JoeEvans

If I was looking for another double bass I would always look here, on eBay and at the Double Bass Room as a basic start.

All the better - being smoothly handsome isn't very metal!

It helps if you can make it easy for promoters to sell you to their audience, who might be into the genre but won't have heard of you. So a good online presence with at least one decent bit of film on a sharable platform, some nice hi res photos, a reasonably active social media account - probably Instagram these days.

I have one of these to sell. It's been really well looked after - over the years it's had a new neck, body, pickup, wiring and even new hardware. So I reckon I can ask a bit more for it that that battered old thing.

I think a dyneema tail wire slightly improved the sound on my bass, but it was going the whole hog and getting rid of the tailpiece altogether that made the really big improvement.

In this case it looks to me like 3d printing gets you something that you could make just as easily from a chunk of wood... And if you are able to prepare the data, you could get that chunk machined by a business with a CNC router for not too much money.

That's good to know. Maybe I need to hold out for a (dog's) BX.

Have you played both? I'm quite fancying one of these myself but opinions seem to vary on which of those two is better. Yamaha BX1 looks better than both but more expensive too...

It occurs to me that a Steinberger Spirit would cost about the same as a high quality roof box, and would take up less storage space for the rest of the year...

I saw the Polish klezmer trio Kroke play once (violin, accordion, double bass), and afterwards noticed them loading up into an estate car with a fibreglass case for the double bass on a roof rack. It looked to me as though he had a 3/4 bass in a soft case that fitted inside the hard case, which was possibly made for a 4/4 bass to give space. The hard case was permanently fixed to the roof rack. It took two of them to lift the bass in, but it evidently meant that the whole band could tour in one estate car.

If the action is ok with the bridge the wrong way round I would just leave that as is. At some stage a new bridge could be fitted. I think I'd use hide glue to fix the endpin fitting back in, just because at some stage someone might want to rebore the hole for a new one, and globs of rock hard epoxy would make that tricky. I recently replaced my tailpiece with four loops of 2mm dyneema - I posted pics on here if you're interested. £20 for the materials and it made a big improvement to the sound of the bass. Might be worth a try?

I think it would be fine if the bottom block was filled or repaired with modern glues, if the block itself remains glued in place with hide glue. WEST system epoxy is amazing stuff for imaginative bodging. You mix up a two part glue which is a thick, clear liquid, then you can add filler powders to get the right consistency to work with and the right balance of strength and sandability when set. People build wooden boats with it with no mechanical fixings at all.

If you're going for DIY the main thing is to use hide glue throughout, so that your work is reversible. It doesn't smell great but it's otherwise quite nice to work with.

I was going to say, cricket bat willow would actually be a great material for a bass body - light, hard and resonant.

What would you recommend carrying for a fight with a drummer? Always good to be prepared. One of those tranquilliser dart guns that vets use could be handy, I'd have thought.

Pine can move more with changes in humidity, so paint crazing might be more likely in the long run. Ash is lovely to work with but weighs a ton. Beech would be nice, still on the heavy side but you can get a lovely finish. Robbins Timber in Bristol stocks a lot of interesting species, would be worth a look for some ideas.

Thanks! I reduced my bridge a little recently, was thinking of going further. I also fitted a home made low mass tailpiece which I posted about here recently, that made a huge difference to the tone, so I'm thinking that removing weight connected to the strings is a good thing.

How thin did you make the bridge at the top?

Now that is very close! If the foil was mixed gold and silver and there were some weird charred bits, that would be it.

The other thing I've been doing a lot is pentatonics with shifts. So if - is a shift of hand position on one string and / is a change of string, and starting with A on the E string, A / C D - E / G A / C D - E D - C / A G / E D - C / A. I do that working up the semitones from F sharp to C. It's really helping with intonation and a sense of free movement round the neck.

It was more weird than that - squares of gold and silver leaf randomly applied, almost bare wood in places and charred / melted bits where it had been burned. Straight gold is a bit too blingy for me, this was more of a steampunk / post-apocalyptic vibe.

Years ago - decades in fact - a friend had an extremely cool jazz bass that had been stripped back to bare wood, covered in gold and silver leaf, attacked with a blowtorch and then lacquered. The effect was extraordinary, it looked like it had been rescued from a fire in a Czar's palace or something. I clicked on this thread kind of hoping that it might have resurfaced... I bet it's out there somewhere.

I'm struggling here, playing double bass in two bands so I've got that and a fretless that's been literally my only bass for thirty years. But suddenly I've got a massive urge to buy a Status type headless, bodyless bass like a Hohner B2 or a Yamaha BX1. I can barely imagine a scenario in which it would have any practical use in my life. Where does that come from?

The double bass player here was 80 when this was recorded, touring internationally with a hot young fiddle player and gigging regularly at home (Hungary). He makes what he's doing look easy but there are very few people who could deliver that drive, power and rhythmic energy. So don't start thinking you're old at fifty, you're only just warming up!

The only thing you have to watch out for with drone work is that major thirds sound 'right' when they're a bit flat of standard tuning. So when you play with other people later you might have practiced in a slightly different intonation to the one you need...