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I'm liquid and funky! "overall live bass duties are taken care of by band member Ely XXX, whose liquid yet funky and distorted basslines tie together the diverse styles displayed on the record...

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It happens, even in the world of the successful. A guy I know who has worked with a very well known artist for many years was simply told last year "you`re not in the band anymore" after being unable to make some dates due to scheduling. Never nice, irrespective of whatever level, and to me simply shows the real character of the person doing the dropping.

NBD Sandberg Lionel.

New bass day! 78’ Mustang in translucent wine-red. The picture does not do the beautiful ash body justice. What a find!

I finally managed to complete my doom rack! Found a bloke in the USA that makes rack mounts for Darkglass 900 series amps. Took a couple of weeks to get it (thanks NZ post) but damn this guy does good work. Well built and a full set of installation hardware and comprehensive installation instructions. Absolutely delighted with this. Just need a better footswitch for the amp - either the Super Intelligent or the new Midi (if they ever arrive)

...and now of course, having said all that, I took it to rehearsal last night and oh my giddy bloody aunt, it sounds amazing through my gig rig. It cuts through like an extremely sharp thing hacking its way through something easily hackable. Perhaps I can live with the weight and the balance after all..? ❤️

I was in a band 20 years ago and the band leader started to give a bass playing friend of his some of our gigs. Same story, I was down graded to a "pool of deps" in my own band. I told him to shove it.

Bands mean people, and people are a problem. Always.

Hello guys!!!!! So I may be a little out of date on pick ups as I haven’t been on it as much as I normally am. back in my day the TSBS used to have Seymour Duncan’s in. But as a very brief brush stroke as a rule I find the split coil Pick up to be their weakest offering. Delano’s are more ‘hi-fi’ for want of a better word. It doesn’t make them sterile, they have character, but if you are someone who likes pre-amps, other baked in sounds - this is a really good option - it will let that sound go through and won’t colour too much In house Sandberg ones - well at least the old ones in my MarloweDK are more vintage sounding and really are the bees knees. It has enough punch to not be weak if you solo’s the neck pup and can approach that P sound (evidently not there tho). These will also take effects etc brilliantly, but they are a nod to yesteryear and vintage. black labels - they were prolly designed for when the superlight bases came in as they need more oomph. Delano is a right hook/power slap to the face - Black labels are a big old gut punch - not over powering, but very punchy and if you like slap bass these will do you right. i haven’t read all the posts, but as an aside if you want to know what my ear hears dUg Pinnick, Glenn Hughes,Billy Gould, Mike Inez, muzz skillings, Pat Badger - all have bass sounds I like if you can hear a sound bite the Perfect P bass pick up for me is the Creamery 58P - that’s where I sit, but I do love modern stuff too!! hope that helps! gotta get back to work!!

This stuff really works. The fella did a great job!

Joan of Ark — Leonard Cohen

Weren't we all! Ashdown flatly refuse to drop the gimmicky VU to save real-estate. What meer mortals really want is this:

My new Lionel...

I thought I'd leave starting this thread until there was some reasonable progress to show. When Rautia, who'd supplied the pickups for my my first Wal-a-like, closed down, Mike and I spoke about him developing his own multi-coil pickups and I decided to commission a new bass which would be the guinea pig for these in-house designs. The first bass had been paired with a Lusithand filter pre, but I decided I wanted this one to be different and that we'd go passive - Wal passive models still have their own distinctive Wal tone, after all. At around the same time I returned the first bass to Mike to swap out the rather cheap monorail bridge units I'd supplied to him when it was built for some more substantial Hipshot items. During the course of this work it became apparent that one of the original Rautia pickups had developed a problem and that they would need to be changed, so he was now making two pairs of pickups for me. This was to be the start of an extensive period of research which involved Mike investigating all aspects of the design, specification and topography of the Wal originals, which has only now culminated in him finally being able to start winding his own pickups - with the help of a new coil winder he's just invested in. Specs for the new bass are: Zoot Boudica body shape Paulownia body with wenge top and back - wax & oil finish Multi-laminate neck of roasted maple and mahogany with maple and wenge stringers. Soft V profile 32" scale with 38mm nut. 18mm string spacing at bridge 2 x new Zoot multicoil pickups V/T and series/parallel switch per pickup Zoot solid brass bridge Hipshot ultralite tuners and string retainer Here's some progress pictures:

I first went into the Gallery in the late 1990s. It was a proper bass shop then and it is just the same now. There are many places that do online listings better, particularly premium vintage stock, but everything I have given them to sell has achieved a good price and quickly. Being in an accessible central location, for a lot of people it’s relatively easy to check things out in person. Unfortunately for my wallet, it’s within walking distance of my workplace.

