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Mediocre Polymath

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Everything posted by Mediocre Polymath

  1. Mediocre Polymath
    The theatre techie would be my wife, she's been running theatre workshops for long enough that she's on first name terms with everyone there. They've left their old warehouse (the one in Deptford, yes?) and gone out to Dartford now.
  2. Mediocre Polymath
    It's finished! Mug for scale. It's 42 cm high, 30 cm wide and 34 cm deep. Weight is 11 kg, though I think about a kilo of that is the weight of the (removable) luggage handle and the heavy-duty flightcase wheels. I don't drive, so my aim was to make a speaker cab that's small enough to be wheeled around like a carry-on suitcase on public transit, and light enough to not cause me grief when going up stairs. I've covered it with some luxurious brown faux-leather (left over from reupholstering some dining chairs), but I'll probably make a weatherproof cover once I've had more practice with my wife's sewing machine. The main speaker is a Faital Pro 10PR320 (300 watts RMS), while the mid-ish tweeter is a Faital Pro 4FE42. It's got a hand-wired 4th order crossover that splits the signal at about 1.8 khz. It sounds really great to my ears, though I admit I'm not the most experienced judge of these things. The response seems pretty even, sounding like a DI'ed bass when everything's set flat on the amp, but it responds well to any adjustments to the eq or pickup balance changes. It's also noticeably louder than my old cab, and reaches "shaking the walls and annoying the neighbors" levels with my amp's gain and volume at about 3 out of 10. Considering I only use a Little Mark 250, and this is an 8 ohm cab, that's impressive, I think. Many thanks to @Bill Fitzmaurice and @Phil Starr for answering questions about the elements of the design I got stuck on, and for generally dispensing wisdom essential to this build in various threads.
  3. Mediocre Polymath

    Finished building myself a new guitar! I think I'm going to set my luthier's tools aside for a few years now though, and try doing something else.

