Beer of the Bass

I'm fairly sure the Cembalet is the same type of reeds as my Pianet of the same era. If you have to remove and re-mount one they tend to keep their tuning very well, they're held with a single flat headed machine screw through a hole in the reed, with quite close tolerances. New reeds are tuned by filing either at the free end to reduce the mass and raise the pitch, or across the flex point by the screw end, which reduces the stiffness and lowers the pitch. But the factory tuning is usual good for the life of the instrument. Edit; I hadn't had time to watch through video earlier, they are a bit different than the Pianet reeds, having no hole. Though I presume if they're inserted to the correct depth they should retain the tuning, and it looks like the reed block is closed at the back so they may just butt up to the end before the screws are tightened.

Which of his keyboards is it? The Hohner Cembalet was the most unusual one in his setup, and not nearly as straightforward as the others for documentation or parts availability. I have an old Pianet N that's the cousin of it (same reeds and pickup system, different plucking method), so chances are I'd find that an interesting watch.

Is that "wet" in the sense of being recorded with a lot of reverb (which I know ECM tends towards), or "wet" in the sense of Molesworth disparaging his classmate Fotherington-Thomas (utterly wet and a weed, etc)? Though it gets the point across either way!

I have an ancient Pioneer PL11, predecessor to the PL12D mentioned earlier, that uses an idler wheel drive - neither belt nor direct drive. Other than fitting a newer Audio Technica cartridge when styli for the original Pioneer cartridge got hard to find, it's just worked for years without having to think about it much.

The video wasn't even meant to be about the "tonewood debate" (yawn), he's just trying something novel, wacky and more than a little impractical for the curiosity and spectacle of it.

Possibly a niche concern, but I'd love to see double bass string makers looking at the field of lively, sustaining metal core strings. Thomastik Spirocores have been around over 50 years and are still the state of the art in that area, and almost every new string on the market in the last 20 years is aiming for a darker, more damped gut-like sound to varying extents.

I know Behringer don't always clone circuits as closely as the cosmetics suggest, some are only accurate to a block diagram level. So I wouldn't automatically expect it to sound identical, though it should certainly be in the ballpark.

Not many jazz players use an extension - Ron Carter is a rare exception. I've not spent time with one myself, but some players feel they change the pizzicato feel and response on the E string in ways they don't like. They're very widely used by orchestral players where pizzicato is a lower priority, and even required by some orchestras. I'm guessing that pic of McKibbon is some years later than Birth Of The Cool, since he appears to have a pickup wire coming from his bridge too.

I'd say that's all solid, partly from looking at the edges of the side, and partly because it's a multi-piece back and has reinforcement strips along the joins on the inside, which would be unnecessary with a laminated back.

Thomastik Superflexible aren't a low tension string, they're a steel core string with fairly high tension. They're one of Thomastik's older designs, named because the core is braided steel rope which is more flexible than a solid steel core, but the standard Superflexible set is still comparable to something like Spirocore mediums. Though there is also a Solo gauge intended to be tuned a whole tone higher, that will be relatively low tension for steels at standard pitch. So I don't know that what your experiencing is a "low tension strings" issue, or that changing to a different steel core string would solve it.

I haven't used them, but some of the newer Aquila strings seem to be designed around similar concepts to the Velvets - relatively low tension, synthetic cores, copper windings etc.

Are you playing French or German? I've found dealers here tend to have fairly slim pickings for German bows, though you may have more luck with French. In addition to the Violin Shop in Glasgow, both Stringers and Gordon Stevenson in Edinburgh might be worth calling to see what they have in (I'd do that before travelling). None of them keep a huge range in for bass, but they may have what you need.

It could still do some screwy things even without stressing the amp. At the frequency where one speaker has an impedance peak, the signal voltage across the other speaker will drop so that it has very little output, which has got to sound weird.

I'm sure I remember seeing specific cautions about running dissimilar speakers in series. I don't recall what the precise issue was, but it would seem to be a quite complex situation with the impedance curves of the different speakers interacting and likely quite hard to anticipate how it will behave.

I have two dots on the face on the fingerboard at the octave and a fourth above (where the 12th and 17th frets aren't). Some people are quite scathing about the idea and it tends to get shot down in online discussions, but then a surprising number of better players than me have dots up in thumb position so I'm not going to feel bad about it. It does help me to feel a little more confident in venturing up there, and I'm using the small side dots from a set of guitar dot stickers, so it's neat looking but easily undone.