I was in a band who were never going to make it, granted we were just ahead of the rise of Groove Metal but I wasn't interested in doing anything other than making the music I wanted to make but other members on the band thought we could/should be making it. We had a great rhythm guitarist who was in another band and his commitments very occasionally clashed with ours. The rest of the band wanted to throw him out because his first commitment was to his first band, obviously! I stayed out of it, I thought it was ridiculous to throw him out when a) we could do gigs with just one guitarist, b) it seemed, to me, quite obvious, we were going to be an originals band that played to decent crowds around our county. We did have some label interest but, again, we could have continued with him as an as and when member. Unfortunately egos prevailed and he was kicked out. A fortnight later he was on Top of the Pops with a top ten single. The rest of the band were jealous and dissing him, I thought it was great! It's the one and only time I've ever put up with such nonsense, I wish I'd walked when they chucked him out and I feel bad for sitting on the sidelines but it's hard to tell people they are living in cloud cuckoo land thinking the band is going to be a success.

A new name to me, Japanese band Koenji Hyakkei playing at the Lexington. Wish I'd been there 🙂

I think our aural tastes are similar: those pickups in the Marlowe DK are the Alnico V ones, the same as in the TT Passive 😉👌 I too think they're absolutely fantastic

Couple more photos which show the body after three (I think) coats of Mike's wax and oil mix.

So far so good. The picture below is the Top Right of the guitar. 22hrs 43mins to go. The hexagon pattern is the support for the undeneath of the middle of the guitar. This support will be cut away as the middle of the guitar is H shaped. The bottom part of the H will be the plywood backbone. This is a cutaway of the guitar so you can see the H. This helps provide strutural integrity This the the top left and middle. This was 38 hours long and now down to 18 hours or so. The section on the right in the picture below is the top left of the guitar. The section on the right with the the holes is where the bridge and pickups will go. The holes on each side allow pickups to be mounted directly to the guitar OR I can mount the pickups on a pickup shield. There's one more major section to print after this and then I can think about assembly. I now have the Hipshot lightweight tuners, thanks @Raslee. I will need to make some bushingsso that they are a tight fit. I have also been filling the back of the guitar neck wher the old mounting screws were with bamboo skewers and TiteBond. It was suggested that Bamboo is a good choice as its a very hard wood and it comes in 3mm wide skewers which are a bit big, but I trim them down. The only problem is that the colours don't make at all Any suggestions as to handle the colour difference welcomed.

Folsom Prism Blues - Johnny Cash Point of order Mr Chairman... the perpetrator of that particular piece was Clive Dunn (and it was co-written by a certain Herbie Flowers). St Winifred's Borstal Choir were responsible for the even more stomach-churning 'There's No-One Quite Like Grandma', a song etched forever into my brain thanks to a car journey around that time, during which my young niece sang the chorus over and over again for at least half an hour.

I get that. I sometimes think about having my Lionel routed out for a PJ and putting EMGs in it. And then I play it passively and tell myself to not be stupid! Although I do wish I had a pair of Lionels so I could have one with flats and one with rounds.

Don't forget that for a small upcharge Sandberg will put any pickups you want in it. I'm not a fan of their pickups in general but I adore the rest of the instrument so I'm happy to do pickup changes. My TT4 Superlight now has EMG J set and an EMG EQ. I really like Bobby Vega's EMG Jazz sound and since I first heard him I have always put EMGS in jazz types. My Lionel came with the stock P pickup and I had heard the pickup was a bit modern sounding. That proved to be true. So I swapped that for an Aguilar AG4P that I had. I wanted a more traditional mid pushed P sound. The 'berg pickup has too much bass and was too hot for a traditional sound. I debated asking Sandberg to do the pickup change when I ordered it, but as I already owned the Aguilar there was no point in buying another one!

