nekomatic

You’d want to connect D to Qbar I think. Also if your footswitch is only a single-pole switch with one set of contacts, you can’t necessarily just connect this circuit across them without first checking the voltage and polarity that the amp puts across the open switch.

Second coat Tuff Cab. Trim applied to grille. We’re getting close!

Two coats black satin applied to baffle and baffle reveal; first coat Tuff Cab to cabinet exterior; port siliconed in. Next update this time tomorrow.

I have just learned that Tamsin Greig plays bass in a forthcoming TV series and I may need to loosen my collar and lie down for a bit.

Assembled for testing. It sounds pretty good! Maybe not quite as refined as the two-way 112 but that's only on a quick test, and I'm still learning how to get the best out of the Eden anyway (which deserves a NAD post at some point). There's a slight whirring sound on low notes at louder volume which I'm assuming is a bit of air leakage and unsurprising as I haven't put screws in all the mounting holes or properly sealed the port. Testing with an oscillator app on the phone, the tuning feels like 60-65 Hz and I can't feel any resonance on the side panels, but I can on the back at somewhere like 80 Hz. Any thoughts on bracing the back panel - a front-to-back brace would require that I glue the baffle in permanently (which is an option), alternatively a brace along the length, one across the width, or how about two diagonal braces from the back panel to somewhere around the centres of the sides? Also have other constructors lined this cab? I've got some wadding left over from the last project.

That’s not a bad look, at a good price. Do you know what the percentage open area of that mesh is, and have you compared the sound with and without the grille fitted? Edit: Actually their price for 10 mm mild steel mesh is OK too, not sure why I didn’t find that in my own eBay search.

Grilles. This is a speaker for taking out and about so I want a bit more protection than just some fabric. Custom made and painted speaker grilles aren't cheap, but I am. Well, I'm trying to keep the budget down for this project anyway. ESR do pre-painted speaker grille material which I could cut to size, but with postage that's still over twenty-five quid. Even a piece of unpainted steel mesh from eBay suppliers is north of twenty. The only really low-cost speaker grilles are the round ones you clamp in front of the speaker, but that doesn't protect the port, and I'm afraid I do think they look a bit amateur. The round grilles though, they do come in sizes all the way up to a whopping 46 cm (eighteen inches if you'd rather). That's quite a large area of grille material. I wonder if… A quick consultation with Mr. Pythagoras showed this plan had legs, and part of the CPC order that went in just before I discovered the handle issue was an eighteen inch round grille for seven pounds eighty-six. A few minutes of sparks-flying fun with the cutting wheel on the Dremel (in the back garden, WITH eye protection) and I have a perfectly proportioned grille. The edges are a bit messy, but happily the plastic trim easily comes off the circumference of the round grille (what's left of it) and should cover all that up if cut into the right lengths and attached to the rectangular one with a bit of superglue. I cut sections of batten as shown in pic which are now getting glued to the baffle to mount the grille but leave the baffle screw holes exposed - I could have made a continuous frame and used long screws but this way seems OK to me. The long horizontal piece in the middle is simply what was left over after cutting the other bits, but I decided to use it like that as it should add some stiffness to the baffle. Meanwhile the new handle arrived, and I cut holes for that and for the connector plate, also bevelled the edges and corners with some more Dremel madness (a bit rough, but I'll try and even them out with the proper sander). And here's the handle in place. I think we can say we're going for an 'oversize' aesthetic here, but it fits, and crucially the actual handle is only a centimetre off the centre-of-mass line for near-optimal carrying. As soon as the grille supports are all glued and dry (I only have four clamps, so be patient) I'll be able to assemble and test it…

Hello! I grew up in Southampton and am now not far from Wythenshawe, and I think several of my older work colleagues started out at Ferranti.

