Mediocre Polymath

Huh. So, this is weird. I've been ambiently aware of that song for as long as I can remember – just as something that gets played on oldies stations. I don't think I've ever seriously listened to it, and definitely not noticed how good the guitar playing is.

I'm always in awe of the sheer speed of bluegrass players. This is a lovely little phone recording of three of the best around today – particularly Noam Pickleny (banjo) and Brittany Haas (fiddle) – roaring through an old folksong and managing to sound like a band twice the size.

Good to hear its not just me. I've bought one of those Ibanez gig bags, because they're not black and pretty cheap, which is important because I have half a mind to busting out the sewing machine at some point and try repositioning the straps or making a second set of anchor points further up.

Just to expand on my previous post. A big part of my job these days is research and fact-checking (and supervising others who do the same), so I've been coming up against the AI authorship problem quite a lot lately. I'm not claiming to be an expert AI-witchfinder, but I've edited millions of words of published material over the course of my career, and I've seen the breadth (and depths) of how people write. Stuff that isn't written by people at all tends to have a certain something that feels, er, off, to me. It's hard to put that vague hunch into words, but there are a few aspects that I'd highlight. The main thing is Large Language Models aren't able (at least at the moment) to write in a way that assumes a particular level of pre-existing knowledge in their audience. So, they always start with with the absolute basics – stuff that, in a lot of cases, no-one would bother to mention if they were talking to reasonably informed adults. To give an example from the linked website, ask yourself, would a person writing a review of a particular model of Rickenbacker bass (for other bass players, you'd assume) feel the need to start by saying "The Rickenbacker 4003 is a renowned four-string electric bass guitar known for its distinctive design and unique tonal characteristics"? Or start a piece about Jaco with, "Jaco Pastorius (1951-1987) was an influential American jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader."? That's how you'd start your presentation to the class if, for some bizarre reason, your middle-school teacher had told you to do a book report on the Rickenbacker 4003, or Jaco Pastorius. Those sentences also illustrate something else about AI writing – the waffle. Chat GPT is incredibly wordy, and often writes with a strange sort of pseudo-conversational tone that feels out of place in more formal, nominally print-ready contexts. Every sentence is full of filler phrases, adjectives and vague descriptive passages that don't actually contain any additional information. To go back to the book report analogy, it reads like your middle school teacher told you to do a 1000-word book report on the Rickenbacker 4003, and you only had 600 words worth of material. The overall impression is of someone vamping to fill space on a subject they don't really know or understand.

Publishing industry editor/writer weighing in to agree with @Burns-bass. There's a distinctive sort of slightly stilted, verbose enthusiasm to how the current generations of chatGPT write. Their prose is like badly written PR/Marketing copy, probably because that's a large chunk of what they've been trained on.

Just adding to the general consensus here, I think, but here's my two cents. I've bought two basses from them in the past (pretty distant past now) and sold one on commission through them as well. They're good blokes to deal with, but because I'm in London I've only ever used their website for idle window shopping. All my actual dealings with them have been in person. I get the impression that they don't put a whole lot of effort into the website itself, with most of their online activity (social media etc.) focused on luring people down to the physical store. The thing I find particularly strange, given the unusual and valuable nature of a lot of their stock, is how sparse their product descriptions are. Like, they'll have some esoteric 1980s custom bass made out of gold and walrus ivory or something, and with, say, eight knobs and four switches and a bullet-hole in the body and the description will just say "4-string, details to come".

Quick postscript to this build. I just replaced the Kent Armstrong jazz pickup with a Bartolini 9J-S1 that I bought from @loudspeaker. I did this for purely aesthetic reasons (I wanted the pickups to match) and I'm dead chuffed with how well the level of wear on the new Bart matches the one that's already there. I'd wondered if perhaps the new pickup would bring about some dramatic improvement or change in the sound, but honestly it's almost exactly the same. I recorded the bass before and after, and even with big monitoring headphones on, it's near impossible to tell the new and the old pickups apart. Something worth considering when you're next planning an electronics upgrade.

