lemmywinks

Hey look they do a Musicman one too!

Definitely a fretted model. I suppose you could always pull the frets out with one of these: Personally I think it's cheap tat but each to their own!

It's a Mazeti, cheapo eBay bass from a few years back. Decent enough by all accounts though. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mazeti-6-String-Active-Thru-Neck-Maple-And-Walnut-Bass-/130929635412?nma=true&si=kvUqnsZJST70a1NLtzVJ3omciXs%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

They were about £120 new IIRC.

If it's a standard jack you can bend the pins, if it's a barrell jack you have to replace it.

Been doing the same thing, my tech guy is fitting a buffer preamp to a piezo bridge to blend with passive mag pickups. Interesting that you say it's not worth blending them, I'm having 3 seperate volume controls on mine, may be a better idea to just have a switch and a tone control. I had seen the East piezo preamp and it looks tidy, will maybe think about getting one when I have the bass and have a better idea about whether I should change anything.

It's just personal preference, I gig cheapys nowadays and they're actually very nice basses with nice pickups and comfortable necks. I really dislike bass snobbery and the whole "not good enough for me" ethos you get, especially for covers/function band players because obviously we all [i]need[/i] a new custom bass to play Good Times right? Up until last week (when I played a Hofner violin bass - horrible!) it had been years since I picked up a bass I couldn't happily gig, kids are lucky these days for sure.

Could I ask what sort of connectors you use? Provided it isn't a secret of course!

[quote name='icastle' timestamp='1394563415' post='2392800'] So... you need to solder on a solderless connection to avoid the need to learn how to solder. [/quote] You know what I mean! I thought the OP just wanted less hassle when wiring pickups in, dunno if he can solder or not.I've thought of the standard screw terminals before but they're pretty big and control cavities can be pretty tight. Don't know if you can get small terminals with screw connections at both ends, would be handy.

[quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394553586' post='2392601'] Just to be clear, my comments refer to non touchscreen use, and Windows 8 with a keyboard and mouse is hopeless IMHO. It is for tablets and touchscreens, which if you actually work on a machine (spreadsheets, word processing, email etc) rather than just surf the net, a touchscreen is as much use as a hog roast at a bar mitzvah. Windows 8 is a hog roast. [/quote] I'll post again and hope you actually take a look this time: http://www.classicshell.net/ Windows 8 is pretty much Windows 7 with a tacked on touch interface, there's a full desktop there and the only thing missing is the Start menu. Install the above 5mb freeware program which takes less than a minute and you have full Windows 7 functionality. It's a full desktop OS which is very much like the last one, not quite sure where you're getting this tablet OS stuff from as the tablet version is different, it only runs the metro apps and is designed to compete against Apple and Android tablets. Maybe you got confused between the two?

[quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394547567' post='2392517'] I've been a PC person since day 1 and have hated apple because of their firm belief anyone not using an apple product was inferior. The one thing that has really changed my mind recently is Windows 8, which for tablets seems fine, but on a desktop it is hopeless. [/quote] [url="http://www.classicshell.net/"]http://www.classicshell.net/[/url] You can also change the Start button to the Win7 one if you so wish: [url="http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=174"]http://www.classicsh....php?f=18&t=174[/url] If Microsoft hadn't forced the tile interface on people nobody would bat an eyelid about WIndows 8, it would just be seen as a continuation of the good work done with Windows 7. I am using Win8 with Classic Shell installed on a touchscreen laptop and it's very nice to use (and super quick), I actually prefer it to WIndows 7 ever so slightly. If I didn't have a touchscreen I would prefer Win7 though as they tiles are quick and handy sometimes but on a non-touch laptop they are a chore to use.

For a neater solution you could use the little PCB screw terminals, solder the wires to the base pin and then shrink tube it.

[quote name='goblin' timestamp='1394506870' post='2392078'] My load is incredibly large, [/quote]

To be honest if that's all you need then a basic laptop will be more than enough, eBuyer have this for £250: http://www.ebuyer.com/584180-hp-255-g1-laptop-h6r11ea-abu For something more portable they have this for the same price: www.ebuyer.com/623492-acer-aspire-v5-123-laptop-nx-mfrek-001 Neither will set the world alight but they are neat little machines for 250 notes, maybe add a cheap mixing desk (Behringer Xenyx 502 for £30) for more control over audio output as well as being able to plug your bass and headphones in for silent practice. You can get a silly amount of portable computing power for your money nowadays. Ebuyer are very good btw if you do want a PC/Laptop.

