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Bloke obviously hasn’t seen our pedalboard thread

An early start, in the beer garden of a rough assed pub just outside Bristol. We were a last minute stand in, which worked as our planned gig had been cancelled. I've never seen so many drunken scaffolders in the same place before. With their families. At 5pm. Football came on in the pub and the garden emptied. We played the second set to the occasional smoker. The place was so filthy I stopped at a Macdonalds to wash on the way home.

Since you're all there, here's a few random photos. I realise I fretted without taking a single pic. So here's the all important preparation before fretting. I've learned the very very hard way to check every slot is deep enough before starting to fret. A bent over piece of fretwire with the tangs filed off is perfect. When I glued on the black/white veneer on to the bottom of the fretboard, some of the epoxy seeped through into the slots. Time to bring out the world's tiniest saw... Then side dots. With another of my fugly jigs. Honestly, there should be a law against it....

I keep finding something I 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘧𝘯'𝘵 buy. Sure is tempting, though. I guess I can buy it and sell a few of my Squiers. Bacchus Handmade...they don't get any better!

Just picked up a BBP34 Jeez this thing sounds fantastic. I’m officially a convert now. Sounds more like a P bass than a P bass somehow, and the jazz PU at the back is just perfect. Snappy and sharp sounding but still reads nicely as a bass sound. So fast and fun to play and it’s put together so well. im really considering buying another one to put flats on I like it so much. Only downside for me is those fret ends are a bit sharp/poky for me. They look great and have been nicely finished in a way (it’s no dog like a fender) but still bit sharp. I have ultra sensitive skin tho. No worries I’ll grab a file 🤘 best sounding bass on my rack.

Going to collect this tomorrow...last time I played anything less than 34" was 1977. No idea what to expect, but a bit excited.

So I’m now the latest keeper of the pink Rockinfreakapotamus. I’m not here to introduce the bass, I’m here to gush about Jon Shuker. I’ve never had an interest in the name, never had one of his basses on my radar but I was mistaken and wrong. Custom hardware aside (it’s got a lane Poor pickup and bad a$$ bridge.) I’m familiar with Lane Poor from other basses I’ve owned, this is a legacy not original (anyone have one to sell?) but it’s still tight, punchy and hot. That aside the build quality is superb, balance, neck and overall feel are I think probably some of the best I’ve played and many of you know the basses that have been through my grubby mitts. I do like a battered bass and I think the relic job on this is done well. If you haven’t checked out a Shuker, I think you should, I will certainly be keeping my eye on the market place. I hear rumour of the grey one that has just changed hands and I’d like to track that one down too so the pair can be reunited! @walshy I’m sure you know where it is you keep tabs on this duo. Great commission and Jon if you follow basschat you have a new customer.

These two just chatting and jamming. Nuff said.

I don’t think I mentioned that a few weeks ago I got another Meatball. It was a bargain price but there were one or two complications with postage etc however I’m happy to report that it’s in excellent condition and working properly. I haven’t had much time to sit down with it and compare to my Mutron but plan on doing so tomorrow!

Would have to be to spend so much time with Lars.

I've just taken delivery of a Prusa MK4 to replace one of my MK3S+ 3D printers. A quick heads up in case anybody is thinking of buying one. I've done a load of test printing and there's good and bad. The good is the speed and the quality. It's so much faster than a MK3S+, nearly twice as fast on some pieces. The quality also looks very good indeed. There are new things such as Input Shaping that I haven't got my head around yet, but I'll learn. The bad is that Prusa appear to have deliberately crippled Octoprint to work with it. Octoprint acts as a print server, normally runs on something a Raspberry Pi and provides a fabulous wealth of plugins for users such as emails when the print is finished or when filament needs changing. Octoprint can also drive the front panel of a MK3S+ so you can see how long is left and other usefyk stuff. Prusa doesn't support the specific gcode for that, so the front panel on Mk4 looks very simplistic (see above). It was supported so I think Prusa is pushing towards Prusalink, they can forget that as I'll simply reuse an old tablet for the display and ignore the front panel. There also appears to be a long running issue over the filament sensor not working properly. It detects the filament is out but sometimes doesn't recognise the replacement filament and keeps saying put it in. I had it twice when I tested it but not actually reoccurred for the last 8-10 tests I then did. I'll keep an eye on that. Very, very dissapointing from Prusa. The ticket on it started 6/7/2023 and its still not resolved. Just had anotehr look at a test print and it is very, very good with Input Shaping. .

