Mediocre Polymath

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.

At university in the mid-2000s I shared a stage/bill a few times with 2010s pop-star Ellie Golding (Eleanor-Jane Goulding, I think she was at the time). These were tiny pub and university campus gigs, mostly for free beer and attention. She was a decent guitar player back then and used to do sets of singer-songwriter-y stuff (Ani DiFranco, Joni Mitchell, etc.). Could never have predicted the trajectory her career has taken.

Interesting, thanks. That tallies with my own subjective experience – I think the 4" speaker I've been using as a tweeter is a mid-range driver designed to go up to something like 8,000–10,000 Hz, and I've found I much prefer that sound. (I made the switch because I'd convinced myself that I needed a tweeter with a power handling greater than any easily-found compression tweeter, so I seem to have stumbled into the right answer by accident). I was worried that there some some arcane detail to do with impedances or phase problems or something that I was missing.

Hello folks. I've had to call in sick to band practice today, so I've been sitting around at home coughing, drinking tea and going through some old project ideas. Last year I started pondering the idea of making myself a small, lightweight 1x12 cab – something that I've discovered is an idea lots of people have had over the years. I made some fairly detailed design drawings, but didn't go ahead and make anything. At the moment I use a cab that more or less fits the "small" criteria, but not really the "lightweight" one. It's a weird 1x10 cab that I designed back in 2015, using ineptly-operated winISD and random bits of information I could glean from the internet. It's made from 18-mm birch-ply and it weighs somewhere in the region of 15–20 kg, mostly due to the hench Eminence Delta speaker (a funny discontinued model with a whizzer cone and a power handling of about 200 watts). It sounds fantastic, but it's generally a bit of a pain in the arse to move around. My design criteria for the new design was that it should be 1. capable of handling around 250 watts at 8 ohms, 2. be no more than 350 mm wide (I'd like it to fit in a narrow alcove in my house), and 3. (most important) be light enough for one person to lug around on public transport. This is what I came up with last summer, based around the Faital 12PR320 and a B&C speaker for the high-frequencies. I recently discovered that this is essentially a parrallel-evolution version of the Basschat 112, just slightly smaller and with, notably, a different tweeter. Which gets to my question. Why do speaker designers favor compression drivers over small-diameter cone speakers? This isn't an accusatory thing, nor am I trying to start a fight, I genuinely want to know what the reasons are. I had a compression tweeter in my 110 cab originally, but I found it sounded extremely harsh and excessively loud. It burned out after a few gigs, and I replaced it with a small-diameter cone speaker (the same as the B&C one that's in this cab design). Recently, Bill Fitzmaurice's detailed comments on this forum have led me to think this might have been due to the cheap off-the-shelf crossover I used, rather than the tweeter itself, but I'm still not sure if I like the full 40–20,000 Hz sound (but then again, I also don't like 40–4,500 Hz sound of tweeterless cabs).

As others have mentioned, they've occupied this building (just round the back of Oxford Street) since before the pandemic (I work in that neck of the woods). They acquired the space during their ill-fated drive to diversify into pro audio, consumer tech and suchlike. I'd guess they got saddled with a long lease and are trying to find something to do with the space.

I suppose I should probably say something about what it's like to play after all that. I have it set up exactly as I like, with extremely low action and standard-gauge 45-105 strings. It has pretty big and tall frets and a 9.5 inch radius on the board, so it's comfortable on the hands. (I don't really have any strong opinions about radiuses on bass fingerboards, but I generally go for 9.5 inch as it's what I like for guitars.) The range of sounds you can get out of this is wide, but perhaps not what you'd expect. The Bartolini pickup is in the correct MM position (just a smidge bridgewards from where a P-bass pickup sits), which means that with the pickup in parallel you get the traditional Musicman sound. However, if you switch it to series (which I prefer) you get something more akin to a high output, aggressive sounding Precision. The weird stuff comes with the single-coil sounds. With the MM pickup split you get the north (neckwards) coil, which is about halfway between where the two pickups on a jazz sit. That coil soloed is more Rickenbacker-like than anything Fender-y. Similarly the angled jazz pickup is a good 4-5 cm closer to the neck than a jazz or precision pickup, so it has a sound all of its own. Combining the two single coils gives a very bassy tone that's got an even more pronounced version of the Jazz Bass mid-scoop. It tends to get lost in a band situation, but sounds nice.

