BigRedX

More crap form our German "friends" MOS. Once again I have saved you the trouble of clicking the link.

If you are going to be doing your own electrics then you really should invest in multimeter or at least a continuity tester, otherwise you are reduced to "monkey see, monkey do" and run into problems like this when the product doesn't match the information you have, and you won't be able to work out why things have gone wrong when they do. The problem with "soap bar" when it comes to describing bass pickups is that it is essentially meaningless. Unlike guitar soap bars which are fat single coil pickups usually based on the Gibson P90 style, all you can say about bass soap bars is that the casing is wider than a typical J-style pickup. What is actually inside the casing is entirely up to the manufacturer and unless they specifically state what coil arrangements are under the cover you don't really know. Information about the Claymore pickups on the Kent Armstrong site is fairly sketchy, although the implication appears to be that under the cover is a standard (Stingray type) humbucking pickup with two full width coils. However there is nothing in the description that actually confirms this, and it could just as easily be a P-style split coil or any other arrangement with two coils that can be wired together to give a humbucking effect. I suspect that the reason they have wrapped the back and white wires together is that these are the ones that need to be connected in series humbucking mode, but it would have been less confusing if they had simply labelled each wire. In your OP you appear to have shown just a small part of the supplied wiring guide. I suspect that being able to see the other options would have clarified exactly what each wire does. Again the ability to be able to read and understand a circuit diagram would be most useful to you. If you simply want to have two pickups (with each pickup wired as a series humbucker) then for each pickup solder together the black and white wires and cover each join in insulating tape. Then follow the Standard Jazz Bass wiring diagram you posted substituting white on the diagram for red on the pickup and black on the diagram for green on the pickup.

If you are unsure get your multimeter out and check to see how the pickup is wired without any of the wires twisted together. While it is convenient, there is no logical reason why one manufacturer should follow the same colour coding for their wires as another.

I played about 15 seconds of each of the tracks that I was interested in and the thing that struck me was that how terrible most of the isolated sounds were, but how perfect they are when you hear the final mix. It all goes to prove that there is no great bass tone, just one that works well with a particular combination of musicians and instruments, and why for the most part chasing someone else's tone is a futile exercise.

Unless the jack socket fitting is recessed, I can't see that tool being any more useful that either the right sized spanner or a good quality monkey wrench.

That's you problem right there. As a band you all need to be "on the same page" as far as gigging goes. Nothing breaks up a band quicker than not all of the members wanting the same thing out of being in it, or what may be perceived as unequal division of labour when it comes to getting and organising gigs - even though some members may be much better at this aspect than others.

It's great pity that not everyone's experience of Ashdown's customer service is as good as that. Personally I'll never buy another Ashdown product again.

As you know sound proofing and acoustic treatment are two entirely different things and need to be tackled separately. What's on the other side of those wooden walls? The outside world? How close are your neighbours? How close is any noisy stuff going on outside? How much smaller could the room be without compromising the usable space? For sound proofing you need mass and lots of it if you want to prevent noises leaking out or in. The current structure won't be very good at this. Ideally you want to be building a room within this structure isolated as far as possible from it, but that will probably eat up too much of the space and be too costly to be practical. At the very least you need to pack the space between the studs with RW3 and then apply two layers of acoustic plasterboard to the inside walls bonded together with Green Glue. And then maybe consider floating a floor inside this. Don't forget the ceiling. It need to have at least the same amount of mass separating the inside from the outside otherwise will be the weak point in your structure from a sound proofing PoV. Don't forget about ventilation. Unfortunately there is no way of working out how practical this will be without doing it first and being/hearing the results. Once you have successfully sorted out the sound proofing, you can worry about the acoustic treatment. If it's also a living space but not a studio or somewhere where critical listening is taking place you won't have to do much unless you also need to install mirrors and a hard wooden floor for the dance studio functions in which case you will probably need to have additional damping elsewhere. You'll need to install all the essential non acoustic elements first and then work out how to get it sounding decent afterwards.

What sort of band is it? Covers, originals, tribute? what genre(s)? Where are you based? There is no one size fits all process to getting gigs. IME of originals bands once you've got a foot in the door through either contacts or sheer bloody persistence, you need to make the most of the opportunity by being brilliantly entertaining. At one point with The Terrortones almost every gig we were playing was leading to two others - a rebooking at the place we had just played and someone in the audience recommending somewhere else we should play and giving us a good contact to talk to. Even then you do need to be politely persistent. Mr Venom would spend at least an hour every evening on the phone or social media reminding venues, promoters, bands we would like to support who we were and why they should give us a gig. If you live somewhere where there a few "local" venues then you will need to be prepared to travel in order to play. Of corse you could bypass the whole system and just organise your own gigs. Book somewhere to play and do everything yourself. Easier if you are an originals band as you can book at better-known band of the same genre to headline and your band supports. This way you also build up an impressive gigging "CV" that can be used to persuade other venues and promotors of your band's worth. Of course if you are a covers band very little of that (other than the fact you need to be entertaining - which is not the same as being technically good musicians) applies.

I tried it once. The process ruined one of my pans and one of the strings snapped when I tried to put them back on. All-in-all a complete waste of time.

You know what? If you want to learn a song the least you could do would be to buy an actual copy. Maybe the artist or songwriter won't get much/any of your money from doing so, but they definitely won't get anything if you "nick" it off a streaming service. If find it incredible that the owner of a musician's forum is advocating IP theft.

