Mediocre Polymath

I use an EHX Bass Soul Food to do just this. For me it's an always-on, very low gain pedal. Just there to put a bit of hair on things. I think there's one currently for sale on the marketplace for not very much.

There isn't really a clear "I want to play bass" moment for me. It was an impulse that just bubbled up to the surface from the teenage primordial soup of dumb ideas, anxieties and dreams. When I was 14 or 15, a few of my friends at school started to play the guitar, as did my older brother. I thought they seemed really cool and wanted to join in. My dad would probably let me play his old bass, I knew that, but I was ultimately too chicken to try. At the time, I thought of myself as unteachably inept at any sort of physical skill – I was crap at sports, a risk to myself and others in a workshop and had displayed a spectacular lack of musical ability throughout my childhood. I figured trying to play an instrument again would just be setting myself up for embarrassing failure. At around the same time, oddly, I also developed a sort of nagging and largely irrational anxiety about the prospect of learning to drive. Like, I was aware that this was a thing – a physical skill – I'd need to do, and I was concerned that I would turn out to be just as bad at that as I had been at everything else. I started thinking that perhaps I should try to learn to do something (play an instrument? juggle? knit?) to reassure myself that I was capable of learning something new. The final piece of the puzzle came on a day when I was off school and bored. I was playing 1080 Snowboarding for the N64, and set a time on the "Crystal Lake" run that was genuinely world-beating. Well, perhaps not world-beating, but definitely fast enough that I could write into the magazine if I wanted, get my name in print. I sat there, looking at my character celebrating on the screen, looking out of the window at the sunny summer's day I was avoiding, and had a sudden urge to do something – anything – more productive than this. Something that might make people think I was cool, something that girls might think was cool. I went upstairs and pulled my dad's old bass out of a cupboard. I downloaded the tab for "Dammit" by Blink-182 and started awkwardly plucking the notes. With help from my brother and my dad, I beat my expectations and got surprisingly good surprisingly fast. Haven't stopped playing since. It never did help me get any girls though, and I never did learn to drive.

Hi there. Sorry I completely forgot about this. Here's the voltage selector, looks to be on 120/240 for mine.

I'll have a look in the morning.

Happy update. Got a can of Kobra "Venom Red" from the local DIY store and this is the colour I was hoping for (going for an Audi Quattro sort of a colour scheme).

There's always a moment when you look at the paint drying and think "maybe I can make this work?", but no. I can't pull off a hot pink bass.

Sigh. So this is what Montana Color call "Fire Engine Red". Oh well, off to buy more paint I guess.

I looked in my parts bin, as for some reason I kept the truss rod when I binned the neck from my old OLP MM2, but sadly I think I decided "what possible use could anyone have for an old OLP truss rod" and threw it away a few months ago. That said, I remember the spoke wheel being welded on, so perhaps it was a different design. If the adaptor doesn't fit, you can always try pulling the truss rod out and replacing it. They're double action rods in a straight rectangular channel – you can generally pull the out if there's no tension on them.

When I was in my late teens I bought a compressor. I'd been told by the received wisdom of the internet that compressors were good and important, so I went up to Denmark street with my supermarket paycheck. I had also been told that Tech 21 were a great company, and given that I knew very little about what a compressor was supposed to do, I opted for the Tech 21 one – a pedal called the Bass Compactor. The problem was that the Bass Compactor is absolute, unmitigated balls. Like, I've played through plenty of T21 stuff since and loved it, but that pedal was awful. It was effectively a one-knob compressor (ratio) with the other controls being output vol and a 2-band EQ. It didn't behave like any other pedal I've heard since, with this strange make-up gain thing that was coupled with a really aggressive noise gate. With the ratio at 1:1 it sucked the life out of everything and it only got worse from there. It put me off compressors, and effects pedals of any kind, for about 15 years.

Trick is to go for the one for tomatoes, it doesn't have any internal shelving. It's not the sturdiest thing – its ok with the weight of the Hohner, and could probably cope with a body and a neck separately, but it would buckle under the weight of, say, an Ibanez Musician or an Aria SB.

Two more days were spent filling the exposed ends of the fret slots with lacquer, which is a slow process of dripping stuff in with a pipette and then filing it down. After that I was ready to start painting in my newly aquired (from Argos) spray booth/greenhouse. I was a little stumped by how to hold an instrument that has no tuning peg holes or neck pocket to use, but decided on a big M-10 eyebolt through the jack socket hole. And here's how it looks as of right now. Don't worry, this is just the first step in what will be a fairly elaborate finish.

