Doctor J

Masters of Reality - Kill The King "And in many degrees of heat The fire looked at the meat And if I cook you the least you can do Is lay there and be sweet"

They tried to kill my BB1100S, but they needed to try harder. Yamahas are made from the hard stuff. Only the active/passive switch needed to be changed.

It largely depends on what it is you're trying to cut through. There is no default "cuts-through" EQ setting. If the other components of your band push the same frequencies do you, then you're all fighting over the same sonic space and it sounds like mush. You've got to work with the other instruments, give each other room. Generally, definition will come from mids and high frequencies so, unless the other instruments are thin and trebly sounding, you won't hear yourself if your tone is all low end. You've got to have mids in there. Don't set your bass tone in isolation. What sounds good on its own frequently sounds crap in the context of other instruments.

At least there’s no neck dive.

That is tasty. Wee, but tasty.

At domestic gigs, me neither but, when you’re completely out of your comfort zone, things can change and you can surprise yourself 🙂

I quite enjoy going to gigs solo. I still usually head up the front so it’s not as if I’d be spending the night chatting either way. At a gig, I want to really enjoy the music and performance up close and personal. Heading abroad for gigs is great fun too. Last year I combined a five-day run of gigs - Reef / Voivod / Lygo /Killing Joke / Therapy? with a nice break in Hamburg. Explore the city during the day, head to the gig at night. It’s paradise. You tend to get talking to people doing these things and it’s great to meet new people from different cultures. When I head to Frankfurt for Triumph of Death / Yob / The Obsessed jaunt in a couple of weeks, a mate of mine who lives in Colchester is going to meet me over there which should be great craic Three days, three cities, three gigs, but I would have headed over solo if no-one else had volunteered to come along. Tom Warrior playing Hellhammer? It would be rude to miss that 😁

Rough McKagan

I’m off to Frankfurt in a couple of weeks to see Tom G. Warrior play the hits of Hellhammer, then to Wiesbaden the next day for Yob and rounding it off with The Obsessed in Mannheim the day after that. Much doom will be doomed.

It’s over? Morrissey knew this ages ago.

Get a longer strap and have the bass not just below waistcoat level, but below fly level. All the young people say it’s totally, like, rad!

Dave’s humour is as dry as some of the fretboards which wind up on his bench. He’s definitely worth watching for anybody looking to get to grips with setups.

That line reads back quite poorly. It wasn’t intended as a dig and I apologise if it came across that way. What I was trying to get at - poorly - is that there is so much information out there for every aspect of a setup there’s just no mystery out there about it anymore. It’s in everyone’s hands to be able to set up their own instrument exactly as they want it whenever they want it and all for free 🙂

No, the fun was removed on arrival by the taxman. Whatever deal is in place, it doesn't include musical instruments.

Ooooh, faker than a very fake thing. Authentic plywood body! Once he actually does believe it, technically he's not lying 😂

I don't want a thin neck with a narrow nut, I want an old Jazz neck, which is why I went with and what I got with the Bacchus. I don't like thin necks front to back, but I do like the Jazz nut width. I wanted an old Jazz bass with Stingray tone, essentially. A Sterling, fine as they are, isn't that bass 🙂

No, I've played a Sterling, it wasn't for me. I was looking for something with a J neck size, not something with just a J width nut 😉 Nice. The current multitude of series are baffling when most of the information is in Japanese. The older stuff, though, it's all good.