Apologies. Work got a little manic, but I'm back for part four of three – finishing with the finishing. I've tried a bunch of different techniques for applying finishes over the years, with varying degrees of success. My home workshop is just my garden – and it's not a very big garden at that – which makes using spray finishes unpleasant. In order to make a spray booth you have to tie a bunch of old sheets to trees, washing lines etc., and hope that the fumes don't get ignited by one of your neighbour's spliffs. (Here's a guitar being painted in what passes for my spray booth). This is no fun, and it also makes you reliant on getting perfect weather (low humidity, hot but not too hot, no wind to blow the sheets everywhere, no family gatherings on the other side of the hedge). Perfect weather isn't easy to come by in the UK, so I try to avoid spraying as much as I can. What I've settled on is a brush on gloss polyurethane lacquer called Mann's Extra Tough, which is designed for worktops and the like. My technique involves doing many, many coats of laquer and then sanding/buffing to a mirror finish. It's labour intensive, but the lack of fumes and overspray means it's easy to contain and you can do it inside. This was the view from where I sat, working from home during the first few weeks of lockdown. Every now and then, between nervously checking the news and working, I'd get up and apply a quick coat of lacquer. Here's the body and neck (finished with the same stuff and same technique, just with more masking tape), curing in my climate controlled hot-room. This is what it looks like once all the sanding and buffing has been done. Pretty good for brush-on laquer in an attic, I think. I'd added the copper shielding foil by that stage, which is a straighforward process of cutting & sticking and giving yourself hundreds of little cuts on your hands (like paper-cuts, except from something even sharper!). Here's the wiring harness from the old bass, twisted into a bizarre and stiff shape by 15 years crammed into a too-small space. I replaced some of these components – moving the active/passive switch from a push-pull on the volume knob to a separate DPDT switch. Here's a close of up its guts, mid-way through the wiring process. I'm not very tidy when it comes to electrics, as you can see. You can't really see it under the nest of preamp cabling, but there's another DPDT switch under there that switches the humbucker between series, parallel and singlecoil (in reverse polarity to the jazz at the neck). My original intention was for there to be four knobs (rather than the original's 2 plus 1 stacked). It would have had separate bass and treble knobs, with the active/passive switch also flipping the treble knob to work as a passive tone. That was why I moved the switch off the volume pot. However, I discovered mid-way through the build process that centre-detended 50k linear pots are surprisingly expensive, and decided not to bother. The fourth knob, therefore, is a passive tone that's only active whewn the preamp is switched off. I've used it perhaps three times, but it's nice to have. Here's the finished bass next to the carcass of the old one, so you can see the relative size and shape. The bridge is a Schaller, I think, with through body stringing and the tuners are the originals from the OLP. And here's a picture taken outside, so my crap camera could give you a better idea of the colour. And the back, showing the rather nice neck transition.

