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I was recently looking at Reverb and a beautiful Taylor acoustic bass caught my eye.. I was about to reach for my bank card but then I saw the wood grain on the back!! Always best to check the grain before building an instrument. I’ll say no more and leave the rest to your imaginations.

Somebody has to stop me - this is my 3rd new bass day in a month! But when you see something you simply must have at the right price... y'know. Picked it up for roughly £100. Thailand's used bass market is a wonderful thing. Anyway, this is a project bass. It's an early Fender Japan Boxer bass, 32" scale. It feels absolutely tiny, even compared to my other 32" basses. It has been seriously abused. The electronics are shot - pickups are OK thankfully. The neck seems fine, too. The big question is... how to refinish? I'm thinking metallic British Racing Green or something along those lines. here's pics!

I built this about 18 years ago when I was about 16 (fortunate my dad is a luthier 😃) which is like a melted warwick thumb 🤣. It's remarkably inconvinient, if I did make another bass it would be a very different shape but this thing sounds amazing.

I haven't regretted selling basses. There are some I sold for amounts that look crazy low now, but at the time it was right. In the last few months I've sold two: my MIJ Jazz and my 1984 Aria. The MIJ Jazz was the most beautiful jazz bass I've ever seen but something about it just didn't click with me so I sold it to a BC'er. The Aria was a restoration project that again just didn't quite click and I replaced it quite quickly before selling it to a BC'er for less than the amount I sank in to the restoration. I regret neither. I've got some cash in my pocket that I am yet to spend. But what this has done is made me play my MM Stingray a LOT more. And that is no bad thing. I'm quite happily shedding gear at the moment. I'm thinking less is more for me at the moment. It's nice to collect stuff but it's also fairly pointless.

It depends what kinds of venues you are playing. It is my experience that most pub gig and covers band musicians don't really understand how bands on the originals circuit work (if they did they might consider it a more attractive proposition). We don't need to worry about things like monitoring because that's supplied by the venue, and while there are some venues where the PA can be a bit ropy they (IME) are few and and getting fewer all the time. Certainly in the last 20 years of playing in originals bands (probably around 500 gigs) there have been only a handful where the bass guitar wasn't in the PA and the on-stage monitors were strictly vocals only. They all tend to be tiny venues where the FRFR was more than capable of being my "back line" and providing a audible bass for both the rest of the band and the FoH sound. For most gigs I tend to treat my FRFR as a cross between backline and flexible monitoring. It's size and shape means that it can be placed in places where a conventional bass rig wouldn't fit. A lot of the time it goes under the stand which holds the computer for the band's backing tracks, and quite often it will be directed across the stage so that it's impact on the FoH sound is minimal, but still providing adequate stage coverage for the rest of the band to hear me. I don't see the FRFR and IME issues as being in any way related. If the band was to go for IEMs we'd ditch all the backline including my FRFR, The only reason for me to go for IEMs and keep the FRFR would be so I could also get the click on some songs where the drum patterns can be a little off-putting with regards to what I am playing. TL:DR 1. For small gigs with vocal only PAs the FRFR is more than capable of acting as my backline for band and audience to hear me. 2. For medium gigs (most of the ones I play ATM and where the bass is in the PA for FoH) the FRFR acts in exactly the same way as a conventional bass rig, but with more versatile on-stage placement options. 3. For big gigs, I don't bother with the FRFR, as the venue's monitoring system is more than adequate for me and the rest of the band to hear the bass.

But you have to live with these political decisions, no matter how deep you put your head in the sand.

Thinking of getting a sock for my Bass too..

I forgot how my rig sounds. I've been GAS-ing for a different cab for the last couple of months. Took my cab out of the garage and hooked everything up. So in love all over again!

There seems to be a big misconception here about FRFR. Basically, FRFR is a means of hearing your signal without any further influencing factors that will otherwise change your basses tone. Whereas traditional bass cabs tend to have their own prebaked sound that influences your tone, a FRFR amp/cab setup does not. If you want to emulate a speaker cabinet, then you have to do so - typically via modelling. Likewise, your pre is what is doing your tone shaping and the FRFR output phase has no further influence.

To be fair, a lot of the fellas I see playing in pub bands have a similar physique!

After reading what was supposed to be some funny second degree humourous requirements by Martin Taylor, it's quite obvious that they both are pretentious pricks and that at least one is a f*cking dangerous nationalist.

First rehearsal room practice in years, still sounds as good as ever!

Check this @Geek99 (even if I'm not a big Fodera fan) and if, after following all these great step by step instructions, it's still buzzing, then it's time to go and see a luthier. Just ask @Andyjr1515 https://fodera.com/pages/how-to-set-up-your-fodera

It's common for the low end of a speaker to be hard to hear when standing close to it. Reflections off nearby walls and the ceiling create low frequency null zones. If you're standing in one of those null zones the bass will disappear. When you move away from the null zone the true output of the cab will be heard. This effect gave rise to the myth of wave propagation, that it takes a minimum distance from a source for the bass wave to be heard. But if that was true headphones wouldn't work, nor would car subwoofers.

