NickA

Get another of those bridges run off and @funkle might buy it off you. He seems to be a bridge short of the exact Wal sound .. perhaps 😉

Probably another "tiny percentage" thing ... but don't you still have the pickups wired like a Wal pro-bass not a Wal custom? As I recall, that means the individual coils are loading eachother slightly whereas on the custom they are all buffered individually before being summed; that's going to rob some treble .... maybe. I'd hack back through the thread .. but it's gotten a mite long!!

Pressure moulded from what? The real ones are machined aluminium.

Sometimes just needs moving around a bit. I think the placement is more important than the thing itself. Sometimes they slip or fall over and get put back wrong then need repositioning. Still a skilled job though.

Why buy new? 2nd hand is cheaper and you get to try it out before you pay for it. Spent £4k on a 2nd hand bass once though ... but it's actually worth more now, so doesn't count ;¬)

DIY project? That Smithalike neck joint looks pretty professional, but the headstock, cavity cover and the huge knot in the body wood ... not so much. More importantly, how does it sound?

I find that one quite upspetting. Having proudly worked it out in the original key at bass register, I watched originally to see what fingering and key she used .... Only to find she plays it AT PITCH. It's not massively easy on a cello ffs. I don't agree with her bowing mind ... I'm a bit of an Anna Bylsmer fan 😉

I tend to just play that stuff on my cello! But there is a satisfaction from plumbing the lower depths as well as soaring to the rosin dust ... and some things I originally learned on the cello, just sound better on a double bass ( Bach2 serenade, Rachmaninoff Vocalise for starters).

Talk to lots of people, dealers included, they know stuff. Try different basses with different strings. Get the set you like most with the most recommendation and stick with it. In end the notes you play matter more than what they sound llike. In the 35 years I've owned a bass it's had three sets of strings. Should have dumped the helicore hybrids 10 years ago mind.

Changing the bridge height. I got Tim Bachelar to put adjusters on my bridge, so now can change the action. High bridge makes the bass more sensitive and improves the bowed tone greatly. Low bridge great for jazz with a softer sound and more of that "mwah". This explains something another luthier once told me which was that you should raise the bridge to get the best tone ( more pressure on the front of the bass) then raise up the finger board to get the action you want. Ideally you'd probably need a highish bridge and some mechanism for changing the neck angle. But an adjustable bridge is much simpler.

I have those Facom wire cutters and a halfords bicycle cable cutter too. Tend towards the bike cable cutter as I don't want to damage the Facom (have you seen the price of them now?) 🙂

Listened to the very end now. Kind of hard to tell over a pc sound card and laptop speakers ... so plugged my laptop into a PJB BigHead's USB port and it's output into my bass amp (also a very clean PJB thing)! As you didn't grace us with a head to head against that Wal that's lurking in the background, I swapped around between your recordings and my Mk2. I reckon you're 90% there for some settings at least. The lusithand certainly adds the vital bit of fuzz. My Wal is a bit brigher and has a harder attack, maybe a bit growlier (low mids?) ..and that "clipped" sound gets more dominant the more I lay into the strings .. on the other hand it's fitted with DR HiBeams to make it brighter and I've found that pickup height and action make a deal of difference to the sound too. So probably you're now within the range of sounds that come out of a Wal with different setups. Looking forward to the new neck ... and then a mahogany body. And then there are some Wal owners who are convinced a black poly coating over the wood also affects the sound (they're surely wrong) 🙂

Ok. Just ... Wow. Fantastic clean technique too ... evidently Simandl is all you need. And a reminder that I don't listen to enough classical music. It's like she's playing an extended range cello. I especially enjoyed watching to see how she keeps from tangling her bow in her pony tail 😁

Certainly has some Wal like qualities! What became of the Wal clone neck Andy made for you? I've lost track.

And the point of a streamette is? I mean you could always get a streamer. The usp, of the corvette and the main reason for its popularity, surely being that it was relatively cheap.

New neck .. Good move! I think most 3 to 4 conversions they just squeezed an extra string in and changed the nut. You see some strange goings on in peg boxes where an extra peg has been forced in. Sometimes one string even has a non matching tuner. All this variety just adds to the charm of double basses 😁

Thread ending advice there! Mine has always had a crack on the edge of the board. I might try fixing it now. Just need to find some ebony to make dust from.

Wow. Did they need to change the neck? If not it must have had a super wide string spacing when new? I was told mine had originally been a 3, but I see no sign of a conversion. I reckon it was built as a 4 back in 1880 something; but it would still make a very close spaced 5 ( and need a new fingerboard due to having one of those Romberg bevels under the E).

There are suprisingly few 5-string double basses in the world ... combined with a suprisingly large number of orchestral bass parts that go below bottom E. Beats me. I guess the reason is that even the 4-string bass is a fairly recent thing, many old basses having been built as 3-string basses. Whilst you can make a lovely antique 3-string into a 4-string, making it into a 5 would be a stretch too far ... hence not many nice old 5-strings about; and hence 4-strings with those ugly (IMHO) extensions. Plus most parts don't go below bottom E and sometimes you really need to lay in to those low notes that no-one else in the orchestra can reach (tuba and contra-bassoon excepted). Something I've noticed about those few double bassists that play 5-strings is that they don't play them like a 5-string electric bass, they mostly play in first position using the B string to get notes below E ... whereas on a 5-string electric you'd likely play a 4th up and get the advantage of a shorter scale whilst still getting a low E and a range up to Eflat without changing position. Better tone I think. Owen's 5-string NS was a thing of wonder though, so especially if you're going to pluck rather than bow, go 5 if you can find one.

Had some of my spiros for 30 years! Rosin doesn't age them. Expect at least a decade, but they do snap occasionally.