fretmeister

NeuralDSP have justed started their usual Black Friday Sale - 50% off most of their plugins.

Weight Balance Comfort Playability. Colour / looks don't matter to me at all.

She's a hell of a player! Nice one!

I've got £130 of Aguilar pickup in a £100 Jim Deacon P bass, and an EMG P-X in another one of them. One of them also has £100 of Hipshot Ultralites too. The other will get the same when I find some money. I put £300 of Aguilar DCB 6 string pickups into an Ibanez medium / short fan fret EMG J set with BQS into a Sandberg TT4 Superlight. But the best fun I ever had with a pickup swap was firstly swapping pickups in an EBMM Stingray 5 - putting in a set of EMG MM5TW, then taking that out and turning the bass into a Precision (Aguilar narrow spaced P5), then into a PJ with stacked knobs.... but the very best bit of that process was posting on the official EBMM forum about it... The response from the fan boys was epically predictable. And it got more hilarious as they became more unhinged when they realised I just didn't care they were "offended" by what I did with my own instrument. Happy days.

Perfectly put!

I've changed the pickups in almost every bass I've ever owned. Especially the Fenders. Most of my basses end up with EMGs or Aguilar. The Sandberg P pickup is a high quality unit. Zero hum. Well potted. Solidly made. It is higher output than almost every passive pickup I've ever tried over the years - in fact it might even give the Dimarzio Relentless some competition in the output stakes. That was the issue for me - I was playing in a Jazz Big Band. I wanted a vintage toned / traditional sounding pickup for my Lionel. That's why I changed it. I put in an Aguilar AG4P 1960s wind pickup. I could have got the same tone area buy putting in a Fender pickup as well, but the polepieces on Fender P pickups stick out and annoy me beyond reason. The Aguilar's polepieces are very slightly lower than the surrounding plastic so I never get any string on pole noises. When a customer puts in an order for a Sandberg they can specify any pickup they want. Some cost more, others less. I thought the Sandberg VS pickup sounded better than the Relentless for a high output P, but neither was what I was looking for in the end. No concerns about quality / value at all. Just a matter of taste.

It's so specific to the bass and the amount of relief in the truss rod I'm not convinced it can be a set series of measurements. You might even have a slightly high fret somewhere.

Is it not a doubled bass guitar and synth? I get really close to the tone with a Digitech BSW.

Both. I have active JJ, PJ, and P and passive PJ and P. They have a selection of flatwounds and roundwounds on them. All the J pickups are noiseless irrespective of active or passive. I like a set and forget approach as much as possible. On a passive bass I tend to set the amp EQ with the bass tone knocked down to about 2/3 so I have room to let more treble through or cut it completely. Actually I do this on actives where there's only a single tone control as well. Where I have a full EQ then I set the amp EQ with the bass flat and then I can adjust a little if needed as I play - often it will be to cut the bass a bit if the room is boomy. On a 2 pickup bass I adjust the pickup balance far more than anything else. Most of the time I pick the bass I'm playing just because I fancy playing that one rather than any specific tonal approach. I have a view that nearly every bass part can be played on a P or a J bass (and indeed a stingray but I haven't got one of them!) and the differences between them make it fun. If a cover tune is well know for using one of those types then I do sometimes take a perverse pleasure in using the 'wrong' bass for it.

It works great - I do stick a compressor in front of it as well as I find that sounds more amp like to me. I've got the Behringer and the Caline clones. Nothing to pick between them really.

John Deacon (Queen) was a master at using different pulses to change the entire feel of parts of a song. In "One Vision" he starts by matching the guitar part. Same riff, leaving space. Then for the pre-chorus he's thumping crotchet notes in the first half of the bar and then quavers in the second half. The song tempo stays the same but it suddenly feels slower and more deliberate but still giving a hint of what is coming next... Then he's up to straight quavers. The song feels faster and more urgent again even though the tempo hasn't moved. Then he's back on the main riff while Brian May has a bit of a solo. Now try to imagine how different (and crap) the song would have sounded with JD only doubling the guitar throughout, or only playing quavers like a traditional punk band might. That's where the power of the bass is... but it still needs context from the rest of the arrangement.

