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I did the Shuker build course back in February and thought I should should share my experience with any Basschatters who aren't sure if the course was for them. I haven't done any woodworking since high school, so picked a nice simple build. The specs were: Ash Jazz body (classic), stained black and rubbed back to highlight the grain Maple neck Fretless ebony fretboard Musicman style humbucker Passive electronics with stacked volume/tone to keep the front cleaner, but at Jon's suggestion a 3 way switch was added to be able to run the pickup in parallel/single coil/series for a few extra options Schalled elephant ears tuners and Gotoh bridge in black If you don't feel like reading the whole thread, here's the end result! Day 1 The 2 piece ash body had already been glued and planed, so once the centre line was found and the body outline drawn, it was onto the bandsaw for a rough cut. Then a template was used to guide a router around the body, removing about 2-3mm of material each pass until something that looked a bit like a bass happened. Once that was done, the forearm slope was cut out with a hand plane, and the stomach contour was done with a saw rasp. Then lots of sanding, starting at 100 grit paper, then moving on through 120, 180, 240, 320 and finally, 400. I'm a puny man and my arms were so gone by the end of the day I couldn't raise them horizontally, and had to buy a hot/cold pack from the train station Superdrug on the way home to try and get them ready for the following day's work. I decided I was going to take breaks if needed to make sure I got through the rest of the week. As it happens, that was the worst of the physical side of it, but I did get a good excuse to pet Jon's new dog lots, 10 month old Lily. Lily enjoys head scratches, singing the songs of her people and chewing everything, including my shoes, while I was still wearing them.

Got asked to join a very busy heavy blues rock band (very flattering but bit too busy for me, absolutely every fri, sat & some sundays & some midweeks too) I'm not the most technical or musicianly player but the band leader told me that "I got it across the footlights, with energy, attitude & passion". I took that & was very pleased with that compliment.

I bring... More pedals than the guitarist.

But not when I'm playing it!!

Why oh why oh why would a band want to do tunes that are the best known and loved songs by various artists to a crowd who want to hear covers of the best known and loved songs by various artists? What a head scratcher! Can't fathom it at all...

Day 2 Body routing for the control cavity, pickup and neck pockets. I was terrified of routers before doing the course, but by day 2 I felt very confident using them and the woodworking possibilities seemed vast with them. I figured with a good enough router and the right templates and jigs, you could build the vast majority of a guitar with a router. The body roundover was also done and you can see the scorch marks on the edges where I lingered too long. Nothing too drastic that wouldn't sand out thankfully. The neck was also done in much the same manner as the body. A channel was done down the centre for the truss rod and a hole drilled at the heel end for adjustment. Once the rod was inserted, a strip of wood was added and glued into place to cover it, which was then planed back until flush with the body. The ebony board was cut to rough shape, glued and clamped and day 2 was over. Things were coming together nicely!

I made a reggae remix of a song off the new Billie Eilish album.

I just knew you had a Ric for some reason. Couldn't quite put my finger on why Should you not have had them facing the camera or are they shy Dave

Best wishes to you butty. (with the op' and the new bass) 👍

Best wishes fleabag

You should see our kitchen!! 😲

I picked the Stella up 😁. I've spent most of this afternoon acquainting myself with it's many features! I like them all. The build quality is excellent, the pedal has a really solid feel and is a fair bit smaller than a Boss pedal, for instance. I had a message from Becos saying that mine was arriving with premium aluminium knobs "as a way to say thank you for placing a back-order for a new BECOS product". The basic compressor functions work as described and I really like the sounds available and the control they give over the waveform. The tilt Eq is really nice, and not overpowering. Clockwise from centre gives a more aggressive tone I feel, but I will probably use the added fatness to the left of 12 o'clock. I love the tone of both the hard and soft knee settings and will probably use the side chain filter switch in the L position although all the positions sound great and my opinion may change as I become more familiar with the pedal. The timing switch sounds good in both automatic positions but I will probably use it in Manual and use the attack and release knobs. The threshold knob has to be set fairly low to light up more than a couple of the Led's with my passive basses plugged directly into the Stella at around 4:1 on the ratio knob. This will allow plenty of adjustment for any extra gain when used in a chain of pedals though. The tape saturation circuit will probably be of more use to me when recording as it sounds good with flatwound strings to get that slightly distorted Jamerson tone that sits nice in a mix. I decided not to remove the LoCut jumper as recommended as that affects the whole of the dry signal not just the saturation and takes away a bit from the Parallel compression feature when not using the saturation. To summarise then, a fantastic full featured transparent compressor with added bells and whistles. Sounds punchy with regular compression settings, great for slap and fingerstyle. Sounds really good as a limiter too with the Ratio set higher. When set at unity gain it adds a discernible improvement to the same basic tone. I'm really pleased.