There are two ways you could do this. You could re-tune the Evertune bridge to D. It's probably not as quick and easy as using the machine head, but it could be done. However you could also set the bridge up so that dropping down to D was outside of the sweet spot. Then when you tune to D either manually or using a D-Tuner the string will drop to the correct pitch. You won't get the benefits of the Evertune bridge on that string while it's tuned to D but it will return to perfect E when you retune.

IIRC Kimbara were the import brand for FCN. I have a Kimbara acoustic guitar which was bought in 1974. It's OK but nothing above any other £30 MIJ acoustic guitar from the mid 70s. I suspect they came from a variety of Japanese factories as the quality seemed to change over the years. I always saw them as being a bit better than Columbus but nowhere near as good as Antoria.

It's a product that has been designed primarily for guitarists and they have decided to test the water with a bass version designed to fit a standard 4-string P or J style bass. It's probably of less use to bass players, but it depends on whether or not an instrument that should only need to be tuned once a day (and maybe not even then) is of any value to you. I'd like to try a version on my Eastwood copy of the Shergold 6-string bass because I thrash the higher strings quite hard when I'm playing "guitar" parts on it, but they are unlikely to make one for such a niche market.

AFAICS it works by holding each string at a constant tension that is user adjustable within certain tolerances - hence the need to stick to pre-approved gauges for each tuning. If you don't do any intentional string bending, the tension of each string should never change. For guitarists there is a compromise with how it is set up the respond to note bends between sensitivity to bends and the ability the the system to stay perfectly in tune. No mention of how it deals with finger vibrato, I suspect that will be too subtle to register on the system. I've got to say I'm intrigued, and would like to try it. It might be great or might be the mechanical version of bad autotune for stringed instruments. Unfortunately as I said in my original post on the subject there's unlikely to be a version that will fit any guitar or bass that I play any time soon.

This should do: The typeface used is a pre-digital version of Bookman. I haven't been able to find an exact match with the flourishes from any of the digital foundries but Bookman JF Pro made slightly bolder will get you very close.

I've always used synths (and MIDI since 1984) on stage. At the time MIDI was the answer to all our high-tech interconnectivity problems. Before that our gear was all different standards - Oct/volt and Hz/volt CV, +ve gates and s-trig, sync24 etc and we had numerous interface boxes and custom leads to get the all to talk to each other. Publications like E&MM which still put out circuit diagrams for this sort of stuff were essential reading in order to solve these kinds of problems. Luckily most of this stuff stayed in the studio and we just used recordings of it live. We did have to modify both the KX5 keytars we had in order to make them suitably gig-proof (all that posing you saw people doing on TotP with them was impossible in the real world without having to deal with numerous stuck notes and power problems). By the mid 90s I was running full MIDI backing for my band live on stage. We had about 15U of rack-mounted samplers and synths doing the keyboard parts as well as controlling the effects and patch changes for the live instruments - guitar, bass, electronic drums and vocals and doing the basic mix for each song, all from a MIDI file running from an Akai Sampler. Of course nowadays you can run most of this "in the box" from a single laptop. I can see one of my bands dispensing with MIDI on stage within the next 18 months apart from the link between a controller keyboard and the computer, and I'll be using the plug-in version of the Helix along with any other VSTs I need to process the bass.

It's almost as if they want MIDI to fail....

My next gig with In Isolation on Saturday 29th April at The Chameleon in Nottingham.

From our "friends" in Essex. Now you don't need to click that link.

I'm similarly phone adverse. In my case I don't need to deal with agents promotors etc for getting gigs as there is someone else in the band (our singer) who is much better at this than I would ever be. All inter-band communication between gigs and rehearsals is done by group text and email. Works very well.

For me it's been completely the opposite. Mains leads and XLRs just go on and on while all the exotic cables - especially any skinny ones with tiny connectors - fail all the time. In the days when I was using a Bass Pod and Floorboard with The Terrortones I was getting through ethernet cables at the rate of one a month, until I was recommended some very expensive ones from Van Damme which were supposedly coilable. I bought 2 which each lasted about a year before failing, and also stopping being coilable just before they did.

No good if they're not answering the phone though. If BD don't want to sell stuff from their web site, then they shouldn't have an "Add to Cart" button next to any of the items. I wonder what the legal situation would be if someone had bought and paid for a bass through their website, but because that hadn't been checked BD then sold it to someone else actually in the shop. Since for the instruments you are supposedly buying the actual example shown and not just one of several in stock it might be a tricky issue for BD.

Personally I don't like adaptors - it's yet another potential point of failure. And then the problem with all these tiny connectors is that you have to use equally skinny cables with them. There's no way I can get the chunky 2-core and screen cable that I use for my MIDI cables into a 3.5mm jack socket. For all these kinds of connectors I have an additional tested cable for every instance in my spares bag, because I simply don't expect them to be as durable as normal XLR or 1/4 jack leads. Some of the XLR leads I'm currently using were made up almost 30 years ago and are still going strong.

IIRC the specification was originally going to be XLRs when MIDI was first announced to the general public in 1982. By the time the first actual devices with MIDI interfaces had been released the following year along with the V1.0 spec that had been changed due to pressure from the Japanese Manufacturers to 5-Pin DIN for reasons of cost. Only Octave Plateau stuck with XLRs. Also IIRC once the 5-pin DIN had been standardised, any manufacturer not using them was supposed to supply suitable adaptors. Certainly my Tenori-On which has a single multi-way socket for MIDI came complete with the appropriate cable terminating in 5-Pin DIN female plugs. I wonder how manufacturers like Mod devices get away with using 3.5mm jacks and no adaptor cables?