HowieBass

I'd be tempted to replace the volume pot - when you turn it 'off' it sounds like you're losing a connection to ground.

I lasted two songs, then decided she was unlikely to improve... shouty rather than powerful, out of tune rather than distinctive. Give me Wolf Alice any day!

That colour body really shines with the maple board - inspired choice!

[quote name='skej21' timestamp='1435165850' post='2806166'] Gibson don't use ebony now after 'the incident'... They've replaced it with 'black richlite' [/quote] Hmmmm, what incident? Just Googled 'black richlite' and it sounds exactly the same as Ebonol.

... plus, should you feel it necessary, you can angle the pickups to get individual string to pole distances across all 4 strings.

Very nice looking indeed. Is the front chambered and the back solid?

I think he was a bit hard on the Eurythmics but apart from that, pretty much spot on...

A destructive edit is only going to be a problem if you save the edited file back over itself - I would assume this not to be the case when splitting one recording into individual new separate files/songs. The same holds true when converting from one file type to another.

I wonder if Epiphones are a better bet since they're put together AFAIK by Cort...

Audacity?

I've always thought of growl as a pleasing throaty emphasis of the mids, but what I hear as my mids probably wouldn't overlap with what you hear as yours and as for throatiness... Is growl what you get before bark?

Have you warned the neighbours?

I've never done this to a bass but I think I can safely say you won't be needing a hammer! LOL There are proper pincers for lifting frets so I'd get those. Also, from what I've seen, briefly heating the frets with something like a soldering iron, is the way to go before you pull them; it softens the glue (which these days seems to be a liquid cyanoacrylate - you'd use that if gluing in wood veneers in the slots left behind).

Good to see that it's all done apart from the setting up. Will this be the first 12 string bass you've owned?

I've read that D'Addario strings are hex core which is supposed to offer higher tension/less compliance that round core so as suggested try those.

Can't help you with the bass but that painting of the baby is giving me nightmares already!

Get to learn how the individual tone controls work with the others set 'flat' at the centre detente - the issue here is that you might not have a flat response even when a tone pot is centred, it all depends on how the preamp/EQ is voiced. Do try cutting in addition to boosting as has already been mentioned. You might find that there's an interaction between the various frequency bands of the EQ stack which can make it harder to find your ideal tone compared to a simple passive cut tone control. Enjoy!!!

Hmmmm, but a violin is a violin isn't it? I would imagine it has different resonance modes and it's not a great deal of mass able to resonate and sap energy from a vibrating string... do violins suffer with dead spots? I genuinely don't know. I'm sure that all components of an instrument influence its behaviour and certainly strings, pickup construction and position, electronics, how it's played (fingerstyle, pick, muting) make clearly audible differences but I wouldn't dismiss the woods involved, otherwise how can people consistently hear differences between maple and rosewood fingerboards?

One thing to be aware of is you could well have problems stringing flatwounds through the body because of the break angle, in which case go for top-loading with those. Bear in mind also that stringing through needs a little more string length, so depending on what strings you're using and the scale length you might find the silks coming close to the nut.

So nobody tried arguing that wood makes no difference and it's all in the fingers eh?

At least it arrived in a box! I bought my Cort B4FL off eBay and it arrived wearing nothing more than a few layers of bubble wrap... happily, it was in perfect condition!

I now like to think of a bass as a structure that supports a vibrating string where the vibration leaks out at each end - in effect leaking out at the nut and bridge, and also at the point where you stop/fret the string (fingerboard/fret), these points, where the ends of a vibrating string are fixed, behave as imperfect mirrors. Since these end points are imperfect mirrors, they're unable to contain all of the vibrational energy of the string, so some vibration leaks out beyond the nut, beyond the bridge, and beyond the fingerboard/fret, into the rest of the instrument - into the neck, the headstock and the body; which act as heat sinks. These heat sinks will have characteristic resonance modes, not unlike the wooden blocks of a xylophone. I see the body and neck of a bass acting as absorbers of energy, they take it from the string, but only at specific frequencies, frequencies that correlate to the resonance modes of the instrument - this is why and how dead spots occur where the major contribution is from flexure of the neck and headstock. I imagine dead spots are less of a problem with necks made of very stiff materials that resonate at high frequencies outside of the range covered by the bass note fundamental and low order overtones - such as graphite and aluminium?. So if construction method (single piece or laminate neck, inclusion of graphite reinforcing bars, types of wood, bolt on or neck through) makes a difference, and it seems it does, I think it's likely because there's a process of some of the vibration energy being sucked out of the string, resulting in the colouration of a note in terms of the balance between the fundamental and its overtones. Maybe the wood tap test is looking for notes that don't interfere destructively with the range of frequencies you want to 'sing' with a bass guitar. All in my humble opinion obviously.

If it does it only on the open B and not when you fret the string I wonder if there's a problem with the nut slot? When you say the slightly heavier gauge strings (the EMPs) have less 'ring' this might be because the extra .005" keeps it sitting in the slot better. You could try putting a small piece of paper in the slot under the string to see if this reduces/eliminates the buzz; if it does then the slot is probably a bit too wide.

[quote name='ebenezer' timestamp='1434034784' post='2796158'] I am lead to believe cort actually make the lakland skyline basses, they are then shipped to the us for final set-up...please correct me if I am wrong! [/quote] You're right... Cort also build basses for several other brands (such as Squier and Epiphone).

A new GB75 is going to set you back about £440 (from a UK dealer) and surprisingly Thomann (generally acknowledged as offering very good deals) want close to £450. If the vendor is local go and have a play!