neepheid

I'll nip round tonight if that's OK?

They're considered "vintage" now because enough time has passed?

I mostly run mine passive, and start the bass/treble knobs at about 75-80% then adjust from there. I have mine modded for single inner coils so with both on it's almost like having a third pickup in between and it yields a sweet tone which I love. That setting is parallel only, so I have gravitated towards a preference for passive, but series neck pickup does give some good old school thump if you back off the treble. Not a fan of the treble boost, it's too harsh - more like a finger squeak boost really.

[quote name='Ou7shined' post='1093980' date='Jan 18 2011, 03:49 PM']Actually, he's probably ahead of me now (his man-beard grows faster than my pathetic boy-fluff can) but last I heard he'd lost the mouser (as allowed in the rules) and is going for the Amish look. So pound for pound it could be close. [/quote] Nah, that was just speculation on my part. If I can get the right hat then I might do it

[quote name='Ou7shined' post='1093673' date='Jan 18 2011, 11:43 AM']According to [url="http://www.glguitars.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=45"]this[/url] L-2000s should have solid shafts. Maybe yours are aftermarket (or maybe because it's a Tribute) and 6mm would be fine. Haven't you got a ruler?[/quote] Ahh, but look here: [url="http://www.glguitars.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=145"]http://www.glguitars.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=145[/url] According to that page Tribute pots are split shaft. I'm pretty sure my pots are Mighty Mite. I will confirm tonight on my Tribute L-2000.

Not a very exciting update you might think, but I'm excited My quest to find the missing Posi-Lok strap button has finally come to an end thanks to Gibson Restoration and Repair (not their main customer services - who know nothing about anything they no longer manufacture). Took a month or so because Christmas got in the way but I came home from work to find a suspiciously large FedEx padded envelope. What was inside? AT LAST! I've been looking all over for these bad boys since the Victory arrived. I got messed around by some guy in Italy who wanted something preposterous like 50 euro for a single one, and the few that appeared on eBay were always gold. I am probably disproportionately pleased about this but it's just so cool to have landed the period correct parts in NOS condition. The final part of the puzzle if you will.

This is the place to put any extensive tinkering, building, repairing or restoring. I'm always interested in seeing stuff coming back to life.

My opinion is to save up and get a Squier. Better quality - I haven't heard many bad things said about the newest Squier output (Vintage Modified and Classic Vibe ranges). The trouble with buying a cheap, old bass is that cheap old basses in the past were (on average) a lot cheaper/nastier than the cheap basses of today. It might be a diamond in the rough, but there's a good chance it'll just be rough. For your first bass, you want something which is easy to play/look after/use, otherwise you'll be put off trying to work around all the problems.

[quote name='Johnston' post='1089299' date='Jan 14 2011, 01:25 PM']Isn't there something about Gibsons being really hard to date by the serial number. Something about them not actually going in any sort of sequential order?? Or is that only the real vintage stuff? Besides that if I went to another country and bought a high end instrument I would be pretty keen to check the authenticity of it before leaving the country and going home half way across the globe.[/quote] The current, sane system began in late 1977. There was a brief attempt at sanity from 1975-77, before then there's not a lot of rhyme and reason to it, serial numbers can mean a few things and you need something like pot codes or body/neck date stamps to make sense of it.

Tell him to prove it, take you to court or poke it. Don't send any refund unless you get the guitar back first. Oh, and if he gets arsey, make some kind of reference to the Falkland Islands, always a crowd pleaser. That last piece of advice might have been a joke.

[quote name='mcnach' post='1089033' date='Jan 14 2011, 10:37 AM']27 switching options... (where's the emoticon for an imploding head? I have been playing guitar for many more years than I'd admit, and I got into modifying the electronics early on. I learnt to solder when I was a kid, as my dad was often soldering stuff at home, so it was fun to get new sounds simply by changing a few cheap components and combining pickups. The thing is that at the end of the day, most options are subtle variants. Yes, sound A and sound B are different... but in a live situation they are not different enough and a simple change in EQ (for example) is more effective. And even recording, you are able to achieve enough variations from the preamp alone and/or postprocessing. 27 switching options playing live seems like a huge headache and in *my* experience, it all comes down to a handful of tones that I would really use. The geek in me worked out ways to separate coils in humbuckers and combine them in weird ways... a Strat with HSH configuration provided a lot of entertainment! But not every sound was distinct enough to warrant a "preset", and navigation among all the options to find the handful of sounds *I* wanted was complicated. Different people, different tastes! I'm not saying you're wrong at all, whatever works for you. I want simplicity, I want to play without having to think too much about switching. That's why I also prefer my basic pedalboard with individual boxes to a multiFX even if a multiFX can give me lots of other sounds: I feel more "in control" when I see the individual function leds and where the knobs are.[/quote] Most of what I said was not particularly serious, in reality in the live situation I find a setting that I can hear above the band in the room I'm in and leave it. I just like having options, even if I never use them. Put it another way - this was my calculator through secondary school and university - I mostly used it to add stuff and do a bit of trig and base functions. I probably used about a tenth of its capabilities. On the plus side no-one asked to borrow it I'm with you on multiFX though - I can't be bothered trying to work it all out.