Right, part three. Making the neck. So the first step in this part of the process was that the maple neck blank went up to my wife's workshop so she could bandsaw it out. Unfortunately, on that particular day one of my wife's students had messed up the set-up of the bandsaw in a novel and exciting way (undergraduates man, they have talents). This caused the blade to drift off track and irrepairably damage the wood around where the headstock would be. There is perhaps a parallel universe where this didn't happen, where the last piece left over from the maple board I bought back in 2016 was actually used to make my bass along with the last of the body wood. In that world I might have finished my bass, said "well that's that" and walked away from luthierie forever. In this timeline though, I had to buy another 2.4 metres of maple board, setting up the body-wood/neck-wood nacho cycle that will likely keep me making instruments for the forseeable future. (It's also not the last you'll hear of that ill-fated neck blank – there's a reason why my fretless bass is headless). Anyway, back to the actual process. After the correctly bandsawed neck came back from the shop, I set to work. First thing was to drill out the holes for the tuner pegs (using the janky-ass drill press from last time), followed by the truss rod channel. Because of my aforementioned beef with routers, I do my truss rod routs using an old-fashioned Stanley router plane. This really doesn't take very long (probably quicker than doing it with a router when you factor in making the jig, setting it up, sweeping up all the dust, etc.) and is good exercise. I wholeheartedly recommend router planes. They're great. After that I glued on the fingerboard using some little alignment pins though holes around a few fret slots and – as is tradition – every clamp in my postcode. The fingerboard on this bass is a pre-slotted one that I'd bought from StewMac a few years earlier. I generally cut fret slots myself, because it gives me more options when it comes to scale length and wood choice, but I was happy for the opportunity to skip that stage here. I then planed/rasped away the excess. You'll note that I've still not carved the neck; this is because I find all the other steps in the process easier to do with a flat-bottomed slab. With the fingerboard attached, I got out my slightly smaller plane again to properly level the glued fingerboard. It was pretty flat to begin with, but I didn't want any bumps to get introduced by the glueing and clamping. This also revealed the lovely colour of the wood. Here's the board after I'd added the dot-markers and sanded it with radius blocks. I'd originally intended for this bass to have blocks and binding, but I decided that this didn't really fit with the aesthetic. I also didn't feel like dealing with the hassle of cutting the recesses and the channel for the binding. Here's the neck after the fret installation (done with a big hammer and earplugs). I go through and shape the fret ends after I'ver finished carving the neck. With all that sorted, I got to shaping the slab neck using rasps and a spokeshave. You can see the neck from the OLP in the background here because I was measuring and comparing to get the dimensions and shape more or less the same. I don't have any gauges or guides for this part of the process; aside from the occasional check of the overall thickness I primarly work on feel. You know how I mentioned the router plane is good exercise? Well, it's nothing compared to this stage. I'm still not entirely sure whether Rock Maple is a wood-like rock or a rock-like wood. I don't know if you can really see the shape of the neck heel in this picture, but that's something I'm particularly proud of. I carve them to exactly follow the curve of join with the body, so they go straight to playable thickness with no Fender-style chunky section in front of the joint. Here's the finished neck, next to the old OLP neck it replaced. I was going to try and wrap up this trilogy here, but I once again find myself talking too much. It will have to be a Douglas-Adams-style trilogy in four parts.

Some people seem to be interested, so I'll continue. Though before I do, I think it would make more sense for me to quickly explain my general set-up. My guitars are mostly made at home, at a workbench in my garden (which periodically requires me to duck out of the rain holding an armful of tools). I have the option, however, of periodically taking stuff up to my wife's work so we can do things that require big, expensive tools like table saws, CNCs or routers. My wife is a scenic carpenter who runs a professional set-building shop with just about every tool you could possibly want. She's also a much better woodworker than me, it's handy. Anyway, back to the build. When I first started making guitars I bought a big ol' slab of ash, something like 2.4 m (8 ft) of the stuff, to make bodies with. I liked the way it looked, but it was very, very heavy and, by the time I came to start work on this bass, I'd already used most of it. I decided to use the remaining length of wood, cut into thin strips, to make a multi-piece body from contrasting woods (the other wood being sapele). I was inspired to do this by a picture of a bass made by a now-mostly-forgotten British luthier called Peter Cook, which I came across in Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar years ago. Weirdly, when looking though my old reference images I realized that a bunch of them came from this very forum. So, er, thanks @FlatEric [I don't know how to do the tagging thing] for providing those. If you read this, I thought you might be interested to see my Peter-Cook-Axis-inspired electric mandolin, which I made around the same time. The last section of ash board was cut down on the table saw in my wife's workshop, then I set to squaring it all up and levelling the sides with my trusty flea-market Record No. 7. This is the bass body with all its pieces squared up. It's not been glued in this picture, but I had already drilled the holes laterally through the centreblock for alignment dowels. I cut out the side pieces with a borrowed jigsaw, and did the remaining bits of the centreblock shaping by hand. I drilled those pilot holes for routing before I glued the body up, because my drill stand wouldn't reach when it was all joined together. And here's my hi-tech set up for carving out control cavities. Note the 1980s Bosch drill stand that my wife found at the back of the cupboard at work. I didn't take any pictures of the routing process, but here's the router template for the pickup routs and neck pocket. My wife was able to import my technical drawings to her workshop CNC, and I then brought the body up to the workshop to use the routers there. I should mention at this point that I really, really hate using routers. They scare the shit out of me. And here's the finished product. Pickups and neck pocket routed, as well as a recess for the control cavity cover on the back. The string-through holes and the neck mounting holes were done with the workshop pillar drill. All the shaping and rounding had been done at home with rasps and spokeshaves.

