cytania

Thanks to all the replies so far. I half expected a roasting. Comment about wood is interesting as my current NT bass is mahogany/walnut, the old Ibanez maple/maple. Very interested in what people are saying about poor setup/poor neck joint on P and J basses. I certainly thought the strings on the shop Fenders were wiry and overlight...

Going round a shop the other day. Tried out some nice looking Fenders but just playing them acoustically I missed the way my own basses respond. Pluck a note and you can feel it in the body, immediate finger feedback. Is it the Fender's big D shape neck that makes them like a dead log? Even the Jazz I picked up had a big neck I wouldn't prefer to play. By the way this isn't just actual branded Fenders but also of the copies I've handled. As soon as I picked up a Washburn Taurus, voila, there was a bass that sang in the hand. Could this be a Neck-Thru thing? But my old Ibanez is bolted and has my X-factor. Am I looking for OTT sustain? This isn't an attack on Fender by the way. I love that classic bass sound but somehow their 2 classic designs leave me cold. Do they have to be broken in? Or are there 'good 'uns' that do resonate and most be tracked down?

Part of this is how big the venue is. Could you really fill it with just your rig? Once the answer is no then you have to set your levels for what sounds good in the PA mix. Luckily my outfit just do small places. Particularly lucky as last gig the PA was missing alot of the important leads. I spent most of the afternoon setup just getting a working arrangement and zero time to obsess on my bass stuff. Particularly as the support were to use it first. No chance to DI or mike it. Just the natural push. Oh and I didn't get a wedge either. Anyway up on stage I couldn't hear the drums as per usual, then I moved forward to a 'rock'n'roll teetering near the stage edge' position and Lo! I could feel the kick and hear myself. Was it my secret sonic weapon perhaps? An old orange box painted black under the Barefaced cab... And the audience said we sounded great :-)

What alot of quick replies, thank you. I've watched a clip of the kid with the white bass but he's as awkward playing from the tab as I am. Had alot more success working from the root upwards as suggested. Interesting to hear Fenders were involved, I'd have sworn it was some 60s semi but clearly I don't have the ear ;-) Wood is clearly a great player of anything stringed. It's just tricky following in non-standard footsteps. Ah well practice, practice, practice, drunkeness...

Been trying to get a grip on this bassline for an upcoming party gig. It's oddly up-front and nasal sounding. Lots of slides and hammer-ons that just serve to make the next note late. It's like Ron's idea of bass playing was directly transferred from flashy jazz soloing on an archtop. Any idea what gear Wood used? Any clips of this bassline being played?

I think their bassist is Tyler Pope, anyway the clip I saw he was digging into a blue/black bass and then next time the camera visits him the E string is hanging limp. Gig nightmare! A moment later he's playing a postbox red bass with a full set of strings. Holy emergency changeover batman!

Tough gig for Willie Nelson's bassist Bee Spears, for first half of the set the sound just wasn't gelling. Him and the drummer kept looking for time queues as Willie quickly lurched between one old hit and the next. Mister Spears was manfully keeping the beat up as the drummer appeared only to have a snare and some brushes. Also Bee Spears was playing a Gibson Les Paul type bass which had a very trebly sound, sorta country but really up with the guitar end of things. I bet he was wishing for his old Epiphone or a Fender or anything with more umph. Maybe the stage sound was bad, maybe it's having a legend as a bandleader who doesn't pay much attention to what's going on behind him but the sidesmen kept slugging away and eventually things came together. Epic bass endurance. Did it appear better to anyone actually there, wasn't great on the TV for me...

