Leaderboard

Years ago I foolishly sold my Warwick Alien 6 to @therealting and regretted it fairly swiftly. I've been on the hunt more or less ever since for another one, and have failed to find one for years... ...Until last week! One popped up within Richtone Music's second hand listings on Reverb. I called them up, agreed a price and paid a deposit. Today being payday saw me pay the rest off, so it should be getting sent out today! With some extreme luck I may even see it tomorrow... Never seen one for sale since I bought the one I sold, so I'm pretty chuffed to finally have one on the way!

Since I’ve ran out of excuses, space, outputs and money to buy more pedals, I have decided to treat my board (more like treat myself!) to Barefoot buttons. I have chosen those Tallboys and different sizes/heights, which helps a lot to stomp on the upper row, now it’s a breeze and I don’t have to stomp with the tip of my foot. Different heights also help with narrow spacing between footswitches like my Mastro Valvola pedals. Also, they have transparent buttons if which I used where the LED is too close to the footswitch so that I can see thru the colour… bought them from thorpyfx if anyone’s interested (zero affiliation) since there’s no other distributors that I know of in the UK.

We took our Bandeoke show to the Blue Lagoon in Bristol last night. First time there, and sadly a very quiet night. However those who were there couldn't have been more enthusiastic, one young woman even came up and gave us a 20 quid tip! The dearth of punters meant we basically played a two hour request show. I used my new HB 25th anniversary bass, Bugera Veyron into Barefaced Compact and jolly good it all was too. Just after we had finished the pack down a rugby team walked in. If only they'd been an hour earlier....

Update. The neck pocket was cut to a taper being 63.5 mm at the widest part. The Honer neck was also cut to a taper at about .6 mm wider than that. I didn't want to plane down the neck so after some considerable time in thought gently planed and scrapped the short side of the pocket with a nice sharp chisel. About 10 mins work. These come without bolt holes so not wanting to fill the existing holes in the neck I opted to resort to the art of cheating. This involves a tightish fitting sawn of screw being put into the holes in the neck and being used as a dot marker. The holes can then be pilot drilled from inside the neck pocket and finnished from the other side. Warning. It has to be a pilot hole from the inside as the lacquer will crack around the holes as the drill bit comes through. Masking tape on it first may help. Using a drill press is a good idea if you are not sure how straight you can drill. One of the reasons for this palava was because the existing holes in the neck were not quite right from the start. I could have used a wooden chop stick etc and made dowels/plugs but didn't want to take more material out of the heel of the neck so opted to go with the existing holes. The supervisor was watchingT

You'll need to keep that plate nice and clean...You don't want the letter 'B' covered in mud and sh*te.

Some gear porn from the Bash. Enjoy!

The latest iteration of my basic bi-amp board. Some pedals seem to have found a 'permanent' home, others keep changing still but I'm definitely getting closer. The Ampero has three switchable effects and a tuner on the extension switch and is doing a lot of preamp, signal splitting, compression, noise gate type stuff in the background.

Whittle be the day. Buddy H

And this

I received mine at the end of Feb and wanted to wait until I'd done a few gigs with it before posting a review to try and avoid that 'new toy' bias. I've now done 7 or 8 gigs with both it and an incredible jazz bass that Dan @d_g built for me and I've just been blown away by the tone from this combination, it's easily the best sound I've ever had. I'm going straight to the desk via the Capo and using in ears with RCF935s as FoH and it sounds equally amazing to me through both. I have the A side set to have just a bit of saturation with the B side then giving a bit of a boost to both volume and hair when needed. Below is some raw audio straight from the desk from a gig last night, majority are just Capo A side but the 5th clip (Somebody Told Me) I think I kicked in B Side about halfway through the clip. The last one (TIRO) starts with Capo A side plus C4, then goes into Capo A side plus Aftershock, then Capo B side plus Aftershock. In short, I absolutely love it! Capo.mp3

Some nice tones here from Naoto who I follow, there’s a bit of slap in there, using fender flats which I didn’t get on with as they were a bit high tension for me

Tiger stripe

Beautiful instrument. Wonderful sound, played like a dream. I love it.

Took me a long time to get into flats, and even longer into flats on a Jazz, in part because many years ago a guy in a music shop told me "flatwound string sound dead". OK, they're kinda definitive on a Precision and accepted as such, in so many respects they're even more so on a Jazz. Wanna hit some retro heaven? Flats, back PUP on full, front PUP rolled off a little bit, and a pic through an all-tube head. Sorted 👍

Just adding these pics to keep the story going. Just playing ahead of us now

There's a couple actually: a headless Status S2 (5 or 6 string). I've absolutely loved the shape since I first saw them in the '80s, way before I ever took up bass (which was about 18 months ago). Just intrigued. And this one from the classifieds right here. I can't afford it. I have no reason to believe I can play fretless bass (never tried). But ... just look at it! https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/469484-marleaux-diva-6-bass-signature-redwood-burl-top/

Flat-Bottomed Girls ～ Quëën

I suspect that he would sound as good whether he's playing a '62 Fender or an Encore, he is great proof of the 'all in the fingers' model 👍

My two ebony ‘boards.

I can honestly say I had it hung round my neck for over two hours straight last night and I did not notice the weight. I do use a wide Gruvgear strap, but I believe it is the perfect balance of the bass makes it work.