Thanks all for the responses. Think we're going to find a dealer in the south who stocks the RCF 735/745 and give them a test run

I just want to say thank you very much to @stoo, I have just build my own midi controller for my HX Stomp based on your code and wanted to show the result. I used different board, layout and libraries but it all started with your post. I have attached my code but I would try to keep it update on github: https://github.com/yeraym/vulcano_controller vulcano_controller.ino

Day 5 I'd saved a lot of time by not having frets, so I'd jumped ahead of the other 2 people on the course by about Thursday afternoon. But Friday was the scary part; drilling holes into all my hard work for the week and hoping I didn't make any mistakes. There was a lot of nervous butt clenching, which wasn't helped by Jon telling us stories of people who'd got to the last day and then made mistakes like drilling tuner holes all the way through the headstock! After the control cavity was lined with copper tape, it was onto the drilling for the neck pocket, front controls, bridge, tuners and anything else I've forgotten. Having most of the day for this, I took my time and thankfully there were no mishaps. The electronics were wired up and installed, and then the hardware and neck screwed into place. A bone nut blank was cut, filed down and polished once the strings (Rotosound flats, 40-100) were loosely installed and then glued in place. I quit eating meat at the start of 2018 and wish I'd asked about another material rather than bone, but didn't think about it until it was too late so just went with it. I might install a Graph Tec one in it's place at some point. Strings on, it was time to set the bass up. 1st fret height was fine, but the neck required a very slight shim to get the action low. A piece of veneer cut to shape was all it took, a slight adjustment to the truss rod and the height could be lowered sufficiently for easy play. Bridge saddle adjustments sorted the intonation out and everything was done! A quick blast through the shop amp ('Music for Chameleons' and 'Every Time You Go Away') checked everything worked as it should (apart from my intonation). The only cosmetic thing I don't like is the amount of the fretboard material that extends behind the nut. I wish I'd taken it back by 5mm or so, but that's really my only issue. Other than that, I'm extremely happy with it. I was worried my lack of woodworking experience would be an issue, but Jon and the man helping him on the first 3 days (none other than Tim Lever, former keyboard player for Dead or Alive) were both amazingly patient and all round great teachers and the whole thing was pretty painless.

Hi there - heard about this event from my teacher. I'll be coming along with my Ibanez SRF700, and I can offer a lift if anyone is struggling to get in from the Frome-ish area.

I am definitely more minging than most so I bring a greater opportunity for the rest of the band to score

All of the amps on the Stomp, for me at least, had the drive controls too far up and sounded too muddy on the presets and when the amp is selected into an empty block. There is a chap by the name of Jon Willis who has done a lot of work providing bass patches and settings for the Helix series within a couple of groups on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/669957523419623/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/145604946038429/ If use you Jon's settings in the images below - for which I take no credit and that are available via the first group above - the amps are much cleaner and it's possible to work from a more useful starting point. These 'clean' settings come into their own, I've found, at proper volume through an amp (via the FX return) and cab.

When I get to an audition I aim to: have done my homework on the band, the material, the gigs; be honest with them about what I can or can't do, in terms of both playing and commitment; and be the solution they are looking for, not another potential problem.

It's cool, looking like a good move to be fair. 🙂

Acoustic gig last night. Blue

And just so that your box is not feeling too lonely, here's what arrived on the Krow doorstep this morning too 😀😂

Funnily enough, I had my 5 guitar (£15) stand delivered today: From R to L - a black J and a P and a Ric' (obviously). Never mind the blue shortscale J (I might give that to the kid next door), or the Fender acoustic (I am not a folkie!). And never mind what may or may not be behind and/or under various sofas. Therefore I have space for a couple more! 😀

OK, first impressions. Loud, gnarly, distorted, gwaaaaar. And so on. My initial preference is for the Alpha side...it just sounds more controlled. I'll have a play over the weekend and report back. I would say that I tried it with the Barefaced Big One, lovely, but with the Aguilar SL112s it didn't procure such a happy result, so I suspect these will appear in the For Sale section over the weekend (don't worry mods, I'm paid up); it's simply not a happy pairing, they're simply not aggressive enough and I just feel that they're trying too hard to smooth things out, so there's little point in keeping them. I'm hoping at some point to try these out with a pair of Barefaced BB2 courtesy of @Graemeross More later...