The Subject: Ibanez SRX400 The Mod: ACG EQ02 preamp 3K/S The Problem: Nice bass, lightweight contoured body, slim neck that's just the getting worn in but nasal, false, snidey tone. Ibanez use 'phat eq' a single tone knob lo-mids boost. Adds big balls but now I've gotten used to playing bass it seems artificial with a shimmery/shuddering quality, particularly when compression is used. Price £180 (but hey you could pay that for a pedal that just makes things worse). Tools Required: allen key, spanner, philips screwdriver, watchmaker's screwdriver, bib wire stripper and cutter, successive drill bits to 8mm, wet/dry paper, dowel. Installation: the Ibanez SRX400 has a precision style big scratchplate. Before I even ordered the preamp I checked underneath and mercifully found a big cavity. ACG send a battery clip and jack but since the Ibanez already has a battery compartment and a decent jack I didn't use these. Next I cut out the removed the vol and phat-eq carefully clipping the wires close-in and stripping 3-4mm of wire. Then it's poke them in the hole and screw down. Takes a steady hand. The tone stack pots connect with ribbon cables that terminate in prongs. Again care is needed to gently insert these into the connector without bending a prong. Once wired up I checked all was working without the scratchplate. Make sure the volume is up. All very good. I used pritt sticky pads to secure the board to the bottom cavity back. The board is coated with a thick insulative layer. Several stuck together hold it firm, but I'm working with gravity placing it where it would come to rest anyway. The next stage was to add a hole to the scratchplate. I specificly went for the 3 knob version as I could see the passive tone knob would be a squeeze. As it was Ibanez left quite a space between their two controls so I drilled a third hole halfway between the originals. Start with small drill bits and work up. Larger drill bits may leave a slightly ragged hole so wet/dry paper on a 6-7mm should be used to finish. The filter stack knobs are slightly larger than 8mm whereas the volume pot fit straight in. So I gently whittled the holes fractionally larger with wet/dry paper constantly checking with the pot thread. At last they both fit through. At this point look to see if the ribbon threads are naturally folding into the cavity. Try not the fold or crease them too much. Flex them to where they should go around the other components and wires. Start securing them to the scratchplate with nut and washers. Tighten and again check they are folding away neatly. Check no wires are caught as you finalise the scratchplate. The knobs fasten to the stack shaft with an allen key. Here the trick is to work the shaft anti clockwise and then fix the knob where you'd expect it to be, then work it clockwise and see if everything makes sense visually. Result: a purer more open sound. Haven't yet really mastered the two filter stacks but I'm thinking of the lower knob as a sweeping spotlight across the strings and the top knob as an enlivener. You can produce some silly settings that are flat, muddy or piercingly bright but I quickly found a magic combination that made this bass more alive than it's every been before. It's like the strings have more bounce and life. A pleasure to play. Snags: Beware a picture in the instructions of the single pickup versions that is different from what you will receive. A quick email from Alan put me right. The current preamp is one board for all configurations with differing connectors There is a slight noise when I touch the knobs, suspect I need to improve grounding but it's no biggie.

Do they do part-exchanges there?

Hi Andy I get the impression you're bass buying at present or considering an upgrade path? You're trying to break down a bass into cost options. OK one thing to be clear on is that a maple topped bass with a 'superb 3D flame' won't sound different from a maple topped bass that is just 'nice'. Some things are cosmetic, however... No manufacturer picks crazy materials for a neck most are made of maple or similar woods. A cheap bass may have used a decent piece of maple but the frets won't have been done so well, the neck won't be shaped well (might suit your hand though), the finish may be horrible and sticky/glossy, the fret ends may be sharp. These make a big difference to tone because our human hands are playing that neck and ouch, wearing fret-ends smooth yourself is annoying. More of the same... maple necks feel hard to play and you can tell they are more harsh/zingy (I like mine) whilst rosewood is warm/fuzzy/indistinct? The distinction between the good descriptive words and bad descriptive words depends of the care taken by the maker and what your ear expects. At present my ears seem obessed with fuzzy/thumpy sounds and I'm falling out of love with my clean, crisp, piano-like Ibanez (which is all maple, neck and body). Now when I played a gig last week I changed basses andf thought I was giving different sounds. Did the band notice? Did my wife in the audience notice? Nah, not a bit of it... but I noticed and I'm doing the playing ;-)

The main vibrating wood is the neck, this is why Danelectro get away with Masonite. The body is in some ways a damper. At the extremes a balsa wood bass would have next to no sound whilst one made of cast iron would sqeal forever. Most tonewoods tend to be in the happy middle zone. Alot of hoodoo is ascribed to them and some of it is quite illusory. One big differential already mentioned is the rosewood board as opposed to the all maple neck, here glueing on the rosewood is stiffening/dampening the maple. It's difficult to generalise on bolt-on vs neck thru as the quality/stiffness of each varies. So a well bolted bass could sound brighter than a poorly made neck-thru. Also manufacturers tend to compensate so if a neck jointing system is very bright they match it with a duller wood. Head spinning now, off to lie down../

That's it Lefty it's the bass I was keeping way low. Amp is an SMC hybrid, one valve rest is solid state. Like the pedal suggestions, I've been shy of them up until now but maybe's the time to try a few...

Thanks for the replies, I've not taken the soldering iron to the Ibanez so it's safe for now. Next rehearsal I'm going to try starting off with a low gain and seeing what the master can do. Feel like maybe I've gone up a blind alley soundwise. Time to experiment some more...

