NickA

I switched from spiros to helicore hybrids some 20 years back to make bowing easier. Never noticed a coating. good strings .. bowable, pluckable, fairly soft under both hands, flexible for easy thumb position....last forever. NB: Switched back to spiros a few weeks ago, as I had only jazz gigs coming ... Wondering why I ever swapped for helicores. God that growl and sustain. With the Carbon bow, they sound and feel great. Maybe a certain lack of subtlety .. and rather loud. Playing Brahms 4th next week ... Keeping the spiros on. See if anyone complains! Meanwhile, went to a jazz session, hosted by a pro trio ... the pro bassist was using helicore hybrids ( and had the same bow as me ); sounded great.

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56, bad back ( prolapsed a disk years back) none of my basses weigh under 4.8kg. I'm with the OP. They just feel so good. Not that I'm doing two hour sets six times a week in a casino band ... which a fellow Wal owner and (facebook) acquaintance manages. Solid mahogany, nowt like it😃

I got my first 5-string a few months back. I was playing music with a low D in it and was also drawn in by the extra low notes and the increased number of notes available per hand position. BUT: most of the 5-strings I tried (including a Pedulla, a Zon, some Stingrays, plus a Chowny and some Warwicks at the EM bass bash) seemed to sound and feel a lot different on the bottom B string, it didn't feel "in keeping" with the rest of the bass; of these the stingrays were OK, but a Sandberg VM was perhaps the only one with the same feel and sound across all five strings - but that had a 34" neck (and I have small hands). Bought a 2nd Wal in the end ... just ... well I'm a Wal freak and couldn't help myself. It IS a different instrument to a 4-string. First you have to be a lot more careful about string damping as there are more strings to damp than you have free fingers to do the damping; I've had to adopt "floating thumb" which is actually good and I'm now using it on the 4-strings too. Second, it is not always easy to hit the right string when you are used to none of them being further than one string from the edge, the A in the middle is confusing and at first I'd find I was plucking one string and fingering a different one; I'm getting there. Third the neck is wide so it's a long way across to the bottom string. My hopes to plant my hand further up the neck and still get a bottom E ... yes, sometimes it's good, some music that on a four string demands all kinds of up and down the neck suddenly doesn't. But apart from remembering I don't have to change position, the tone up there isn't quite as good as you get from playing the same notes in a lower position, so I'm still based in first position. All in all, I'm glad to have a 5-string ...for one it's improved my four string playing, its an interesting learning experience and its opening up new avenues; if I could only keep one bass .. hmm. Not sure. Think I'd stick with the 4 string..... which I took out to a session last night and did not miss the extra string one tiny bit.

Judging by my dad's cello bow collection ... People just keep the old one and buy another. I have two bass bows and two cello bows so far.. and likely a third cello bow by Xmas. Then more bows than electric basses even! Ps: don't think wooden bows sound "richer" really. Anyone? Maybe a bit "darker", all very subjective. My bass is a big fat dark sounding one, the new bow gives it lift / clarity ...but so might a £2000 wooden one. Gotta go try a load .. but don't write carbon off. A £2000 carbon bow is nothing like a £200 composite one.

Malcolm is still going in boxhill. T&G Martin in Oxfordshire? Worth a visit (you can see Simandl's own bass there too!) Casswells Strings (near Silverstone)? Stock Arcus and Coda carbon bows, not many wooden ones though. In the midlands: Bass bags (stock ..or at least can get.. Arcus but their wooden bows are lower end). Turners Violins: lots of wooden bows at all prices. Tim Bachelar in Leicester (http://www.batchelar.com/bows.html) I was bow shopping myself a couple of years back. The problem I found was that I wanted to compare good carbon bows with decent wooden ones (budget around £1k) and failed to find a dealer who stocked equivalent wood and carbon. I think around that price a carbon one is better than wood and dealers who stock carbon bows can't sell the wooden ones. Consensus seems to be that if you have a big budget, wood eventually gets better than carbon again! Meanwhile, I borrowed an Arcus S3 bow (hand made carbon) from bass bags (down the road from me) and liked it so much, I just kept it. My then bass teacher liked it enough to buy one himself. Massive step up on my old "brazil wood" bow. Water proof (!) drop proof (it's been dropped on its stainless tip from a music stand with no ill effects) and no CITES issues (no tropical wood, no "mammoth" ivory) and none of the expensive silver or gold trimmings that wooden bow makers seem to like adding and which really thump up the cost; just stainless and titanium. Should have tried lots more bows, but this one hit the spot.

The original pickups in my j bass were single coil for sure. The two being wound in different directions and having opposite polarity magnets. Turn one pickup off and lots of hum results. The delanos are silent. The sound I think comes from the narrow aperture rather than the singlecoiliness per se. So you can make a humbucker that sounds close to a regular single coil .. trad humbuckers ( stingrays, Wals etc ) have a wider aperture.

I have a pair of humbucking j pickups in a bass (Delano) but Don't fender make a version too? I think they have two coils inside but only one around a magnet.

Sandberg VM5. The split coil pickup is the other way up so closer to the bridge on the bass side ( which is how all p pickups should be imho ) also has an H near the bridge so can do Stingray noises too, but it's easily turned off. One of the best basses I tried on a recent 5 string hunt. Leo fender said his best basses were the g&l ones ....so it seems he didn't think he'd got it right first time with the precision!

