Beer of the Bass

Since I changed to roundwounds last year I've been embracing a bit of grit from pushing the front end of my Ampeg PF50T a little harder than previously. Not full-on filthy, but just getting some hair at the louder end of my playing, and a slightly grindy character on harder hit low notes. In a mix you can barely pick out that it's distorted, but it gets some extra midrange presence and a compressed character. We're working on some new album tracks at the moment, I pushed it a little more on some songs than others, but I feel like it does add something interesting for what we're doing.

I feel like when bassists playing clubs and small venues are carting around a big rack setup, it's often about signalling that they're a serious big touring guy, even if they're not actually doing serious big touring at the moment (or at all).

Yep, I find it varies a lot with the size and shape of the room and the relative position of bass and speakers, but typically I find that there's one position of the phase switch where feedback starts later and at a different frequency to the other, and because of all the variables it's nigh-on impossible to anticipate which position will work better at a given gig.

I've played for a long time, I got interested when I was a teenager back in the 90s. I had an old Italian bowlback (which I still have but find uncomfortable) and for the last couple of years a Sears catalogue Harmony archtop. I've also played octave mandola and now cittern. But I've just picked up this guy to add to the family, it's a Fylde from 1999, before the current Touchstone models. It's lovely to play and has good sustain across the range - not quite the type of woody punch you'd want for bluegrass but great for my mostly Scottish and Irish repertoire. I have D'addario EFW74 flatwound strings on there at the moment, I like how clean and round a note they give, without any clang on the bottom string.

Is there any live footage of this contraption? I can only find the studio photographer shots, and I wonder if it turned out so impractical that it didn't make it out on gigs that much. It is ridiculous, but the band at the time were all about that campy over-the-top performance style and it kind of fits.

If you have a phase switch on the preamp, that's worth a go in these edge of feedback situations too. I find there's usually one position of the switch that reaches the feedback point slightly later than the other, but it's not the same one in every situation.

I like my five string and it's my only electric bass unless I've brought out the fretless. Though listening back to my bands last album and the rhythm section tracking we've just done for the next one, I'm extremely sparing on where I use notes below E, it really is only a handful of places where it makes for a more interesting variation on a line, plus a couple where I wanted to underpin a guitarist in DADGAD. So I could absolutely do it with a four string plus Hipshot, if I chose to.

Gaffer tape is annoying for jobs like this - it's fine at first but after a while the adhesive migrates and sticks to your gear. At one point I lashed up a couple of temporary covers from old post bags and had that issue. If you've got access to a sewing machine it's all straight lines, though, so not the most complex thing to pattern and sew.

I enjoyed him with MMW for a long time, right from when they did A Go Go with John Scofield. But it's always fun hearing players who are more than capable of being experimental and adventurous focusing their thing on a song-based setting, as he's doing with the Wood Brothers.

Shorter scale can have more focused punch on single notes but can be a little barky when playing chords. Longer scale typically has more jangle and zing. I really like GDAD over GDAE myself, my approach is usually to use a capo to put the DAD courses into a useful place for the key I'm in, as melodies in keys with fewer open notes get a little stretchy. Though my instrument is a 10 string cittern, 650mm scale, tuned CGDAD.

The Talkbass way appears to be to stack multiple boutique preamps together in front of an amp that would have worked fine without one. Seems a little silly to me, but people love buying little boxes and talking about them.

The insurance valuation of mine makes some sense as a figure I could dependably source a functional replacement for - it's a good sounding old flatback depreciated somewhat by having had a rough life, some bad-old-days repairs and a remarkably bad over-varnish.

I'm not sure about the correlation between insurance valuations and realistic sale prices. My bass came with a valuation written in the late 90s for £2750, and I feel that even ignoring inflation and that it's had a good new fingerboard fitted since, that would be an ambitious price if I were to try and sell it.

It always bothers me that there's a modelling amp company called Positive Grid, when usually the grid being positive means something is about to be on fire!

I feel like the bass sounds that typically get called "HiFi" aren't really about flat, uncoloured response at all, they're usually hyped at some point in the signal chain to emphasise the deep lows and high end, increasing the impression of a broad frequency spectrum.

You still need to run a speaker with your amp when using a speaker level DI - the DI has a relatively high impedance and places essentially no load on the amp on its own, which is a quick way to damage a valve amp. So it's more of a solution for live use without the potential bleed of a mic, not a method for quiet home recording. If you are considering other heads, the Ampeg PF50T has a speaker level DI output and (unusually) a dummy load that allows you to run it with no speaker. But having done this, I think the magic for recording is in the mic'ed speaker sound - the DI sound doesn't really have the same feel as that.

Ceramic pickups though - not always a bad thing, but it's a step away from the classic strat pickup recipe.

Cheers, sounds like they'll probably work OK for me. I find sometimes when I go for a less bright string type that the B can be dead sounding even if the other four are doing what I want, so I just wanted to check the Platinums don't suffer too much from that.

Has anyone here tried the Platinum strings on a five string? I'm wondering what the B string is like. I was on flatwounds for years, then made the jump to rounds last year looking for a bit more clank out of my bass. I found I enjoy my current Rotosound nickels once they've been played for a few months, but the rough feel still annoys me. So the notion of a smoother feeling string with a "played-in rounds" sound might be just the job.

There was a similarly hacked P Bass in Kevin Ayers' old Whole World band. It gets passed back and forth between Ayers and a very young Mike Oldfield, so I don't know whose bass it was. But it does seem to be a thing that people did!

I've known people use bits of saxophone reed to shim pickups too, they're handy if you need to fill a tapered gap.

He does appear to know his stuff and have a lot of experience with fine basses and serious players, but I always get the feeling his opinions are heavily coloured by how his particular shop runs. So "this bass has no value" mostly means he wouldn't be able to turn a profit on it with his business model and clientele. But any Talkbass posts of his would have to be a few years old, I think he was a little much for them too.

I've been seeing a few people say similar things about the 801, and it does look a handy size. If I end up doing more jazz volume double bass gigs I'd definitely want to try one. My GK MB200 and homebuilt 1x10" does fine for those, but an absolutely tiny combo seems appealing!

I'd be struggling with my double bass at about 41 1/2 inches!

This is all so much more sophisticated than the pickup winding setup I cobbled together a few years ago. I can't find the pictures, but it was a little hobby drill lashed to a plank with cable ties, a speed controller board off ebay, hand fed wire and a couple of chunks of wine cork over a dowel on the side of the plank to set the limits of the wire travel. I'm still using a couple of the pickups I did, on my fretless bass and a electric guitar, so I guess it got me there!