Set the action to what fits your hands. There is no right action across the board as dictated in a manual, it's what is right for your playing style and your hands. Set it to what feels best for you. I find it hard to believe people give their instrument to a stranger, who has never heard them play, to configure and then accept what they get back without personalising it in some way. It's easy to do once you think about what tweaks to each adjustable part does to the instrument as a whole. It's as personal as setting a driving position in your car, you've got to go with what feels most comfortable to you. I don't measure anything but I know that I set my action lower than most. It suits me that way. My general setup is like this: Start with the neck. I like the neck quite straight so it's a big deal to set the tension on the truss rod correctly. Neck relief is good when I can see a tiny bit of a gap between the bottom of the string and the top of 8th and 9th frets, when holding the string down at the first and last fret. I need to be able to push the string down at the 8th fret like that and it has enough space to perceive it move down to the fret - but it's a tiny gap, the width of a piece of paper. I really like the neck straight. A slightly bowed neck just feels messy from the 5th fret on and crappy higher up the neck. Nut action is very important to me. I like the action at the first fret to be as if there was a zero fret, or the action at the second fret when you hold the string down on the first fret. I hate a high nut, it serves no purpose other than to make playing harder. Depending on how the nut is installed, I either file down the string slots or, preferably, take the nut out and sand down the base of the nut. This is something you do slowly and check frequently. The only way to undo is to replace the nut so do a little and then check a lot. It is, however, something you only ever need to do once. Once the neck is set, move to the bridge. I like to hear a bit of fret grit when I play hard so I set the action of each string accordingly. I generally set the action slightly higher on the bass side than I do the treble side, I don't strictly follow the radius of the neck. It's done by feel. I don't like the notes to choke, they need to ring clear and true when I play gently, but a bit of grind when I dig in is a sound I love, so I take a bit of time to do this. Again, it's how I like it set up, not what the manual says. Then I set the intonation, adjusting as required, then revisit the bridge action again to make sure everything is in order. After that, pickup height. I start with the bridge pickup (if there is one) and set that to a height where it doesn't get in my way when playing and isn't so high that it's not being pushed up against the screws by whatever springs or foam are underneath. I do like the pickup to be reasonably close, though. There's a bit of funk to be had by the string really violating the magnetic field which is nice to my ears, so I usually have the bridge pickup close enough to the strings to get this, not so close that the magnetic pull is affecting the string's vibration. I then set the height of the neck pickup so that, if I switch from bridge to neck and back, there is no perceivable volume drop. The bridge pickup is a naturally thinner sound and the vibration pattern of the string isn't as great as over the neck pickup, so the neck pickup is almost always further away from the string than the bridge pickup. An even volume balance across the strings is important too, so the pickups might be slightly closer to the strings on the treble side than the bass side. It's important not to adjust pickups visually, you've got to go with what sounds best, not what looks right when holding a ruler. Most people don't factor in pickup height into a setup but, to me, it's as important a step as any other. Then I play for a while and see how it all feels and sounds. If a string is hitting a pickup, the pickups get set lower. If the action is too low, it goes up, too high and it goes down. It's all down to how it plays and sounds to me. It's not to everyone's taste but we all come in different shapes and sizes and one size does not fit all. You don't play the bass exactly the same way as anyone else so why would I be set up the same as everyone else's? The best it is, once you get it right, if you use the same strings the only thing you'll ever need to set again is the truss rod as the neck moves, usually in Autumn and Spring. It is easy. You just have to think about one tweak at a time and what that means to the rest of the instrument.

I was amazed by the difference!

Fretboard clean and oil. Clean the frets with ultra-fine wire wool. Truss rod tweak if needed. General bio-sludge clean from neck, tuners and bridge as required.

Another vote for Ric here, albeit a half-hearted one. I had a fireglo 4003 from the early 90's. I loved the look, adored the sound but it was the most uncomfortable bugger to play. My playing style didn't get along with the slab body and bound edges and that wretched pickup mounting ring.

The more or less standard Jazzes, ESP 400 Series and Bacchus Standard 5. I've had the ESP for almost 30 years and it's the one which always feels like home. I recently installed a Noll TCM3 preamp which gives B,M,T cut and boost as well as a passive circuit with a tone control. It's a beast. The Bacchus arrived second hand about 15 years ago. It was a real eye-opener, amazing bass. The hybrids, J body but pickup deviations, Charvel JP and a homemade JPJ. The Charvel has a slim neck like a Soundgear but with a P width nut. It had a fretboard replacement before I got it, the 21-fretted rosewood board replaced with a fretless two-octave ebony board. I had it fretted and replaced the V,V,T Reflex active electronics. It now has Loureiro pickups and a Vol, Blend, Tone with a push-pull volume control which runs the pickups in series for Angry Bear mode. The JPJ is a Mightymite neck and one-piece ash body with EMG pickups and electronics. The neck J and P are routed to a three-way mini-switch and the output of that goes into a blend control with the bridge J so I can run any combination of the pickups with bass and treble cut and boost controls. The distant cousins, modified J shape and pickup deviants, Bacchus 24 and Grooveline. The 24 was the lightest bass I owned, a really nice and comfortable modern take on the Jazz. The Grooveline arrived last week and is even lighter. It's needs a bit of work, it has clearly had a hard life, but I really, really like it already. I'm confident it will be really amazing when the work is done on it.

Yep, the first thing which came to mind from the title alone was bass and treble boosted, little to no mids in the classic Stingray style. Try running all the eq flat and seeing if it fills the room better, then making minor adjustments to suit your tonal requirements.

Also available on axesrus https://www.axesrus.co.uk/Machinehead-Nylon-Tension-Washers-p/nylongwashers.htm

Bass playing aside, that is such a bloody good song. It's nice to just have a reason to listen to it again and enjoy the bejesus out of it 😎