fauxtoe

15 hours ago, funkle said:

Tonewood discussions in my experience tend to be fruitless. Everyone has their own opinion, and now, I will add mine...

 

I've now had a good while to play with both the Wal and the Wal-ish side by side. In my opinion, we are just about there, sonically.

 

The neck has added a huge amount to the sound, more than I had initially appreciated. There are some preamp settings now where the two instruments are indistinguishable to my ear. 

 

However, it's not perfect. I'm going to say I think changing the body wood to mahogany will add the last 5-10% to the sound. It will also be the single biggest expense of the project, most likely. Typical 80/20 or 90/10 Pareto principle type stuff....

 

I think for others who wanted to build a Wal-ish, they could stop right here and call it good, as it would be 90% of the sound without the extra cost. I'm not going to do that, obviously, lol.

 

Whilst I try and figure out the best way to record direct video comparisons, here's what open G looks like from the Wal-ish bass through Reaper into SPAN - all filters open and pickups even: 

 

 

 

And here's what open G looks like from the Wal bass through Reaper into SPAN - all filters open and pickups even:

 

 

 

There is a bit more complexity going on with the Wal, still. But it is very close indeed on rough scope and listening. 

Wow! Seeing the measurement really shows how close it is. 
 

I’m glad the neck is proving to show how it does affect the tonal signature. That comes as no surprise to me whatsoever and I think you’re well on your way to getting it dialed in even closer. 
 

Other than my Wal-ish bass, the only other bass I’ve owned that had a mahogany body was a vintage SD Curlee bass. My gosh that little thing was a monster with its single DiMarzio model P pickup at the bridge. Its maple neck was uniquely attached to where it was a 3/4 neck thru, but was also a bolt on with a gigantic brass plate on the back. It had a very distinct, aggressive, but also slightly compressed sound to it. Whether that compression was from body wood or its other features like a brass nut and brass bridge that contributed, I don’t know. However, when you played it without amplification you could hear the basis for the tone before the electronics came into play.

6 minutes ago, Kiwi said:

Classic Barts help dial back the bite a bit and fatten up the lower mids.  As does putting the bass through an SWR400/500/900 or a Mesa Boogie Bass 400, there's something about the colouring that preserves the firm midrange but sweetens a graphite necked bass really nicely.

What's funny is that I vastly prefer the EMG tone and the way the preamp operates. On my old Q5 I swapped the all Bart setup for EMG and it was night and day better. That Bart preamp was a little touchy and got out of hand quickly. Not sure if it was the frequency they chose or the amount of dB boost or cut built in per EQ, but I could never get it to operate as smooth as I would have liked. No such problem with EMG! 

3 minutes ago, Kiwi said:

On a strat, it's all about the pickups.  There are cardboard and concrete bodied strat shaped guitars out there which have three single coils and they all sound distinctively like strats.

 

With graphite, it's about the constructed stiffness.  Not all necks are the same.  It's also possible to make a neck too stiff and that results in a brittle sounding instrument unless some of the attack can be rolled off by the electronics (and there are options ranging from pickup windings to extra capacitors to change inductance).

Totally agree, and that attack is ever present in carbon fiber necks. They need to be paired with the right electronics for what you're aiming to achieve or else it can become clank city really fast. There's a major difference between my Modulus Flea Bass 5 with a Legacy Lane Poor pickup and Bartolini preamp  and my three G. Gould basses which all have different setups of EMG pickups and preamps. The Gould's can get as bright as you want them, but they tame down significantly more. It's a rare day that I'm ever dialing in extra treble!

On 12/12/2022 at 13:53, funkle said:

Appreciate your feedback @NickA, good points. I debated doing another head to head with the Wal but reckoned people would do as you did - swap around videos. It gave me more time to delve into the preamp. 
 

The Wal definitely has more growl/low mids. It also has something of a kind of ‘compressed’ sound that I think may have something to do with the neck stiffness. I don’t know really, just speculating.
 

I will likely need the mahogany body. These pickups are flat response and what goes in is pretty much what comes out. This has been a useful experiment in what makes a bass sound the way it does. I’m eating more humble pie as we go along… 
 

Big learning point for me is that I like rosewood boards with pickups that don’t have a strong built in resonant peak. I.e. these pickups. Hate it with typical Jazz pickups (resonant peak likely 3kHz ish depending on the capacitor - http://www.buildyourguitar.com/resources/lemme/table.htm). 