I always think we talk a lot about what bass to play and what to plug it in to but not enough about how we actually play it, so I'm not sure why I didn't spot this thread originally. Let's keep it going! I always start with a plucking hand evenness/consistency exercise, which is good for getting into the practicing zone: repeated notes on one string at a time, probably 4 notes per slow metronome beat, cycling through quiet/medium/loud, trying to make it as smooth and even as possible. Then probably a fretting hand exercise which would be choosing a pattern e.g. 1/4/3/2, 2/3/4/1 etc etc and playing that in the same position on each string, again keeping time to the slow metronome. And something with string crossing like a scale in thirds. These are all from the SBL Technique Accelerator course which I started something like four years ago and still haven't finished. Recently though I've also dug out a Carole Kaye book I found in a bargain bin once (Electric Bass Lines vol. 3, I think) which has half a page or so of 'walking bass' patterns for each scale and am working through them as reading exercises, as my reading is shocking especially in bass clef. What I want to try and include is some shifting exercises, because I think that needs improvement (and is what comes next in the SBL course), and probably some more of the scales-in-xths stuff as that feels like it ought to help with jazz lines.

We did have a how was your jam? thread a while back, but it sort of petered out. No harm starting another one though.

I rejected a top mounted strap handle as an amp head wouldn't sit nicely on top of it, but have to admit I didn't think of side mounting. However I have found a better-suited bar handle from Terralec for six pounds forty delivered, which should do the job (as long as it turns up). After a quick test with an offcut of the ply I have concluded that I'm overthinking the speaker mounting issue and will just use self-tapping screws (with suitable washers) into the baffle. If they prove somehow unsatisfactory I can always upgrade this to some sort of T-nut arrangement. I am hatching a plot for a low cost grille which is either utter genius or utter folly. Stay tuned to find out which.

That’s fair enough if the artist got a nice healthy advance from their recording contract at the time of the original release; less so if they put time and effort into it unpaid in the hope that they’d see a return from people buying it. My understanding is that the former situation is rare these days for all but the biggest artists.

Anything they like, you won’t hear them!

Drilled the holes for the screws that will fix the baffle to the front battens - taking care to miss both the screws that fix the battens to the top and sides, and the holes I incorrectly drilled front to back in the same battens - and very temporarily fixed the baffle to the cab and the speaker to the baffle, so that I could measure where the centre of mass sits, and put the handle there so the cab will hang nicely vertically from it. BUT THERE IS A PROBLEM. I wanted to use - and have bought - the round handle from Blue Aran, in sort of homage to the Basschat 112 design since I didn’t use that one in my own 112. However it’s too big to fit in the right position according to the balance point, because the cutout for it would need to come through the front batten and into the baffle. So it’s either fit this handle about 3 cm further back, which is basically in the centre of the top panel, or get a replacement which will have to be less pleasingly circular. 😭 Needless to say I put an order in to CPC earlier today for the last bits I thought I needed 😭😭 No updates for a few days now, we have guests over the weekend and I’ve had to tidy everything up as the kids will have to sleep in the spare room where I was working. Gives me some time to ponder the options…

By total coincidence I had a look at the Wilkinsons Hi-fi website today, after coming across a link to it in an old post somewhere on here, and they currently have a Varislope III on sale as a ‘restoration project’ for £49: https://www.wilkinsons.tv/product/leak-varislope-iii3/

Glued. I thought I'd be clever and save myself further countersinking by digging some slightly longer screws out of the Box Of Random Screws and substituting those for the ones that failed to bite well. Not a bad idea in principle except that (a) some were too long and came out of the outside of the panel - not a problem after removing them again, any holes are tiny and will be easily sanded/filled - and (b) some were too thick, so they felt like they were doing up good and solid but left a gaping crack between the panels, because they weren't turning freely in the batten in order to pull in the panel. All rectified I think. Remaining minor imperfections and gaps due to short battens were filled with wood filler / wood glue mix, which I also ran a bead of along any inside joints that didn't obviously have surplus glue squeezing out. Now dried it feels sturdy and is square. A few places still need a touch of filler but I'm going to leave that until later as I still have a couple more holes to cut and sharp corners to round off, and anything might happen. Marked out the screw positions for the speaker. To me this looks a bit marginal for putting either T-nuts straight into the back of the baffle (one positioned for reference), or self-tapping screws into the baffle alone - what do the experts think? I can easily add a piece of batten behind each hole to give more wood for the fixing to get its teeth into.

Cool, and it's good to hear Andertons came good in the end.

Hello!

I have never heard of, or knowingly heard, the band in question, but I saw this on Bluesky (that's the one that's like Twitter but less Nazi) and thought it would amuse you lot too:

This is the way of thinking about modes that makes most sense to me, and I believe it’s the one George Russell describes in his legendary The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. (I say ‘believe’ because I don’t have a copy, although I’d like to, because I’ve never seen it on sale for under a hundred quid). Having said that I don’t think about modes specifically in my current practice, which is mainly focused on getting better at walking jazz bass. When I get round to spending some time on soloing I might find a way of working them in.

