Mediocre Polymath

A local guitar shop had one of these for sale on commission for a while. Such an awkward, misbegotten thing. The guy who ran the place tried to sell me on it, and the only thing he could think of as a pitch was "it's really rare, probably collectible". To get back to the topic at hand, I would say that something that's worth remembering is that you can use much lighter woods than maple and still have a pretty stable neck. Probably the combo of, say a multi laminated sapele neck and a super-small Bass Collection-style headstock would help with the centre of gravity issues.

I made a new year's resolution to tidy up the nest of cables, plugs and musical doodads that was filling up my attic. It took a while, but I've consolidated everything down to a few shelves next to my desk (which, I have to admit, doesn't help me keep focused on zoom meetings). I'd been working on a layout that involved a sort of patch bay unit with dozens of jack sockets front and back routed to a bunch of rotary switches, but after I got the Trace Elliot GP11 from @Skinner, I realised that it had outputs enough to do everything with the green box. I can plug an instrument into the GP11 and have it to through effects (in the FX loop) and then on to either my bass amp (with home made cab), my home made valve amp/cab, or my computer interface. Or all three at once. Now I just need to re-cover the manky tolex on the valve amp with brown faux leather to match the other components.

The "Duncan Designed" pickups were a VM series thing, as were the precision-bass-style knurled metal knobs (most Jazzes have black plastic knobs). The body wood on the natural finish ones was "soft maple" I think. Source: I played one of these as my main bass for about 8 years. They're lovely things. I made a couple of cosmetic changes to mine, but left everything else more or less stock. This is what mine looked like after I replaced the knobs, drilled through the bridge for through-body stringing and added ashtrays to make it more 70s and funky.

Wonderful, thanks for this. It's reassuring to have something that – if nothing else – I could give to a tech if something goes wrong.

Does anyone have any wiring diagrams or old service manuals for the Mk. V GP11 heads/preamps? I recently got a very fine GP11 rackmount preamp from @Skinner and while it works fine (and sounds fantastic) I'd feel a little more comfortable with this 40-year-old piece of hardware if I had details on how to fix anything that fails.

Fender are going to be in quite a pickle, that's for sure. Don't they have two factories not far apart, one on either side of the US-Mexico border?

The one that bothers me is when the songs are on Spotify, but the mix is completely different to the CD release. There are a couple of early Jason Isbell albums in particular where the Spotify mix just seems to have a few of instruments missing from the audio. Take for example the fun bit of boogie that is "Never Could Believe" off Here we Rest. Here's a YouTube link with the CD mix (that particular upload also includes the brief instrumental "Ballad of Nobeard"). The Spotify version meanwhile has a weird echoey mix and the first guitar solo is just missing, meaning there's a weird interlude where the piano player and rhythm guitarist seem to be vamping between verses. There's also "The Blue", a lovely song off his self-titled 2009 album. The original mix has a metronome that's very prominently and deliberately left in the final mix, but it's gone in the Spotify version.

I suspect it was a combination of slightly iffy port tuning and the driver being potentially a bit of a wrongun. Like I said, I'm not particularly bothered – the 6FE200 works and while I'm not a independently wealthy gentleman of leisure I can eat the cost of a busted speaker without feeling bad.

Slightly bigger box on my build, volume of about 13.5 litres, but it looks like it would work reasonably well with the 10 litre box with a ~8 cm long port tube, you'd just lose a bit of oomph from the low end. That said, I'm not anything like an expert on this sort of thing, so if you're considering making your own I'd suggest that you wait for Phil to get time to have a proper think.

So the 6FE200 arrived today (along with the handle that I'd forgotten to get). I recut the tuning port and wired it all up. It sounds much better than the 6FE100, and is noticeably much louder for the same power. I think that might be a consequence of tweaking the port tuning. I had the gain on the markbass at noon, and all eq knobs flat. Got it up to about 12 o'clock on the master volume before my ears started to hurt. Speaker seemed fine, if a little farty in the low end, distorting a little, but not in an unmusical way. The speaker excursion wasn't visible to the naked eye at that volume. With the low end boosted (destruction testing, I suppose) and the low pass filter turned up it did a great impression of the "Ampeg fliptop running flat out" sound you get on Otis Redding live recordings.

