janmaat

I've done the yacht varnish mistake. def not hard enough. use rustins floor paint instead.

Hi all while in Germany I am set to buy some spare part to upgrade my Yamaha RBX (4 string). But I don't have the instrument with me, so quick question to you RBX owners, could you send me the measurements of the mechanics and the size of the nut, please? Very much appreciated.

Hi, hands up I'm the tea chest player. Not so much tea chest - forget about that, it MUST be a bucket. Have a look at the construction I'm using now here: [url="http://bucketbass.com/"]http://bucketbass.com/[/url] just get some bits of wood and one of this "tuff tubs" from the b&q Really loud - louder than double bass. add a finger board as i did and you get your 2 octaves on one string. add a pedal like i have so you don't have to put your foot on the bucket all the time - plus it lifts the bucket off the ground making it louder. difficult bit is the tunig peg - you need to make sure the string keeps proper tension. the first model i built used a hand winch, like the thing you use to fasten belts when you tie loads to a car hanger etc. (not very precise in tuning, but hey your're fretless) - slipping string is a bigger problem than a super-tight-fixed string. You can knock a simple one together in 1/2 hour that will do the job, but you must plan for sand paper to avoid splinters!!! washing line will do the job but an old wound db string will be better. as for amplification, i'm still wondering why not build something off a car subwoofer with a car battery, that plus a cheap shadow pickup, preamp, and 'nuf noise!' - plus you look super cool, people will just chock money at you Good luck with that oh and btw sorry i just had to change my avatar for a little while - i'm from hamburg (and actually IN hamburg now)

Now Steve is a top gentleman! I bought a t-rex distortion pedal off him, but it got lost in the post. He was careful enough to send it registered delivery, so tracking it showed that it had indeed not been delivered. The royal mail lost it!!! So he instantly returned me my money, which I think is amazing!! Thanks Steve, and keep me posted if it turns up, as will I, of course. I'd be more than happy to do business again with you - and who knows, maybe the pedal resurfaces, and the story continues. Guys, there is surely nobody more trustworthy than Steve.

How did you drill the cave for the MM? special tool, or just with a hand drill?

Hey, thanks, that was great. I'd love to start a "bassists using linux / free software" thread, that could be really helpful.

Yes I am really enjoying this thing now. Well given the man hours I put in there, I could have bought one of the same quality new. But then I just can't nuke an instrument, and I certainly learned new skills and now have a bass nobody else has - the whale.

So the idea to recycle some strings didn't quite work as the low E just broke. Hello out there, can you help me by suggesting what type of strings I should put on? I'm a DB beginner, so I play country, really, but leaning towards - jazz...

My one actually features only a P pick that I have just upgraded by there is still not enough punch in the lower freqs for me. So I am toying with the idea to fit in a MM style pickup. I guess the most difficult is to cut the hole (and to know where). Anyone done this? MM pickups are great for fretless I find. (Though my yammi is fretted)

+1 for house backlines and practise room gear. Then we'd finally only had to carry the amp heads. Nobody will then have any more need for tiny little neo cabs while having great sound everywhere. I like the idea.

This is such an important issue. Burglars broke into my flat this Sunday at 1pm (!), fortunately they got spooked so all they grabbed was my camera, none of the music equipment - I was glad I had stacked the valuable stuff under the bed leaving only the crap gear out. Living in East London, I feel insecure about valuables 100% of the time for good reason. Walking home from a jam session to take the night bus with gear worth a grand once a week - whats the chance of a hold up!! And for breaking ins, about once a year seems normal in East London, they sometimes just take the entire door frame out. I even know people who ran a recording studio, and the guys who rented the place turned out to be a robbery squat - they tied down the guy, beat him to bits, nicked all the gear - and then did the same in the next studio. Many studios are now fitted with alarm buttons for a reason... Oh and in case you have not done it yet: write down the serial numbers of all your valuables. For the unlikely event of police actually busting a burglar, they find this pile of stuff and the only way to assign it to you is if you knew your serial number. Mark all your possessions by carving your name into them.

Zombie thread, but I'm in the same situation now. Where do I get such a wheel, or do you reckon it's easier + cheaper to build one? Any other recommendations regarding wheels please?

There is plenty advise on cheap basses on different threads here, it seems to be gear4music or thomann best. Get a cheap laminate one but avoid Antoni - if you go for slapping, you want to spend some money on an ebony fingerboard as softwood will look like the grand canyon in no time (and if you busk and the rain gets into that...). So spend 500 quid on a laminate with hard wood fb, and then set it up the way you like - strings you like, action you like. That's the same with all instruments really, you'll customise the sound as you play, finding what suits you best. Make friend with other DB players - that will happen within the first 10 minutes after you got it. Invest in a gig bag and a pickup with preamp. You'll be more than happy with that until the following conditions for the noble bass are fulfilled: your playing ability craving for better tone; you own a house to store the thing in, and a cosy studio with stable climate; a van; and the 3 grand or so it costs to buy that thing.... good luck. start plywood

[quote name='CoolCat' post='869820' date='Jun 17 2010, 12:19 PM']Kudos to you, it looks very good considering the initial state of the beast. The nut job (no pun intended) is quite simple considering the work you have done already. Just place a business card below the strings for clearence to the fingerboard and use round or neddle files on the slots until the strings touch the card. Sand down for a perfect finish all the excess material from the top of the nut until the slots are deep about half of the string height.Lubricate using a soft pencil back and forward on the slots a few times to coat the slot - good on the bridge slots as well. Well done you. Sound clips.[/quote] Yes I will do this. I think the yacht varnish was a mistake - didnt know the stuff was that rubbery / soft. Will probably have to get rid of that again at some point and then do as prosebass recommended: floor paint.