Well the short answer is that the bass response of a speaker is completely dependent on the cabinet (volume and tuning of the reflex port if it has one), so the low end frequency response quoted in the speaker specs doesn’t really tell you anything helpful by itself. There is software that will work all this out for you as long as the necessary data for the speaker is available, and friendly people on this forum will often run some calculations for you if you ask. Do you know the volume of the empty cab, and what diameter driver did it take?

The error I forgot to mention above is that the 25 mm screws I bought are a bit too short to bite in the panels without countersinking them into the battens, so I had to do that, which was a bit of time wasted, especially if you also do it for the holes you didn't actually need to drill in the first place (see picture). Anyway here it is fully dry assembled, apart from the baffle… …and with the baffle in place, which is a nice friction fit. Athough that probably means it'll be too tight after painting the recess. We'll cross that bridge when etc. It's beginning to look like a cab! The dry assembly was worth doing as it allowed me to check that everything fitted together (it did but only after sanding the too-long baffles short) and that all the screws bit and pulled in the panels properly (some of them didn't, so need a bit more countersinking). I found I preferred to use a hand screwdriver to do them up rather than the drill/driver - an elegant weapon for a more civilised age, or something. It's certainly not perfect but I'm fairly confident it is going to be airtight and robust and not wobbly. A little bit of sanding and filler and the wonders of Tuffcab will deal with the gaps and rough edges. It seems a shame when I've just put it together, but the next step is to take it all apart again and reassemble it with the glue.

I’m keeping this simple, so it’ll be the same dark brown Tuffcab I used on my previous cab refurb. I’m still happy with how that one looks and it’ll be nice to have them match somewhat. Tonight I cut and drilled all the battens and started dry assembling them to the panels. A couple of errors: the verticals have come out a couple of mm too long (despite measuring against the panels 🤷‍♂️) so will need some sanding, and I failed to think through that only the rear verticals need holes in both directions, because the baffle will be screwed on from the front. Not fatal errors, I reckon. Some pics next post.

So the monthly jazz jam I go to has moved venue and whether it's because the 'stage' was on a hard floor and is now on carpet, or something else, I don't know, but I just can't hear myself through the house bassist's down-firing Acoustic Image combo any more. 'I know what' I said to myself, 'I'll bring my own rig next time, the compact transportable one, then I'll be in charge of my own sound. Job's a good 'un!' 'There's one problem,' I replied, 'you don't have a compact transportable rig.' 'Ah,' I said, 'fair point. Guess I'll have to get round to building that Basschat 1x8 then.' So then (and no more internal dialogue, I promise): driver and hardware obtained, timber supplies assessed, and a trip round the side of the house made to cut a bit off the length of spare drainpipe that's been lying around there ever since we moved in; deadline for completion, next jam on 13th Feb; let's go! I already had some bits of B&Q 12mm ply, and one of them was a strip I got cut 280 mm wide for some forgotten reason, so to save me a couple of cuts I've slightly adjusted the size to use a 280 mm wide baffle and back panel. Do not mix these two up Remaining cuts made with the handheld electric saw, using a batten or piece of board clamped to the workpiece as a guide, after careful adjustment (and checking the guide piece is actually straight). This could easily go wrong, but I seem to have got away with it. I cut the driver and port holes with the Dremel and circle attachment. This was very easy but in my excitement I forgot to properly allow for the cut thickness, so both holes have come out a couple of mm bigger than planned. Bit of a pain for the port, which will need packing out with something, but still plenty of wood left for the speaker to seal on as long as it stays properly centred in the aperture. To ensure that I cut some little pieces of a moulding I happened to have spare, and glued them to the insides of the cutout, and that seems to be just right to keep the speaker located. Now off to watch Phil's assembly video one more time…

Dyslexia and dyscalculia are recognised conditions and I believe we're getting past the assumption that people who have them 'just aren't trying hard enough' or 'just haven't been taught properly', so it would be no surprise that a similar thing exists for musical notation. It's intriguing that you seem to get this for notation but not for tab. But then the brain is an intriguing and incompletely understood thing.