Hello folks, Paul the Plug suggested that people might be interested to see the two basses I've built over the last few years. I'll start with my four-string fretted bass, as that is the one I documented in more detail. I wasn't a member here back when I made it, but I figure I could post this in installments, like a conventional build diary. Partly to keep things in style and also so I don't have to write a shitload of stuff at once. So, where to begin? I think this all starts with my very first bass, which was a 2002 OLP MM-2. For those who don't remember, these were decent-enough licensed Musicman copies (Sterling back when the "Sterling" was a specific model not a brand) with passive electrics, basswood bodies and maple necks. This picture isn't mine, but it looked exactly like this. At some point around 2004 me and my brother drilled out the body and stuck a Kent Armstrong jazz pickup in at the neck. Later we (well, mostly him if I'm honest) replaced the stock pickup with a Bartolini MMC and crammed a NTBT preamp in there. The picture below shows my brother's sophisticated workshop set up (note the bracelets, because it was 2004 and we were cool). You would be amazed how clean a rout he was able to make freehand with a black and decker + blunt chisel combo. It sounded awesome but it never played particularly well, and that only got worse as I made various ham-fisted attempts at fixing it (attempts that saw most of the frets get filed away). In 2007, I bought a Yamaha BB604 and sent my OLP off on a years-long odyssey that saw it get passed around my social circle. (it only got more stupid stickers over time) Fast forward to 2017, when, after having made two electric mandolins and a guitar, I started giving some thought to making myself a bass. I remembered that my old OLP had a good 300 quids' worth of high quality electrics in it, so I retrieved it from the friend of a friend who had it gathering dust in their attic, poor thing. On getting it back, however, I was surprised to find that it sounded even better than I remembered it sounding. And while I procrastinated on the design of my new bass, I decided to refret it with some stainless wire that I'd bought by mistake for another project and not used. I remembered this as just a stop-gap thing, but looking back through my photos I realize that this frankenstiened, almost 20-year-old OLP – with its blank headstock, tinfoil shielding and its finish marred by the residue of removed stickers – was actually my main bass for like three years. I played quite a few gigs with this thing. Eventually though, I settled on this design, and started buying the wood I needed. Tune in next time for the actual build process (I'd intended to at least start that here, but I got carried away).

Hah, just a roundabout way of saying "my dad's bass". Both he and the bass are still going strong. He even still gigs with it, despite it being about the most uncomfortable and awkward bass ever made. Can't deny it looks cool though.

Thanks, I'll have to dig through the photos on my phone and see how well I documented those builds. I'm not great at taking pictures as I work. Also, I'm much happier hanging out with fellow old-timers than fielding the umpteenth question this week about whether or not you need a specific kind of bass to play [insert esoteric heavy metal subgenre here], which is 90 percent of bass conversations online.

Hello folks. Name's Ben. I've been playing since I was 16 or so, and I'm getting alarmingly close to 40 now. I have never been a touring or regularly gigging musician, though I have had periods of playing live fairly frequently and have been in many, many of those sorts of bands that rehearse for months and then fall apart without playing a gig because everyone's too busy. My formative bass influences were, as is probably pretty ordinary for my generation, Flea and Stuart Zender, with a bit of Matt Freeman and Mike Dirnt thrown in. More recent years have seen me gravitate towards the work of the old masters, studying the ways of Jamerson, Dunn and Rainey. I've always kept my stable of basses to no more than two – a fretted and a fretless, though the roster has changed a few times. The fretted list starts with the family heirloom Gibson EB-3 that I learned on, then an OLP Stingray copy (see the note about Flea), a Yamaha BB604, a Squier VM Jazz, and finally a thing I made myself. My fretless basses have been a mysterious 1980s Yamaha I got from a pawnbroker, a Warwick Corvette, and finally another weird headless custom of my own design. My amps have been many and various, but these days I rock a Markbass head and a stupidly heavy 1x10 cab I made myself. My effects consist of the traditional bass player tuner>compressor>overdrive. In addition to electric bass, I also have an upright bass (that I got for free and can't really play very well), various guitars, a banjo and a mandolin (which I think of as a tiny bass strung backwards). I'm at the stage of life where old bandmates from days of yore are getting bored with parenting, and deciding that maybe they want to get a band together and play Steely Dan covers in the pub. Which means I'm starting to get called on again.