Wolverinebass

Well, I'll bring it along when the date gets arranged!

Many thanks for your help squire. It really is greatly appreciated.

Neck through. Sorry, I'll post a picture of the back.

Thanks. Yes, the way the jacks are wired is like a Rickenbacker. So if you use a mono cable, the circuit won't output through the stereo jack. Vice versa also works the same way. The precise wiring is beyond me in terms of what wiring does what, though I do understand the concepts of how it works. Incidentally, both ways are "single lead." It's not wired like a Billy Sheehan Yamaha Attitude. Jack nearest the bridge is stereo, the one below is mono.

So, yesterday, this arrived. Before we get to the photo, if anyone doesn't like pointy things, leave. There is nothing here for you but pain. I ordered this in 2021. How has it taken so long you ask? There was a thing called covid if I recall. Also, there were also hilarious parts problems on backorder for ages. Enough of that nonsense. What is it and where is it made then? Grainger basses and guitars are up near Peterborough, and around the time of one of the lockdowns they posted a bass in this shape that had a mad blue acrylic top. The cogs started turning. So, my idea was to have this wired like an Alembic Series 1 bass and it is. After chatting to Nuno at Lusithand about it I bought some filters off him (his stuff is great by the way - check out his site) with the caveat that it might not work. Undeterred, I sought the advice of the basschat massive and many thanks to @Hellzero who provided the Jack wiring diagram. Basically, the bass can be used stereo or mono with different jacks (like a Rickenbacker), but it's active with a filter and volume for each pickup also a pickup selector. So there's 2 jack outputs. I also got Darren and Gavin to make the bass modelling the neck on my own Alembics. They've done that amazingly precisely. Top and back is flame maple, body is walnut with headstock facings and neck strings. There is a touch of neck dive, but I've not used a wide strap yet. The bass is quite light as the upper wing is chambered. Naturally, I've got a hipshot on it for drop D and there's a brass Warwick Just a Nut too. Bridge is Babicz mono rails to accommodate the narrower spacing. Inlays are mother of pearl. Pickups are Nordstrand Zen Blades wired in parallel to keep as much top end as possible. The reason being is that Lusithand Filters go to 4kHz give or take, whereas Alembics go to 6.6kHz. So, does it sound like an Alembic? In a word, yes. If you want that John Entwistle 1982 Who bass sound, you'll get it. Or if you want a great clean sound it'll do that too. Darren, Gavin and Nuno were fantastic throughout this especially when there were wiring issues we had to resolve. If you're looking for a custom bass made by a British company (or anyone actually), then Grainger do really exceptional work. Also, Nuno at Lusithand makes really good preamps and pedals which are well worth checking out.

I made a joke about this a long time ago. Mainly all the people who might say, "I'll come to the next one." I postulated that if we were playing a gig in their front room, they'd say they had something important to do in the kitchen. That was at a time when I was in bands that played probably more accessible material ironically.

I think it's when you get into stuff that's quite niche that you have problems. He says in 2 progressive metal bands. When you're in a wide genre, great. If you kind of skirt round it a bit more or are a small percentage of it, not so much.

It wasn't the pickups themselves. It was the ears where you'd put the screws through the pickups into the body. What it meant was that even discounting the difference in depth, they didn't fit without being filed down. I just thought it was weird that it wasn't on their website as there was no way they'd properly fit a Stingray route without some filing.

An interesting thing about the Herrick pickups is something a bit odd. Now, Martin advertises them as obviously needing routing for the depth. That's fine of course. What he didn't say was that the ears where the screws go in aren't straight and slope outwards towards the bottom. So, I had to get a tech to file half the casing back by 3mm up to halfway up the pickup. Now when I said this, Martin told me he'd had feedback about this issue with standard MM cavities which I thought was peculiar he didn't say that or list it on his website. Alas, I've not yet got the neck for the bitsa thr pickups are in, so I can't tell anyone how it compares to a Wal.

I'd be very interested to hear the difference if any. Certainly, the samples of the Alex Venturella bass on the Status website that are semi isolated I could tell the difference right away between the wood and graphite neck. However, it's worth saying that in a mix you'd probably never really be able to tell unless there was more higher notes played with a bit more percussive type sound. Obviously Slipknot is rather downtuned. I've been toying with getting one as I missed out on getting a Stealth by a week when Rob stopped taking orders. Still kicking myself over that as the options I wanted haven't been used on any other stealth made.

This is brilliant. This thread reminds me of the famous James Coburn quote from Cross of Iron. Please feel free to substitute the names in it for bass players you hate (cough - sorry, "don't get"). "Do you think that just because you and Colonel Brandt are more enlightened than most officers that I hate you any less? I hate all officers, all the Stranskys, all the Triebigs, all the Iron Cross scavengers in the whole German army."

Exactly. Whomever made that decision has literally no taste at all. I think that clearly it's just being shoved out now for whatever reason. Considering the price point, there are so many things that are infinitely better around there. I can't see many folk using this giving the voicing of the pedal has been changed so much from the original. Whilst I appreciate that the type of distortion one uses is a very personal thing ranging from mild overdrive, through tube distortion to full on djent chainsaw type, I can't hear how that pedals sound is going work for anyone that well. If someone was recording bass in my studio and sounded like that, I'd probably have to have a difficult conversation about their gear and overall tone. Or I'd just re-amp it all through something decent.

What I'm now actually finding hilarious is the Facebook reels by Ashdown and PMT today. Which are some synth music zooming into the pedal on top of a combo and about a minute of James LoMenzo chatting respectively. None of them have audio from the pedal. It's kind of "if we don't mention that it sounds awful, nobody will know and that's okay isn't it?" I wonder if they have the "crisis management team" on call for whenever someone thinks about plugging a bass into this pedal and uploading a demo to the Internet they get smashed with a "cease and desist" legal letter. I'm almost tempted to buy one just to really know if it actually is so unfathomably pish. Obviously, it'd be going back under distance selling regs, but it does pose some interesting questions. Will my rib cage survive either the dry heaving from being so violently sick after playing it, or from laughing so hard that I could forget to breathe for several minutes? In many ways I'd actually like to do a review of it by putting some insanely high end basses through it and seeing if any or all of them (possibly) come out sounding like an out of tune Sue Ryder bass from 1986.

Well, the PMT video is back up, though in a different cut. Kind of like Blade Runner, except without being any good. In case anyone is wondering, the demo still sounds absolutely crap. I think this is quite astounding that Ashdown have in effect ruined probably the best pedal they've ever made. Don't expect any more demos as since they won't get favourable reviews, there won't be any. The only reason this is out is because LoMenzo is interviewed for most of the video. I think had it not been the case, it would have stayed taken down.

I think the main point of contention is that Charles is a YouTuber. Now, he's obviously a very talented chap and fair play, he appears to be doing rather well for himself at the whole video content thing. I very much doubt that it's easy and no doubt comes with as many (if not more problems) than being what some might consider to be a "conventional" working bass player. I think what most people take against YouTubers is the clickbait titles, the constantly spamming groups on Facebook, the "personality" that inevitably goes hand in hand with constant content creation in an effort to be seen as edgey or exciting. It's just the nature of the beast. It's quite easy to not watch any of this stuff if you don't want to. Or, if they're one of the aforementioned people spamming a group you're on on Facebook with their inane clickbait, just block them. Easy enough. Why get annoyed?