BigRedX

Republica? At Rebellion? As much as I'd like to see them, that can't be right?

You could say that about almost any mass-produced bass that isn't a Precision or a Jazz.

If I'd had the money when I was a teenager, I would have had a 4001 (or a John Birch copy), as for me they were the iconic bass of 70s pop/rock. I don't have one now because I have no use for a 4-string bass and when I have tried one the pickup cover is in my preferred picking position, and IMO they look wrong (and on some of the older models the "cover" is an essential part of the pickup and so they don't work) without the cover in place.

Bassist from Freddie and the Dreamers used one too (probably the most untypical performance with a Thunderbird you'll ever see):

As I've said before, most bassists claiming to be lusting after a Rickenbacker really want Precision with a 4001 holographically laid over the top.

For the sorts of gigs I expect Killing joke to be playing that rig is a complete waste of time from a sonic PoV. However it seems work well for hiding the backup keyboard player.

Nearly all my bass amps have been PA amps, usually two channel solid state for bi-amping. I've only owned one dedicated bass amp in 45 years of gigging (and only used that for about 5-6 years). I've now stopped using any dedicated amps at all and go straight into the PA via a Line6 Helix.

Paging @Bassassin

Are you working towards getting the PA to do all the heavy lifting as far as the band's sound is concerned or is it simply a way of having to take less gear to gigs? What sort of band is it? Originals or covers? Do you have your own PA? what size venues are you playing?

In my guitarist days I ran a Marshall PowerBrake with a Hughes & Kettner Tube 50 combo, to allow me to run the power-amp section at full tilt whilst keeping the on-stage volumes at a suitable level. This offered numerous levels of attenuation (11 IIRC) from "off" to full output. The thing to realise about these devices is that good ones are relatively large and heavy, and can get very hot very quickly (they are essentially turning all that unwanted power into heat). The PowerBrake was equipped with a fan to try and cool it down, but at the the end of a 45 minute set, even though the fan had been running continuously, the casing would almost be too hot to touch. In retrospect the difference between using the PowerBrake as my volume control and simply using the master volume on the amp would have been negligible in a live band mix, because there is no speaker break-up which I have come to find is more important to my guitar sound then any distortion added by the power amp valves working hard.

I have a feeling that they are going to have to draw up the pre-amp circuit (that should be fairly easy since IIRC it's all point-to-point wiring), then work out exactly what should be going on at each point in the circuit and test until they find where it's doing something different which will probably be where the problem lies.

It's "Mojo"! You're not supposed to clean it off.

IME, you don't actually need a demo, just a good idea of your target audience and a lot of front. It also helps if you have either a manger or a member of the band who can assume the alter-ego of your manager for the purposes of talking to venues, promoters and other bands. Find bands who you like that are playing a similar style of music, who are playing within travelling distance, and then get in touch with the venue, the promotor and the band themselves and ask for a support. Keep doing this until someone says yes. Then build it from there. Have you or any of your band mates get contacts from previous bands that owe you a favour? Both The Terrortones and Hurtsfall got our first few gigs off the back of the bands the various members had been in previously and, having acquitted ourselves both sonically and visually, we had no problems getting repeat bookings for support slots. With both bands we were gigging long before we had any kind of "demo" recording, and in the case of The Terrortones our first gig was less than two months from our first rehearsal. It was useful that Mr Venom's "normal" persona that he used as our manager to get us the gigs was so far removed from how he appeared with the band that only people who knew him well, were aware that they were one and the same. I lost count fairly quickly of the number of promotors and venues who would ask if our manager was going to be at the gig! There is always an element of luck, although IME the harder you work the "luckier" you get. The Terrortones' 5th gig was a late afternoon slot an all-day psychobilly festival with The Meteors headlining. Once we'd done that and gone down well the gigs just kept coming in. Also in the early days be prepared to play anywhere at short notice. If you are serious about gigging, there little point of having band members who need weeks of notice in order to be able to do gigs. We ended up sacking one drummer and guitarist after they turned down the opportunity to play at The Met during Whitby Goth Weekend because we had less than a week's notice of the gig.

