NickA

Depends what you want! The John East ones are very clean, but clip horribly if overdriven with a less than full voltage battery. Alembic also quite HiFi. Lusithand, we're told, a little gnarlier. The Wal one "distinctive" in it's soft distortion .. roughs up beautifully if you play hard. I play my Wals a lot and hardly ever change the batteries... The bass with the East ACG in it once went flat mid rehearsal .. but maybe the battery was duff. My own version less good as it derived a split +-4.5V supply voltage from a potential divider ... which used more power than the 8x op-amps! As for function, all have a low pass filter for each pickup, a pickup blend and a master volume. Filters different tho. Wal and Alembic have filter Q switches ( boosts at the cut frequency). The East acg-eq-01 has variable Q filters ( two extra pots). Wal and the East have a "bright boost" /"pick attack" function; switched in the Wal, variable in gain and frequency on the East ( yet another two pots!) The East has the most tweakability ( too much ..hence newer versions only available on ACG basses). The Wal one is most organic. Choices choices.

My own version of the Wal electronics was a purely functional copy with no attempt to emulate the exact sound ... couple of FET x4 op-amps, a few resistors and four pots. It worked pretty well, but wassn't reliable. That particular bass now has an East ACG-EQ-01 in it that can do "some" wal like noises but really isn't the same as (like my own design) is as linear and wide bandwidth as possible!! Did Wal deliberately degrade the sound path to get a more "organic" sound or is it just a happy accident? !! Who knows. Sadly we can't ask him and Paul is just making new from the old schematics I think. Anyway it's really interesting to see the schematic as I've been sort of meaning to go through my own Wal to do that ... and now will never need to 🙂

Seems mighty complicated for what it does ( buffer each pickup, filter each pickup, sum them together, add in some hp filtered signal for pick attack ). And capacitors all over the place! And why those transistors? Weird stinky poo. One thing is that transistors are not very linear, so probably putting those in creates some distortion ...in which case using just the right transistor might be important.

The narrow neck is ugly, but with the wider fingerboard and a new tailpiece it's workable! Least of our worries!

OK! So we're thinking blockless due to the inward curves in the upper ribs just before they join the neck (visible in some of the photos I took) and we're thinking unconverted blockless due to the narrow (likely beech) neck. South German / Tyrolean 1880s. But not necessarily too bad a thing so long as the neck doesn't wobble (amazingly it doesn't) This whole project has kind of stalled as the orchestra don't really want to spend a few hundred quid in order to gain a bass worth maybe a couple of thousand when they don't really want to own a bass at all. Tim Batchelar is too busy and short of parts to fix it at the moment. The chap who was playing it can't afford to buy it, let alone buy it and get it repaired, and they won't give him the bass to fix up at his own expense and he won't spend much money on it if he has to give it back! I'm wondering if I should make them an offer and get it fixed up myself, but then I'd have to sell it really ... or maybe persuade them to sell it on here as a do it up project ... neither of which gets my mate a bass to play, but at least gets it out of the cupboard it's living in and back out in the world. Ah basses, dontchaluvem.

Oo, a compact surface mount Wal tronics clone. That would be good to have. Bit unfair on Electric Wood...but I guess they've had many years to reap the profits of the design work.

Great info. We'd guessed about the rather basic conversion from 3 to 4 string but that it's a "bockless wonder" is a suprise. My first poke at it told me it DID have a block. How do I tell for sure?

Second that. And you'd have to lose C, C#, D, D# on the bottom string, rendering much cello music unplayable ... I'm intrigued by the existence of 4ths tuned string sets though and off to read up. As a cellist originally, I tried tuning my first bass guitar in 5ths ... didn't last tho.

Man up! 😉😁 I had full strength Spiro's on my 4/4 and no trouble with night in Tunisia .... But is your action too high? You can go really low with high tension strings. Higher positions are much easier since I dropped the bridge a bit and thumb position possible without injury. Nb: switched to full strength Eva pirazis a couple of years back, to make bowing easier, intending to swap Spiro's back in for jazz, but the Eva's are ok and stay put ... I'd probably struggle with the Spiro's now!

