Diablo

You forgot to mention it comes fully PAT tested, and in authentic vintage amp style, is condemned due to failing said test Already said 2 hours early old chap.

I've never done a bass neck, but with lots of other wood you put the wood to be bent or twisted in a tube (piece of 4" drainpipe from an B&Q or the like will do the trick), wrap it in towels or an old duvet to keep heat in, boil water and feed it into one end and vent the other end. A kettle with the switch held on does just fine to make the steam, just keep adding water so the element is covered. Give it 30-60 mins to get the hot moisture into the wood, remove from rig and it will bend as easy as you like. Clamp it into the shape you want and leave to cool. How that works on coated/lacquered finishes I'm not sure. Using the method in the post above but with near boiling water in the bin would have done the job in a few mins rather than weeks as the heat just speeds the process up no end. Cheers, Rich

[quote]Let's not forget that music/bass playing isn't just Mustang Sally down the local.[/quote] Err, it was last Friday at our gig! Love it or hate it, the crowd always boogie to it. Most of the punters are there to have fun, and that song always goes down well at a general party gig however cheesy the seasoned musicians think it may be. If the punters love it, then give them what they want. As for bassists and food - well what about the poor tree that died to make your instrument. And do food-protest bands only play instruments with no animal content...? Do they actually KNOW what goes into making all those wires, pots, finishes, colours etc? Animal-based food for thought! Cheers, Rich

Just thinking out loud for voltages and levels and pup heights, I can understand that there may be "dead" areas where the strings and fields are not so happy or effective. I don't know, perhaps that is why there is such a different sound from plucking a string in/out rather than up/down.? What I suppose I should do is connect up my oscilloscope and see what the voltage signals and magnitudes are doing then mess about with setup. Not for a few weeks though, work and hols mean not much play-time for me. Cheers, Rich

Well I'm glad the first post generated some great info and lots of perspectives on this. For my gig last Friday I decided to do a setup on the J in the afternoon. Rather than lift the pickups I lowered the action (which kind of did the same thing of course) and reset the intonation. With the amp gain set on full for the J it gave the same levels as the P on 9 tenths, so pretty much as close as you like, and at that setting both were showing a nice green LED input level and only when really trying with the low E would the red over level LED just flash momentarily. Previously the J would not even light the green. I also set the master volume at 2/3rd on my Boss pedals which does raise the input, but not far enough to develop any distortion. I did not mess about with the pup volume knobs through, I will try that at the next outing on Friday. Too hard to do it at home, my practice room is too small to get a good feel for the sound. Must have sounded okay, the headline act bassist asked me if I'd sell him the J and amp as he loved the sound....! It certainly was not my playing that lifted up a bad rig, my gear is better than me my a long chalk. Cheers, Rich

Must admit that Andy Baxter put me on to Elites Player Series 45-105 Nickel strings. I just love the slightly bright but full sound from them. They do sound great on a P or J in my opinion. I've never liked flatwounds at all, just not my bag. I don't even like the "sticky" feel of them on my fingers. Cheers, Rich

At least you have two empty bottles to bash him over the head with, or to insert forcefully as required. I never like saying "no" to anyone who wants to borrow gear, but there is always that 1 time in 100 that the person is a moron and breaks your stuff, then walks away and pretends it was nothing to do with them. More and more I'm afraid I just say no, explain that my gear is my gear and I am responsible for it, and their feck-up is not my problem. I have a lot of specialist tooling for vintage motorcycles and the same applies, it stays in my workshop and I am the only one who uses it. Why didn't he DI into the desk...? Would have saved him going to A&E to have a wine bottle removed..! Cheers, Rich

what kind of bass player turns up for a gig without an amp....? I often see and have drummers share core kit (all but cymbals) but never backline or guitars. I personally don't drink before a gig, and very occasionally have a pint in an interval, but that is it. I'm not sure I've met a bassist who can neck a bottle of wine and still play a tight set. Cheers, Rich

That router video is seriously foolish - has he never heard of a router table and push-sticks? If you use your fingers to make a living you owe it to yourself to look after them!

