GarethFlatlands

There are a couple of £300 HX Stomps on Facebook marketplace from accounts created this year, which seems suspicious. The others are all £420+. As there's a GT1000 Core in my local music shop for £450, I think I'm going to go buy it if it's still there on Tuesday.

The one gig I tried IEMs was using an XLR from my pedalboard (Behringer BDI-21) into a belt pack, while the FOH guy ran a jack from the 1/4" output into his own DI. I did it for the first time live as we I had to transport the PA, sound guy and singer in my Fabia and had no room for cabs. It actually worked great and meant I had to bring less gear, maybe I had in the back of my mind I could do that again but ditch the Berhinger and not replace it with a different, more transparent DI if I ever went back to gigging. For now, it's mainly so I can practice bass silently at home without having to fire up my PC and a VST.

Thanks for the advice so far. Seems like a I might have been overthinking things (again) and the HX Stomp is a good choice. I'll check out the MOD and Boss units too. I briefly owned a Zoom B3 but didn't really like the quality of the effects enough to keep it for long. And maybe calling XLR out "essential" was overstating things, although I'm surprised more units don't seem to have it.

I'm considering a multi fx (with an amp sim), but it's been a while since I looked. There seem to be more than I remember and I get option paralysis easily. The Helix Stomp jumped out at me as you can hook it up to your PC for some deep dive editing, and being able to isolate different frequencies and apply effects to them seemed like it would be very useful, but from what I've read the DSP isn't the best and there are presumably better options out there. The Hotone Ampero 2 looks good but seems to have had a slightly rough launch. I have a budget of around £500. Mainly for home practice but I may want to gig again some day, so a headphone jack and an XLR out are essential. I don't use a ton of effects so really just need excellent compressors and amp sims, and everything else would be a bonus. Instead of reading about them all for months and not buying one, what are you using and would you recommend it? Are you a millionaire who's tried them all and has opinions? Did you buy one and loved it so hard it cured your GAS forever?

A handful of contrast issues reported by Chrome Lighthouse, the text could be a bit lighter too to make it slightly easier to read. But overall, looks great!

Bought a set of Tonerider Jazz pickups from Bagsie, he posted them out very fast and was generally great to deal with.

I'm missing out on discovering that no bass (or other piece of gear) will ever make me sound like Geddy Lee or Chris Squire. I'm never buying one so I can hold onto that dream.

More slow progress for a few reasons. Once everything was assembled, I decided I didn't like the neck. This led to a sanding down, re-shaping and then 6 or so days spent re-oiling it with gun oil. During the re-shaping, the post on the E string tuner fell clean out. No problem, that'll go back in right? It did not, and the main assembly is rattling around and seems properly broken. Now, I have some Fender style tuners, but they have no bushings. I could buy some bushings, but the existing holes are the wrong size. I could dowel and re-drill the tuner holes, but the Fender style tuners and bushings need a 3/4 inch hole and 3/4 inch drill bits are weirdly expensive compared to metric ones. Another option is try to find some tuners that will fit a 12mm hole, but that's also expensive. Lastly, and I think this is the route I'm going to go down; use the neck template to make a template of just the headstock, and use a bottom bearing router bit with one of my other bass headstocks to make some holes the correct size in this new template, then transfer these over. A wrong move and I've taken a chunk out of a perfectly good bass neck, but I think it's actually the easiest option, and the only cost is the new bushings. Also, there are some nut files on the way, kindly loaned to me by ForbiddenWytch. They should be arriving any day now, so at least that's a job I can get done.

Thanks for the tips and tricks everyone, I've had a couple of offers of loans of Hosco files so I should be sorted. I'll invest in a set if I decide to do any further bass building in future, but this will get me over the finish line for now.

I have a set of small files, and one of them was spot on for the low E so that slot is done! I keep thinking about trying the string trick and then dismissing it. I'm just very much a "right tool for the job" kind of person, and an improvised method makes me break out in a cold sweat. Maybe I should just give it a go.

Morning all, I'm building a bass at home and am agonisingly close to the end. After cutting the nut slot and giving it a setup I'm done! I documented most of the build here. https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/401447-jazz-neck-build-now-a-full-jazz-build/ In an attempt to save some money on a set of Stu Mac files, I bought some nut slot files from the US via Ebay and.... they're not good. They dulled incredibly fast (the D string slot isn't even cut to 0.4mm deep, and the file is almost smooth when you scrap a nail down it) and they're not going to do the job. You can see from left to right, the files for the A string (unused and the file grooves just about visible), D string (almost useless now) and the G string (barely removing any material). Therefore, this is a plea to see if anyone has a set of proper files they know work and are willing to loan them to me for a few days while I finally finish my lovely bass off? I'm happy to pay postage both ways and a little extra for your troubles (or make a charitable donation). Mods, feel free to move this to another forum, but this seemed like the most appropriate. Thanks Gareth

Looong time since the last update! Apologies for the blurry pictures, they look OK on my phone screen but like hot crap on my desktop screen where I'm typing this. The tearout was 90% fixed by building a masking tape dam around the edge of the tuner holes and using the glue and sawdust method. The face of the headstock was sanded up through the grades again to 400 grit, then given 8-9 coats of tru-oil. Looking OK if you don't get too close! I also used an old beer can to cut out some pickup shaped plates and a thin strip of aluminium. The plates will go under the pickups (largely pointless as the cavities are already shielded with copper tape) and the strip will run from the bridge to the neck pickup cavity and make contact with the plate. A ground wire will then be soldered to the plate for grounding purposes. Time to level the fretboard. A piece of square edge steel should be dead straight, so I cut and stuck several strips of 80 grit paper to one of the narrower edges of the beam using double sided sticky tape. I alternated between the raidus block and my new straight edge sanding beam, using pencil marks over the fretboard until it was all sanded off evenly and checking using the non-sandpaper covered edge of the beam until I was happy it was dead straight. This took a long time, but should be worth it in the long run. The 'mwah' sound from fretless bass comes from the fretless equivalent of fret-buzz, and needs a dead straight board to sound. All done. Now for the side dots. I clamped the neck to the fretting template and used a 90 degree square to mark off the location of the dots. Then I used a 2mm bit to drill a few mm into the side of the board, inserted the plastic rod dipped in a tiny amount of superglue into the hole, and then cut it as close to the wood as I dared using a small pair of cutters used for delicate electronics. All done, I sanded the dots level with the wood using 400 grit paper. Why not put 2 dots where 12th fret should be? Because my sleep deprived brain forgot that was a thing. All done, I used the radius block again and sanded up to 400 grit on the fretboard, wiped the dust off with a damp cloth and then gave it a coat of lemon oil once the water had dried. The lemon oil dried pretty unevenly which told me I'd have to do another coat or 2. Turned out to be 2, but the oil looked great and dried evenly after the third coat. Time for assembly. You can see the grounding strip installed here, along with an annoying scuff I stupidly did while re-drilling the hole between the pickup and control cavities, as the first one wasn't wide enough to pass the wires through. Everything is soldered into place here. Time for some strings. Without a set of nut files, this is as close to finished as I can get for now. Nearly there though!

1 & 2 sounded a little too dry for me. 5 was doing well until the clipping on the last note. 4 was more phaser than flange to my ears! I'd stick with 3 personally, if I'm using a chorus then I want it wet sounding and 80's. I'd be interested to know what they were too.