So, for context, my experience is all from an infamous south London comp (most of the notable alumni on its wiki page are murderers) between 1997 and 2004. I did school music classes (as in the academic subject, not instrument-specific lessons) during my first three years at secondary school. We just had the one teacher during that time, who I'll call Mr Johnson. Looking back, Mr Johnson was a sad, haunting sort of a figure. He had a big bottle-brush moustache, side-parted brown hair and a pinkish face that was always shiny with rage-sweat. I remember being told that he was apparently one of the country's finest players of an instrument that there's absolutely no demand for – like a contrabass Saxhorn or something like that. He'd typically start his lessons by yelling at a volume that sounded genuinely painful. Once everyone had shut up, he'd start working through some rote lesson, interrupting himself at increasingly frequent intervals to do some more red-faced shouting. Eventually, there would come a point in every lesson where he'd completely lose his temper, slam the lid of the classroom piano down and scream "SILENCE!". Then we'd sit for the rest of the lesson in tense, terrifying silence. He'd glower at us; we'd stare at our hands; and the clock would tick away in the corner by the door. Sometimes he reached that tipping point less than 20 minutes into an hour-long period. It was white-knuckle stuff. I dropped music at GCSE, and I think Mr Johnson was encouraged to find a new career about a year later. I believe his last term of teaching was the one where the lid of the piano finally broke, though the actual final straw was when he gave a kid a concussion by repeatedly slamming his head in a door. --- There are two parts to this story though. After Mr Johnson left, he was replaced by an NQT – a guy who had done a teacher-training degree in his early 30s because he was fed up with life as a touring musician and cruise-ship performer. I'll call him Mr Smith. About six months after Mr Smith started, I agreed to record a bass part for a friend who was doing a music GCSE. I'd been playing for less than a year at this point, but this kid didn't know anyone better. I went in after school, set myself up, and we recorded a bunch of takes for a (truly dreadful) song he was working on. Mr Smith was around during this process, and came up to me after the session. He said he thought I sounded really good, and asked if I'd be willing to play on some other projects people were working on in the music department. I explained that I wasn't doing music, and he explained that this didn't matter. I ended up as part of a sort of spotty-teenager wrecking crew that backed singers and played at school events all the way through sixth form. Mr Smith led rehearsals and occasionally filled in on guitar, and also dispensed more musical education in ad-hoc explanations of chord changes or walking basslines than I think I'd gotten in several years of classes. When I started a noisy rock band with some other members of the group, he helped set us up with rehearsal spaces on the school grounds.

Just recieved an old pickup off I bought from John. Everything went smoothly, and he was very patient with my Basschat newbie confusion.

Huh. I didn't know that. Makes sense though, those videos look like they take a lot of time to write, record and edit. I know from colleagues who work in digital video production that the bottom has completely fallen out of the YT business. The per-view revenue share rate is about half what it was a few years ago.

Hah. Resurrecting this old thread to say that I am the sneaky devil that nabbed these. They're now part of my headless fretless.

The only one I'm really a regular watcher of is Adam Neely. He's a great bass player, but he's also a conservatoire-trained jazz musician who has an in-depth knowledge of music theory and composition. He's also just a far more articulate and thoughtful person than seems reasonable for someone who makes YouTube videos for a living.

If I'm learning songs or playing late at night then I plug into my Focusrite interface and use a simple (EQ and compression) patch in Ableton. My wife has no problem with my playing, but I'm conscious of the fact that hearing someone playing through the middle eight of Kid Charlemagne over and over and over again is going to drive even the most tolerant person crazy. I used to play through my big-boy rig at home as well, mostly because it's not very big (jumbo custom 1x10 ported cab and a MarkBass head), but I recently switched over to using my guitar amp most of the time because it is literally right next to my desk (I work from home, and that's also where my personal computer is, so that's where I spend about 70 percent of my time). The guitar amp in question is a home-made 5w Fender Champ-style head running into an equally home made sealed 1x10 cab. I picked that kit from AmpMaker because it has just a gain knob and nothing else – my logic being that no tone stack means no tone stack to be voiced wrong for either guitar or bass. The can just has a celestion guitar speaker that's good down to about 80 Hz, but it sounds really really good as a slightly overdriven low-volume amp.