Do you have the manual? I had a look when it used to be on the TecAmp website and I'm pretty sure that at least one of those valves should be different to the others. Regarding the Power Amp problems, it's a completely separate unit, so it shouldn't affect the pre-amp. What I found was that it was very susceptible to under-voltage issues. The Terrortones used to play a venue that had added a second stage in another part of the building and this would cause the power requirements to occasionally exceed what was available, at which point the amp would go silent and refuse to come back on. Every time it would be fine once I got it back home.

That's the finish mine had:

As the other owner of this amp, who never had any problems with the pre-amp section (mine were all with the completely separate power amp module going into protect mode when presented with dodgy mains supplies), I would suspect that a problem has developed with the pre-amp which is causing the transformer to blow, and if the protection circuit has performed properly the fuse to blow (does a visual inspection show it to be blown). I'm surprised that your tech hasn't been able to track down this underlying problem, because it is my understanding that the pre-amp is based on a simple "classic" design.

I posted a photo the one I used to own in the thread about them in General Discussion recently. Mine was a slightly different shape had EMG passive pickups and controls, and much more flamboyant colour scheme. Not in the slightest bit collectable. They were being sold off in vast quantities for bargain-basement prices when I bought mine for under £100. Mine was a nice enough bass (for a 4-string) but nothing special apart from the finish. Worth about £100 tops IMO - the one in the OP less because it's not as interesting looking.

1981-82 Carlsbro Wasp Combo. This was a guitar practice amp but since the band was mostly a recording one, and I spent most of my time channeling my inner Peter Hook the low power and lack of bottom end really didn't matter. One the few occasions when we played live and I couldn't use a real bass amp from one of the other bands on the bill we'd stick a mic in front of it. 1982-89 No name generic 100W transistor amp into home made 2x12 cab and 1x18 cab. 1989-1995 Roland GP8 Multi-effects > Trace Elliot GP12 Preamp bi-amped into > Home-made 2x100W power-amp > home made 2x8 cab and Carlsbro 1x15 cab. 1995-2002 Peavey BassFex bi-amped into > Carlsbro 2x300w power amp > home made 2x8 cab and Carlsbro 1x15 cab. 2002-2006 Line 6 BassPod XT Pro bi-amped into > Carlsbro 2x300w power amp > home made 2x8 cab and Carlsbro 1x15 cab. 2006-2017 Line 6 BassPod XT Pro Tech Soundsystems Black Cat amp > EBS 2x10 and EBS 4x10 cabs. 2017 to present Line 6 Helix direct into the PA. I have an RCF 745 power cab for rehearsals for one band and for on-stage monitoring when the quality of the PA foldback is known, but these days since the majority of the gigs I play are on decent sized stages with a good PA and foldback, taking a bass amp is a complete waste of time and effort. So I don't.

17th March, Nottingham, at The Old Salutation Inn With: X-Superstar (Andy Cousin's new band), Gothzilla and Feather Trade Tickets 18th March, Heckmondwicke, at Westgate 23 With: Gothzilla 25th March, Bathgate, DreadnoughtRock CANCELLED 30th March, London, at The Fidler's Elbow With: X-Superstar, Gothzilla and Feather Trade Tickets 31st March, York, at The Fulford Arms With Gothzilla and Eyrx London Tickets 1st April, Bracknell, The Acoustic Couch (this is not an acoustic gig) With Greymere and Gothzilla Tickets

I used to own this one: Looked great, played and sounded just like a bass guitar. However they were being sold off very cheaply at the end, and IIRC the shops that stocked them and eBay was flooded with them at the time so they are NOT rare. I wouldn't pay more than £100 for one (I definitely paid a lot less than that for mine).