So it's set up again. I have sanded the fingerboard after cutting about 10 inch from the bottom of it, taking off up to 3 mm all along. Then I filled the holes with car body filler, painted it with emanel black spray paint, coated it with yacht varnish, always sanding in between (using the mahagony blocks prosebass made for me - cheers dude that was sooo handy!!!). Then the board looked so nice I couldn't live with the trashy look of the rest of it, so i sanded the whole body down a bit, gave it a grey undercoat, an acrylic blue undercoat, and a rather cloudy java blue car paint coat. Most of these materials were chosen on a low budget and in fact I didn't spend enough on the java blue to make it look solid, instead I sprinkled some silver spray paint so it looks more like a night sky rather than a car. (I actually think it looks like a whale). I really didnt want to spend more than 50 quid on this monster and not too much time neither. But also fitted a bit of wood over the tailpin hole so it sits firm again. I then sanded the bridge and cut the excess off at the top, and had a go on it with a knife giving it its present shape - rough job I admit, but may fine-tune that soon. The previous owner came round and we set the soundpost back up with a barbeque fork and knocked the thing back together, re-stringing it with some old metal core strings another mate donated. Tuning up and yes it works! Fitted that cheap shadow piezo that I keep for years, sticking it in the bridge with some pressure between cigarette filter tips. That pickup sounds astonishingly good (through a Fishman BII pre), even better than the DB double-clip-on we tried as comparison. I'll be going to show it to a luthier for some more recommendations. Particularly I believe I could give the nut a go lowering the action a bit more from the top end. And one of the tuners is really crap (the D). Thanks all for your valuable advise, and I'll keep you posted about future improvements & adventures. Sorry for the bad quality pics but my camera died so I took these with my phone. Oh and by the way, does anyone have a gig bag for sale ?

How about the nut? I don't like the nut on mine (I believe it is not original neither).

just set up a soundpost with a barbeque fork, two people, a good light, and it took 15 min. Used a long bit of wood to hammer it into place. If it is a valuable instrument, the settler is probably an investment worth it. In our case, it was a doghouse fiddle and the settler would almost cost as much as the bass LOL - so you may as well give it a try and if it don't work for you, get the tool IMHO

[quote name='PerryJ' post='866123' date='Jun 13 2010, 04:31 PM']Quick question... can anyone tell me why this laminated bass [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/thomann_kontrabass_111.htm"]http://www.thomann.de/gb/thomann_kontrabass_111.htm[/url] is so much cheaper than the plywood ones? Other than the finish, I can't see much difference and I've been led to believe that laminated plywood is the superior material. One worrying thing about the Thomann site is their disclaimer concerning errors in site content. Does it mean they can get away with advertising an ebony fingerboard and delivering a softwood one!? I know they can't get away with that in England but, I'm not really up on my German advertising laws...[/quote] Well as a German I can only say that here in the UK you get away with almost everything while not so in Germany. If you trust UK pages 100% than you can trust German ones 250% - I'm not being patriotic but over there, people are so acribic it sucks.

I'm still promoting the Minimark (not the micromark). Should go down in price a wee bit soon. Great thing that it is REALLY portable, doesn't bang on my knees and works on crowded tube. I can go to an audition, then the rehearsal, and then to a jam session all in one evening without even thinking about the amp. Those 2x6'' deliver a lot of bass, unbelievable but true. Enough as a stage monitor when XLR out to PA does the rest. When I plug in an extension cab, it makes skirts go up. Only I wish it had some more EQ - but hey, that's a preamp thing then.

[quote name='fatback' post='866962' date='Jun 14 2010, 12:52 PM']Why not try a quality outboard preamp? No messing with routing, and you can keep it after you sell the bass.[/quote] +1 good point, when I play that RBX through the Fishman BII (which is for double bass, really, and has only bass + treble) it sounds WAY better. Outboard preamp is probably the best tip you can give ANY bassist who hasn't got one yet IMHO - and it's easy enough to try that out

[quote name='ead' post='866899' date='Jun 14 2010, 11:59 AM']Cheers Kongo, looks interesting....[/quote] Interesting, let me know the results as I have one of these RBX banging about and don't quite know what to do with it. It is actually a hybrid as the neck + body are from two different RBXs. I have sanded the body down so it looks quite nice and is very light, but that's about all I like about that guitar... Mabe new nut, better pickups and active electronics would help, but then I think I'd rather flog it and buy something better. I actually bought this thing way back as a jam session bass to leave in a venue, and that's what I still think it's good for...

Q what's the difference between bass and guitar? A everybody can play the guitar