Just stumbled across this thread and thought I'd raise my hand as another person who plays in both GDAE and EADG. I've dabbled in mandolin since I was a teenager (my dad also plays both), but I didn't really take to it with any particular enthusiasm until about six years ago, when I realised that a guitar I was making for someone else would leave exactly enough waste material to make an electric mandolin. I made this, which is has a excessively thick and heavy ash body based on a design by a 1970s British luthier called Peter Cook, and a cheap ebay piezo pickup running through a perfboard-and-splotchy-solder buffer circuit. I don't know if this is anyone else's experience, but I find that playing the mandolin for a week or two makes me come back to the bass with new ears and habits. The experience of looking at the same scale patterns the other way round makes me notice inversions and shapes I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. It's also just a fun instrument to play. I typically go through cycles of playing the mandolin constantly for about six weeks, then putting it aside for about six months when the strings get manky and I can't bring myself to go through the monumental hassle of replacing them. Like seemingly everyone here though, I've also found myself eyeing tenor mandolas and octave mandolas/mandolins. For me it's not so much a question of size (though I'd be lying if I said I could play much of anything above the 9th fret) as it is one of pitch. I just don't find the sound of the top string on a mandolin to be musically useful. I think that's partly to do with the quality of the instrument (the high E sounds better on my dad's Nigel Thornbory acoustic mandolin than it does on my electric one) but it think it's also just a taste thing. It's like the plinky top keys on an old upright piano. This is the design I've been toying with. Not sure if I'll actually bother to build it though.

Right. Last part. I noticed when I was looking back at what I posted yesterday that the last picture doesn't quite show the body in its finished state. The upper bout inlay was missing. I now remember that it took me a week or two of procrastinating before I bit the bullet and actually carved that out. I was scared of screwing up the lovely walnut top after every other step in the process had gone so unexpectedly well. As it turned out, the process was fine. I used various sizes of drill bits to do the radiused corners, and to remove the bulk of the area that the inlay would cover. I then used small chisels and gouges to tidy up the edges. There's a wee bit of filler in one spot to cover the effect of an uncooperative bit of grain, but it otherwise went well. The inlay material itself is cut from a ~3-mm-thick offcut of ash I had lying around. Here's a picture taken during the finishing process. As with my other instruments, this is polyurethane lacquer applied with a brush and then later sanded down. I used the same lacquer on the neck, though I masked off the fingerboard. The reflective finish in this picture is actually just very hard wood that has been planed and sanded to a gloss finish. (I forgot to sand the saw marks off the bottom of the neck blank before I stuck the truss rod in, but it's not visible in the assembled bass.) Here's the finished bass. It has a pair of StewMac Golden Age jazz bass pickups (because they were on sale when I was buying some other things) and a basic vol-vol-tone control layout. The head-piece has turned out to be plenty strong enough to hold the strings in place. Here's view of the back, showing the control cover which I made from the same ash offcut as the inlay on the front. It's actually from a totally different batch of timber, but the grain matches surprisingly well. I had it set up with D'Addario half-rounds initially, but found them to be very dull-sounding. More flatwound than roundwound, I think. From the moment I first plugged it in, I knew that it blew my old Warwick Corvette fretless out of the water (not least because it was about a kilo lighter and didn't neck dive). Nicer feeling neck, lower action, clearer sound – the Warwick went straight to the Bass Gallery, who sold it on consignment a few months later. As a postscript, about a year after it was finished I was down in Brighton seeing some friends, and popped into GAK because I wanted to try out a Trace Elliot Elf. After noodling around for a while, I asked if they had a fretless I could try it with. The clerk gave me the only fretless they had in stock, which was – oddly – a Fender Custom Shop Tony Franklin signature. The neck and feel of this bass was a transcendental experience, and I realised that I'd set the bar too low by merely going for "better than my Warwick". When I got home, I removed the neck and reprofiled the fingerboard. I lacquered it with a layer of superglue (poor man's epoxy) and obsessively sanded and polished it until the neck was perfectly flat. I'm still not quite sure if I've managed to match that Tony Franklin bass, but I think I'm close enough that I don't mind the difference. Since then this has been my main at-home bass. I play my fretted bass in bands, because that's where the money notes are, but this is the one I reach for when I'm practicing and keep on a stand next to my desk. I'm considering spending some money this year on updating the electronics, just because they're not really up to the same standard of quality as the rest of the instrument. I'm tempted to go for some beefy DiMarzios or Bartolinis, and perhaps try out one of those Lusithand filter preamps, as they seem interesting. Anyone have any experience with those?