Yeah they didn't deliver quite what I was expecting. I've had pretty much every Sandberg pickup variant over the years, but can only speak from my experiences. I found the stock Sandberg 'Delano style' pickups to be a bit more organic than the black labels, but they're still pretty modern sounding.

Singer sounds like a bit of a w**ker. Sees a potentially successful band and wants to get his mates in. Perhaps you should turn the tables and get another singer in.

@thebrig you should feel frustrated at the ridiculous power ratings as well as the almost as ridiculous maximum sound levels. It makes rational choice almost impossible and is probably illegal in the UK but who has the power (no pun intended) or time to take legal action over false advertising. Power ratings are a moderately complex subject to negotiate/understand. The best advice is to ignore all the claims. Not least is that each speaker will have two power limits and the ratings for amplifiers are measured in a completely different way to speakers. Another is that to keep costs down people like Alto use the same amps in all their speakers in a range which is why they claim 2,000W in their 8,10,12 and 15" cabs. The reality is that the 8" speaker will handle around 100W (and not at all frequencies) the 10 around 200W and the 12 around 300W. The manufacturers build these cabs with digital processing that limits the amp power so the speakers never get near their limits and remain reliably in one piece. Remember that we are talking about budget level kit here compared with the £000's+ touring bands use. Even the best RCF/Yamaha gear pub bands use is more family car than formula 1. Performance at this level is clustered around a sweet spot of value for money. The idea that a £250 8" speaker is 2,000W is like saying your base level VW Lupo will go 0-60 in just over a second and has a maxumum speed of 900mph. 10 times reality. It's so ridiculous that it is laughable. Having said that since 2-300W will drive a 12" speaker to it's full potential and a lot of budget gear is really good there is no fear involved. I had the chance to compare a 10"Alto TS10 with my RCF ART310 on Tues and they are both really good speakers, I wouldn't have any trouble using either as vocal only PA. Alto make great kit for the money and Yamaha et al are all at it in selling with over-inflated claims. Incidentally it is very hard to get much more than 122dB out of a midrange 12" mid/bass driver so 132db SPL is a lie too. It's based upon the 2000W that doesn't exist. 132dB would almost instantaneously cause permanent hearing loss and be loud enough to be heard over a Boeing 747 20m away. So go away and have a look at decent used 12" active cabs from Yamaha, RCF, JBL, EV etc which will do you a job for a long while. Alto, Wharfedale, HH are cheaper but still good remembering you get what you pay for Alt TX's won't match the TS range for example and the Mackie Thumps aren't up to the Mackie SRM's. Don't worry about power

Boomer, Boomer! Out Go The Lights - Pat Travers Band

So, its been six months since I started the search for my old Ric 4001 (serial number PL7996). Still having no luck, although there have been a couple of near misses- a guitar shop in Germany recently sold PL7986 and the Rick Resource website, who have a member compiled database of over 50,000 instruments, are listing PL7998 as being located somewhere in Tennessee. Both of these were probably from the same production run as mine. I’m not deterred though, but as mentioned in an earlier post I’m now just playing the long game, waiting for some info to appear. There are plenty of examples of missing guitars suddenly appearing again, even after many years. You just have to stay vigilant. If Peter Frampton's Les Paul can turn up 31 years after being lost in a plane crash in a jungle, there's always a chance. Although, for obvious reasons I hope it doesn’t take that long…

How many watts = how long is a piece of string As per previous thread, you can never have too many, only too few 👍