With the 6x 5" the sixpak only puts out about 190W as it is a 12ohm speaker setup, so you need an extension cab to get the power up. Two guitarists each running 60-80W amps at full chat means 400W or more required on the bass, and not being into turning things up to max, it does make more sense to run more speakers and a lower vol on the amp. Either way, gig last night I had the sixpak and 2x10 extension cab sat on top with volume set on 6 out of 10 and I could hear myself nicely but without drowning anything else out. Must have sounded okay, the bassist from the pro band who followed us on stage came up to me afterwards and asked to buy my setup! "not for sale" says I. Cheers, Rich

I'm afraid for my machines that badge profile has too many varying radius curves. You are probably going to spend more than its worth to get a company to create the CAM file and mill it as a one-off, like £80-£120 which is a lot for one badge. Arrk, CRDM, proto-labs and the like (google rapid prototyping) will lead you there. There are companies in China that you can email CAD files to and they will CNC them and send you the parts within 3 days but again it is all based about min order value. Cheers, Rich

The funny thing is I've yet to see a relic'ed guitar that actually looks like authentic wear. They look fake because they are fake. Not my bag at all!

3D printed parts have a rough textured surface look to them, you have a bunch of hand working to do to smooth them off. If you want bevelled edge like the Marshall logo, rather than square edged, you need CNC mill rather than laser cut. Usually anything to be 3D printed or laser cut comes with a min order of £80-£100. Do you have an image of what you have in mind? I've got 3 axis CNC milling but I don't have very good CAD to CNC file software, as I don't need it for 99% of my stuff I make. I just program by hand which is fine unless you have splines, in which case it takes ages. The Marshall badges will be die cast/moulded rather than die cut I would expect. Cheers Rich

I love playing "good times", not that I can get it as clean and accurate as the album track though. One day....

The observant among you will have seen my various threads and comments about being lost in the mix, having funny burning smells from my Laney RB7 (300w, 2x10 kickback combo) and needing another solution. Volume + clarity = happy me. I realised that the first thing I needed as a decent amp. Without that I was wasting my time with anything else. A trawl of the for sale section on here, a few PM's here and there and finally I did a deal with Kev for his PJB M500 head with 6x 5" piranha speakers. 700W at 2ohms and a very high quality cab on wheels seemed a good buy. As standard that is a 12 ohm load so only ~200W output. The Laney RB7, although sold as a 300W is only actually an 8ohm load at 200W. For the full output you need an extension cab, but at full volume it smelt VERY hot pulling only the standard cab speakers so no way would that pull an extension cab and be happy. So here I am with the PJB and the RB7. I need to get more air shifted, and get the PJB M500 onto more load. It seems crazy to buy an ext cab when I already have a 2x10 albeit currently a combo. So it was time to do some DIY cab mods and here is what I got up to. First was to order a 2 pols speakon male-male cable and two 2 pole speakon female sockets from fleabay. My RB7 still works, just smells a lot when at high loads, so I did not want to bin it all. But it has no method of isolating the speakers from the amp. So I took it to bits, popped out the speakers and saw they are two 16ohm units in parallel giving the 8ohm total load. They use simple wiring and push on 3/16" connectors. It is therefore a very easy job to choose a place in the back of the cab to drill two holes and fit a speakon socket into each. One speakon is connected to the RB7 amp output wires, the other speakon was connected to the pair of speakers in the cab. Now by using the speakon external cable I can complete the link from the RB7 amp to the 2x10's, so in effect operates as it did. BUT - I now I have a speakon cable that I can connect from the second output of the PJB M500 amp to the RB7 speakers, so in effect it gives a 2x10 8 ohm extension cab when connected in this way. I ran this setup tonight at rehearsal, the PJB M500 amp, 6x5" pirhana speakers in the PJB cab, and the RB7 2x10 as an extension cab. Wow, what a difference. The 2x10's give really meaty bottom end, trouser flapping E and A strings, and the upper levels are taken care of by the piranhas. Sound quality of the laney speakers when run from the PJB are a different world to the RB7 amp. The RB7 amp would get very muddy and distort at moderate volumes, but drive the same speakers from the PJB and you get lovely clear sound as far as 7 out of 10 on vol, which was as far as I needed to go to drown everyone else out. I actually backed off the vol from there, it was just a test. The mods cost me a total of £20 and half an hour of time. A very easy and cheap way of getting an extension cab that seems to really bring life, clarity and volume to the whole mix. The speakers in the RB7 actually seems pretty good for budget stuff but the amp is clearly no where near as good. The advantage is that by taking both cabs to a gig I end up with a spare amp head that will run either speaker cab so redundancy on both sides if something goes belly up at a gig. You will see the red/black wires as the orginal wires from the amp to the speakers, which I redirected to the speakon "out" socket. The purple and brown wires as the ones Iadded from the speakon "in" to the speakers. I fixed the two speakon sockets into a flat area at the back of the amp where they won't get bashed and are out of the way. I also marked the back so I know which is which! Here should be some pics of the mods. Cheers, Rich [attachment=158733:20140326_155331 (Medium).jpg]

I'm just going to start a new thread with pics to show what I got up to. It worked great. As you will all probably know it is not a case of turning the other guitarists down, the overall sound volume is dictated by the drummer who only seems to have a switch that is either "off" or "loud". So the guitars turn up to be heard, and even with a kickback cab pointing at my head my old Laney amp was not up to being heard. I could feel it though the floor, but that is a very rough sound that does not tell you much about your sound. More in the other thread coming in a few mins.... Cheers, Rich P.S. - guitarists both said "WTF", then with amp vol on 6 from 10 I could hear every note I played clear as you like. Job done.