Righty then. On to the actual making of stuff. The first job was to cut the damaged headstock off the neck blank, which I did with a tenon saw, and to plane down the fingerboard. The neck already had its truss rod channel routed into it, but because the brass headpiece had its truss rod access hole in completely the wrong place (the reason, I suspect, why whatever project it was made for got abandoned), I plugged the headstock end of the channel with a piece cut from the scrap headstock and opened it out at the bottom for a wheel-type body-end adjuster. The fingerboard was a piece of Pao Ferro I'd bought on clearance and forgotten about. I planed it flat and cut the fret slots into it. I had no intention of putting frets in, but I like my fretless basses lined. Unlined fingerboards just feel like making life unecessarily hard for yourself. I marked out the board for cutting by printing the neck section of my technical drawings, taping them to the board using a centreline for alignment, and then scoring through the paper to mark positions. I cut them using a straight-edge and a fretting saw. After the neck was roughed out, I started work on the body. This is the bit where the lack of pictures is annoying, as the construction process here was quite clever. When I was designing this bass, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to go up to my wife's workshop to use the routers or pillar drills. As a result, the body had to be planned out with my limited tools in in mind – whatever I came up with would have to be doable with just a jigsaw, small drill-stand and chisels. I knew the drill stand wouldn't reach to the centre of the body, and I couldn't freehand things like bridge mounting holes and pickup routs, so I designed the body so that the two halves would only be joined together after all that stuff have been done. This is my blueprint for one of the body halves against the dimensions of the board it was to be cut out from. The vertical dotted lines are the location of the dowels I'd drilled laterally through to keep the halves aligned. (They didn't actually go all the way through, obviously). This picture is from the process of drilling the chambering into one of the body halves before I glued it up. It's about the only actual picture I have of the process. This is the finished body with the dry-fitted neck. The marks left by the drill show you clearly how I made those routs. The recess for the tuner access was roughed out with forstner bits, and then tidied up with a mixture of chisels, gouges and a massive amount of sanding. So much sanding.

In my write up of my home-made fretted bass, I mentioned that the original neck I mad earmarked for it was damaged by a badly behaved bandsaw. This is the story of what I did with that damaged neck blank. For about two years, that neck blank sat propped up against the wall in the attic. I had a vague idea of making a headless bass with it, even though I've never been a huge fan of headless instruments (this is before their sudden renaissance really got going). However, I'd looked at how much decent headless bass hardware cost and scampered away with my tail between my legs. (A Hipshot bridge/headpiece set costs like £400, which was more than I was planning on spending on the whole project). Then, one day, I stumbled across someone (perhaps of this parish) selling a set of ABM individual bridge-tuner units and a hand-made brass headpiece for £100 on eBay. I snapped them up because that's about £200 less than they would have cost new, and this was during the pandemic, so no-one had new ones in stock anyway. With this stuff delivered, I made some measurements and started working on a design. My main priority was that I wanted to have the tuners easily acessible without having them hanging off the back, or having the body cut inwards to make them acessible. Like the odd annulus things on some Alembics – I've always thought those access cutaways give your bass a sort of flabby cloaca thing. Below is the design I settled on. My thinking was that without a headstock to counterbalance, I could dispense with the top horn, and if I followed the staggered angle of the bridge units with the lower edge of the body, I could handle tuner accessibility with a routed-out recess. The little shape in the upper bout was going to be either an inlay or a soundhole-like thing – I hadn't decided which, but I felt it needed something there for visual balance. The idea was that this would be a two-piece ash body with a walnut top. The ash would be chambered to keep the weight down. It was to have simple passive electronics and cheap jazz pickups because I wasn't sure about the integrity of headpiece, and didn't know how I'd go about replacing it if it didn't work, so I bought all my parts with the possibility in mind that the whole thing might be a bust. I'll continue this tomorrow, but I should note up top that I took far fewer pictures of the process of making this bass than I did with my other one. I think this was because it was the spring of 2021, and I was in an Omicron-lockdown fugue state. That means this write-up will probably be a bit more concise than the last one (it didn't require a "15 years earlier" prologue, so that's a good start).