Neck Carve! I always cheat when it comes to neck carving. I start by carving a series of facets onto the neck. These are carefully measured and calculated. Once they're done there's still quite a lot of wood to take off, but they give the neck it's final shape. Here are the first two facets: Here I'm starting on the next one. The tape is there to remind me where the line is I'm supposed to be carving to. You really don't want to get carried away and go to far beyond the line. It's veeeery late in the day to start a new neck. And on dark wood a pencil line can be darn hard to see. I end up with.....ummmm...is it 8 facets, something like that. I spend quite a long time getting these pretty flat and consistent. I think it reduces the amount of 'shoe-shine' sanding which is needed, which is the god-awful final stage.... So here we are: VID_20240607_121041~3.mp4 If I can over the weekend I'll make a start on the headstock transition. Edit: Hmm...that video is masssssive! Does anyone know how to make it smaller?

Some of the new stuff I've heard recently... yeah, I mean... in a way, I can see his point 🤷🏻‍♂️

Tone deaf nonsense being spouted by a leech who produces nothing and takes almost everything.

A friend of mine is an ex pro prog and death bassist who loves jaco. He was always trying to learn jaco covers. I think all great musicians have an appreciation for the very best who played their instrument. I could never get in to jaco but I was crap

I have a 3d scanner but not set it up yet. It was Kickstarter from last year. It's on the list but making a bass took priority

Instead of filling this post with nonsense, why don't you dive into each others DMs and make out there instead?

Latest pedalboard. HX Stomp I sold one a couple of years ago as I didn't 'get on' with it, but since then ... having tried various other multi-fx I've come back to one; with its ability to run a frequency split parallel path, the power of on device editing and the new fx in the latest v3.7 firmware it ticks my boxes. Also two years of fiddling has helped me learn a bit more about what I actually like/need/use (Much more learning to be done still!). Now to spend the hours tuning in the 'perfect' sounds ... Ian Martin Allison where are you lol! MXR bass octave deluxe in the Stomp FX loop; during my brief foray into single pedals I fell in love with this unit. If I can get a Stomp effect to sound in the same ballpark I will take it off, allowing me to use a smaller board. Morningstar MC6 MkII Mindblowingly flexible MIDI controller. The board configuration is setup to have the Stomp switches in Stomp mode and add FS4/5 on the Morningstar, this gives me the ability to on/off 5 fx. The top three Morningstar switches allow for selection of snapshots and the bottom right is setup for tuner/tap tempo. A long press on either of the bottom left two allows for shifting up/down a Stomp preset. (Based on a slightly tweaked version of the setup here https://eitanmuir.com/2022/01/03/hx-stomp-mc6-elegance/) Vexpress into Stomp for controlling effect levels. All mounted on a Metro 16 and powered from a Krisdonia Laptop Power brick (It should give me 6+ hours of mains free playing time). Sam x

OK there's a lot of space around the contents. But they were just trying to provide plenty of air on a G string.

This is my current setup for my fretless. 1. Boss OC-5 Octave: Tried quite a few Octave pedals and nothing has beaten it for tracking and tone. A wonderful pedal. 2. Zoom MS-60B: Has been hacked and is used for ambient effects using some delays and reverbs to mimic a cello and orchestral sounds. 3. EBS UniChorus: Been through a lot of chorus pedals but after seeing @Dood review, it seemed to be just what I was after and it is. Amazing Chorus pedal. 4. Walrus Audio Slo: my main reverb and used for some ambient effects as well. 5. Ampeg Opto Compressor: Sounds great and just sprinkles lots of magic goodness on my tone. 6. Sansamp BDDI v2: Absolutely brilliant, I wished I'd got one sooner. I wish I could mount my power supply under my Pedaltrain Metro 16 but it's too tall. If I could then I'd also have my TC Electronic Spark Booster and maybe a Phaser pedal or EBS Envelope Filter as well.