Too many options? Not enough options in my opinion. That's why I had the single coil option added to the middle switch on my L-2000. That means I have 27 switching options where you only have 18. That means mine is betterer It's probably the computer geek coming out in me but I love basses with unusual switching options. All my basses have at least 1 switch on them. In addition to the semi-mad L-2000 (I say semi-mad because I haven't done the final mod which allows you to choose inner or outer single coils - mine is inner only) I added the selector switch to my Epi Les Paul bass, the G-3 has a pickup selector, the Hodad has 7 combinations of 3 pickups and the Victory has pickup selector and a passive/active/active with mid notch. There's something satisfying about flicking a switch and something tangible happening. You can take your blend pot and poke it

[quote name='Ou7shined' post='1088669' date='Jan 13 2011, 10:06 PM']How many more times am I going to say on here that G&Ls DO NOT do Musicman. It's impossible - the pups are wrong and the eq is just "hell no".[/quote] Set up a keyboard macro, mannie, it's going to be a long haul.

Won't needle nose pliers get in there? Don't try and hammer a slot in the top of the screw, it'll take ages and you run the risk of driving the screw into the hole, stripping the threads that were cut in the wood meaning the replacement screw if it's the same size will have nothing to bite into/follow. Or worse, you could miss, or whatever you're using to try and make a slot could bounce out then take a gouge out of your bass Hacksaw. If you are changing the strap button anyway then you could saw through the lot if the screw hasn't cleared the strap button enough to get the saw onto it. Dremel or equivalent with cutting wheel would be even easier. Alternatively you could drill the head off the screw, remove the strap button then use the pliers on the length of screw that did make it out of there or cut a slot in it if there's enough left.

If anyone's looking for a Squier to mod, this one's going for £80 delivered, including a bag that seems like a pretty good deal to me. Only drawback is missing D string. [url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280615880907"]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...em=280615880907[/url]

I'm still fizzing about my band breaking up back in August.

You've slackened off the strings before trying to adjust it, yes?

Dunno what to tell you. Epiphone LP (not so) Standard - active only Gibson G-3 - passive only G&L Tribute L-2000 - basically passive with an active line boost which I never use Danelectro Hodad - passive only Gibson Victory Artist - fully active/passive So in my house it's passive by a nose Truth is that I'm coming to the conclusion that all the fancy pants EQ options in the world won't make a bit of difference to Johnny Punter in the audience. These days I'm buying basses purely on the basis that they intrigue me in either the way they look or the way they operate, rather than the actual tone they produce.

[quote name='eude' post='1086432' date='Jan 12 2011, 09:37 AM']The Mustang had it's own baby Precision style pickup, the Musicmaster, I ain't sure as it was under a plastic case hiding the pole pieces, but I'm pretty sure the cheapy Squier Bronco ships with a strat pickup, which is usually the first thing to go when folks start modding. Eude[/quote] Correct. The Musicmaster reused guitar pickups that Fender had lying around, the plastic cover is used to hide this fact. Here is a pic of someone in the process of swapping out the original 6 pole guitar pickup for a 4 pole bass pickup:

Replacing the bridge with something which allows lateral string adjustment per saddle would work. Direct replacements which shouldn't require modifications to your bass would be the Schaller 3-D (uses the 2 outer screw holes and the middle one) and the Hipshot A-style (Fender Mount), a Badass II with slotted saddles or a vintage Fender one with the threaded saddles. Remember to keep the original bridge - cockeyed though it seems, the vintage crowd will prefer a wonky original bridge over a functionally superior replacement.

Quite a workout! I did better than I thought I would. Enthusiasm 67% Perception 99% Emotional 6% Social 56% Curiosity 78% Scored 16/18 in Match the Beat, 7/9 at high accuracy in Tap to the Beat (one medium and one low where I got the time signature completely wrong and was tapping out something else, oops!) and 9/12 in Melody Memory (way better than I thought I'd do). The grouping thing is a bit arbitrary.