BigRedX

Any intonation issues (I don't have any on mine) are down to the design of the bridge which is completely separate from the vibrato unit. AFAICS the Staytrem bridge solves any tuning and intonation problems by giving the saddles a wider travel length and also by making a model that doesn't rock back and forth with vibrato usage. Apparently you can also prevent this rocking by fitting a sleeve around the height adjustment posts. TBH the vibrato system is fairly redundant on this instrument. Even with the lighter gauge string that are supplied as standard there is minimal pitch change, and once you've fitted any decent heavier strings even less. I can't really see the need for a locking system on the Bass VI as it moves so little anyway! Finally my Squier VM Bass VI has a Crafted in Indonesia sticker on the back of the headstock. I have no idea how the quality compares with a MiM Fender (of any kind) because I've never played one.

I'd agree that the short comings of the Squier Bass VI are down to the design of the instrument and not anything that is lacking because it's made to a tighter budget than a "real" Fender.

I'd check continuity through the screening in the control cavity and see if something there is keeping the pre-amp permanently switched on. A quick way to check would be to take the pre-amp out of the bass and see if it runs down the batteries like that.

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477400570' post='3161976'] The Good ol' US of A is here to stay. Just look at Blue on this very site. You will never take him alive. [/quote] No I'm just saying that here in the UK we have an extra 5 days that deserve to be christmas free!

I'd agree with sending it to BBC introducing. However I'd suggest that the best way to make you music widely available is to make a decent video for it and get it up on YouTube. You don't have to spend a lot of money - the three Terrortones PVs were made for a grand total of around £600 and biggest expenditure was the props for "StickyPants Trance" and the location for "I Can't Find My Braincell". However you might already be too late for Christmas 2016...

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1477393438' post='3161883'] [url="https://postimg.org/image/esjfzrlcz/"][/url] [/quote] And for us in the UK in should say: Fact: If someone is playing Christmas music before November 5th, you are legally allowed to kill them and use their corpse as a Guy Fawkes.

To add to the above, IME mid-week gigs, unless your band (or one of the other bands on the bill) has a sizeable following, are a complete waste of time. At best you play to a handful of totally disinterested punters. Stick to Friday and Saturday nights (plus Sunday or Thursday at a push if the bands and/or venue has the right reputation) and leave it at that.

If it's live you'll be surprised by how few mistakes the audience notice apart from those who are obsessive fans of the band. IME unless the song comes grinding to a halt 30 seconds after the start very few people in the audience will actually notice that anything has gone wrong. They certainly won't spot the occasional fluffed noted or dropped beat. As musicians our job is to carry on playing and act like nothing has gone wrong even when it has. If it's a recording you can just go for another take.

I bought the Squier VM version back in May and wrote a review of it [url=http://basschat.co.uk/topic/285268-bigredx-buys-a-fender/]here - which I have just updated with my most recent thoughts[/url]. HTH

After almost 6 months now, how am I getting on? I've recently started playing bass in a post-punk/goth influenced band, so I thought that the Bass VI would be ideal. And it is if I'm sticking the strictly 2-string chords and New Order or Cure style tuneful bass lines. However when I want to play something more conventionally bass guitar-y, it simply doesn't have the bottom end presence I need in a band with heavily effected guitar and synth. There's a couple of songs that I'd use it on if we were recording them, but live unless I have a personal roadie to help with my instrument changes, it's way too much hassle to bring to gigs when the Red Gus with the right EQ on the amp gets so very close to the sound and is far easier to play. Also although the neck isn't significantly narrower than some of my guitars, combined with the heavier bass strings the string spacing is just a bit too tight and then when you add the fat Fender neck (I'm used to wide shallow custom made necks on my guitars and basses) I just don't find it particularly comfortable to play. Also I'm not getting a lot of use out of the B and high E strings, I'm finding the sound of these just too bland and insipid. In order to get chords sounding good I'm playing so far up the neck, I might as well be using my Baritone guitar instead. The vibrato simply doesn't have enough of an effect to warrant it's presence, which is a pity, because I like vibratos and all my guitars bar one have them.. What I am finding is that the guitar-like string spacing and the short scale do make me think differently when coming up with bass line, so for writing it's great, but I haven't yet come up with something on the Bass VI that I couldn't subsequently play on my Gus basses. Will I keep it? We're about to do some new recordings. If it gets used and is in the final mix of at least one song then yes. Otherwise probably not. I don't think there's anything lacking in the Squier version that a vintage Fender or CiJ re-issue would improve for me. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of getting a Bass VI that was more suited to my preferences - wider, shallower neck to give me a millimetre or two extra space between the strings and some slightly hotter pickups, but I couldn't use this particular style of Bass VI as my main bass even in a band whose musical style suits it more than most. At Squire prices it has been a worth-while punt. I think I might have been seriously disappointed if I had paid the full Fender price for this instrument.I'll re-evaluate it in the new year before making a final decision on whether or not to keep it.

