uncle psychosis

You can make a B-B baritone easily using a standard guitar and fairly standard strings. If you think about it, the highest five strings of a B-B set are the same as the lowest five strings of an E-E set (pedantry: one of the strings is out by a semitone). So just take a standard set of guitar strings and move them all one position, so put the low E where the A string normally goes, A string where the D normally is, etc. Find a suitable single string for the low B (I think D'addario and Ernie Ball both do very heavy singles, you probably want something like 0.60---or buy a single bass G string of suitable size) and Bob's your mother's brother. You may need a new nut to do this but finding the strings should be straightforward. Guys on another forum I frequent have done this and claim it works great. Its not quite the same as a proper longscale baritone but it would probably work for what you want to do.

I've got a BB414, the neck on it is fantastic. I think the pickup heights on mine need a good tweak (the balance across the two pickups isn't quite right) but I've never bothered because I bought it as a backup bass and so it spends 95% of its time in the wardrobe. For the £150-ish they cost second hand they are incredible instruments. Would happily gig and record with it. I imagine that the older Japanese ones and the higher end modern ones are even more impressive.

Personally I don't think you need to restrict yourself to neck-through (someone was going to say it, might as well be me). Other than that I have nothing helpful to say.

[quote name='Roland Rock' timestamp='1413891939' post='2583161'] Great price - was that used? I've just bought a Neotech Mega after a shoulder injury, and am very happy with it indeed. The stretch/bounce really absorbs shock compared to my plain leather one. Mega comfy. [/quote] Yes, got it off a basschatter

[quote name='neepheid' timestamp='1413758960' post='2581674'] The Neotech Mega bass strap makes playing a 12lb+ bass bearable for me, so I imagine it would do a job for a 9lb bass. Nice and wide neoprene job. [/quote] Another +1 for the Neotech Mega. Probably the best £20 I've ever spent.

[quote name='sirmuppet' timestamp='1413885586' post='2583045'] Would contact Fender but doubt Fender UK or USA would know as it's Fender Japan. [/quote] Contact Fender Japan? Edit: I used to own a Fender Japan telecaster. Fender UK were able to help me with a query I had about it without any issue. The FSR ones are imported into the country officially so Fender UK must know something about them.

Contact Fender and ask them, they should be able to tell you

[quote name='alhbass' timestamp='1413645141' post='2580499'] Thank you for your contributions so far. But i must say i'm absolutely none the wiser. Can't make head or tail of the Wiki article, and everyone else seems to be as vague as I am... What is it meant to do? [/quote] All the Wikipedia page really says is that Presence is an upper-mid / high frequency boost.

Some impressive trust in authority on display in this thread. Customs and Border Control can do pretty much whatever they want for whatever reason they want and just because your papers are in order doesn't mean they're going to let you in. No idea what the full story is here but the assumption that UK customs are nice chaps who always apply the rules correctly is quite amusing.

Do it do it do it

[quote name='Sean' timestamp='1413375471' post='2577631'] I'm currently liking [i]Taranis, [/i]the Celtic/British god of thunder and king of the gods. [/quote] Hope the amp costs a bit less than this Taranis [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Taranis"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Taranis[/url]

Doing a gig next week, the promoter assures us that the backline is being provided by one of the other bands. Lets hope he's OK'd it with them first

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1413363468' post='2577424'] I'd go further than this. If you can establish that disassembling and rebuilding the bass has minimal affect on the sound then I would want to see what effect different bodies made out of the same wood have. I'd suggest that a sample of 20 bodies would be an absolute minimum and would be happier with something in the 100 bodies range would be more representative. Also each of the bodies would have to be made out of a single piece of wood. IMO once you start gluing bits of wood together you simply add too many variable even if you could guarantee that all the joins were in exactly the same place on all the bodies and the same amount of glue had been used each time. And finally each body would need to have been made on the same CNC machine from the same template and any finishing was exactly the same on all the bodies. Only after all that would I start to consider a different type of wood and see if there were any constant differences between the two types. [/quote] I agree, thats what I was getting at when I said you'd need to do "lots more experiments". Doing this kind of thing properly is actually really hard, its why nobody has really bothered doing it. Acousticians have more interesting problems to work on (purely acoustic instruments, for starters) and amateur musicians / bass makers have neither the time, the expertise, or the means to do it properly. I genuinely tend to think "forget about what you think it might sound like, choose based on aesthetic and weight and let the bass maker worry about everything else" is the way forward.