Right, part three. Making the neck. So the first step in this part of the process was that the maple neck blank went up to my wife's workshop so she could bandsaw it out. Unfortunately, on that particular day one of my wife's students had messed up the set-up of the bandsaw in a novel and exciting way (undergraduates man, they have talents). This caused the blade to drift off track and irrepairably damage the wood around where the headstock would be. There is perhaps a parallel universe where this didn't happen, where the last piece left over from the maple board I bought back in 2016 was actually used to make my bass along with the last of the body wood. In that world I might have finished my bass, said "well that's that" and walked away from luthierie forever. In this timeline though, I had to buy another 2.4 metres of maple board, setting up the body-wood/neck-wood nacho cycle that will likely keep me making instruments for the forseeable future. (It's also not the last you'll hear of that ill-fated neck blank – there's a reason why my fretless bass is headless). Anyway, back to the actual process. After the correctly bandsawed neck came back from the shop, I set to work. First thing was to drill out the holes for the tuner pegs (using the janky-ass drill press from last time), followed by the truss rod channel. Because of my aforementioned beef with routers, I do my truss rod routs using an old-fashioned Stanley router plane. This really doesn't take very long (probably quicker than doing it with a router when you factor in making the jig, setting it up, sweeping up all the dust, etc.) and is good exercise. I wholeheartedly recommend router planes. They're great. After that I glued on the fingerboard using some little alignment pins though holes around a few fret slots and – as is tradition – every clamp in my postcode. The fingerboard on this bass is a pre-slotted one that I'd bought from StewMac a few years earlier. I generally cut fret slots myself, because it gives me more options when it comes to scale length and wood choice, but I was happy for the opportunity to skip that stage here. I then planed/rasped away the excess. You'll note that I've still not carved the neck; this is because I find all the other steps in the process easier to do with a flat-bottomed slab. With the fingerboard attached, I got out my slightly smaller plane again to properly level the glued fingerboard. It was pretty flat to begin with, but I didn't want any bumps to get introduced by the glueing and clamping. This also revealed the lovely colour of the wood. Here's the board after I'd added the dot-markers and sanded it with radius blocks. I'd originally intended for this bass to have blocks and binding, but I decided that this didn't really fit with the aesthetic. I also didn't feel like dealing with the hassle of cutting the recesses and the channel for the binding. Here's the neck after the fret installation (done with a big hammer and earplugs). I go through and shape the fret ends after I'ver finished carving the neck. With all that sorted, I got to shaping the slab neck using rasps and a spokeshave. You can see the neck from the OLP in the background here because I was measuring and comparing to get the dimensions and shape more or less the same. I don't have any gauges or guides for this part of the process; aside from the occasional check of the overall thickness I primarly work on feel. You know how I mentioned the router plane is good exercise? Well, it's nothing compared to this stage. I'm still not entirely sure whether Rock Maple is a wood-like rock or a rock-like wood. I don't know if you can really see the shape of the neck heel in this picture, but that's something I'm particularly proud of. I carve them to exactly follow the curve of join with the body, so they go straight to playable thickness with no Fender-style chunky section in front of the joint. Here's the finished neck, next to the old OLP neck it replaced. I was going to try and wrap up this trilogy here, but I once again find myself talking too much. It will have to be a Douglas-Adams-style trilogy in four parts.

And now back in my hands. At least it will be when it's delivered....

The way I approached it... I'm either happy just playing with my mates, and if I wasn't I'd leave and find some more chums to play with. We'd have a laugh, earn some shekels, but not take it too seriously. We're having fun, and if the fun ever stopper then so would I. Or I'd really go for it, be completely focussed and driven and end up with a decent paying job with a household name act. That never happened, because I was never driven to do so when I was young enough that it might have happened. It's the in between bit, the no man's land between the two, that seems to be the danger zone and I've been fortunate to avoid it and all the bull that seems to go along with it.

I have an ACG that exhibits this very thing. The answer is to use a strap even when seated. If you follow the usual advice to have the bass at the same height standing as it is sitting then you won't even have to adjust the strap length.

I guess it all depends what you like tonally, the black labels are maybe okay if you want a modern, powerful, super clean and neutral sound, but I've come to realise that I prefer a much more organic, 'soulful' tone and dynamic response from pickups. I do highly recommend the Alnico V J pickups in the TT passive, they sound superb. If you want an active preamp, I'm sure they'd be happy to make you a TT5, but with the pickups from the passive model. Good luck in your endeavours! Oli

Where you goin', city boy?

The Bass Gallery has always been old school and you get so much more out of face to face interaction there than you would an automated online transaction. For them it must work well that way otherwise you’d think there’d put more resource into the website.