NickA

The wedge on mine is a much more subtle affair! About 5mm thick at the thickest bit, so no effect on the neck profile. Certainly a very skilled job, but much lower impact than taking the whole neck off. Also it allows for adjustment of the side to side angle of the fingerboard, ie you can change the action more on one side than the other which is usually what's needed on an old bass built for gut strings being converted for higher tension steel. It's still going to cost a few £100 - normally the kind of thing you negotiate into the price when buying from a dealer .. ie "I'll pay you £5k for that if you change the action, fit a new bridge and add a new set of spiros"

You may not need a neck reset. They can put a wedge under fingerboard leaving the neck as is. Mine has one put in by Malcolm Healy when I bought it. Made a huge difference to the playability. For complicated reasons the action ended up too high again and I was advised to have a new wedge put in ... I sawed a cm off the bridge instead and it's just fine, no change in sound, just easier to play ( especially in high positions ). I think somewhen I may go to a mender and have an adjustable bridge fitted, can tweak the mwah on the fly then - and crank back up for classical stuff.

2nd / 3rd hand strings received from @Clarky today. Thanks mate. The bass indeed sounds huge (it IS quite large) - but it's the extra attack, sustain and articulation that are so nice to have back! The Helicores (though bowable) are dull and thuddy by comparison. Thomastik Spirocore - there is no substitute. Others may be more subtle, but these babies swing! Dont try slapping though, they'll have your thumb off.

Those perpetuals have a good write up: "Extremely energetic with very little effort and a juicy right hand feel when played pizzicato, yet strong and complex with good stability under the bow." Maybe true at the price (though still less than Eudoxas!) Anyway, that's an offer too good to refuse. PMd you. Why do the Ds always give out first? Just cause it's the longest string and there's more to fail?

Had a look on his site (https://thedoublebassroom.com/) whilst poking about for cheap basses; everything he lists is over £3000 (and very well priced at that for the quality). Does he have a hidden back room (a "bargain bassment" perhaps?). +1 for an old and well setup ply bass btw No setup will make a bad bass into a good one, but even a good bass won't work without being properly setup and, unlike an electric bass, it's not something you can do by yourself . Decent dealers and owners will sell basses that ARE properly set up .. Thomann etc probably not. Worth factoring in when comparing prices.

Realising that I have only Jazz to play until September; I decided to take the D'Addario Helicore Hybrid strings off my DB and put on my old set of Thomastic Spiros. The Spiros have been sitting in a box for 20 odd years (!!) and when I dug them out I found that the D string has a knot in the peg end (must have snapped some time) and the E has gone AWOL. So, off to my local bass shoppe on Monday to buy at least a new E .. probably a D too ... oh sod it, probably a whole new set (£166!) Has anyone tried both Siprocore Medium and Spiroco Light (weich)? What is the difference in sound? I think my spiros date from when spiros were spiros and the three different tensions weren't an issue. I quite like the idea of a lighter string that's easier to hold down - but don't want to sacrifice tone. NB: the bass is a fairly hefty 43.5" scale German affair - solid and loud with a big fat tone when bowed, and pizz sustain that goes on and on and on and ..........

I'm not really sure £600 is enough to get you into a double bass. Double basses cost £1000s not £100s. A £600 double bass is kind of the equivalent of a £50 electric bass - there is just so much more material in them. The cheapest new bass at Bass Bags is £1100 (not set up) or £1280 (perfectly set up) The cheapest new bass at Thomann is £598 (and a new set of strings for it will be another £100 or so, full setup around £150) Still: toe in the water and that. Sounds like the plan is to play acoustically, in which case something half decent would be good - but if the band will let you hide a small amp, then fitting a magnetic pickup (yet another £100) gets around most issues with the bass itself and just amplifies the strings; it will sound a lot like an EUB, but look more authentic and get you closer to the day you want to spend bucks on a really nice double bass! Second hand will give you a better bass for a given cost ... generally. In time you may end up spending money on it; but it spreads the cost at least; a quick scan through the usual places, shows only this at under £600 ... but it might actually do the job. This one? https://www.gumtree.com/p/double-bass/double-bass-3-4-michael-poller-beautiful-condition-/1348333529 (reviewed here on an old thread : Good luck and let us know how you get on.

Meanwhile here is the wonderful Esperanza playing her CzechEase (her full size bass has a nicer tone - but this is not something you'd complain about).

I guess that's one reason I bought it. The boot is tiny but the car is surprisingly voluminous for its external dimensions. Literally has "a wheel at each corner" which keeps wheel arches out the way. I load the bass bum end first through the passenger front door, pushing it in far enough that the neck then slips into the footwell. Lots of vids on line of people doing it. Here's the one I learned the method from. Note the bit about supporting the body using a pillow or the headrest, so the weight doesn't go on the neck. The neck will "probably" survive but it bends the tuners.