Frankencab is ALIVE bwhahahaha My ears are ringing from my home testing, 500w LED just flicks on occasionally, we are good to go. Will report back with pics of mods when I get back from rehearsal tonight. Cheers for all advice and info, all good stuff and I appreciate it. I also know somewhat understand why one of the guitarists with an 80w amp can drown out my 300w effort. Tonight, however, he's gonna get his guts thumped by me. Cheers, Rich

[quote]In many ways though this is something you could do in the privacy of your own home but not something to do in public[/quote] I'm not sure if that implies I risk blowing stuff up, letting magic smoke out, or just looking rather foolish by investing my time into the worlds worst bass rig! I'm just waiting for some speakon sockets to turn up. Just to clarify that I'm not completely mad, I've got a 700W 2ohm amp which is plenty. Plan is to use a 12 ohm 200W cab (6x5), and an 8 ohm 250W cab (2x10) as a start point giving 4.8 ohms total at around 400W. That should leave plenty of headroom on the speakers and the amp. If that does not do the trick I will add another 2x10 at 8 ohms to give 3ohms total and just under 600W, which again is keeping the amp and cabs all within their limits. Why am I doing this? Decibels. Me vs two guitarists and 1 drummer has not been a fair competition so far, so for the gig this Friday I'm going armed

Cheers. I'm not going to even think about changing the original pups in a '68, that would be sacrilege. I'll have a play around and lift them tomorrow, I don't play hard so can't see strings hitting pickups being an issue. I've got a set of Boss ME-50B pedals, I'll see if they can boost before I go and buy a pedal. I've tried winding up the output vol on the ME-50B before and found after about 6-7 on the vol it just distorts rather than gets louder. More experimenting to do so thanks for the suggestions to try. Cheers, Rich

I guess the cheap Chinese copy of a PJ that is in my local cash converters didn't make the top 10 then?

Bought a combo off Kev, easily sorted out collection arrangements and payment, all done and dusted in less than 24 hrs. Great piece of kit too! Cheers, Rich

Tonight when playing back to back my 2011 Fender P, and 1968 Fender J, using a decent amp I realised just how low the output on the J is. Both are in good condition and set up pretty much as per the Fender manuals. With the P I can have the amp red input level LED flickering on all strings with normal playing, which is where it should be set. With the J it does *just* light the green LED on the E string but no chance on any other string, and no way even playing hard will it light the red. I just wondered if this is par for the course, or if there are some tricks or techniques people use to up the signal from vintage J's? Cheers, Rich

Looking at different heads and amps it all comes down to how the impedances stack up to give the total power out from the amp. Cabs in series you add the ohms of each, cabs in series you use the 1/ formula http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/higher/physics/elect/resistors/revision/1/ Now looking at the spec sheets from some head manufacturers they say it is fine to mix, for instance a 12 + 12 + 8 + 8 = 2.5 ohms when all in parallel. Or a 12 + 6 = 4ohms, so if people have mixed cabs on their spec sheets, what is the reason it is somewhat frowned upon to mix impedances? I realise you will end up with different voltages, but is it not the power that matters given a bit if V=IR and P=I squared R? Is there a guide where one should keep impendances within a few ohms (ie 12 and 8, or 8 and 4, or 4 and 2) rather than stick a 12 in parallel with a 4 for instance giving 3ohms total? Cheers, Rich

Speaking of the Wilburys, I'm just a bit too young to remember them much other than the episode of Dukes of Hazzard when Roy Orbison played the Boars Nest! But my parents went to see Roy Orbison play live. He was the only act on the bill. Walked onto stage, played solid for 3 1/2 hours, said thanks to the crowd and walked off again. A great voice and player though, he just didn't have that outgoing frontman personality, perhaps a good thing sometimes. Sometimes the music is the show, rather than supplementing the egos on stage.

Cheers, I feel a bit of ebay and cabinet chopping coming up. I was going to use it as an extension cab / monitor rather than primary air shifting. I have the RB7 manual and did search the Laney site but never found the impedance. I guess if it still sounds middy after this then at least I tried Cheers, Rich