Annoying Twit

Down to £140 now. Still not sold. That shows me for thinking that £150 was a bargain

DEKO (Singular) Four string acoustic bass. [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_clb_10sce_bks_deko.htm"]http://www.thomann.d...ce_bks_deko.htm[/url] This is the slightly upmarket acoustic bass with a solid spruce top, and a Fishman pickup. EDIT: It went up at 4:33am this morning. That's an even more unfriendly time for things to go up than 11pm and 8am as frequently happens. (Aside: I'm not sure if there should be an s on happens or not given that two times are listed. Grammar advice gratefully accepted if someone would be so kind.) EDIT: Gone

After seeing this thread, I googled, and found this interesting Talkbass thread. http://www.talkbass.com/threads/ibanez-affirma-series-afr-104.350336/ It's nice to read that the relationship between the massive company Ibanez and the independent luthier [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif][size=2]Spuler was as cooperative as it was. [/size][/font][/color]

[quote name='Huge Hands' timestamp='1432843600' post='2785597'] Erm, the neck seems kinda straight. There is a bit of zinging and pinging occasionally when fretting, but I'm putting that down to the very bright round wounds and new frets it came with. I'm loathe to touch it at the moment as I have a history of making guitars worse than better when I tamper with truss rods! I certainly don't think there is enough wrong with it for me to want to mess with it. I've been playing with it on and off all afternoon and it is great for what I wanted it for, and certainly worth £50! In answer to landwomble's point, I haven't tried it plugged in yet - I'm not sure I'll ever need it for that! [/quote] My acoustic is a four string fretless. I put Fender flatwound strings on it, and it reduced the zing quite a bit. IMHO, the built in electronics sound very nice, and I think that the built in 4 band EQ is very suitably voiced for giving the user good control over the sound. Even if you're mainly intending to use it for unplugged playing, I recommend that you give it a go plugged in. Unless your tastes are quite different from mine (which is possible and reasonable ) I think you'll enjoy what you hear.

[quote name='ColinB' timestamp='1432836711' post='2785510'] The two most popular bass distortion pedals are the American Sound and the Ultimate Drive. Thomann are doing them both under the Harley Benton banner. [/quote] For guitars, they are the two best sounding HB guitar distortions, in my subjective opinion. I went through all of the Harley Benton distortions and listened to the samples. (Sad, but true ). If they are good for bass too, then it's very likely that I will buy them at some point.

Whi[size=4][quote name='elephantgrey' timestamp='1432763605' post='2784838'][/size] Anyone know anything about the drive pedals? do they relate to the American Sound/Ultimate Drive pedals they do? or are they based off of different ones than those? [/quote] Which drive pedals do you mean? Joyo do a whole lot of guitar overdrive pedals, but I can't find a bass one. I looked around, and on Talkbass people are recommending Joyo guitar distortions for bass.

Congrats Huge Hands! Another happy deko owner. How well was it set up when you received it? My two dekos definitely needed some truss rod attention when I received them.

"3 Feet High and Rising" by De La Soul. It introduced me to quality rap music.

[quote name='yorks5stringer' timestamp='1432770383' post='2784927'] Show available until you click on the item....! [/quote] Yep, this has been happening a lot recently. Annoying, but the main thing I'm watching for is instruments that are newly listed, and it doesn't stop me doing that.

Good point about the moisture sensitivity. And I agree that other composite materials may be the future. I've been curious about carbon fibre instruments, but it is very expensive. I'm not sure if there's a chance that carbon fibre may become cheaper in the future. I found the article about carbon nanocrystals (not carbon 'micro crystals' - my bad) when I google searched "when will carbon fibre be cheaper than wood" or something similar. I'm curious about the basses that have been made using 3D printers (picture below). They sometimes have an open lattice of plastic and are mainly air. I wonder how they avoid significant neck dive as the bodies must weigh a lot less than standard wood. Since then, I've seen the bass made from layers of plexiglass (I presume) that KodiakBlair posted in the ebay forum thread on acrylic guitars. All of those got me thinking about alternative materials for basses.

[quote name='kodiakblair' timestamp='1432754555' post='2784702'] wjs guitars up here in Scotland have this prototype for sale just now. [attachment=192960:Layer Bass.jpg] The Layer Bass. Not quite sure what to make of it but as it's a proto anything could change. [/quote] That's a very interesting concept, is it layers of perspex for the body? If anyone decides they're going to build one like that, please tell me and I'll subscribe to the build thread.

I've just come back from swimming around a lake, and I see that there were a '75 Jazz bass, AND a white HB-60 semi-hollow Gretchish bass dekos. I'm tempted by the HB-60, but it's YAF4SB (yet another fretted four string bass). [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_hb_60_vw_deko.htm"] Harley Benton HB-60 VW Deko [/url] Anybody notice these when they were live? And if so, anyone get one? Even the cheap classical guitar (£8.80 as a deko) and the shorty strat that came up at the same time have sold out.

