tauzero

I was doing a bit of spring cleaning and I noticed that one picture was taking up 3.3MB and, like many others, was called "image.png". I assume that was one that I pasted in from the clipboard rather than dragging an image file in, as I use JPEGs. So I went to the original image, cropped it as I'd done before, saved it as a JPEG, deleted the original image from the post by removing the attachment in the editor, and dragged the shrunken JPEG in instead. That saved about 2.5MB.

If you have phono-to-phono leads, a brace of jack-to-phono adaptors will do the job. Doing it with a proper cassette deck, decent soundcard, and good software (when I did this a while ago I used Audacity) means you can record to WAV rather than MP3 which gives you the best starting point to go from.

The unmodded one looks quite nice apart from the headstock, the stripped one with the Al scratchplate looks hideous.

The torpedo bridge looks attractive, at least on the right bass, and if you can get past the annoying presentation of the bloke in the Youtube video on the website, pretty simple to fit. Unlike other bridge swaps, it's not really reversible because of the holes drilled through the body. The sliding post that the bridge sits on looks quite substantial so it will probably only flex a bit, and only tilt in the tube that it runs in a bit and not seize very much at all, and as long as you use a really really long allen key/screwdriver, the body of the bass won't get in the way of intonation adjustment. It's very expensive as well (and don't compare the price with the ABM headless system, you need to throw in a set of tuners to make the cost comparable). I won't be putting it on any of my basses, I like them too much.

Ahem. Five posts, no fewer.

They shouldn't be driving their lawn mowers on the road.

I feel an idea for a play coming on. "The man who mistook his bass for a hat".

That looks interesting. Are the circular parts eccentric cams to raise and lower the string height, or does the string pass over the central cylindrical part of it and you rotate it to set the height, then clamp it with the top pieces?

So rotating the cam affects the string height, and screwing the intonation tube in and out changes the intonation - and surely will also change the string height. But then changing the angle of the tube in order to set the string height back to where you want it will also affect the intonation. So it would be an absolute nightmare to set up.

You have a tube screwing into a bridge body. The string is angled against the lip of the tube. Any flex in the tube will absorb vibration and reduce sustain. Any movement in the thread/thread interface will also absorb vibration, but if there's no movement, the tube can't be screwed in and out. It seems flawed in such a way as to defeat the very objectives that it sets out to improve.

So who wants to tell Trudy that she's spelt Calliope wrong?

"She", surely? Not many men called Trudy.

When I bought my first Warwick Thumb in 1988, it was £950 (I got it for £900, Dave at Musical Exchange was a jolly nice chap). For comparison, a new 3-bed semi-detached house had cost me £17k five years earlier. I had terrible crises of self-confidence deciding whether to buy it and finally made up my mind that I would. Since then, I've bought two more Thumbs and three Seis (all second-hand, I'm not made of money), and haven't bothered with having crises of self-confidence again. As for Fodera, playability is a subjective thing. I've played a 4-string Fodera (since I moved over to 5-string only) and found it far less playable than not just my old Warwick JD Thumb but also a Cort GB4 I have. Based on that, I wouldn't buy one. Obviously, far better bassists than me (eg. Victor Wooten) don't feel the same way about them. Or perhaps they do, but they relish a challenge and get paid lots by Fodera.

I thought bass 1 was clearer, bass 2 was a bit more ill-defined and woolly. Based on that, I've guessed that bass 1 is the USA/Ki0gon, as it would be terrible to spend money to make your bass sound worse 😁

For anyone who may be interested - v3.15 of Helix/HX/HX Edit has been released. https://line6.com/support/page/kb/effects-controllers/helix/helix-315-release-notes-r992/

I suppose it depends how much of the process is automated. Lined fretless has the side dots in the same place as fretted, so the process is identical until the frets or fretlines get stuck in.

I bought my first real bass as a load of bits. Hayman had gone bust and there were a load of necks, bodies, electrics, etc at the Fender Soundhouse, which coincidentally had a fire, so I bought all the bits for a 40/40 and put it together. That was a good learning experience - I had adjusted truss rods, string height, and intonation on guitars before. I don't do fret work or nuts, but I'm happy doing electronics.

So I can replace a bass because it's defective - it has one too few strings?

One band I was in had rehearsed up to the point of gig-readiness - we were all experienced and playing pretty standard covers. The drummer was in another band as well, so we organised a double band gig at a local pub. The drummer, singer, the guitarists, singer, and bassist from the other band, and me were all there, wondering what had happened to our guitarist. After some time (this was in the days before mobile phones) we got a message that he'd jumped in the canal and I think had been taken to hospital. He'd always been a little strange but never seemed that way inclined before. Anyroadup, we borrowed the other band's guitarists and got through the gig (the advantages of playing covers that every bugger plays).

Saw her a good few years ago, at the Roadhouse in Birmingham, with bassist and drummer. Very good.

Alternatively he was opposed to vaccine mandates but not an anti-vaxxer, and found masks that weren't N95 ineffective and a nuisance rather than a protection (which ignores the fact that they're to protect others). There's rather more nuance to this than some would have you believe. Remarkably, the Torygraph seems the paper that most appreciates nuance: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/21/meat-loaf-railed-against-covid-rules-nuisance-face-masks-death/ which should be read properly.

Tamworth: Wolfsbane (and hence Blaze Bayley) Julian Cope Donald Skinner Magnum

Tonga being in the news brought this little ditty to mind (the first of the Flanders & Swann songs herein). Reflecting on it, I believe it would be rather less acceptable nowadays as it's about non-consensual sex. It's rather hard to imagine Flanders and Swann being more offensive than Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, but Wayne is giving a choice of having sex or leaving.

I'm in until somebody sells an Ibanez SRF705 (or exchanges it for a Cort GB4). Hmm, really should get round to posting in the marketplace.

I thought it was charged at the rate applicable in the supplying country, but looking into it further, it's the rate applicable in the supplying country if the supplier has annual sales lower than 10 000 Euros, and in the country being supplied to if it's more.