My band 'Shreds.' hits our home base of Sheffield soon, playing at 'The Lughole' in just over two weeks! Come check us out! Saturday May 13th: https://facebook.com/events/s/sheffield-hunt-saboteurs-benef/736172934798939/

In Arduinoland, ezButton is pretty handy. https://arduinogetstarted.com/tutorials/arduino-button-library - the button array is good for multiple buttons. Setting the pressed time when isPressed is true and then comparing it when isReleased is true and seeing what the delay was. I did a similar ESP32 page turner using bluetooth - made it to send page up/down, line up/down, or next/prev window with a display to say which it was doing. That was before I encountered ezButton so it debounced by spotting the button press, hanging on briefly, then checking if the button was still pressed. Subsequently I saw another method which I thought was very clever - there's a variant on it at https://www.e-tinkers.com/2021/05/the-simplest-button-debounce-solution/ (go down to "The simplest debounce function").

Darkglass e500 and PhilJones C2 !

Given the reputation I’d like to try a Wal.

Probably. I used a Roland bass synth as my main gigging bass for a few years in the 80's. (Bought it from Jack Bruce as well!) Here's the proof back in the day.

Propella. Rhianna

These I've thought look fun too

I’ve got Fender flats on my jazz which sound good but they’re like cables and don’t quite have the smooth feel of LaBellas or Chromes so I’ll most likely swap them out soon. For tone and feel it’s flatwounds all the way for me, on any bass. Neck pickup + flats is my favourite sound on a jazz.

I like my subtle, and not quite as subtle, vibratos, thank you. Adds to the organic expression. This is stupid and one step closer to make your bass sound like a programed midi bass rather than a real played one. But I am sure it'll appeal to people who are more perfectionists than is for their own good, or are of the misconception that all music should ideally sound as if a machine was playing it, looking at you modern metal people, I mean what's the point of playing it even then, if you are going to quantize everything anyway why not just program it to start with (applies to modern pop music as well where everything is pitch corrected)? Should have been named Analtune.

Same here, i was looking forward to it but i had a gig in North Devon. Maybe next time.

I liked most of it - not so keen on the first verse. But then I also like Coldplay, Nickelback, and U2, and dislike most Prince, so the Basschat thought police will be coming for me.

Just adding this as a place marker for old links to my previous reviews as I need to see which are still live and of those that aren't can be recovered: (A server crash was blamed for many losses)

Favourite shirt - haircut 100

I always have respect for artists who use their own signature guitars….. and I don’t mean just on one song in order to promote sales, I mean actually use it during most of a gig. I think it validates the instrument. Of course, they could just be skint and have no choice!

here you go.

It may be too early to say, but... continuing on my love/hate relationship with my VM4, I think I may have found a new #1 pushing away my trusty Stingray 😲 I had to stop using my Stingray because I carelessly damaged the preamp. It still works fine and I could use it, but the mids module doesn't work well, and until I get a replacement I turned to my VM4 and I'm really liking this beast now. A little bit of a sponge did the trick! I still plan to put the Tone Capsule in this bass, plus a passive tone control always available, but I'm getting such a great sound from this bass now that I'm not in such a hurry. First, the neon DR strings mellowed out much faster than their otehr coated strings from what I remember, and that was nice although their low output bugs me sometimes. And then I had a gig with the UB40 tribute and I thought about cutting a bit of a sponge from Ikea (the one that's very soft on one side and coarse on the other, seems made for this bass )... what a sound! It's a completely different sound from my usual with the Stingray, and it's not quite Precision either... it's got a lot of low mids, and the low end is mellowed a bit with the sponge mute, less of the very low end, but still fat and retaining great definition. It's a sound that seems to trigger my synth pedal very nicely too. So I will definitely repair the Stingray very soon, but I'll be playing the VM4 primarily for a while... I love how light it is too, compared to the Stingray or the Ray35 that I tend to use.

So as I recently shared my fusion board,I've a gig this Saturday with my rock/Soul covers band. Unfortunately at this time I have to cannibalise the big board. But with incoming gig funds, I'll be looking at starting a small board separately (ive started with the MXR octave 🤣) For this Band I'm using 4 and 5 string Spector Euro LX. EBS Microbass 2 - effects are in the loop Sadowsky BP2 Pre FEA Optifet JPTR Jive MXR Bass Octave Deluxe - I use it for 1 song, a rocked up version of Superstition, will be used with Drive. It has a clean tone and tracks well with the active Spectors. Will be looking into a reasonably cheap A/B box/headphone pre, however the EBS covers everything well.

I've thrown some Elixir rounds on this thing and it absolutely works. Here's a small clip to demo the sounds (80% neck, both, bridge, neck again, then I turned the Mutron on for a laugh). The tone is about halfway for most of the video - it has a really useful range and mixed with the different pickup flavours it means I have loads of options. It has such a tight and full bottom end, even being short scale and in drop D!

My starting point for any wiring task is always the Seymour Duncan website HERE, they have clear easy to follow diagrams for most arrangements. as you are rewiring and replacing one of the pots i would suggest replacing all of them with good quality ones (CTS would be my top pick, with Alpha second choice) while you're in there, I will often make most of the harness out of the bass and then make the last connections before fitting it back into the bass, i generally get a bit of thick card and mount the pots into that while i'm soldering everything together if the pickup wires are long enough you should be able to do all the work out of the bass except the output jack connections. another thing to check/replace is the output jack, that style are notorious for failing, fitting a switchcraft version should give you the longest life. Matt