The term 'buzz' could refer to many things, concerning a bass. Mechanical (something loose inside vibrating..?), playing technique (strings too close to the frets..?), electrical problems (buzz from the amp/speakers..?) and much more. Two options, really... - Film yourself playing, making sure that the buzz is captured on the video, and post it here, so that we may see/hear what's going on, or... - Meet up with a fellow bass player (from this Forum..?), and show him/her the issue. Of course, a visit to a reputable technicien would do the trick, too, but the solution may be simple, if only 'we' (the Bass Hive...) knew precisely what you mean by 'buzz'. Any help..?

I have been looking at these for ages, and have finally caved in, RM800 EVO II incoming. I have watched a number of reviews/videos and nothing has deterred me. I bought direct from Ashdown via their discount page. £475 for the 800 is pretty good I think. Rob

Ferry Cross The Mercy - Gerry and The Pacemakers

I know he just toured with them for the first time in years. I think Josh Paul was playing with them before Rob came back. Hopefully they'll do some new material. Tye Trujillo, Rob's son, is also shaping up to be a very good bass player. He toured with Korn after Fieldy went on hiatus, played with Suicidal Tendencies after their bass player, Ra Diaz, went off to Korn to replace Fieldy on a more permanent basis, and has his own band. I think it's cool that they share a love and appreciation of Jaco despite coming from two different musical worlds - Marcus was talking about Jaco being his mentor and friend, and Rob made a documentary film about him and is the owner/custodian of the Bass Of Doom!

If you can, get an Octoprint server setup. A cheap PI 3 is more than adequate. Saves a lot of time and makes a massive difference. @SamIAm is spot in with her description. First thing I did after unpacking the printer and before I even plugged it in was to setup a Raspberry Pi as an Octoprint server.

It is very quick. Just printed at 0.1mm layer, best it can do and the quality is very, very good indeed. This Input Shaping is quick and good. Still need to play and explore the limits.

Well one thing is for certain, the Meatball has a lot more flexibility than the Mutron, but that's not always a good thing. I have pretty much matched the sound using the settings pictured above to my Haz Mutron, so that'll be my starting point. Certainly there's more range above and below this point, including more 'wobble' on tap via the colour knob. I also have only played it at 9v so far but from memory using 12v increased the range of just about everything so I'll try that too. Two things I like even if everything else was the same as the Mutron: Always on filter sweep light (green LED) and an active/bypass LED too (which the Mutron doesn't have). I have also yet to try a fuzz or octave in the fx loop. It's like theres a lot of overlap between the two but each has it's own thing going on too. If it does end up replacing the Mutron on my board, it'll ONLY just fit, but looks awesome next to my Valco pedals which use the same type of enclosure. The Mutron is just as happy off the board because it has big feet and has a power switch so it can stay plugged in with batteries with no drain. So I'm weighing it all up! Yes I am looking down at my pedals and thinking why the hell do I like the massive impractical ones 😆

I’ve just added all my reviews from Guitar Interactive issues 5 (when I started there) through to 40 to my playlist. Yay! Loads of very young Dan ha ha! I will update the lists and links above when I get time. For now, get cracking with checking out some really cool gear!! {EDIT} 312 videos in the playlist now, so I have a bit of admin to do!!!

With apologies for two posts in a row, I thought I'd mention today's gig at the Ramsden fete. The music went very well - lots of children dancing to it and people hanging around to listen past official chucking out time, until the electricity was cut off half way through our last number. I somehow left my amp's kettle lead behind as well and had to scrounge one; my bass's acoustic volume was not enough for the drummer.