[quote name='TheSiberian' timestamp='1413306804' post='2576986'] I think of one interesting experiment (at least intelectually wise); let's make two bodies of let's say first a christmass tree wood and second a 20 years selected walnut tone wood, put some Bartolinis with a Pope preamp, some DR hi beams strings and a maple neck with rosewood fingerboard, badass bridge, etc. [b]The two basses will be absolutely the same except the body wood.[/b] [/quote] That's debateable, actually Strings vary from set to set, and the two necks won't be identical either---they're also made from two separate pieces of wood. What you need to do is to make one instrument, play it and record it, take the neck and all of the hardware off and put it back on again (repeatedly) to prove that you can put it back on without changing the sound of this first instrument at all (if just putting a bass together differently changes the tone significantly then all bets are off), then take the neck and hardware and put it on the second body, and then prove that the sound of this second bass is sufficiently different that the change in body wood can be said to be meaningful. Even then, all you'd have done is prove that two different pieces of wood sound different. If you wanted to make sweeping statements about the sounds of different kinds of woods you'd need to do [i]a lot [/i]more experiments. What I will say is this. Most brass musicians swear blind that the metal you make their instruments from makes a clear difference to the sound they make. White gold is "mellower" than brass, etc etc etc. However, proper double blind tests, where a high end trumpet maker made a series of valveless trumpets (they have no moving parts so they're fairly straightforward to duplicate) out of different materials showed that the effect of the material was inconclusive at best. Turns out musicians are better at "listening" with their eyes then their ears Same with violinists. "Everyone knows" old violins like Strads are "the best" but in double blind tests professional violinists prefer modern top end violins to old classics. The moral of the tale is that its very, very dangerous to assume anything when it comes to the brains effect on the ears.

Short version: Possibly, but not enough to actually bother worrying about. Choose based on aesthetics and weight. Longer version: I have a PhD in musical acoustics (admittedly not in string instruments) but I know enough about psychoacoustics and instrument variability to be dubious about some of the outlandish claims made by musicians when it comes to the noises that instruments make. The sound of a bass guitar is probably affected a bit by the wood from which its made but frankly everything else in the signal chain probably has as big if not a bigger effect. Any effect that the wood has is probably not even repeated across two bits of wood of the same species, so I don't think its really possible to make meaningful blanket statements about what different types of wood "sound like". Personally, I'd never even consider what a bass is made of when buying it other than 1) what does it look like and 2) how much does it weigh. If I want to tweak the sound a bit I'll adjust the EQ on my amp. Much more controllable and much more repeatable than worrying about whether alder "has more mids" than ash. Disclaimer: this is for electric instruments. Acoustic ones are up for grabs

Well, given that the FSR ones are (somewhat) limited edition and they're £150 cheaper they'd be my first choice if I was choosing between them. With distance selling regs you can always return it if you don't like it anyway and then get a normal aerodyne which are fairly easy to find.

I think tipping in general is much more common in the US than it is here. I've never seen a tip jar at a gig here.

I've been in quite a few of those storage places and I'd never leave an instrument I cared about in any of them for any length of time. The warehouses are never temperature controlled and I'd be really worried about the temperature and humidity.

Nice bass. Shame that he'll only go and play Rush songs on it

Might be of interest to some of you, Strings Direct currently selling twin packs of D'addario EXL strings for £30 delivered. They come with a free string winder/cutter that looks a bit crappy but £15 a set for these strings is pretty competitive pricing from what I can gather so anything else is a bonus.

[quote name='xilddx' timestamp='1412889229' post='2573139'] It's not common sense man, it's specialised knowledge. Your employer is in breach of their statutory duties and you have a legal duty to report any work-related ill health. There's a good reason for that. Get it sorted. [/quote] This, this, this. Your employer is [b]legally obliged[/b] to help you out. Don't cripple yourself for your work. No job is worth that. Good luck.

Its just overdrive isn't it?

I'm about 99% certain that my desire to play guitar stems from [i]that [/i]scene in Back To The Future. [i]Uhh...all right guys, listen, this is a blues riff in B. Watch me for the changes and, uhh, try and keep up, okay?[/i] [i]Chuck! Chuck, it's Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Berry. You know that new sound you're looking for? Well, listen to this![/i]

The Colourful Band is gigging in Edinburgh on Friday 10/10/14 TCB have been used in the soundtrack to a "controversial BBC TV drama" called Lip Service and another has been played on Radio 2 by the lovely Steve Lamacq. Here's my favourite TCB song to give you an idea of what to expect: [url="https://soundcloud.com/the-colourful-band/into-the-bright-sun-from"]https://soundcloud.com/the-colourful-band/into-the-bright-sun-from[/url] Also playing with us is Iona Marshall: “[i]Lovely voice; a wee bit like Karine Polwart. I’m a big fan of this pastoral, picky acoustic music. It’s nice to hear something like that but with a modern edge.” ---[/i]Rod Jones, Idlewild, The Skinny [url="http://ionamarshall.bandcamp.com/"]http://ionamarshall.bandcamp.com[/url] Anyway, I hope you can make it along. Here are the details: Friday October 10th, doors from 7.30pm, finish 10pm £5, £3 with student card Henrys Cellar Bar 16a Morrison Street Edinburgh, United Kingdom (Round the corner from the Odeon in Tollcross, underneath Lebowskis)

That's awesome, like that a lot.