No more whisky for me … or anything else been teetotal for three months now

In my humble opinion, FRFR to me meant finding amplification that made my basses louder but didn’t colour the tone in any way whatsoever, or at least as close to that as possible. For me, until I found that fundamental basic tone of a bass it was pointless manipulating that tone when you weren’t ‘at zero’ so to speak. I finally felt I’d found that fundamental tone once I began using the QSC K12.2. From that point on I began to manipulate the tone with a HX Stomp, even though these manipulations were tiny, in my opinion this made the signal no longer FRFR. Playing the bass through an active uncoloured speaker with nothing else in the signal chain is what FRFR means to me but the minute you manipulate the tone in any way or listen to the tone via IEMs, a PA, headphones, whatever, then part of your tone is the bass, part of it is the other things the signal is travelling through. So, for me, FRFR was about finding as uncoloured tonal basis from which I could start. All the other benefits, the small size of the rig, the happy faces of FOH engineers when they can DI straight out of the back of the speaker and finally hearing how my basses really actually sound and being able to work with that tone from as close to flat as I could get.

Added some stacked pots and knobs to the bb425 today for 'fun'. Interesting variations available and just replacing the pots from the originals has whipped a few electrons into line as it does seem a bit more presence/brighter. I went with my usual 0.1uf so I have sparkle down to pure mud option. I changed the switch to after the pots so I have independent control on single pickup selection. Centre needs a bit more work as I think might have to fit some resistors for prevent the volumes fighting in the centre position. But happy with the experiment so far. Any one else tried this?

Sort of related: the first Roxy Music album still sounds like it was dropped from outer space. It's retrospective and futuristic at the same time.

It's nice to be playing a bit more. Both the 4 and 5 string have been taken out. I can play either interchangeably now, which is nice. Feels like I've achieved something over the Covid period. I mean I'm equally bad on each now. I've kinda come to the conclusion that I'm at heart a 4 string player, the upsides and downsides are about even, but there's something fun about a 4 that I like. It will be interesting, I have two basses at the moment and normally own 3-4. One build on order and keeping eyes open for something else too... it will be interesting to see where my 5 string will end up on the pecking order. It's a nice sounding thing despite it being a 5 string. At the moment though the Sadowsky metro gets all the playing time... as it has since I got it!

I love this pedal! Like a bassballs and a Seamoon funk machine, had a baby 😁

You know Leo Fender thought this all through for you and designed it in the best possible way already?

You can tell her that if she doesn't like there are a queue waiting to take it off your hands and first dibs please 😁

Just watching Bass The World's review. Being a filter junkie this is on my shopping list.

Well now. How far do you want to go down the rabbit hole? I’d get a USB keyboard controller like an m-audio key station 49 or equivalent and then pick a digital audio workstation piece of software to play, record etc. Most of them come with instruments built in, and you can add to it later with others both free and paid for. The other option is a proper synth that still plugs into the PC but has built in patches and can be played live without a PC. More expensive but you get the option of taking it out and about to play.

Everything in a culture evolves. If it doesn't something is seriously wrong.

Sugar minott , lovers

I listened to the recording years ago and assumed Gomez must be a bit of a nightmare but having just read Martin's rider I'm not so sure ???

@Hellzero - Really you should be thanking David Cameron, he will be forever know as the person that orchestrated the demise of Britain! Is there any room in Belgium for me, my wife and my basses? 😁

Just my imagination - Donald Byrd

Bing! https://schalltechnik04.de/en/instructions/omnilooper Has 3 sends, LP HP and full range with the filter frequency of each channel adjustable. Adds in phase as well which is a must for some effects (lovetone meatball for example) that flip the phase. It's a very dense build so not for the faint hearted! I'd recommend buying the case from him as well as drilling to the required tolerances seems non-trivial to me!

Maybe he just made a boob.

Just using the BC cheapskate setup of a Behringer PM2 belt pack and KZ ZS10 IEMs. cost is about £50-£60. I DI from a Fishman Platinum Pro which is has everything I need, I have a small clamp on shelf to store the IEM setup and a tablet holder which are both permanently attached to my Hercules stand, that's it for my gigging setup. The desk we have now is a Behringer XR18 which are usually £480-£500, the old desk we had was a Mackie DL32r which is more than double that but has enough aux sends for stereo monitoring for 6 people.

Message me and I will help you sort it out. If the job isn't done right, you can indeed end up with a mess. I do not have any replacement PCBs left, ironically in all the years I have serviced these amps, I have never needed a replacement board but I have seen plenty damaged from failed repair attempts that would have been a simple, inexpensive job for a QUALIFIED tech. They are a double sided PCB with plated holes, damage the plating and you have a problem. Due to chronic issues with blue LEDs from what were well qualified suppliers/brands, we moved to using CREE parts due to their much higher overall reliability (of course they cost more too, but that wasn't the reason we used the parts we did use, CREE didn't have this part available until years after the amp was designed.)

Plan on filming the process too. fancy a project for myself, editing something of a documentary together. just because I’m a bit of an idiot

Modulus QW5- just bought this today. Yet to check, but this is the 21mm spacing I think

So basically, you did a terrible job of putting a new jack on a cable?

Can no one go 60 seconds without making some kind of political comment at the end of an otherwise interesting post? I ain't interested in politics, don't care, don't want to hear it.

One thing I've learnt is not to bother with any new projects that don't already have a drummer. It seems like there's no good drummers available. That and avoid heavy pot smokers, even if they're nice people it's really frustrating when they're an hour late every rehearsal because they lost their keys, guitar, trousers, car (all genuinely used excuses from one pot head) plus you have to listen to their crazy ideas about the government controlling us.