lownote

My 940FL wot is for sale on ere is a little gem. All wood, well crafted, light as a feather and no training wheels. If they're all like that you're laughing.

Have pulled the trigger on this head for my Cab 47 and 27. Barely 150w RMS, and half that with just one of the cabs, so will be interesting to see if it can ruffle my trouser legs even turned up full. But then I am gearing up for a purely hypothetical career playing fretless faux upright in small venue jazz blues and even folk, so I might be OK.

Many thanks! This could take me some time.......

Did you play the regular score for this, as found by googling, or did you modify it in some way?

How do you make that orange alert with the @ symbol and a member's name?

@Lozz196

Be sure to post link to your video when it’s done. Thanks

I have converted two basses from fretted to fretless. Providing care is taken in the filling and sanding there should be no reason for the fret slot inserts to be palpable.

My thoughts are completely irrelevant. My admiration is so total there's no room left in my head for thoughts.

Cheap, too, compared with the Trace 2x8. Just £250 new and a bit more than half that secondhand if you're lucky, like wot I've just been. .

But Ashdown may soon be handling Trace servicing.

So excited. I haven't had retail therapy since... two days ago, at the Coop and this is better than an 18 pack of Stella, even. Paired up with me Cab47, and an Ashdown 300 Mag Evo II and my two fretless basses it's goin' to snort. I'll start with a 6 pack of 7 inchers (cabs together), then try the 27 on her own. Then make a decision on the future. Keep one, keep two, etc, etc...

I had the Bass Gallery correct the 12th fret note markers on my Revelation as they were out. This involved blacking out the originals and adding new ones a centimetre away. As you might expect the result was professional and not obvious at all in anything but bright light, close up. Not expensive to have it done, but then I didn't need the whole board done. You'd need to get a quote.

It's a tricky one. I guess it's the frequency and necessity of the habit. My sax teacher sometimes swabs out his horn during a practice session as well as after px or gigs. Anal or what? But if you are that's cool, just seems a lot of faff to me. I only clean my sax when the sound starts to bubble through the spit lake in the bell. My basses get a wipe over if they look or feel gunky. Being fretless dirty frets isn't a visual issue, and one being a white bass, ditto. Many years ago I was at a party in the Caribbean. Suddenly the bassist in the local calypso band offered me his bass to sub him for a bit. Quite new to the bass I was overawed and grateful he thought that much of my nascent abilities. I was a slightly less overawed when I found out he'd had the runs all day, hence the need for a time out.

I recently watched Steve Lawson's masterclass on fretless in SBL and both he and Scott counselled against this, as 'slide and find' quickly becomes an ingrained sloppy habit (their words, not mine) . Their advice is to teach your fingers where the note is and hit it first time.

😂😂

I only play fretless now. It offers you a great deal more creative freedom and is easier to play fluently, IMHO. If I go back to fretted for any reason (usually chordal playing) I find they get in the way. A critical variable is 'mwah', that singing sound you get as the strings vibrate against the fingerboard. Don't make the mistake of thinking 'mwah' is what fretless is all about. It isn't, necessarily. Mwah will fascinate for all of a day before it starts annoying the t*ts off you and all around you. Whether you get mwah is determined mainly by how low the action is set and the nut is cut. A very low action and low cut nut slots will give you mwah. If you lower the nut slots to no lower than around half a mil off the fingerboard and stick to a conventional action height your bass will sound just like a normal fretted bass, but with more freedom to be creative. Another factor is lined or unlined. Major name educators like Scott Devine and Steve Lawson insist that lined is sensible because it gives you precise finger placing control, which can be tricky, especially high on the fingerboard as Drax says. Others like me just find lines distracting. I only own unlined fretlesses simply because they're what came up when I was looking, but I very rarely wish I had lines to guide me. Perfectly happy with unlined. I quickly learned to play by ear and look at the fingerboard far less than I used to with fretted. Finally you will find fretless a little more difficult if the side dots are between and not on the notes, as is often case with a conversion. Even more finally, just go for it. It may not be your cup of tea but you may love it. More people on here than you might think play fretless.

I currently have a Book of the Dead* file on my PC so when I go down for the third time I don't have to waste my last thought on telling Mrs Lownote where the jewels are. * Ancient Egyptians used the BotD to give the dead instructions for the afterlife.

I do that with desktop lights.. is it a mains outage or a bust bulb?

Hmmm... the Sound. Fantastic. I've always been a great admirer of Cort styling, although not keen on this zebra effect with the top grain, prefer the grain blander. Seems to be full string spacing too. Optimum prime. I had a GB75. Beware if the pots go as mine did they're proprietary (sp?) and wirerd into a board, so replacing them is a real pain. Otherwise very serious bit of kit for the money.

There are others doing the same and borrowing ideas from SD on other instruments. Classic example is Jay Metcalf's Better Sax.