I have finally managed to get some progress on the winder, its basically a number of sideways steps but at least they are not backwards I got an Arduino R4 (with Wifi no less) to see if the increase in speed would help driving the stepper motors at a faster speed. I decided that simply moving to the R4 from the R3 was too easy, so decided to move my dev environment from an old Macbook (2013) to a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) but running a CF card and not an NVE so speeds a bit slow. However it's a proper UNIX box and is dedicated to this. I also decided not to use the Arduino IDE and move to the command line and Emacs. I feel a lot happier with a decent editor and TBH prefer the command line. Its just a quicker way of working with Emacs as you rarely take the hands off the keyboard. Pretty simple as well, I've only taken 30 years to learn it properly. The issue then was that nothing worked on the R4, no LCD display, no keyboard input, no stepper motors. It turns out that the R4 breaks a lot of Arduino libraries. So I started with a blank sketch and simply got the LCD to work. That took a little bit of fiddling about but that worked. The next step was to get the keypad to work. No matter what I did, it looked like random key presses coming down the line. Turns out the R4 has a different set of resistors on their circuits and a simple fix (that took a long time to find) was all that was needed and then I had keypad AND a display. Motors were a pain and nothing worked. It turns out that the AccelStepper library which is pretty much a standard doesn't work at all.It also appears that not many people are using an R4 with stepper motors, but a couple of people responded to my plea for help and a pointers to a working library and I ended up with MobaTools, a library aimed at model railways Their sample sketch also included a wifi server to control the R4 from a website, after a few attempts to get the stepper motor pins right on the CNC Shield and in the code, I got motors to turn, not only did they turn, they turned fast. I managed to go from 6 revs / sec to approx 20 revs / second. Thats 1200RPM. There is no load and nothing else happening so unlikely to keep that speed but thats 3x the max I got from the R3, so I'm a very happy bunny. I need to merge all of the different bits of code together and see if it still works, thats the forward step Rob

Great vid. Lots of fun to see Marcus rocking out with Trujillo during the jam at the end! Trujillo needs a new side project - I want to hear him doing his thing like he did in Infectious Grooves, Mass Mental and so on. Musically, he’s a bit wasted in Metallica, but I believe the salary is good.

that’s how I use mine. Always on and first in the chain. Just adds a little gain. After a while you won’t notice it at all unless you turn it off. I mean that in a good way of course.

I have the same power supply and the metro 24. If you get little rubber feet out of a hardware store (cost me about 2-3 pounds I think) they give you the elevation to fit the supply underneath. Only annoying thing about the supply is the fiddly power plug is the a bit difficult to plug in under the board, especially when it's dark. I ended up making my own adapter to attach to the edge of the board, if your handy with a soldering iron it makes things easier and a smoother setup.

I like it. I think I like it best either without any of the switches on, or with the top one on. It just adds a little harmonic richness to the sound. At the moment I’ve got it first in the chain, but I’ll experiment another day when it isn’t rugby final day.

Thanks. Never thought of using a laptop bag. Being a largeish class D head, it makes sense. I only got that amp a couple of weeks ago and only used it once at band practice. It's certainly powerful, that was the first thing I noticed. It wasn't the greatest test as I was trying out my old 60's Thunderbird copy with an outboard preamp. It sounded great but it was more an experiment with the bass than a proper amp test. But like I said, it sounded pretty darn good through a 2x12 cab.

I suppose he is right though, if the purpose is just to make any content for the sake of content, but inset the word "quality" in front of "content", and the statement becomes absolutely absurd. Nothing new about shit costing next to nothing to produce though, unless of course it is expensive shit.

I'd rather have one cheap Harley Benton and lots of beer.

I hate the word 'content' We used to create music, now it's just content...ones and zeroes to a funky beat! If content be the food of love then stream on and on and on...until we break even If we're lucky 😆

That is a really good video by Mary Spender. I’d never really thought about the cost of doing what she does until I watched that when it came out.

Actually, it's a significant cost to create content. For example

Here’s my latest build…….👍🏻

Last night's gig (and the "open rehearsal" the night before) weren't too bad. We got a reasonable number of dancers in, and the rhythm section (bass, drums, tres, percussion) kept good time despite some soloists' attempts to shake the foundations on occasion. First time I've gigged with a fretted bass, which was strange. The venue was here. I've not been since before they revamped it to add a bar; it's a rather nice performance space now.