I've been meaning to write that up for the build diaries section. I'll put something together in the next few days.

Yeah, I made a headless bass a few years ago, and being able to stick in a guitar gig bag is liberating. A glimpse of how the other half live. Unfortunately it's my fretless, and I don't often get called on to play that outside my attic.

I have considered that, weird though it would look, but the geometry of the straps (they're usually really wide apart at the bottom) would make it really uncomfortable.

Thanks for the suggestions all. A funny thing that I should probably have mentioned: I'm not complaining about this because I'm worried for the integrity of my bass – it's a sturdy homemade thing and that never really crossed my mind – I simply find bashing into doorframes incredibly annoying. I think I'll probably start with @PaulthePlug's suggestion, and get the sewing machine out. If that doesn't work then yeah, the protec contego looks like a good shout.

Yeah, I saw that. Those Mono bags do look sturdy, just also very tall. I think I might just have to concede defeat and get back into practice when it comes to ducking through every doorway.

On my way home from yesterday's rehearsal, I noticed that my trusty Levy's gigbag is really starting to show the years of wear and tear. It has some frayed seams, the padding's perishing a bit and the zips are getting finicky. I have to concede defeat and admit that I need a new gig bag. However, while my bag is honestly not very good – the padding was always thin, the front pocket small and flimsy, and the straps are just two 3-cm-wide bits of webbing – it has one huge advantage over every other bag I've tried, which is that the shoulder straps are mounted just a smidge under 30-cm from the top of the bag. This means that the headstock doesn't stick up past the top of my head when I'm using the shoulder straps, and I can go through doorways and board public transit without smashing the headstock into the ceiling. I mean look at that – it's like it was designed by someone who has actually tried to get on a train with a bass. The problem I have is that this bag doesn't appear to be in production anymore, and I don't think it was ever sold in the UK anyway. I got it with a Warwick Corvette that I bought second-hand from the Bass Gallery back in 2008 (as it turned out, I liked this bag much more than I liked the bass). Every other gig bag I've seen (Mono, Gator, Fender, etc.) appear to have a 50–60-cm gap between the point at which the straps join the bag and the top of the headstock, meaning me wearing one would be about 2.3 metres tall. Does anyone have a suggestion for a gig bag that doesn't make me feel like I'm wearing a comically large stovepipe hat?

Hi Phil, thanks for the detailed response. I hope you didn't think I was casting any shade on the basschat 112 design – my current plans for this speaker can probably be most accurately described as "the BC 112, but a little bit smaller and a little bit worse". I'm willing to make some fairly significant compromises on bass response and general fidelity if it means I can carry it down the rickety Jacob's ladder that goes up to my attic without worrying halfway down that I'm going to fall and die. My modelling in WinISD suggests it will be louder and bassier than my current 110, and that's worked fine in every situation I've used it in so far. What's the crossover frequency on the basschat crossover, because I'd be tempted to just copy that design, again, imperfect though it would be in my set up.