[quote name='TheGreek' timestamp='1477166638' post='3160347'] Having said that, one of my heroes, Mick Karn, used one to unbelievable effect - check out his tones for examples of the Wal's versatility. [/quote] He did. But he sounded very similar (if not IMO slightly better) when he was using his Travis Bean TB2000.

[quote name='SisterAbdullahX' timestamp='1477227272' post='3160676'] Or this..... [media]http://youtu.be/UoS5q4buIq0[/media] Pretty great too! [/quote] Of course you get away with any old crap if you play over the original synth bass.

[quote name='moonbass' timestamp='1476652113' post='3156076'] Or just do it with a bass: [media]http://youtu.be/1XmcX9x4OqY[/media] Still pretty great! [/quote] That's horrible. Without that great sounding synth bass right up front it's become just another very average vaguely funky pop arrangement. Plus everything goes really weedy during the parts that would have had the long sustained bass notes which are reduced to a blip at the beginning of each bar. I'm surprised that Mr Mars' MD lets him get away with such rubbish.

Treat it the same as a band with two guitarist would. Different sounds, different lines. But also remember the awesome power of really tight unison playing too!

[quote name='landwomble' timestamp='1477303227' post='3161167'] Hi All, I was listening to a few old records over the weekend and one track jumped out at me. PJ Harvey's excellent early 90s album "Dry" has a track called "Sheela-na-gig" which has the grindiest bass tone that made me go "I want that!". I dug out some old Reading Festival videos and looks like the bassist uses a fretless Stingray with what sounds like a heavy scooped tone, but the bit I REALLY like is the grinding drive to it. [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkS_R7RDuMc"]https://www.youtube....h?v=xkS_R7RDuMc[/url] Is that just a touch of overdrive? It's not a fuzz and the tube drive on my amp doesn't quite get there. Any shortcuts to finding this tone much appreciated. I have a Jazz with a John East and a Precision and this track is not helping me avoid GAS and buying a Sterling SUB...! Cheers [/quote] Will it work with the sound of your band?

[quote name='mr zed' timestamp='1455556672' post='2980192'] My daugher bought me one of these for my birthday a couple of years ago. Keyboard player said she didn't realise there was a Mr Bassist [url="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bassist%60-hobbies-occupations-perfect-guitar/dp/B00FS5YFGC"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bassist%60-hobbies-occupations-perfect-guitar/dp/B00FS5YFGC[/url] This is allowed because it was a present and it could have been socks! [/quote] I'd have rather had socks.

[quote name='ahpook' timestamp='1477051215' post='3159514'] Why wouldn't you take the chance to check your tuning if you have the opportunity ? [/quote] There's doing it when you have the opportunity (during a guitar-free song intro or while the front man is telling the audience something important), and obsessively compulsively doing it between every song irrespective of whether your guitar has gone out of tune and holding up the flow of the set.

IME unless his guitar is very crap or he's keen user of a non-locking vibrato system, then it's entirely down to OCD/comfort blanket. Any modern guitar (that's something made since the mid-70s) is very unlikely to have machine heads so poor that they are causing string slippage. On the other hand he might not be fitting his strings properly in a way that they don't slip. I personally think that a lot of guitarists spend far too much time between songs fiddling with their tuning and completely ruining the flow of the set. No one in the audience wants breaks in between the songs where the musicians muck about with the gear even if it is silently. In the days when I was playing non-programmable synths, which are far more time-consuming to set up for each new song than a simple guitar tuning check, I made sure I knew exactly how to get to each new setting as quickly as possible from the moment the last note of the previous song had died away to where I needed to come in on the next without the band having to wait for me. I don't see why guitarists can't do the same. For me learning this is just as important as learning what to play on the songs themselves. Also IME you have to be very out of tune for most of the audience to even notice. I once did a gig where our guitarist had accidentally managed to change her pedal tuner from A440 to something else. For the whole set we played completely out of tune with each other although perfect in tune with ourselves. Only our (very musical) drummer noticed anything and kept asking us to check out tuning, which of course according to our individual tuners was perfectly fine. It wasn't apparent what had happened until the next rehearsal where it was much easier to hear that we were out of tune with each other!