£900 seems pretty decent to me 🙂

Dear friends, I’ve started to build these 2 basses in 2016.... end of that year my life has changed & I wasn’t able to finish these basses... now in 2019 I felt that the time was come to finally finish these 2 basses ... many thanks to all of you for your comments !

All things considered, that's quite reasonable for expert guidance on building your own handmade bass Very nice looking bass it is too

With the flexibility in the helix you can put it in any order. I actually put it in an effects loop and move it around to suit.

I bring.. Inappropriate use of disco octaves, and slap in Motown tunes.

Busy, busy, busy getting things finished for Sunday......

I sometimes run a couple of pedals in the loops of my Stomp. They work just fine. As much as I like to hear them, it's extra stuff to cart around, and I'm getting great results with just the Stomp by itself. I'll still use pedals from time to time, but not for most gigs.

Hi all! Just bumping an old thread to say that Tommy's been ill and had to down tools for quite a while, but happy to say he's back in the saddle...

Day 4 The front of the neck was done, so Jon took the body away for a couple of layers of clear coat so that the staining could be done, and I got to work on the back of the neck. The heel and the headstock ends were done first, then I worked in to the middle using a flat file, a rounded file/rasp and a saw rasp, checking regularly until I felt like it was a shape I liked. Then lots of sanding and crossed fingers that no major re-working needed doing. There wasn't! Lots of detail sanding was done too. The holes for the tuners were marked out and drilled out on the drill press using a forstner bit. The body was stanined black with some stain diluted with acetone, being careful not to rub it in too aggressively and take any clear coat off. Once done, Jon's assistant rubbed this off until just the grain was black. Then more clear coat. The lion's share of the work done, Friday would be about installing the hardware and setup. I'd been travelling from Sheffield on the train all week but my fiancee and I decided to make a trip of it and stay at the Old Hall Hotel down the road on the evening of day 4 for a pub dinner and a sleep in a 4 poster bed.

Not having that mate, classic tune!

Yeah not bad. Think the star should be a slice of lime instead

Bury is good - not too far from my bit of Essex. Depending on dates, I could be talked into this (probably quite easily in fact).

And he produced, amongst others, some Little Feat records.

A really common thing to do in mixing land (yeah I know, but bear with me) is to eq signal hitting the compressor and then eq it again after that. George Massenburg (massive 'hero' of mine) explains this sort of thing so well in this video:- If you are still interested he does something interesting with eq and compression in this one too:- If you are wondering who the hell George Massenburg is, he literally invented the parametric eq, legend or what!

Nah, we're about to start kicking off dude, ever since he brought my mom up in the conversation, I mean, that stinky poo is unforgiveable

That's a wise choice Blue. I find opportunities are much harder to find if you're not active and you're out of sight and mind. My take is that 'something' is always better than 'nothing'.

My Precision was £956 plus £20 P&P

Push down on the string behind the nut, while doing so play the open string in question, if the noise stops it's the nut slot cut too wide for the gauge. Or the break angle from nut to tuning peg isn't enough, this sounds possible since you have changed the bridge. Fix is to have more string raps around the tuning peg.

My last ‘audition’ went like this... “Phil says you’re the best bass player he knows? Are you?” ’yeah, but Phil only knows 3 people in total...’ the guy laughed, and we did about 5 years together. Phil lasted 3 gigs - still friends with both. Everything else I’ve done has been stuff I’ve started.

Ten years ago: - fully prepared and learned the songs; - enthusiastic; - willing to bend over backwards to meet other people schedules; - always on time; - always bring a Fender Precision 'coz that iz wot the PROs play'; - keen to play and explore as many genres as possible; - always keen to come up with songwriting ideas, but equally happy to play exactly what is requested when required. Now: - I have a car.

Not possible to test one in your local PMT? Appreciate it won’t be at gig levels etc but it should give you the flavour... Also if you’re anywhere near our HQ in Essex and fancy a trip out you can blast one as loud as you want for as long as you like.

OK - all bagged up and ready to go: One final job before I did that was to pop some spare strings on to do an initial setup so that @fleabag has at least a head start. So that means MORE PHOTOS! Forgive the self-indulgence:

Amazing skills and attention to detail.

There won't many who can name the guy that cut down the tree their bass is made from!