I know you and I have talked about neck construction being a big part of the equation. My Wal-ish bass has an all wenge neck because the basses I've played with them exhibited a more dense mid-range and brighter tone, and I also own four different basses with carbon fiber necks. Most other things being equal, carbon fiber is immediately distinguishable from the rest. I've always felt that the stiffer the neck gets, the more the tone starts to open up and noticeably change. Now whether that changes for the better or for your preference becomes a personal taste. Not everyone likes the sound of a carbon fiber. There's no denying it's a different tone (usually brighter), plays very evenly, and has sustain for days (can't emphasize that enough!). So why then, when it comes to wood necked basses, would that be any different? I've played on plenty that were dead as can be, and others that would just absolutely sing. Wood, is not a (mostly) synthesized and controlled product like carbon fiber, so it inherently is going to exhibit differences. Wal figured it out a long time ago in their process that if they dry it to a certain humidity and do a multi-wood construction that the tone will remain relatively consistent from one bass to the other. I bet if you changed the neck on a Wal to carbon fiber that it would still sound like one, but different characteristics would start popping out and others might disappear.

Body wood remains on the bottom of the list for me for a major tone factor in a solid-body, bolt-on neck construction, with a top loading bridge. I think there is a good relationship between the neck and the body and the connection between the two needs to be tight to resonate properly, but the body wood itself is less of a factor. The bridge I feel also does more than the body wood does, and I've experienced that first hand swapping them out on a few basses and hearing the immediate difference. Wal uses their own design which is not found on anything else in the world, so unless someone swapped their original for something else it would be hard to say how much it is a contributing factor...but I bet it's enough to notice.

I've also had a conversation with a buddy of mine who has owned hundreds of guitars and works at a boutique guitar company. On a strat style setup the pickups are mounted to a plastic pickguard, and if equipped with a tremelo the bridge floats between the two posts and the springs. So what tone are you actually hearing in this case? The neck? The pickups? This could bring the argument that a lot of bass pickups are screwed to the body wood and it might make a bigger difference, but then there's Wal which functions more like a Gibson style humbucker that floats on a pickup ring. So again, what tone combination are we actually hearing? In my mind, and minus the type of strings, it goes like this: Pickups>Preamp>Neck>Bridge>Body

1 minute ago, eude said:

A large chunk of the saturation and dirt, to my ear comes from driving some kind of outboard gear, possibly even the channel on a high end Neve desk, but I have read a few articles that state he recorded the whole album using his GK rig.

Sad thing is, I doubt even Flea will remember, it was a fairly wild time on the Chilli's career...

I just listened to some of the isolated tracks again and I totally agree that something is being driven. Whoever mixed and mastered that album had a lot of quality tone to work with and the ability to punch it up where needed. That brings me back to Peter's dilemma - a Wal-ish bass still has to have that fundamental distinct tone even before an amp or other gear. If that isn't there, then no amount of cab/amp sim is going to help. You were right to show it without one. I also think Geddy's studio recorded tone of his basses is much more of a raw Wal sound for comparison purposes.

On 10/12/2022 at 01:50, funkle said:

I really struggled with this video about whether to add an amp sim. With the Ampeg B15 sim from Amplitube, it’s basically perfect for the RHCP BSSM sound. However it’s so flattering to the tone that it’s not a fair comparison to my first video. 
 

Similarly some compressors added so much grit that I turned them off for the same reason. It’s hard to work out how much to do ‘just DI’ and how much post production magic to add. It’s too easy to do….

 

EDIT: although I recognize most of us play through amps, which does add pleasing colouration….so it could be argued either way…

As a major user of being amp-less on stage and going direct through in-ears, I think that having an amp/cab sim is sometimes a necessary part of the equation. There is a definite harshness that comes with hearing bass direct and it needs a little fluffing up along the way. I've found that the Tech21 YYZ pedal does a great job of this for me in conjunction with the Nordstrand Starlifter preamp at the end of the chain (which has its own vintage and modern tone shaping capabilities, should they be needed). I don't know how they recorded Flea's Wal on BSSM, but there is definitely compression added somewhere along the way and in the videos you do see his GK/Mesa rig. 

Hello everyone! I have followed along with this thread silently as @funkle and I have conversed on TalkBass about building Wal-ish basses. For those of you who might have planned to use anything from Rautia, he just put out a message today that his business is now shut down - "THE SHOP IS CLOSED. THANK YOU SO MUCH TO ALL MY CUSTOMERS. 36 YEARS OF GUITAR WORK BEHIND, THE LAST 10 YEARS MAINLY PICKUPS. NOW SOMETHING ELSE...."  

I put a set if his pickups in my "Jazz-Wal" hybrid bass and they are everything that I could have ever hoped for with that build, so it's unfortunate we are now down one less multi-coil builder in the world.