I'm a huge pjb fan for double bass, but I'd call it "accurate" "transparent" "hifi".... Not exactly bright. No tweeters. Does sound a lot like a double bass does without amplification.

I shipped a £10k 'cello to South Korea once, then to Hong Kong then home a few years later. The shipping company made it a double skinned plywood crate then packed it in the container with all my other household stuff. I left the double bass with my dad though!

The 4 is boire? Looks just like my ovangkol one. I thought boire went out with the bartolinis. Quite a pod there!

Replace "Alembic" with "Wal" and I'm in a similar position!! Likes = the sound, the flexibility. Dislikes = the ergonomics, the price and (in the original ones) slightly dodgy build tolerances (eg is that neck angle what it should be, and why are the strings not evenly spaced?) I think Pete Stevens was knocking them out quite rapidly in the late 80s / early 90s .... not that it changes the SOUND, which is what it's all a bout IMO. Though the workmanship on some of the Alembics is a bit special don't you think?

Especially if you have a signature sound dialed in by expert sound people using specific plug-ins / effects etc. I guess there's no point having controls on the bass if you have "a sound". I think Joe's sound is great; but I don't really think it's straight out the bass or entirely due to his fingers. I'll bet there was a lot of "tweaking" going on to get there.

Oh man!!! He'd sound great playing anything. What a gig.

Certainly is. Makes my pjb flight case giggable.

Of course I did. It's a bit like seeing someone else snog your girlfriend, but I'm a generous chap 😂. He loved it but didn't make me an offer. First time I played a ( lovely walnut ) fretless custom (1985) I wasn't well impressed. £550 seemed expensive. It takes a while to get into the Wal groove. As I'm sure you know Wal sounds are also to be found in the playing of Percy Jones, Mick Karn, Colin Bass and many more; Chancellor, Lee and Flea are outliers for me. But that the bass can do all that says a lot.

Absolutely. And there's come back as no-one wants a bad name here and lots of stuff does the rounds. EG I believe I have Beedsters old pb300 active extension cab ... though this is the first he'll know if it!!

Excellent place to look for a bass ..but what's their commission like? I think most dealers take 20% ( bass bags a bit less I think), but dealers will up the price which softens the commission blow a bit. I thought of trading mine in for one a little better quality and significantly better condition a few years back. I'd have spent £10k to get the better bass, the dealer said he'd put mine up for around £6k but he'd do £1k of work on it first so couldn't pay more than £5k and wouldn't do a comission sale without the work being done. He suggested I sell it privately 🙂 . ...since when Tim Batchelar has declared mine "a nice bass" and made it sound better than the £10k one. Dealers hmm.

Also here. Though it tends towards orchestral and hence rather higher end stuff than basschat. https://www.musicalchairs.info/double-bass/sales

My case says Wal on it. Most people haven't a clue what it means. I get asked " is that a Warwick"? " Who made that?" Even a professional jazz bass player asked me what it was at a jam session.... before begging a go on it. Disappointing but reassuring lack of recognition! Anyway WE know exactly what it is and are very pleased for you. What year? Did you get it / check it on the Wal database? http://www.nedcom.nl/WAL/ PS: Good to see a tool fan not insisting on Maple facing, only 4-strings, mk2 body. You chose wisely imo 😉

Re Eudoxa .... Used to use them on my cello but price aside, they went out of tune with the slightest weather change and the silver winding first turned my fingers black then wore through, freyed and made my fingers bleed. ...if they didn't just randomly snap first. Bunch of crap ... But they do sound lovely under the bow, especially if you like that slight "chuff" as they start to sound and aren't too bothered about volume. £230 for my db's set of Eva's was quite enough cash ..and they're so good I've stopped swapping back to Spiro's for jazz.

Indeed class B or class AB was the trad hifi amp. Class A being better but much too lossy. Class C high efficiency but lots of distortion. Class D (pwm) getting so good now that A and AB likely to disappear. The gnome, the elf and the pjb power amp in my pb300 and flight case are all class D. Run pretty cool. It's true that my 450W of pjb is quieter than my old 350W of trace ( class ab) ...but trace watts were always bigger! No-one would use class C for audio surely. Awful distortion.