NickA

Another rabbit hole down which I just descended Inherited. I love the sound of well played viols but so far I'm strangling cats .. scratchy gut strings, upside down bow hold, up bows are down bows, enequal tuning and the good stuff written in a weird clef. Spent an hour this morning replacing a fret gut and more time tuning it than playing it. No wonder the cello was invented. But then I put on some Jordi Savall playing Anthony Holborne and off we go again. The bow hold is quite different from that of a German bass bow as you don't touch the frog and have a finger on the bow hair. But you can see how one evolved into the other. Long way before I'm buying it a better bow.

I have one side of a shadow wing pickup. It was a two sided jobbie but one side failed so I disconnected it. What's left looks a lot like the wing pickup of an RB PRO setup. Yours for free if you want it. Pm me.

I tried a £25,000 tubbs cello bow this year. It spoke to me. It said: "so much for your prejudice against fancy antique bows eh? ... I'm beautiful aren't I, and you'll never own anything as good. Now piss off you rank amateur you".

You can pay 25k for a new gold mounted wooden bow. A really good carbon one is £7k. Commissioning one from Andrew McGill in Banbury will be upwards of £3.5k ( and a long wait). You really want to spend that? Go bowspeed, with your bass, try lots and dont rule out old ones. They would send you four to try in fact, but you need to have a budget, so best to go in the shop and decide what your budget is The problem being that every time you double your budget, you find something incrementally better! Caswells have lots of mid range bows and probs better for new ones than bowspeed, they stock mid to high end carbon ones too. My £1000 arcus S3 is pretty good tho. Does me fine for orchestra and around grade 8 classical. I may upgrade eventually but that's "want" not "need".

17 REMAINING!!!!!! I only had two cellos a guitar and a Viola de Gamba of my dad's! Trying to talk two of my orchestra bass section colleagues into an upgrade but that would barely scratch the surface.

My dad's cello went for restoration a year ago and is still not sold; tho negotiations are under way. However as it's a commission sale the dealer has no outlay ( they were paid for the restoration) but they still have a shop and a workshop to support. Most of all they return rare and lovely instruments to professional playing standard and the work is skilled, detailed, intense and long winded. I don't begrudge these guys ... I guess the bigger sellers buy cheap at auction and suck up the workshop costs before trying to recoup it all in the sales price. The odd unscrupulous dealer will put unrestored instruments on show and it's up to the buyer to ensure all the necessary work is done within the ticket price.

Sounds like you could just start up your own double bass room! How many do you have? It's really hard to put prices on old instruments, I've seen 19th century "German Basses" for anything from £2k to £15k, it really does need the advice of a dealer - or a day trying other basses to see where yours fit in the price range. The dealers always big up the sale price and knock down the buy price ("it will need a lot of work to reach show-room condition" etc). "Rob-Dogs" as my gran used to say. It's a jungle out there. Prices at the double bass rooms seem remarkably reasonable, so you might get a better price out of Thwaites (or similar), but might also have a long wait to get it (eg they have the identical cello to my Dad's teaching one up for £4k and it's been there for at least 18 months .. I was only asking £3k on musicalchairs). Looking forward to some pictures!

These are quite lovely...and I've never seen a leftie before. They're mostly owned by orchestral players and soloists for whom right handed is the only way. This kind of quality don't come cheap I think.

Well, you can advertise here, but "posh" basses don't really sell that well ( ie stentors and zellers will go, a John Lott, perhaps not). Musicalchairs.com? But it suffers from people wanting to try several basses, rather than travel miles to try just one. Bass shop ( thwaites, neitzert, Tofts, turners etc) but they'll sting you for 20% commission. Bassbags will also sell stuff on commission (10% I think) specialise in mid range stuff but like to have the odd £10k bass in stock. Good thing about these folk is that they know lots of people, get lots of custom; they all know each other and will commission-share if someone is hunting for a particular thing and they know where one is. I recently had to sell my late dad's cellos. Bassbags have agreed to sell his £3k teaching cello ( it was on musical chairs for a year with zero interest) but his performance cello ( rare 18th century job) had to go to a specialist restorer who charged us £5k to do it up and will take another £15k or so in commission when it sells ..... still better than selling "as seen" at auction. The value determines the best method really. Do you know what you have in that respect? Try here first!