Righty. So I've made more progress since the last update, but I'm afraid I've not been very diligent about taking pictures. When I last checked in, the new frets were in the board, but that was about it. The first big job after that was to trim/file them all to the right length. This is a painstaking process because you're filing and filing and filing for ages, but you're still having to maintain enough control that you don't accidentally gouge a chunk out of the fingerboard. I did one half of the fingerboard one day, then came back and did the other half of the fingerboard the next day. I've learned from experience that if you try to do the whole thing in one go, you're going to end up with a cramped-up claw hand. I didn't take any pictures of this process, partly because it's really boring and partly because I was listening to something interesting and got distracted. Here's the finished fingerboard. The little shiny spots you can see here and there are a mix of glue and sawdust, used to fill the tear-out from the fret removal. As I said, I didn't do the neatest job of that, so these are sort of like bits of tissues paper stuck on after a really inept teenager's first shave. Next comes the leveling and crowning. Again, not many pictures of this process. I did what I always do, which is mark the tops of the frets with a sharpie, then put some 320-grit self-adhesive paper on my 1-metre engineering straightedge. I only had to take a little material off here and there because the fingerboard was nice and level and the frets went in cleanly. After that I roughly rounded over the frets with my crowning file and then tidied them up with a three-corner fret dressing file. After that, it's polishing time. Which involves lots of 2500 grit wet/dry paper and a lot of patience. Here's the finished neck. I'll oil up the fingerboard when the rest of the work is done.

I don't think that was the same place. County Music was the one on the left as you were walking up towards the castle, right? – quite a wide, double fronted shop with keyboards and a separate room full of acoustics, yes? This one was on the right, on the junction with (checks Google maps) Rosemary Lane. It might have only been there for a few years. It was there when I started undergrad in 2004, therefore it had always been there as far as I knew. County Music was also great though. That was where I bought the Yamaha BB604 that was my main bass for several years (£180 second-hand!).

So, I can't get any particularly clear pictures because the flash is bouncing off the other cables and components, but they're both marked as 100uF, 63v, and (I think) rated to 105C, though I can't get a clear look at the last part. The person who assembled my amp was very generous with the rubbery fixing compound, so I had to scrape some of that away to see the PCB labels. Here's the C6 orientation (negative to the right when looking from the front of the amp) And the C5 orientation (negative towards the front) and a fuzzy image of the markings, just to confirm I'm not making this up.

I have one of these amps, and I've had the cover off a few times to replace failed/crackly pots in the preamp board. I'll pop the cover off and take some pictures when I get a moment. These would be the big electrolytic, yes?

I think probably the shop I spent the most time in was in Canterbury, where I went to university. A place called – I think – castle street music, or something like that. It was a guitar shop on castle street, and businesses in Canterbury tend to go for pretty straightforward names. It was a funny little shop that, like most shops in the city, was actually two tiny old storefronts knocked together, with a little doorway between the two. I went in there a few times a month and played basses, bought strings, etc., and made awkward conversation with the guys who ran the place. I'm sure I was an irritating nuisance as I never had the money to buy anything big, but they didn't chase me away. Sadly they shut down not long after I graduated, so I never got to go back there as a taxpayer with cash and buy something shiny to pay them back for all the time I'd taken up. All the chat about the Denmark street of old reminded me of a funny experience I had a few months ago. My company's office is about five minutes' walk from there, and I swing by the shops from time to time to buy strings and fill my lunchbreak. There was one day when I popped into Wunjo to get some bass strings and chatted for a bit with the bass cellar guys about some instruments they'd recently gotten in. I came out, walked to the junction with Charing Cross Road and found myself absentmindedly thinking "hmm. Should I got up to the Virgin Megastore or get on the tube and go straight up to Camden?" It passed in a flash, but for that moment my brain was fully transported back to the summer of 2003, I was 16 and frittering away my paycheck from the supermarket.

That looks great, also I want to just give moral support for a fellow hater of routers. They are the devil's tool, to be avoided as much as possible. And don't don't get me started on table routers, not even once man.

I mean, I have many gripes with the world of instruments, but the one that I'd say qualifies as a strange and slightly irrational hatred is instruments where the pickups+their surrounds are significantly different widths. The Yamaha BB series is the worst offender with the narrow little J pickup and the extra-wide P pickup in a chunky surround.

I do simple routs like this with forstner bits and chisels – I could easily adapt one of my existing humbucker cavity drill templates if you want to go down that route. Just give me the dimensions.

I'm currently about half-way through the learning rhythm notation section of that book, and I agree. I've tried to learn sheet music a few times but it's never really clicked before. I got this book on the good recommendation of various folks on here.