Stronger than carbon fibre and 1/10 the cost of carbon fibre and kevlar. Could this be a material for making bass parts in the future? http://www.gizmag.com/cellulose-nanocrystals-stronger-carbon-fiber-kevlar/23959/

This person has been trying to sell their acrylic jazz for a long while. It failed to sell at a number of reasonable (IMHO) prices, including £45. Pickup only in Brum. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/wesley-bass-guitar-5-string-/121662224022?

Is the Harley Benton pipe bomb the same effect with a different name, or does it differ in some way? [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_micro_stomp_pipe_bomb.htm"]http://www.thomann.d...p_pipe_bomb.htm[/url] EDIT: No, it isn't. Knobs are different, and the shape of the enclosure is different. At least. It certainly isn't a rebadge.

Surely the strings being used will make a big difference. Won't they?

Whoops! I meant to post this in the ebay forum. Sorry people.

A thread I started in the ebay section today disappeared. I'm wondering why this was. I'm sure I did post the thread (rather than accidentally previewing only the thread) as someone else followed up. But now, it's gone. The bass listing that was the topic of the thread was nothing to do with a certain well known USA company. ?????????

There seem to be quite a few of these coming up at the moment, at reasonable prices. For a while after Wesley stopped selling basses people were asking higher amounts for these than they used to sell for new. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Acrylic-Bass-Guitar-Case-/281703738236?hash=item4196d9eb7c

[url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Galveston-UB8000-8-string-Bass-/261902797605?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3cfa9f8b25&autorefresh=true"]http://www.ebay.co.u...utorefresh=true[/url] These come up occasionally. This one seems better than I remember, I have a memory of them looking cheap. Which they were, for an eight string, of course. I'm not sure I'm enamoured of the look of the rosewood fretboard, but the brass nut is a plus. Even though I hope that one day I'll have a nine string, and the eight string isn't that much of a step above my current seven, I've put a lowball bid on this. Feel free to bid away anyhow, as my bid is so low that there is no chance I'll be winning. But, I just felt that I wanted to put something on it. Cheap postage too!

[quote name='Thunderpaws' timestamp='1432647070' post='2783538'] Stoopid phone..... Some of these have bigger weighting over their affect on sound. And human ears are all different, and so are our brains, and sometimes air is more dense, the room might have a carpet, the other room might be a concrete cellar. [/quote] There are a lot of things that can alter what a bass sounds like. The question isn't whether or not body wood makes a difference, but whether it makes a significant, audible, difference. And then there's the question of whether the variation within a single species of wood (including how the wood is treated) compares to the average variation across species. It's similar to MP3 compression. Even at 320kb/s compression, the signal is being considerable changed from the original uncompressed file. The question is whether people can hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed files. Double blind experiments suggest that people can't. I'm not saying that I definitely believe that body wood doesn't make a significant difference. Just that experiments such as the one that I linked to above make it plausible that it doesn't, and that proper scientific experiments are needed to see what the true answer is.

[quote name='warwickhunt' timestamp='1432634079' post='2783341'] I can see this going OT but 'if' the body material (generally wood) didn't have any affect, then every instrument fitted with type X, Y or Z pup and preamp would sound the same... unless the fingerboard material had an effect but then everyone knows that is nonsense! [/quote] In addition to pickup design and preamps as you mention, pickup placement, bridge design, nut type, neck-body join, and other factors could still easily produce differences in sound. IMHO the only thing that can answer this question is extensive double blind testing of different body woods, with all other factors held constant. It's easy to produce logical sounding arguments of all sorts of things that aren't true.

There has been some research into whether or not body wood makes a significant (e.g. audible) difference to electric guitar sound. So far, different experiments give different results. But the most robust experiments I know of suggest that body wood does not make a difference. This of course conflicts with the experience of experienced guitarists who say that it is obvious that guitar body wood makes a difference. However, if it was found that electric guitar body wood doesn't make a difference, it would not be the first time that widely believed things were revealed to be wrong. See e.g. http://www.guitarsite.com/news/music_news_from_around_the_world/electric-guitar-wood-myth-busted/

[quote name='Marvin' timestamp='1432549224' post='2782479'] I think it just demonstrates that tone preferences are a very personal thing. [/quote] Agreed. I've heard a lot of comparisons between expensive and cheaper guitars. Not infrequently my conclusion is that the sounds are different, but it's not the case that one is better than the other.

[quote name='ahpook' timestamp='1432421043' post='2781391'] You'd need to be hale and hearty to keep up with his playing - his stamina is quite something. [/quote] Here here. (sic) (BTW: It's "All hail", and "hear hear" in reality.)