robiredale

I am considering a pickup swap on a guitar, but the ones I have my eye on are a fair bit smaller than the current ones. It'd be lovely to get some custom surrounds made up to eliminate any gaps - wooden potentially might be nice, but a plastic one might also work. Can anyone recommend someone who would be able to do a good job of this?

For standard B tuned stuff, whatever guitar you like will work within reason. I've a 31.5 inch scale ACG fiver that's currently my main gigging bass with a pretty heavy metal band in this tuning. It works extremely well. The shorter neck makes it easier for me to move around the fretboard, which I really like. EQ is such a powerful tool on our guitars, boards and amps these days that any weaker low end that a short scale instrument might have compared with longer scales (and this isn't always the case!) can be easily overcome. If I was downtuning though I'd reach for a Dingwall. String tension on the ACG is a bit low - but equally, it is manageable. No experience with the Overwater's - great rep for quality though and will no doubt be fine instruments. Other multiscales are worth considering, especially second hand Ibby's which can sometimes be had for a bargain price if you keep an eye out. I've no experience with the Spector's but given their rep for quality instruments, I'm sure they'll be very good. The Dingwall will play great, quality is excellent and is likely to hold value well. I love mine. Clearly I am a bit biased as an owner of one, but its hard to look past the NG2 for this application in my opinion. If your budget needs to also stretch to include a suitably Djent preamp , go with a cheaper Ibby and one of the Darkglass AO Photon or Microtubes Infinity pedals too - will get you some awesome tones for that genre (and many others).

Paddy is a top seller - just traded a bass with him and his communication was great, bass exactly as described, well packaged and posted promptly. deal with confidence.

I bought a bass from David recently - great to deal with, clear comms, item well packaged and exactly as described.

Definitely. The DG marketing vids all make it seem as though you plug in your bass and instantly sound like Jon Stockman, Jacob Umansky or whoever else is in the video. Not the case in my experience! The pre's on your basses will help, but they're usually quite broad cuts and boosts. The Source EQ2 pedal (which I don't touch once set up) allows much more surgical cuts, which is what I've ended up with to get to where I wanted. You can also save a preset for each bass on that pedal, so all your instruments can go into the amp at roughly the same level - meaning that your comp/drive settings can be pretty much left alone. Good luck, its worth it in the end!

I've got an AO900 and love it. Have also had all flavours of Darkglass distortion (X, MT and AO) in various pedal formats. My take is that the reality of Darkglass stuff is that there is a very large overlap between the different flavours of distortion. My preference is AO because its got an organic quality to me that's missing from the others, and a less extreme "baked in" EQ (though I do my own EQ in addition to what Darkglass provides - see below). AO sits better in a band situation for me. I found the MT to have less presence in a band situation without really pushing the mids (which gives this "honky" quality to me), and the X (whilst the solution I thought I wanted on paper) I could never get to sound very "natural". That said it is an extremely powerful tool, and I love the Neural DSP plugin that emulates it (Parallax). That's my go-to for recording bass. In terms of clank - on paper the X should do that the best. I found though that the AO is more pleasing for my application. A bit of light drive in the Alpha voicing should do this too - though obviously it will not leave the low end alone. To be honest though I used to think this was important, but now believe it is not as important for me as I thought. I have found that to "unlock" the sound I'm after, whichever flavour of Darkglass product I'm using, is usually a case of appropriate gain staging/EQ before and/or after the drive circuit, rather than endlessly cycling through the Darkglass product library. So for instance, one of the reasons that Dingwall's sound great through them is that they're hot - about 9dB hotter than my Ibanez. Dingwall's also have some mid information that other basses do not have. I'd recommend that rather than chopping in your amp, buy a Source Audio EQ pedal first and experiment with it. I have one before my signal goes into the amp, and it makes a huge difference to my ears. All that said the X900 looks cool. But I have no plans to get rid of the AO900. Happy to brain dump further on my experiences if it helps

Scott sold me Source EQ2 pedal. Item was in great condition as described, fairly priced, and posted quickly. Scott is a friendly and helpful guy and would happily buy/sell with him again.