Right now the big problem with 3D printing of instruments appears to be the size that the budget (sub £1k) 3D printers are capable of. The one from the OP can do 21x21x25cm, and the one @Dad3353 has can accommodate a slightly larger volume. The core part of the guitar (neck pocket to bridge) only just fitted with a little bit of lateral thinking, but you couldn't print the equivalent section of a bass guitar or the neck of either a guitar or bass as a single piece. Also if the Ad Astra guitar bodies are anything to go by there are big problems with getting smooth seamless joints between pieces printed separately. Again the guitar body in the OP appears to get around this by making a feature of the different sections, and also by not showing any close-up photos of what the finished joints look like. Also all the temperature resistant materials with a suitable strength are considerable more expensive than the standard 3D printable plastic (around £100/kg as opposed to £20/kg).

I think we have a problem with terminology. So here is the default Blender interface when I load it for the first time: Any application that adheres to the Macintosh way of doing things would allow me to grab the two sections on the right hand side and simply drag them to a more convenient location - in my case this would be another display, then allowing me to open the main workspace to fill the whole central display. Unfortunately they appear to be permanently attached to workspace, and while I can enlarge the workspace to fill the main display, doing so hides these sections completely which is not what I want. Also neither of the two "Window" menus appear to allow access to any of the other display parameters, that I have seen while browsing through the manual, which I where I would normally expect to find them in the Macintosh interface. Contextual menus are all very well for those who only have a single display to work with, but there should also be an option for those of us with plenty of screen real-estate to be able to have all of them permanently visible. I suspect that this method of working has been ported from the application's native environment (Linux?) without any regard for how other graphical Operating Systems work. The whole point using the built-in GUI of a particular OS is that both the writers and users of the application don't have to "re-invent the wheel" in order to be able navigate the application. So not only am I trying to learn a brand new application, I am also having to learn a brand new interface.

For me a consistency of interface is one of the things that makes learning a new application so much easier. If all the interface elements work in the same way irrespective of the application. One of the great things about all the 2D graphics applications I use is that the palettes that provide all the information can be shifted onto a second screen simply by grabbing and moving them. That way I can save my main screen for the "work space" and all the information about the element I am manipulating at any one time is displayed across a range of "mini windows" on a separate one. So far, despite the fact that the screen grabs I have seen confirm that what I want to do is possible within Blender, I have been unable to persuade them to "undock" from the main window, or for that matter found any way of opening up the palette that allows numerical manipulation of the elements in the workspace. If the interface followed standard Macintosh guidelines, I'd have done this by now and could be getting on with learning the details of how the application works, instead of trying the persuade the interface to work in a way that I know is possible.

@Dad3353 I've downloaded Blender and will probably have a go with it the next time I need to do some simple 3D visualisation to ease myself in. However the first impressions aren't very favourable as the interface doesn't follow the Macintosh GUI guidelines, and while I can see from the manual that it supports multiple displays doing something as simple as moving the interface palettes onto a different one to allow more area for the workspace on the main display doesn't appear to work in the standard Mac way of doing things.

Interesting, although for me the guitar in the OP is visually slightly more pleasing (and I appreciate that this is completely subjective). What isn't as pleasing is the $499 price tag for that body which shows a lot of fairly nasty "finishing" marks around where the various pieces join and also what looks to me like printing errors on some the hexagon edges. This would be reasonably acceptable if I had downloaded the model for free and was outputting it on my 3D printer at home. However IMO it's not acceptable on something that is being offered for sale as a finished item, especially at that price. I also note that they are selling complete guitars with what looks like standard ready made necks for $999! The joint edges of the "flying V" are even nastier and if you zoom in on the photo you can see the layer structure of the printing. I'm assuming that this is a limitation of the current technology and for many applications where 3D printing is being used, these print artefacts are either irrelevant or at least acceptable. In this case I don't think that they are. Right now 3D printing seems to win for prototyping or for custom and JIT manufacturing where functionality is more important than finish.