[quote name='chriswareham' timestamp='1394312295' post='2390267'] How dare you mock the Loggins ;-) [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siwpn14IE7E[/media] [/quote] Talk about answering your own question.... I actually quite like Danger Zone because it's 80s cheese fun, being bombarded with the Top Gun soundtrack on repeat whilst being locked in a car on the way to Dumfries is a pretty tortuous experience though. Still at least it was better than the SImply Red album my old fella bought and in fairness he did like Spandau Ballet too so there wasn't a total lack of well written tunes.

My parents' have always had awful taste in music (Cher, Michael Bolton, Kenny Loggins....) so car journeys were a nightmare until I got a Gameboy and some headphones for Christmas. I'm making sure my little'un grows up with decent music around her, her favourite song is Peek-a-Boo by Devo and she also likes De La Soul. Although currently she's fixated on Aquabats, no bad thing really.

[quote name='xgsjx' timestamp='1394278733' post='2389787'] Good to see you back. I had hoped you was ok & was just thinking last month that I hadn't seen you on here for some time. [/quote] I have been here off and on, mainly buying stuff! [quote name='xgsjx' timestamp='1394279080' post='2389792'] For laptops, there's lots of good things in all budgets. I've got an HP G62 which has the fan in the bottom corner & is prone to clogging up & overheating. To get to it, you have to take the entire laptop apart & it's underneath everything (literally). It takes about 3-4 hours with a map & tools. [/quote] Toshiba did this too (although it looks like they've changed their design now), they used to put their main fan right where it would be covered my someone's right knee. I got given one for repair and as I have a glass lounge table I couldn't reproduce the fault, took me ages to realise what was going on! One of the things I like about AMDs new low clocked APUs is that at their normal clock they are fanless, even in turbo mode they are cold to the touch.

I picked up a little HP Touchsmart 11 for £290 delivered, it's an 11" Windows 8 ultraportable with a nice touchscreen and a low clocked quad core CPU with decent integrated graphics. Does everything I need to as well as some light gaming (PS3 era), the best thing is that even under load it runs completely cold. If you want to spend a bit more you can get a nice full size laptop with a modern i5 (runs cooler) and dedicated Nvidia GPU for under £500 these days. Personally I wouldn't bother with a Chromebook, they offer far less functionality than a netbook and sooner or later you'll need to do something simple and it will come up short. Btw if you get WIndows 8 you'll need this: http://www.classicshell.net/

Just started using the Schaller knockoffs on eBay, £2 a set: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/141121590871?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649 Seem to be very similar to Schaller ones and available in the usual 3 colours. If you fit Schaller types you'll need a hole punch, guide here: http://basschat.co.uk/topic/70420-schaller-strap-locks-and-how-to-fit-them-properly/page__p__681912__hl__straplock%20guide__fromsearch__1#entry681912

http://guitarz.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/your-guitars-andys-pew-bass-andys-done.html Winner.

[quote name='Ou7shined' timestamp='1393332695' post='2378778'] Awesome. [/quote] Make a goat head bass out of a church pew! And then stick a Fender decal on it and stamp it with a '68 serial number...

[quote name='Jazzjames' timestamp='1393331124' post='2378745'] 5'48'' [media]http://youtu.be/xXhhkwG6NTs[/media] [/quote] His opinion is no more valid than anyone's really, perhaps even less so as he has financial (and emotional) investment in old bolted together basses. The thing is that this whole "vintage sounds better" debate is a testable claim - you can easily transplant parts from Fenders and do double blind tests to find out exactly what differences there are (or maybe aren't), in fact if there are any differences you could switch parts around and find out exactly what was causing them. Nobody seems to want to do this though, perhaps the Talkbass tonewood test has made them a bit shy? Probably easier to just keep on prattling about vibrations and resonation on YT videos than actually find out if you're talking bollocks or not. Personally I think there actually is a difference, but not due to some magical harmonic musical relationship developed between two pieces of wood over the last 60 years. The pickups will sound a little different, stick them in a slab of wood, bolt a neck on and I bet nobody would be able to tell. Actually, surely an old reclaimed piece of wood from an 1800s church pew would have more vintage mojo than anything those young upstarts at Fender have produced? All those years of choir singing and repetetive chanting will still resonating through the grain don't you know.........

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRKFb8g_QbM[/media] Low action and some sort of dampening device before the first fret.

[quote name='Ou7shined' timestamp='1392930089' post='2374457'] Yeah well it is said he does likes them young..... guitars I mean. [/quote] [quote name='discreet' timestamp='1392931032' post='2374486'] Plenty of YouTube footage featuring him giving them a damn good thrashing, and so on and so forth. [/quote] All in the name of research!

Acoustic instruments will differ as they age though, that is without question as they are reliant on the properties of the wood to produce sound. A Fender plank with a neck bolted on and a pickup wired in? Not so much.