Well in an effort to tame my Ibanez SRX400, which has a big active MusicMan style pickup I restrung with flatwounds. All very good, allows a slidey jazzy touch an just right for old school rock sounds. However... I find I prefer the amp gain turned right up and the volume almost at the point of cutting out. Nice, fuzzy, sustaining sound for use on Oasis' 'Roll With It'. Trouble is the vol control only needs one kock to be silent or OTT deafening/speaker-blowing. A bit of tape over the control works, sort of... My thoughts are; 1) Get a passive vintage styled bass. 2) Treat the Ibanez as a project and fit a Precision split pickup with simple passive circuit. 3) Am I just hiding my imprecise technique behind a fuzzy sound? Now my wife was in the audience last night and says she didn't notice any difference when I switched basses. Is this a case of she'd have noticed if the sound was wrong for the song or am I just getting tone-itis and should just play everything on my bright 70s rock type bass and be done with it (swopping instruments between numbers is another on-stage complication)?

Here's my take on Two Princes, think of it as a funky/jazzy line; ---------------------------- ---------------------------- -4-5---1-2----------------- --------------4-5---0-1-2-3- -r-p----i-m--r-p----i-m-r-p- I've indicated fingers I'm using American style; index ring middle pinkie. Works best on flatwounds, imagine it's an upright ;-)

Hi Rasher, check this out regards your sig; [url="http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/hunter_thompson.htm"]http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousqu...er_thompson.htm[/url] Interesting huh? For me I wanted to play in a band but increasingly felt like my electric guitar playing was going nowhere. Electric guitar is like making shards of pretty broken glass, beautiful but not for me. Bass is more like strumming my acoustic, driving the music forward, making rhythmn.

Real question Pete is do you want to play a piece of music only available in score form? Do you expect to play in a theatre or orchestra pit in the near future? If the answers are 'no' then leave reading music on the backburner. The basics are not too hard to learn and I'd expect any basschatter given a few evenings could work out what notes were required and tab out their own bassline however... When classically trained types enthuse about reading music they are elevating ease and speed in reading music. The big goal is sight reading, see the staves play the notes. In the pro music world the time interval between recieving the music and being expected to play it can be short. So if you're aiming high getting comfortable with notation is a good thing.. As a bumbling amateur I'm still at the 'figure it out in a fortnight' stage.

I'm drifting to Dr.Dave's position. Inspired by the posts here I took my spare bass to rehearsal last night and tried it for the first run through. Sound was fine, but the neck felt wrong, then the body heft was wrong (who put that horn in my chest?), I was stuck in second gear... Once I'd gone back to my Spea the sound was suddenly better and playing more fun. It's probably familiarity. Like meeting up with an old girlfriend and wondering what you ever saw in her. Now I'm angling to get another singlecut and p-ex my Ibanez. Darn, darn GAS...

Way I figure it is your backup bass is there for dire emergency. If your main bass goes horrible in the middle of a set the band won't be too picky about how you sound, so long as there is bass. I have little stickers on my amp so I never lose the sweet settings, perhaps a second set of stickers for bass two? Of course the real ultimate backup is the exact same model as your main bass.

Got to try out the unaltered version of the Esprit bass yesterday (Nottingham's old SoundControl is now SoundCheck). Initial impression is light but bulky. Body is actually quite small and headstock a bit large for my tastes. Big chunky neck but on the upper side of what I prefer. Original bridge suprised me. It's actually mounted above the body on two lugs, would prefer a real anchor like a Warwick or string through like the GUS mods. GAS dissipating. Nice, but not special must-have...

Korean brand, distribution is patchy in the UK but can be ordered from FretMusic. Great singlecut shape, great pre-amp, great neck. Some of the finishing is cheap, plastic tuner lugs, stick-on-fall-off headstock logo but... Was good enough value for me to consider another in a different wood. Was hoping someone had seen the new cheesy graphiced ones and could tell me it was a decal I could worry away at not a properly inset inlay...

Aargh! You've sent my GAS for it into over-drive...

I have one of the originals with a basic dots fretboard, but check this; [url="http://www.spearguitar.com/product/pro_2/S-p/s-2e.asp"]http://www.spearguitar.com/product/pro_2/S-p/s-2e.asp[/url] Lovely wood, lovely finish but what's that twisty thing at the 12th fret? Looks like a cheesy jazz-bar woman logo. Kit Kat Klub anyone? :-(

Came across this; [url="http://www.guitarjunction.com/shop/view_product.html?prod=1687"]http://www.guitarjunction.com/shop/view_pr....html?prod=1687[/url] New bridge design that appears far more adjustable than last year's single bar. What will that Gibson mini-bucker do soundwise? Cheeky bird graphic too!

Second set I've had that have snapped, and not even when I was attacking them bigtime. Off to buy some D'Addarios tomorrow, will try flats and see if they tame my Ibanez. On the subject of my Ibanez SRX400 I am finding that although the bridge looks rock solid where the strings go through the metal is getting quite gnarled up. Strings can pop out if tuner slackened. Oh and while I'm at it anyone noticed the tuner collars loosen over the months? Found a loose one on my Ibanez and a couple slack on my Spear (whose R has fallen off as predicted). Annoying night for my two basses...