We once, when reattaching a radiator that had fallen off the wall, had to use a screw so long that we went through the wall into the next room.

Another weekend of incremental progress. I was out being sociable on saturday, and being slightly hungover today, so I was only really able to do stuff on Friday and Sunday afternoon. I'd decided early on that I was going to give this bass a full refret, and I figured that bit should probably be next in the order of operations. That way if I clip the body with a fret-cutting-saw or file, then I can address it when I'm tidying up the body before spraying. This might seem a little drastic, as the frets weren't in terrible shape, but I have my reasons. The first, and simplest, is that I may as well do it if I'm going to be putting in a dozen or so hours on restoring the instrument. The frets as they were could have been dressed and polished, but they would always have been a bit sub-par. The second is that I noticed that the fretboard is very low to the body by design, and that the saddles on the bridge appeared to be as low as they'd go. Obviously I've not seen what the action is like with strings on (I got this in bits), but those details were enough to make me a little worried that I might have trouble setting the action, especially if I had to dress the frets down any lower. To that end I ordered some super-jumbo fretwire – 3 mm x 1.47 mm – figuring it will raise the "floor" of the action up a bit, and hopefully give me a bit more leeway with saddle adjustment. The height of the existing frets was about 1.2 mm. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a big difference in terms of feel. I like my fretted basses to be really emphatically fretted, if I want low-profile and smooth I play my fretless. First job was to take the frets out, which just involves carefully pulling them with a set of end-nippers ground down to have an edge that's flush with the front. After that I relaxed the truss rod and levelled the board with light sandpaper and a levelling beam. This fretboard was already more or less fine, so I was really just doing this to tidy some of the tear-out around the fret slots. I have to admit that I didn't do the most careful job with the fret pulling on this occasion. Nothing that can't be addressed with some sawdust and glue down the line though. I radiused the fretwire with my home-made fretwire radiusing tool. This is just three bolts through a old chopping board, with a set of roller-bearings and washers spaced so that you can tighten up the radius on wire. Trying to do fretwork with wire that's a bigger radius than the board you're trying to bash it into is a maddening experience and the results always suck. Professional versions of this tool are adjusted with set-screws and gears. I adjust the radius on mine by gently whacking the middle roller with a hammer. After that comes the arduous and boring task of cutting fretwire to size. This just involves standing at the workbench with a big pair of nippers, cutting off each fret-length piece until your hands hurt. The last few times I've done this it's been on acoustic guitars. Going from those to a 24-fret bass was an annoying experience. If you have the proper tools this goes a lot faster, and with less bruising of the hands, but the proper tools cost like £200 and take up a lot of space. Then, if you think that's boring the next job's even worse. If you don't have a tang-nipper (again, those cost about £200) then the only way to take the ends off the fret tangs so they don't look ugly on the fingerboard edges is to file them off one at a time in a vice. I genuinely don't think I would have gotten into guitar building as a hobby if if weren't for the ubiquity of podcasts and aubiobooks. Finally, you take the fretwire and you bash it in with a hammer. You can get professional results this way, it's just slower and takes a little more care and finesse than using a radius clamping caul and a fret-press. I don't have the space for either, and wouldn't want to spend that much money, so I've just gotten very practiced with my nylon-headed hammer. Pro tip: If you're installing frets at about 7 pm on a sunday evening in a thin-walled terraced house, do it on the kitchen floor. This is just a thin rug over tile on concrete, nothing to reverberate and boom with each hammer blow. The next step is to file off the ends and dress the frets, but I've run out of time for this weekend.

It's been a slow week of work on this. Just building up layers of epoxy to fill the various dents, dings and repair joins. I'll do the refret tomorrow hopefully, and then prep it for painting some time next week. I think I'm going to go down the cheap plastic greenhouse route for my spray-booth.

The walls of my late-victorian terrace are seemingly made of a mixture of sand and, er, cheese? So I don't hang anything heavier than an acoustic guitar by its neck. I keep my basses and various other household instruments in a big wooden rack that fits into an alcove. It's something my wife designed and made from the remains of a heavy oak table. I'd been looking for a new stand to replace my manky old one, but found they're all designed with guitars in mind – that means basses sit leaning back at an angle, forcing you to either bash them into the wall all the time or make bad use of space by leaving a 30-cm gap behind the rack. Here's the design mock-up in my wife's old workshop with CNC'd dummy versions of my basses.

This is true, pirate's facilities could probably stand to be staffed better, or at all, but they do at least have luxurious amenities like fire escapes and up-to-code wiring. That's more than can be said for a lot of studios in London.