These are great. I have four electric basses and on not one of them does everything quite line up ( the Wals included ), so don't get too sore about your unaligned neck. On my Northworthy bass, the misalignment of neck, pickups and bridge was my own fault as I left Alan Marshall making the neck and took the body away to fit with tronics ... And yet!!!! This one has the best string/pickup alignment of the four, by dint of the schaller 3d bridge. Actually the Warwick isn't bad; the bottom half of the two piece bridge is squiff but the upper part is adjustable side to side ( with difficulty ) so the strings can align with the pickups and neck. Looking forward to seeing the end result anyway. Nb: Gotoh tuners .. great, very smooth, very low gear ratio. Bought some with trepidation for the Northworthy bass. Actually work better than schaller lights despite feeling a little flimsy by comparison.

Tried gigging my TC polytune this afternoon. Put it in the signal chain between bass and amp so that turning it to tuning mode blocks the signal to the amp. Good for swapping between the electric and double basses. Works very well, locks on right away all the way down to the e basses bottom B string. Very accurate in single pitch mode and good for a quick check in "poly" mode ( it swaps automatically ). BUT the double bass does act as a big microphone, so external noise ( the vocalist and guitarist warming up even ) gets into the tuner a bit and can switch it into poly mode. Isolating the sound of the dB from everything else, I guess, is the problem, especially if a pa is pumping out electronica behind you. Now understand the issue!

G strings handles "just". In fact at a recent gig I did a list minute check of my fretted bass and adjusted it to the tuner ..which was set to JUST!!! Sounded awful. Never ever ever use just on a fretted instrument! As for orchestras, really good ones ( especially " authentic performance " ones) will use " just " or other carefully chosen non even temper; then the base key will sound perfect and contrasting keys will sound Different. In my kind of amateur orchestra we tune to the same A, then everyone does their own thing .. cellos and violins tuning strings in perfect 5ths, double basses in perfect 4ths ( which is an argument for tuning basses in 5ths!). If you get a melody line then it's usually played in just ( avoiding open strings) but no one is good enough to play say an A minor melody in natural temper of E major! Anything with a piano in has to be even temper anyway .... though I gues if you're lang lang you can get your piano specially tuned for a given performance ?... probably ( I guess not ). Bit of a pet subject 😉

I use gstrings tuner app on my mobile. Set it to 5 string bass guitar, put it on my bridge at orchestra ( much more accurate than listening to the oboe) and put it on my amp when doing jazz. Free, accurate ... does the job. I have just bought a tc polytune tho ... impulse buy.

Nice to see Christian is using both index and middle finger ('cause that's what I do). I used to play with the middle finger only and got awful blisters. Most people seem to use the index finger only. Once had the chance to ask Alec Dankworth how to avoid bleeding fingers and he said a) share the duty, b) turn your amp up (ie don't pluck so hard) and most important of all c) practice a lot!

O Oh Ohh Simandl. I hate it. It is the dullest book ever written. Full of tuneless sequences of notes. But sadly it is a hell we all have to go through to get the basics down (tho you do need to read music). There are other techniques, but this ancient tome, designed for classical bassists playing gut strings with a bow and an action measured in inches, is kind of baseline standard. I've seen so many rock and bluegrass bassists stalled with a bunch of bananas technique trying to change notes by shifting their whole hand about ... I'm not convinced you can injure yourself doing that, but it's severely limiting.

Yes, very. Theorbo best .. but the guitar and harpsichord grew on me. Been playing Bach and correlli on my 5 string bass guitar .. now have to find some Visee to play

Hard to find anything that works really well for DB and EB. Best compromise I found was PJB (the neo-speaker range, BG-150, BG-300, PB-300 etc) but if you found EA too "HiFi", the same will probably apply here - and they only have one input, which means the dreaded ABY switch or fiddling with leads between songs (I switch between passive for DB and active for EB, and generally keep the EQ dead flat except for room acoustic compensation, so that's not an issue). PJB's "piranha" speaker range (BG-400) seems to have a bit more sparkle and has two separate channels as well. Might hit the spot, but does come with a weight penalty. I note that an increasing number of DB players are using Markbass amps, which are also well liked by EB players. Worth a try if you can find some (lots in the Gallery in Camden, but it's a way from Wales).

It's also on Mr Morewood's own site ..https://elitevintageguitars.com/category/wal-bass-pro-ii-e/ Better photos and, yes really, a jg build plate. seems the last two jg basses (1152 and 1153) were pro 2es. This then could be the FIRST Pro2e ( well, some of it) And it's ash not "mahogy".. Thanks to Mr Raggarts Wal history ... from which I have cribbed with impunity 🙂

Know OF him. Through similar Wal selling attempts. He usually has two or three Wals, they are often proclaimed to be for sale, but prices are rarely mentioned. This Wal, specifically, has an unexplained replacement neck ( no bad thing for a player, tho a collector wouldn't like it ) also has a knob missing which, in this case means the shaft is broken or gone; needs a new pot soldered onto the PCB and short of 3d printing one , a new knob would be hard to find. At around £3000 it might be a decent budget way into Wal ownership for someone prepared to do or commission repairs & renovation.

Ah the great and well known Joey Morewood. For a man with so many lovely guitars and basses he appears to know nothing about any of them. Disingenuity I fear, in pursuit of a greater margin. Wouldn't touch this bass with a bargepole at anything near that price.