always the risk when buying ebay stuff, returning something to a real person in a shop is a lot more immediate.

Awww, its just a bit of harmless fun, I think well deserved if he's expecting £500 for that thing

[quote]I recently had it professionally set up and completely made over (at the cost of over £500)[/quote] FAIL!

never played a 2 band but i love the 3-band tone when you just dial out a touch of mid punch, it sits in our mix so well. I'm pretty sure it won't have any different issues with battery consumption, very similar preamp circuit with just another tone stage built in, extra current draw is going to be negligible. I have a piezo 3-eq bought last year off a forum member and it has the best neck of any bass I've played (apart from one of Alan's ACG beauties)

why did u sell them?

if its a chorus stompbox they are not meant to go in the fx loop, gain or impedance or something else a bit technical is wrong i am told, they are meant to go between instrument and preamp input.

This question comes up quite often, I've asked it myself a couple of times. I tend to prefer distortion before chorus, the general concensus is that overdrives should normally come before modulation effects, but I would entirely agree with TNIT, especially with just chorus & o.drive pairing that the guidance should be to try both and see which you prefer. I like the modulation effect of a distorted signal more than the distorted effect of a modulated signal.

Very nice Jake, quite a lot of knobs and a high string count for 2 basses

My best bet with the evidence presented is that theres a short from the live to ground somewhere, probably most likely around where you soldered the new jack socket. Do you have a multimeter to trace the conductivity back from a guitar lead plugged in, through the jack socket and into the tone & vol pots? Do it for both live and earth, you should soon find if theres a wiring fault or short somewhere.

what i dont understand is the significance of any difference in the figures, are you saying this shows an audible difference in terms of tonal response or can the differences only be picked up by the measuring equipment? If there is a margin of measurement error, is it bigger or smaller than any margin of difference you could expect to see between identical units for same mfr? This goes right back to the Capacitor issue, can differences be heard or only measured?

[quote name='ShergoldSnickers' post='908920' date='Jul 29 2010, 09:29 AM']Declaration: This is not scientific - merely experience on my part I've gone through several pairs of hi-fi loudpeakers, the latest of which I still have after nearly 20 years, a pair of Epos ES14s, originally bought as monitoring for a recording studio. I bought these after a protracted audition at a colleagues house, but when I got my new pair home, was surprised at how bass light they sounded.... ...A few years later.... the glue on one of the drivers went, around where the coil former meets the cone. I Put the spare bass/mid driver in and instantly got the bass light sound on this cabinet only. It went after a day or so. It could be psychoacoustics, but the difference was marked, and on balance I'd plump for the driver rather than perception, but can't absolutely prove either one over the other.[/quote] What does this illustrate? That the original drivers had got bassier over time or that the new driver you installed had a different frequency response? Is it breaking in/wearing out or is it inconsistencies within production units? Were there any orange drop spragues involved at any point? We seem to have nerded off-topic but in an entertaining, convivial and light hearted way.

It has to be true, I read it on the interweb.

[quote name='ShergoldSnickers' post='908173' date='Jul 28 2010, 01:36 PM']I took a Naim pre-amp (an old third-hand 80s one guys, I'm not made of money ) in for repair and they replaced some of the capacitors with Tantalum ones. What are the benefits of using Tantalum? I've done the obligatory look-up and see how they get them to work by sintering powder of different grades, just curious as to their properties compared with other capacitor types.[/quote] Tant caps have high tolerance (accurate value) and are (mostly) polar so cannot always be used to replace standard non-polar types. They can blow quite easily of you get them too hot whilst soldering or if you have the polarity the wrong way round. Cheap ceramic caps can be +/- 10% of the printed value, which tbh makes little diff on a bass guitar tone pot. [url="http://www.engineersedge.com/instrumentation/tantalum_capacitors.htm"]http://www.engineersedge.com/instrumentati..._capacitors.htm[/url] Fascinating stuff indeed.

[url="http://www.tonepad.com/"]http://www.tonepad.com/[/url] works fine here

Finally got my Small Clone chorus finished and running - big thanks to a good friend Keith who is an electronics guru with far more knowledge and patience than me, he spotted my 3 deliberate mistakes in the PCB construction and put them right for me. This is a Small Clone Chorus built on a Tonepad.com pcb, with the following mods: 1) 'Heartbeat' LED which pulses in time to the rate setting, instead of a simple on-off LED indicator 2) Depth pot instead of the standard depth switch 3) 4-pos rotary knob which I called 'Voice', switches in 1 of 4 different cap values to allow settings to go from mellow and gentle to full and hyper swirly. Cap values used are 47pF, 100pF, 180pF and 320pF - the stock cap setting is 100 or 150pF. After a very frustrating time trying to get this to work I am so pleased with it now, a super rich and lush chorus which can give a big palette of tones, from a slow almost flange-like moulation, through mellow or super rich chorus into mad Lesley-like oscillations. Very pleased - definitely a keeper, a complex build for me but well worth it in the end. Small demo here: [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOiXYqUBaU"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOiXYqUBaU[/url]