There's a lot of isolated bass tracks available on youtube. If you listen to the bass parts alone, 99.9% of the time you won't feel the heartbreak from the bass part. That emotional content is due to the interplay between everything you are listening to at the same time. If you changed the guitar or the vocals or even the drumming style in "Go your own way" then the bass part would not be as effective in being moving to you. Without the rest of the instruments in that song there is no context by which the bass part can be interpreted as having heartbreak. Sometimes a very simple root note only bass line is exactly what is needed to make the entire arrangement have that emotional content and if a busier bass part was used that emotional content would be ruined. Lots of people think "support" for other instruments is somehow limiting or otherwise diminishing the role of an instrument. It really isn't - that is the difference between say "just" a guitarist or "just" a bassist as opposed to a musician / composer. There are wonderful solo pieces for Double Bass that several bass guitarists have done a great job with for solo bass guitar, and then there are people like Michael Manring and Zander Zon who have built careers from playing solo bass. But that approach wouldn't be right in a Jackson 5 tune (lots of James Jamerson in Jackson 5 tunes) - it just wouldn't work. The best approach is not to think like a bass player - think like a composer and that all the instruments are equally important for the song. Try swapping parts round. If you have an idea for a guitar part, see what happens if the bass or keys, or sax plays it instead. It's up to the composer to decide which instrument (including voice) is going to carry the main hook of a song. Sometimes that is the bass (Chic's Good Times for example), sometimes it is the guitar (a lot of metal), sometimes the Vocal (Aretha Franklin for example). It's the composition that gives any individual part it's emotional content. This is the isolated part for "Go your own way" it's a great part - but I know the song so well my brain is filling in the rest of the instruments in my head. It's quite an easy part and JM is keeping the pulse of the music - thus supporting everything else - giving the bridge between the drums and the rest. Here it is just adding the drums: See how massively different it sounds just because it now has some context? If you haven't got it I really recommend you get the Moises App for your smartphone / tablet. You can loads songs into it and then adjust the levels of each instrument at will. You can listen to loads of tunes with and without other instruments to see how your impression of the bass parts changes when the other elements change too.

That does look very close. Nice!

Other than Sea Foam Green I've never been one for green basses but that is just lovely. I don't know who the guy playing is, I just saw the post on social media.

Anyone know what colour this is? I can't quite find an actual match and I really like it.

JS Bach Jack Bruce But ultimately the bass is the bridge between drums and the rest. That is the primary role. Over do the “emotion” and you’ll be like Billy Sheehan off his Ritalin and on the Red Bull. A bassist is simultaneously the least visible of the band and the reason why people are dancing.

Next time you do this can you do a video of the process? That would be very useful.

Lovely! I’ll join the dibs queue!

Because it means V and not 5. Basically Sandberg used to use P and J terms and Fender got annoyed. So the PS (precision) became VS, the JJ4 (two J pickups) became TT4 and so on. PM used to be a Precision and a Musicman pickup and now it’s VM, JM4 (jazz and mm) is now TM4. The OP bass is technically a Lionel VS4. Lionel because it’s short scale and as it has a solitary precision pickup and 4 strings it is a VS4. These days you can get a Lionel TT4 as well. And for that matter, any pickup configuration you like if you special order it. Mine was a special order made to Superlight specs so it weighs 5.7lb.

Also, that red is really nice. Much better in your photos than on their website.

It’s definitely a Lionel. I have one as well and I love it. Such an easy instrument to play.

They are brilliant!

I went for the guitar one as I play a lot of guitar as well, and most of the time for bass I like a clean tone with compression so it works well. I do wish Boss would put the drum machine in both models though. That would be excellent. The hardware appears to be the same so it's only a firmware issue.

Mushroom Double Swiss. I still haven't forgiven Burger King for taking that off the menu.