tauzero

Must re-read them some time. Of Course I Still Love You. Funny, It Worked Last Time... Incidentally, the publication dates of the Culture novels are given in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

A pair of 8s is what I use with the rock band, with three vocals going through it and sometimes one of the guitars. Power amps are quite lightweight nowadays and an active crossover could be DIY so I just need a sub that weighs < 10kg and I can go to two tops and a sub.

Just Read The Instructions?

I was wondering if it was one of the Culture ships.

"When you said use a belt, I thought you meant a belt sander. How was I to know you meant rub it on a belt buckle?"

There's a chap who comes to an open mic I attend who plays a Roland V-Accordion, so there's all sorts of sounds coming out of it.

As necro threads go, this one has to take the prize - not only 14 years old, but also the OP has since died.

It will probably follow Bartolini's own wiring diagram, somewhere on https://bartolini.net/wiring-diagrams/. The battery negative needs to go to one of the ring and sleeve, the ground needs to go to the other. There is a convention (not always adhered to) of which goes to which but it only matters if you're using wirelesses which charge via the jack plug (Boss WL-20 IIRC). Also, check you haven't got a solder bridge somewhere or a wisp of wire bridging the two. A multimeter would help.

Both pickups solo are fine. I think the issue is that one of the two split coils has been wired incorrectly, so the strings going over the blue bit in the picture are passing over two sections of pickup in phase, while the strings going over the red bit are going over the sections of pickup which are out of phase. Imagine a dual-P bass where one of the segments of pickup has been wired the wrong way round.

I defretted a Squier Affinity Strat that I got for very little as the neck was somewhat bowed (Crack Converters staff don't understand truss rods). Must go back over it, the filling I did is pretty horrible.

The first bass I shimmed was a Hayman 40/40 that I put together from parts (my first bass). Piece of card. Worked, no issues between putting it together and selling it a few years later. I stuck with through-necks for a good many years so shims were irrelevant. Recently I've been through a bout of it. Bought a HB Dullahan guitar which had a high action, needed a shim. I splashed out on a Stew Mac one because of all the talk of ski jumps. Then I bought an Aliexpress acrylic bass which needed a shim. I got a set of the Ebay ones that one should avoid and for some reason one of them worked. Then I bought a cheap Chinese fan-fret headless bass which needed a shim and I (having worked out that neither of the remaining wooden shims from Ebay were tapered) bought a set of the brass shims and used one of those over the rearmost screw. Spot on. My probably unfounded worry about card is that it might compress, hence using something a bit more solid. I've got another three of the brass shims of varying thicknesses so I'm set up for a while. At £4 for the set of four I'm happy.

I used mine at a 3 hour rehearsal and a 2.5 hour open mic night without a recharge. Next time I use it will be a gig tomorrow so I decided it would be prudent to charge up.

Very nice. I'd be terrified of having something like that as I'm sure I'd manage to chip it.

The pickups are this form (from https://bartolini.net/product-category/bass-pickups/bass-soapbars/originalsplits/) Checking with a magnet, they are both the same, as shown. So it's not the magnets that are wrong, it's the internal wiring.

Assuming that it uses a 9-12V power supply, what about using a powerbank with a USB-C output with adaptable voltage and a voltage-setting dongle to give 9V or 12V? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/295636499200 - looks like this is preset to 12V, as were the ones I got. To change voltage, you have to unsolder the link on the 12V pads and move it to another. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314997325531 is an example of a power bank with variable voltage output. Could be velcroed to the light bar (for example).

It wasn't the entire pickup out of phase. The B, E, and A strings are out of phase, the D and G strings aren't. I'd described this in the Repairs and Technical section, forgot I hadn't described the symptoms here. The MK1 pickups are rather like potted up Precision pickups, one magnet and coil covering 3 strings and the other covering 2, so I think that somehow in the manufacturing process the coils on one pickup had been wired incorrectly. I also needed to wire the pickups up with 4-core wire to allow me to switch between serial and parallel, so I needed to order that, and order mini toggle switches, then the first mini toggle switches were too short threaded to use with the 6mm thick front. Just waiting for the other toggle switches to come.

Depends on budget and how important weight is. Lightest - GR Bass AT range, 500W combo under 10kg. A bit heavier - good class D amp (loads of opinions on these, a Tecamp Puma 900 does for me) and either a Barefaced BB2 or one of the LFSys range. I'm doing the same sort of gigs as you.

Our band: 4-piece guitar/vocal, guitar/BV, bass/BV, drums. PA: Behringer XR18, pair of Alto TS408s. One guitar and bass are always through backline, the other guitar either goes backline or through the PA. No mics on the drums. No sub. No item more than 10kg in my car (which carries the PA and my bass gear).

There's lots of different Cort models - I'd advise trying before you buy, if you can, there's a variety of neck profiles and that makes a lot of difference when you're playing a five. Even more so if your hands are on the small side.

Just thought I'd add to the ongoing saga. Bartolini at least replied to me to say that the MK1s were merely designed by Mr Bartolini to give him a bit of retirement money, and Cort turned down their offer of supporting them. Cort haven't replied. I think, but can't be sure, that one of the parts of the internally split pickup has been wired out of phase. However, unlike Bartolini humbuckers, the separate windings are joined internally, so it can't be reversed. However, @Steff had a vast selection of pickups that he was looking for swaps for, including a pair of MK5CBCs that Bartolini had said would be a good upgrade, and I had a pair of Bart BH2s from the aforementioned EHB1265MS that he was interested in, so we did the swap. Stupidly I forgot to consider that they came out of a fan fret and so were 6-string rather than 5-string size, but he did have a bass with the right sized cavities and liked the sound, so all was good there. As the MK5CBCs are humbuckers and the coil windings are separately available, I'm going to make them switchable between series and parallel. Just waiting for some mini toggle switches which have a long enough thread to fit on the 6mm thick control cavity top. More news next week, I should think.

More practically, what are you using as a DMX controller? I'm thinking you may be able to use a brace of single-board computers (Pi Zero W or ESP32), network them wirelessly, have one echoing the DMX controller across their mini network and the other taking that echo and controlling the lights at its end.

Ah, that's easy. They use XLR connectors so just have several short cables joined end to end.

If you've got one incoming, you could just give it a whirl. It would be interesting to find out. I suspect the main factors will be bandwidth (the control signals may be at a higher frequency than an audio system can handle) and possibly slew rate (how much a square wave gets distorted by the speed at which the voltage can change). Did you consider the Lekato MS-1 for the IEMs?

Freecycle would be worth a look too.

Nicely. The neck's not quite as slim as I expected from the GB4, but still comfortable. The strings are 45-65-85-105-135 flats rather than my favoured 40-125 rounds but the action is set quite low (no worries about fret buzz).