My 4/4 fits in my Skoda Citigo and frequently does, along with stool and music stand! Recline front seat and feed it in neck down the foot well and bum side on the back seat upright. The bloke at Bassbags reckons he can fit a bass in anything, though a BMW 3 series saloon was a challenge!

Stops him looking at his fingers I guess. But he must have an incredible memory for sequences of notes. I need a chord chart for an 8-bar blues and once forgot the opening bass line to Miles Davis' All Blues (the pianist had to play it to me so I could join in)! As I struggle to learn 5-string bass after decades playing but four strings ... I am increasingly amazed at these people's skill. (not a Theorbo but an 18 course baroque lute with 24 individual strings to tune) ... my experience with (my Dad's) viola da gamba is that it has too many strings, which are tuned in unequal intervals (not even the same intervals as a guitar) and all the music is written in the one clef I never previously had to read and POLYPHONICALLY so you have to read lots of notes in a strange clef at once. It was my, retired professional 'cellist, Dad's retirement project and out-witted even him! Theorbo and lute music seems to be mostly written out in Tab - which is something else I've never mastered. :¬)

The shop is rammed with stuff. all kinds of basses and more in stock out of site. I guess more 2nd hand stuff is sold on eBay, reverb and .... HERE these days. So they seem to have more and more new instruments. Years ago my home town had a fantastic used guitar and bass shop .. shop's still there but now only sells new .. and mostly fender (yawn).

Spread the load between first and second finger ( ie use both and alternate a bit .. hard to explain) else you're using the same muscle and tendon the whole time, use whole lower arm not just fingers. Do stretches on fingers of right hand. Soak right hand in hot water before and after practice. Some famous violinist (Oisterach?) said 10 minutes with your hand in hot water is worth an hour of practice. I had some physio for similar and it got better with the stretches and hotcwater ...though in my case it wasn't the bass playing that caused it but typing / mousing wrong. Bass playing just used an already strained tendon. One thing the physio said was DON'T stop playing, keep at it and do the stretches too.

Genius! I love it. Even without the audacious fingering, it would still be great.

Just right now watching him on youtoob!

Just downloaded Elizabeth Kenny's solo works from linn records! I used to go in the the early music shoppe at every opportunity but never saw an actual theorbo. Did have a go on a Racket tho, but last year when I decided to buy myself the " build your own racket" kit for Xmas found they'd discontinued it 😞

Ooh and someone has built an electric one. Not so fine looking mind.

TAS: Theorbo Acquisition Syndrome. I really need one of these babies to add to my bassy instrument collection. The 7 extra strings have a longer scale than my 4/4 double bass. Never mind your 6 string basses, this has 14 "courses". The idea is that you fret the top 7 strings and pluck the bottom 7 with your thumb to create a bass line. This particular one appears to allow some of the "bass" strings to be fretted too.

Jones has said he worries about sounding too like Jaco! I think they both pluck all over the place to get different sounds ... compare, say, teen town ( bridge) with " a remark you made " or " refuge of the roads " ( over the fingerboard ) and of course Jaco played fretted too ( Portrait of Tracey ... which I can only get anywhere near playing on the fretless for some reason ). Meanwhile Percy Jones on Noddy goes to Sweden has about every sound you can get out of a (fretless Wal) bass! I count both as major influencers .. but much as I like Mick Kahn and Pino P, (and others from that great British fretless era, eg Andy Pask) I can never sound anything like them. ..and Trevor, you need Wal no 3. A walnut faced fretless would complete that line up nicely!

Nice little article and couldn't be more right. the only true Wal is a fretless Wal .....though the fretted ones are also decent basses. How can a slab-bodied bolt-on neck bass ...be so special (and expensive)????

you're right; I tried playing left handed as an experiment and it was worse that starting all over again. Apparently, if you have a symmetrical fingerboard you can get away with swapping the strings around without moving the bassbar and sound post ... sounds dodgy to me, but I suppose if you're playing through a pickup it doesn't make much odds. Anyway .. way off topic.

No no don't do it! The complicated stuff is all in the fingering hand so you south paws have an advantage over the rest of us! And swapping the bass bar over, fitting a new bridge and reprofiling the fingerboard is an expensive way to de-value a valuable instrument!

There's a VERY early 4-STRING Smith in the for sale section at the moment if this is giving anyone painful GAS. https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/338291-new-pricedrop-smith-pas-ii-1981-new-york-a-piece-of-my-history-quote-from-ken-smith/ Big pricey .. but I believe it's negotiable. Have to get a go on a Smith sometime, bass bucket-list material.