May not be the bass playing. I had a right hand issue that only appeared when playing a 5 string electric bass. Turned out to be a ulna nerve problem from the way I used a computer track pad 😂. Does it go away if you take a few days break from playing? But yes I did have that rhomboid pain thing ( along with pins and needles in my fingering hand) . Maybe not from bass playing, maybe more from too low a work desk... Many hours of "postural realignment" with a variety of physios, none of which worked much till one of them found a single exercise that did the trick. ( Lie on front arms by sides, raise arms, still parallel to your body, pushing shoulder blades together, relax, repeat) it tenses all the muscle fibres then allows them all to relax together and also strengthens the rhomboid muscles so they're not over stressed by whatever you were doing to annoy them.

Looks like Underwood, quite an old one. may have once had a foil covered rubber sleeve around the metal socket with the branding on it. F it is, they're Quite expensive new. £180 to £200. Used one on reverb for £165. Not a shadow anyway. I have a 30yr old shadow one ( no longer used ) and that terminates in a 3.5mm plug with a metal adapter to take a normal 1/4" guitar lead, also no serial number on the piezos. I'm not keen on them ( too "clacky" and hard to get the pressure on the piezos just right) but some people really like them.

https://www.kauffmannsguitarstore.com/how-does-it-sounds/the-beauty-of-paulownia/?v=7885444af42e fair nuff. Some kind of wonder stuff according to these guys. Still won't get me trading in my Wal for a G4M 🙂 (or 40 of them at todays prices 😮 )

My bad about pawlonia. Don't know from where I got it being a species of pine! Much worse in fact. "Paulownia wood is very light, fine-grained, and warp-resistant. It is the fastest-growing hardwood. It is used for chests, boxes, and clogs" But it does have pretty flowers.

Wals and alembics are basically plywood. Just very carefully made plywood, with a fat bit of tonewood in the middle.😂

I've been getting together with a few friends just to play through some tunes. Sax, trumpet, keys, bass. Really interesting playing without a drummer as we have to keep in time without a beat. We four are so much better at open jams now.

Just reading the spec sheet on gear4music, where islt says the fingerboard is "laminated poplar" which I guess means plywood. The pine in these basses is reportedly quite soft as ( similar thread on Facebook ) they're said to dent rather easily .. But yes, at school I made a chopping board from "piranha pine" that was tough as £_&&. You'd need a chisel to dent the Brazillian mahogany core of my old Wal and the Shedua Warwick is pretty tough too. My solid padauk bass has marked a bit though. The issue with soft woods isn't so much dentability as the lack of sustain and high frequency transmission. May not be linearly related.

I bought a string winder. It even connects to an electric drill. Still an awful faff as the winder falls off the tuners too easily. Two people ( one to hold bass one to operate winder) might help.

To be fair they winge about fancy basses too. The warwick I bought from here a few years ago came beautifully setup, with an action so low I couldn't play it 😂. Job 1, jack all the strings up. Does anyone pull a bass out it's box and expect it to be perfect for them straight away? Whatever your bass, it's always worth going over the setup now and then. I reset the string heights, pickup heights and neck relief on my much used fretless Wal this week. New bass! Not sure why, as I doubt things drift much, maybe my playing style changed or the wood changed shape in the winter damp.....well worth it tho. Still setup isn't everything and a pine body and poplar board are never going to feel or sound like mahogany and ebony.

It's the best kind of practice 👍

I guess the p bass is pretty easy to replicate. The endless "has anyone cloned a Wal" threads would suggest some basses are a bit harder!

Especially if you copy something that already works. And once you ditch the endangered tropical hard woods, multi-layer laminations and hand soldered electronics it can evidently be very cheap to do. Over several years I converted my cheap bass into something that I hoped would be somewhere between a Wal and a Warwick, with elements of jazz bass. Added all those fancifications. Cost an f'ing fortune. Doesn't sound like any of those things either. 😂

I could have a hundred of those for my cheapest bass! It's like hifi, every tiny improvement doubles the cost ....and even then most people won't hear the difference.