The Terrortones actually did one gig without any PA at all. We had been booked to play one of our fan's birthday party at a known music venue in Newcastle. Unfortunately in between time the pub had undergone a makeover which involved taking out the in-house PA system and replacing it with... nothing. Luckily a member of the audience was able to lend us his guitar amp and an XLR to jack lead from a nearby rehearsal room, so that we had some form of amplification for Mr Venom and his theremin even if it barely cut over the sound of the rest of the band playing very quietly. It made for a rather "interesting" gig. I'm sure that even if we hadn't been able to find some make-shift amplification for the vocals Mr Venom would have made do with shouting very loudly in the ears of the most attractive girls in the audience...

It depends entirely on what kinds of gigs you are doing and how good the monitoring system is. My band plays all sorts of gigs where the PA ranges from just about enough for the vocals provided that we play fairly quietly (and no foldback whatsoever) to huge rigs with individual monitor mixes for each stage position and the only time I can actually hear any sound coming from my rig (as opposed to out of the monitors) is when I'm stood right in front of it! A lot of the time, if it's a venue we've not played before, there no way of knowing what level of PA is going to be present and unfortunately experience has shown us that even if a gear list is provided ahead of the gig, what is actually supplied on the night can be something entirely different. In these circumstances there is no way I could risk not having a full rig behind me. Of course you also need to consider that for some types of music not having a big stack of amps and speakers at the back of the stage just looks wrong.

The 355 circuit diagram I have, gives the inductor value as 15H, but when I went to buy one from my local electronic components shop it turned out to be quite a lot larger than I was expecting! IIRC I settled for a 1.5H component (or whatever was the closest they had in stock) and ended up with something that fitted comfortably in the control cavity of the guitar I was building.

[quote name='Andyjr1515' timestamp='1476970925' post='3158913'] Ah.....but I DO have a 25k linear pot! Just wired that temporarily and think I'm getting somewhere! With the pot about midway, it's almost same volume as the clean neck pickup, it's in the same tonal range as the neck pickup with tone rolled right off but a tad different. I think this is usable The other two switch positions, taking it through the inductor's split primary and full secondary, make very little difference to going through the full primary. As such, I might have a look to see if, instead, I can use the three positions to bring in three different values of capacitor... Still got no idea what I'm doing but it's immense fun (other than I should be doing other things today ) I will get a trim pot to replace the full size pot so I can use that in the final version. Thanks for all of the input so far, folks. I think I'm starting to clamber up some of the early foothills of the enormous learning curve mountain [/quote] The baritone circuit that I have for the Gibson 355 guitar uses 0.001µF, 0.003µF, 0.01µF, 0.03µF and 0.22µF capacitors for the 5 filter positions (the 6th is a bypass) if that helps?

Depends entirely on the musical style and image of band I'm in.

[quote name='3below' timestamp='1476909807' post='3158471'] This is what 'surprised' me when I put the LRC configuration and values into the simulator. More so when you think about the 'mudbucker' in an EB3, why would you want to further remove high frequencies. I have treated the pickup simply as a source of ac emf and not factored the pickup's resistance (impedance) and inductance into the circuit. I wonder if my simulation was too simple. More research / exploration needed (or an EE on BC). [/quote] Which EB3 circuit are you modelling? AFAICS the [url="http://www.flyguitars.com/gibson/bass/EB3_schematic2.php"]version 2 circuit[/url] has the choke and capacitor in series which should give a notch filter effect. I don't know what the value of the EB3 chokes were, but using the 1.5H choke from the 355 circuit and a .47µF capacitor gives me a 190Hz notch unless I've got my decimal points in the wrong place... The [url=http://www.flyguitars.com/gibson/bass/EB3_schematic.php]version 1 circuit[/url] appears to do something slightly different since it taps into the filter circuit between the capacitor and the choke. Of course given what we've been told previously it could all be Gibson misinformation!

Surely the varitone circuit should be a high-pass filter? Certainly the one I made copied (and expanded) from a Gibson 355 circuit sounded that way. The more usable settings made my DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker sound as tinny as a Telecaster single coil!