Ah, that's reassuring. From a more detailed look at the many variables (you spurred me to actually figure out more than the tiny fraction of WinISD's functionality I'd been using up to now) it looks like the Faital 6FE200 might work well. Requires a slightly bigger box, and its higher frequency drop off is more pronounced, but it otherwise looks to be reasonably solid. I'm making this cab for someone who uses an 1970s EB3 though, so high frequency response isn't particularly important for my purposes.

Yeah, I think I probably over-reached with what I could reasonably get out of a 6-inch speaker. Interesting learning experience though, and it wasn't particularly expensive to learn. I'm mostly just pleased with how the cab itself has turned out. It was more a sewing exercise than a can building one. The speaker/wiring is the most straightforward part of the process. Look! built in cable pockets!

I'm inclined to assume it was something I did, I've never had problems with Faital drivers in the past. Might try again with the 6FE200 and a port tuned to about 80hz.

So I've been tinkering away on a mini speaker project very similar to this one, something small enough that my dad could easily take it to open mics and house jam things. It was going to be a christmas present, hence me working on it today. Like CBD, my attempts to model a flat response curve with the Fane speaker were a bust – I'm guessing they've changed the specs since the original House Jam cabs were made. No matter how I played around with cabinet volume and port tuning, it always had a pronounced 4–5-dB spike around the tuning port frequency and then a drop in efficiency between 100–160 hz. WinISD twiddling suggested I'd have better results with a Faital 6FE100 and a slightly larger cab (about 13.5 litres) tuned to about 65 hz, so I went with that. I built the cab and finally wired it up this morning and while it sounded good for about two minutes, it quickly started distorting, then crackling, then cut out entirely. I was only driving it with a MarkBass 250-watt amp, running at 8 ohms and about 1/4 volume, but yeah, it dead. Any idea where I blundered here? Was my port tuning too low?

Sorry. Wrong thread.

I mostly play a fretless bass (headless even, for double points) and have very long hair, but yeah, no ponytail. In my experience the ponytail is the preserve of the heavy metal dudes and theatre technicians. I generally wind my hair up in a bun when I'm soldering or using power tools. Less flappy.

I recently disassembled and reconditioned the original 3P4T rotary switch in a 1973 EB-3, and I can confirm that those old components can be taken apart relatively easily so long as you have the right tools (surgical hemostats are the answer to many things). However, I only did this because the switch is an unusual type and comparable modern replacements don't really exist (just cheap sealed plastic ones that in my experience break within a few weeks). I wouldn't bother with bog standard components like pots.

Ooh, that's a nice thing. How's the stringing/tuning process? The major downside I'm seeing is that every time you played a gig with one of these, you'd have a bunch of curious nerds down at the front trying to figure out how it works. EDIT: I've also just noticed that there's a routed-in plug of wood under the bridge – did you have difficulty routing the (square?) through holes for the mechanism, or is that just an in-fill for the bridge that was there before

I'm very tempted to have a look at tickets, even though I generally hate big shows with a passion. Showing my age (or perhaps lack thereof) but Travelling Without Moving was the first album I ever bought. I didn't play bass back then, and had no real interest in learning, but I remember being obsessed with the interplay between Stuart Zender and Derrick McKenzie on tracks like "Funktion". I recently stumbled across this fantastic recording, which caused me to totally reassess Jay Kay's role in the band. I'd always assumed that he was the lyricist and the charismatic man-up-front, but not particularly involved in the instrumental side of things. This loose rehearsal jam really shows him in band-leader mode, conducting what sounds like just the core group of McKenzie, Zender and Smith through a song that's already clearly fully formed in his head.

It's a lovely preamp. It's not totally uncoloured, but I'm not sure if that's even a thing really. With everything left flat it subtly changes the sound compared to passive in a way I can only describe as "better". I'm currently playing my NTBT-equipped bass while half paying attention to a work teams meeting.

Here's a pic of my bass's Bartolini gubbins from when I was transferring it all to a new body. The layout of the module is slightly different but the general look is the same, as is the colour coding on the wires. This particular module is more than 20 years old now (yikes) and I don't think they make it anymore, so visual differences wouldn't but surprising.

I know nothing of Vigiers, but that module looks a lot like the Bartolini NTBT I have installed in one of my basses. Does it have any writing on the sides? The trim pot on my preamp is the overall output trimmer.