pete.young

I used to own this bass, and I can assure you that the body really is one piece.

Around 1840, a french violin maker named Villaume discovered that intonation and playability of the instrument was much improved if a longer scale length was used, together with a narrower neck and other modifications. Similar to the revelation that a 34" scale bass works better than a 30" I guess. From 1860 virtually all instruments were made with these changes, but the earlier instruments recieved a neck graft to make them more playable. Google is your friend here if you need exact details.

Well, even if it isn't a GIovanni Grancino (which I'd agree is unlikely) it does look like a nice old fiddle. Copiers would have used the label to indicate the style they were trying to achieve , there being no Italian equivalent of John Hall in the late 1700's and 1800's. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but if the neck heel repair could have been a neck graft then this would date the instrument to pre-1840. This would have involved removing the original neck and saving the peg head, so there should be evidence of a join around the top of the neck near what on a bass we'd call the 'nut' . The lack of a bridge is fixable - as long as there are no cracks in the top it should be possible. The thing really is to take it to either a violin maker or repairer (there seem to be a couple in Sheffield) or an auction house like Bonhams who specialise in musical instruments. Either of these will probably give you an estimate of it's value.

Needs a 'none of the above' button.

Ah, I see - you can tell I know next to nothing about these instruments, other than they sound fantastic. Thanks for that clip Johnston by the way. Looking forward to the next installment, as ever.

That's a relief, with your previous I was half-expecting to see it painted shell pink :-) Looks nice in that finish. I have a slight preference with the cover on - would be really interested to know if there's a difference between the sound with it on and off.

The Hartke is unusual in having two sets of voice coils, one at 4Ohm the other at 8Ohm. There aren't many others like it on the market.

Anyone? By the way, it seems to be happening with IE9 on Windows 7 as well.

Octave pedal.

It's very annoying. I think I've now got most of the band members trained, and I try to use the shorted runs possible and tape everything down. V-Bass cables are £35 quid a pop.

Since the Blog links appeared on the homepage, I appear to be suffering from some Character Encoding problems and wondered if anyone else was seeing the same thing. I have Firefox 14, and the basschat server appears to be including a Character Coding of Western(ISO8859-1), which causes the links to display like this: [url="http://blog.basschat.co.uk/i-was-hitlers-bassist-part-one/"]‘I Was Hitler’s Bassist’ – Part One[/url] [url="http://blog.basschat.co.uk/i-was-hitlers-bassist-starts-wednesday-on-the-basschat-blog/"]‘I Was Hitler’s Bassist’ – Starts Wednesday on the BassChat Blog[/url] I can fix this temporarily by manually switching to UTF-8, but it only works on a page-by-page basis. If I set the default to UTF-8, it still happens (which is what makes me think that it's the server sending the ISO8859-1 setting along with the page). If this is indeed what's happening, why doesn't the page include a character set which displays properly under ISO8859-1 and doesnt' require a switch to UTF-8?

http://basschat.co.uk/topic/156445-markbass-lmii-effects-loop/ There's a link in that thread to a talkbass topic which includes pictures.

Yamaha Nathan East? There was a beauty up for sale here a couple of weeks ago.

My Wanted ad hasn't had much response so I need to seek people's opinions on multi-effects units. I need something that will provide reverb and delay for vocals now that no longer have a mixer with a built-in effects unit. It'll also need a footswitch so the singer can switch the bypass on and off. I was looking at 19" rack units, but someone pointed me at the Behringer FEX 800 which seems like a cheap way to get the job done. Does anyone have any experience with the FEX 800, or any other comments about a better choice on the second-hand market, maybe a Yamaha SPX90 or similar?

Sorry, just spotted this. I've been using a V-Bass for a couple of years, live. I attached the pickup permanently to one of my basses after I got fed up with the double-sided tape falling off, but didn't really persevere with it. It makes no difference sound-wise whether the pickup is screwed on or stuck on. I use some of the different bass models rather than the pickups on my own bass, which are a bit puny by comparison. The only thing about the quality of the bass you use is whether it's playable: if you use the built-in sounds it doesn't matter what you use. dave.c had his on an old cheapo Cort and it sounded absolutely fine. I have a few synth patches set up for '80's stuff like Bilbo's favourite Aint Nobody, Venus, etc. I also use the double bass and arco sounds occasionally. It's great for synth sounds with no tracking issues, but you do spend quite a bit of time getting volume levels for all the various patches to be consistent. It's also very amusing to play the odd burst of heavy metal guitar, if used sparingly. Not made much use of the effects. The compression isn't a lot of use though due to not having any decent monitoring facilities and the threshold and ratio being combined into a single control. The only other effect I use with the V-Bass is a microthumpinator on the output, which I always use no matter what. We've recently acquired a bigger mixer and I've started to dispense with backlilne altogether and just run the V-Bass unit straight into the desk. I'm thinking about using my little Novation instead for synth sounds now we have some spare channels, but will probably continue to use the V-Bass at least in the short term for cab modelling. The other thing is the price of the cables - it's a 13-pin custom job specific to Roland and keeping a spare cable handy is quite expensive. Plan B might just be to plug a normal bass into the unit and just use the effects, as Matej does.

When you do , tell them that their web site is down!

Well, just in case anyone else ends up wondering, a report back: The guitar pre-amp outputs on -10dB were fine. The output off the Roland V-Bass was seriously hot even with the gain on zero, and so I used an unbalanced jack into the line level, which was fine. The drum mikes also surprised me by being really hot, but manageable with the gain control. So it's all good. Many thanks for the help and advice from everyone in this thread.

[quote name='Grand Wazoo' timestamp='1342518664' post='1736339'] I am sure if you contact Neutrik they would send you a free replacement one, I believe they are lifetime guaranteed [/quote] I wish I'd thought of that. I've thrown two of them away, both for the same reason , the sliding ring split into tiny pieces. Hopefully I'll remember when it happens again!

Here are my 2 5-strings. The one on the left is a Tanglewood ebay bargain, the one on the right is a Windsor Premier probably from the 1920's which I've had for a few years, it's set up for old-time and frailing. [IMG]http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f123/cr0ut0n/2012-07-22151719.jpg[/IMG]

Yes, I see what you mean - it does have a slightly un-polished appearance, like it needs an application to t-cut to take off the bloom, though it's hard to say whether that's just the way it was photographed. The paint on my one is pretty glossy by comparison. Original colour would have been either black or what was euphemistically described as chocolate brown.