nekomatic

I live in Stockport and was completely unaware of Rigby Music, so thanks for the tip-off!

I have contemplated nicking one of the Aldi ones and figuring out how to drive it to make a display for some sort of project, but am both too honest and too lazy.

Aldi use what look like little e-paper displays, so the display doesn’t even need a battery - they must have some sort of programmer to plug it into then it just sits there showing what it was programmed to forever, or until reprogrammed. If you multiply the number of Aldi stores by a few hundred labels per store, they probably got a fairly good price per unit on them, and no longer have to pay for paper labels and printing.

It’s possible the power bank output voltage will drop if it can’t maintain its specified power output, and I guess no-one without good knowledge of the amp design can 100% guarantee that it can’t be harmed by low input voltage, but it seems unlikely to me.

I believe standard (i.e. deceptive) practice for the specs of power banks is that they tell you the mAh rating of the internal Li-ion cell, not the output. So it may actually be 20 Ah from the 3.7 volt cell, which would be about 75 watt-hours, which after boosting up to 20 volts gives you three and a half amp hours or thereabouts. If everything else performs as specified then I guess it should work, but not for as long as you might have wanted.

Thanks for the replies so far. I had to go and check to see whether my fretted bass even has side dots, so I guess I don’t look at them very often!

I’ve recently started using Instagram, ‘read-only’, in order to follow some bands or musicians, because it’s so much easier there than on the tar pit that is Facebook (and let’s not mention Twitter). I don’t mind at all if they post some non-music stuff as long as it doesn’t drown out the music and gig info that I mainly want to see.

Anyway @SteveXFR, has your daughter made the decision yet and which way did it go, and how’s she getting on with it?

That used to be true, but between wages rising and the student loan repayment threshold not rising it’s now only just above the full-time national minimum wage. It’s become a graduate tax in all but name.

A brief experience at the NW Bass Bash has persuaded me that it would be fun to pick up a fretless to muck about on, so I’m thinking of picking up a cheapish one and there’s a possible candidate in my local music shop. Apart from the things you’d check before buying a secondhand fretted bass, is there anything specific I should look out for? I’m pretty sure this one has been defretted, so are there particular signs of a good or bad defret job?

OK, if the units are both fairly light and you don’t plan to hump the assembly around to gigs and stuff then screws into a batten are probably fine. I’d still take your measurements off the actual setup though.

I would proceed as follows: 1. obtain the brackets a.k.a. ‘rack strip’ 2. bolt the units to the rack strip 3. measure the resulting assembly 4. design and build the sleeve to match your measurements. It doesn’t sound like those two units should need lots of ventilation, compared to a power amp, say, but the advice above about ventilation is good.

As @itu says, the impedance of each cab is highly dependent on frequency so both the distribution of power and the total output of both cabs will vary in ways that are hard to predict. For example at one cab’s resonance frequency it will have a high impedance, so the other cab will output hardly anything at that frequency.

George Benson’s an 80s pop singing chart topper? 😮

If the cabs aren’t identical you don’t want to run them in series.

Yazz Ahmed in Manchester Jazz Festival, which I can’t describe better than Jazz Times’s reviewer - except to add that Ralph Wyld on vibes and marimba was just extraordinary - almost show-stealing, had all the others not also been so good. Also so far seen Phil Meadows’ Beware of the Bear with Joe Downard excellent on bass guitar and unexpected bonus of Rosie Frater Taylor on guitar; John Ellis with the awesome Grant Russell on DB; and Ladies of Midnight Blue which sounds like it should be a sort of smoky female-vocal led account of the standards songbook but was actually two women (very adeptly) whacking the bejeezus out of various drums whilst spreading Black consciousness. And blowing bubbles. I liked it.

No, not really my cup of tea, but you’ve prompted me to check if Shonen Knife are playing Manchester… and it’s a night I can’t make. Drat! Hope you have a blast!

Interested in this as I’m plotting using a couple of these in a prospective project. Do you mean the buzz is physically coming from the power supply modules, or do you mean it’s injected into the signal when you power the effects off them? Rod Elliott has some suggestions for reducing electrical noise from switch mode power supplies in his recent-ish article on guitar booster amps.

Working with a metronome is definitely part of any classical instrumental training, so it can’t be that your teacher wouldn’t advise it if they thought you should be doing it right now, so they probably think you don’t need to focus on it at the moment. You’re probably putting pressure on yourself to get everything right all at once. Don’t worry - you’ll get there.

Yep, thanks to all and especially Rob for organising (and sponsoring!). It was great to meet you all and an amazing opportunity to try so many fine basses.

I’m guessing I’ll be able to get there around 10, and will need to push off at 3ish. I can bring a spare stand which anyone is welcome to borrow until I need to take it away again. Looking forward to meeting you all, and your basses!

People with 3D printers being so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think about whether they should.

This drives me nuts, less so if I’ve been in a band (when I would have said something), more when I’m in the audience*. Thank you to the drummers on the thread who have confirmed that I’m not mad and it is a reasonable thing to expect. * Extra points if it happens while the drummer has left the stage for a quiet duo or trio number.

Ironic considering it was (supposedly) banned from early church music for fear of summoning the devil!

That looks like a good suggestion too.