    IMG_20240713_162251816.thumb.jpg.7aa6313c510c2144006f5236a0063ecb.jpg

  4. Mediocre Polymath
    Not sure, when I got it it was already about eight years old. I tried various things the clean the neck, but it kept seeping back out.
  5. Mediocre Polymath
    I used to have a Warwick Corvette Standard from either 2001 or 2002 (don't remember exactly). It had a neck like a baseball bat made from a very open-pored set of, I think, Okvangkol laminates. It also had an oil finish that was always just a little sticky to the touch. Beautiful bass, but yeah, deeply unpleasant to play. I eventually gave up and sold it.
  6. Mediocre Polymath
    If you've enjoyed Billy Strings, I'd suggest the great Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers and his own band, Hawktail. I think their track "Frog and Toad" is a good example of him in a more relaxed mood. He can play some crazy stuff, often involving him doubling Brittany Haas's fiddle playing up at the dusty end of the fingerboard. This rendition of the Scandinavian folk song Gla låten is a good example.
  7. Mediocre Polymath
    EDIT: KNOCKING THE PRICE DOWN TO £50 because I've nearly finished building the replacement cab. This is a 1x10 cabinet that I built for myself a little more than a decade ago. At the time the options for speaker cabinets were more limited than they are now, as were my funds. I wanted a speaker that would fit into a narrow alcove in my house, like the line6 combo I was using at the time, but that didn't sound like total arse, like the line6 combo I was using at the time. It measures 34 cm wide (including side feet), 45 cm deep, and is 58 cm high (again, including feet). The cabinet is 18 mm birch ply. The speaker is a 10" Eminence Delta (can't remember the exact model) with a power handling of 200W RMS and a frequency response of something like 55–4,000 hz. The main speaker is paired with a 4" B&C midrange driver that's connected through a crossover, and extends the frequency response up to about 10,000 hz. It originally had a compression tweeter, but I quickily decided this to be scratchy and tinny sounding. I've found these two speakers give a decent half-way point between vintage rumble and hi-fi treble. It has connections for 1/4 jacks and Speakon on the backplate, but as the 1/4 jack output on my amp doesn't work, I can only vouch for the speakon. There's also a switch that bypasses the crossover and tweeter. It's covered in luxurious red leatherlette. I've been using it mostly at home for the last decade, but it does go out on gigs every now and then. When driven by my Little Mark 250 head, it has kept up just fine with the drummers I've played with, and it sounds good to my ears. At this point I'm guessing you're shouting "enough about your taste in tweeters, what's the weight?", and that's fair. I have been avoiding the subject. Due to some combination of unusually dense 18 mm ply, an oversize box and an old non-neodymium speaker, this thing is like a tiny rock-n-roll black hole. It weighs just under 20 kg. So yeah, if you're looking for a speaker to sit in a rehearsal space, basement, or shed with a reasonably strong floor, this cab could be just the thing for you. If nothing else, the handles (there's one at each end), corners and feet are decent quality and probably worth a few bob. Collection only, obviously, I don't want to even consider how much shipping would cost. I'm based in London SE4 and around most days.
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  8. Mediocre Polymath
    I recently had a go with the new Ampeg Venture V3 head at the Yamaha/Line6/Ampeg showroom in central London. They're wee small class D things, but make a very nice noise. The B15/SVT voiced overdrive circuit sounded good to my ears, and it did the low-gain "growl" thing very well. The EQ, with its semi-parametric midrange, is very versatile and I generally found it much more usable and musical than any three- or four-band EQ.
  9. Mediocre Polymath
    This was more or less my experience. I decided I wanted to play bass, and spent a week plunking out simple pop punk basslines on my Dad's old EB-3. At the weekend my dad – who was in hindsight probably a little surprised that his morose teenage son had suddenly shown a burst of enthusiasm for something – went up to the guitar store and got some fresh strings. He gave the truss rod a tweak (it hadn't been played in about a decade), showed me how to restring and tune the bass, and then mostly left me to my own devices. I had access to tab and forums, but online video wasn't really a thing. I figured stuff out. Occasionally he'd check in to provide some tips, show how to play a particular line, or just listen to me rambling about what I was learning.
  10. Mediocre Polymath
    The fact that this bass still hasn't sold is baffling to me. I used to play a BB604, and while its electronics were a little lacking (an issue that has very much been fixed here) it was one of the nicest playing basses I've ever laid hands on. Comfortable, relatively light, and incredibly stable (never had to touch the truss rod in six years and it would stay in tune for months). I make my own basses, I'm broke, I have far too many instruments in my not-large home already and I don't play five strings, but I'm still sorely tempted by this.
  11. Mediocre Polymath
    I think an appreciation of Jamerson is something that comes later in life. My icons as a weird obsessive teenager were the aforementioned Stuart Zender and Flea; it was a long time before I came to appreciate playing as relatively low-key and subtle as most of Jamerson's stuff, even though I'd been listening to old Motown and Atlantic compilation records since I was wee small.
  12. Mediocre Polymath
    Damn. I was a broke student at the time, sadly, and unfortunately responsible with my money.
  13. Mediocre Polymath
    This is definitely true. There's also a funny effect that I've observed, which is that the same gear that's highly sought-after when it's about 40 years old was really cheap when it was about 20 years old (see the prices for once top-of-the-line Ashdown ABM-series amps on this here forum for a good example). It seems to me that when people get to around 40, mortgages and not gigging cause them to offload the gear they bought in their youth, and then nostalgia induces them to buy it back when they're in their 50s. I wish I'd bought an Ibanez musician back in the early-to-mid 2000s when they were about 20 years old and going for £300-400.
  14. Mediocre Polymath
    Interesting, a quick check against the Bank of England inflation calculator suggests that £ values from 1996 are equivalent to roughly double that number today (which in theory means Wals should be a mere £2,116...)
  15. Mediocre Polymath
    Inspired by chat about current gear prices here and elsewhere, I thought I'd share this advert, which I recently stumbled across while digging through some newspaper archives for work-related research. This appeared in the 15 September 1963 edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The fact that Leonards (a local department store) was putting these prices up-front in big writing suggests to me that they regarded these as competitive – they wouldn't have been simply stating RRP here. To put these figures in context, here are the CPI-inflation-adjusted conversions of those prices. They're surprisingly close to the current RRP for top-of-the-line (non-custom-shop) American-made Fenders, higher in most cases. BASSES Jazz Bass $279.50 = $2,854.61 (£2,271.66) Precision Bass $229.50 = $2,343.95 (£1,865.28) Plus another $59.50 ($607.69; £483.59) if you're a fancypants who wants a case. GUITARS Stratocaster $259.50 = $2,650.35 (£2,109.11) Jazzmaster $349.50 = $3,569.54 (£2,840.59) Jaguar $379.50 = $3,875.94 (£3,084.42) Cases from $49.50 ($505.56; £402.31) AMPS Piggyback Bassman $399.50 = $4,080.21 (£3,246.97) Princeton $99.50 = $1,016.22 (£808.69) I've had a look through contemporary used car listings from the same area, and while you couldn't get a nice car for these sorts of prices, you could get a car. Instead of a Jazz Bass you could have picked up a (ahem, stick-shift) 1955 Mercury Montclair, and instead of the misbegotten beast that is the Fender Jaguar (with case), you could be cruising around in the misbegotten beast that is the Ford Edsel. Ask yourself, what are the ladies going to go wild for – a Fender Jaguar or this fly whip?
  16. Mediocre Polymath
    Are you thinking of tinkering with it? I endlessly buggered about with mine when I was a teenager – replacing the pickup, adding another at the neck, routing out the control cavity for a preamp, etc. Honestly not sure if it sounded any better after all that though, those MM2 basses have a quite punchy sound even completely stock.
  17. Mediocre Polymath
    How many volume controls does it have? The early-model OLP MM2 I used to play in the early 2000s had a pair of volume controls – one for each coil of the pickup – and a tone. With that arrangement they have to be in parallel, like a jazz bass. If they were in series one volume would control both coils. That said, ths original wiring was a bit bizarre (just a way to get a musicman-style trio of knobs on a single pickup bass without paying for an active eq), so i wouldn't be surprised if they changed it after 2002.
  18. Mediocre Polymath
    No. But it does involve a carpet steamer and about half a litre of titebond
  19. Mediocre Polymath
    Hello. I've just stumbled across this thread and I'm intrigued. Any updates @Beedster? I found myself in almost exactly the same situation with a perhaps even more battered old bass a few years ago, and managed to get it back into playable condition – I could probably provide some tips that would be helpful (and that would probably strike fear and dismay into a serious DB luthier).
  20. Mediocre Polymath
    Yeah, this is more or less the definition I've reverse-engineered from the bands I've seen it applied to – sort of a country-music-in-exile thing. At least as it's used in the US, I think it also serves to cover bands who are neither rhinestone-and-trucks pop-country, nor straight-down-the-line trad country/bluegrass. I'm thinking of the jazz and classical influenced world of bands like Hawktail, Billy Strings or the Punch Brothers – performers who sit very much in the country tradition, but aren't averse to some fruity jazz harmony or weird prog-rock epics.
  21. 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.
  22. Mediocre Polymath
    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.
  23. Mediocre Polymath
    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.
  24. Mediocre Polymath
    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.
  25. Mediocre Polymath
    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.
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