Stub Mandrel

It will be six weeks before I can get my hands on this bass. In the meantime my brother has traumatised me with a video of him playing it upside down (he's a lefty and somehow he can play them both ways up) and worse ... he says his partner has threatened to stick a plectrum holder on it - wrong in so many ways!

I live 45 minutes from the nearest of my bandmates... but I used to commute over 70 miles a day to and from Birmingham via Spaghetti Junction.

No 🙂 I want to see Clutch live, I've only heard relatively recent stuff, but it's all awesome. They prove you can play music with a sense of humour without being cheesy. Steel Panther and the Darkness please note...

LOL! They have another video that's a demo by Thomas McRocklin. Last time I saw a video of him playing he was about six years old!

It's 'Southam' a Hudswell Clarke diesel shunter. http://www.stubmandrel.co.uk/model-engineering/127-southam-electric-shunter

https://chownybass.com/product/retrovibe-by-chowny-vantage/

Will definitely make the simple version, may try the more complex one. Good suggestion to use presets - it should be set and forget.

First shot at a design - 'rough and ready' chebyschev , hoping that a 3:1tuning ratio for the second stage won't have too extreme an effect. Bodge from Art oif Electronics ideas plus HPF-pre warning C3 is connected the wrong way round in this schematic - I've corrected the simplified one). Super simple design with -3dB at 30Hz, using Analog Devices online designer which chooses clever resistor values and lets you have a zero gain design so no volume control needed. Inclined to think the simpler the better (edit gone back to E24 to make it more practical):

Take a listen to this even if you aren't a Tull or a bass cover fan. This is probably one of the most astounding basslines ever. Credit must go to Dave Pegg, Glenn Cornick and Bach for their roles in creating this... and Troy for managing to cover it.

If it has plain PUP covers it may even be that he's lifted the cover but the pickup itself is jammed down, has he taken it right off to check it's intact? Tell he him that a skateboard pratfall proves his fitness to be a parent 🙂

It's a bit more crowded than this now with an extr, much bigger, lathe, shaper, larger bench drill and CNC milling machine... Mostly 600mm deep, but I don't do a lot of the brown stuff..

The idea is you don't hear any change - but 'sub-harmonics' and thumps get cut giving you more headroom and a cleaner, clearer sound.

I must admit I'm intrigued by the Boss SY-1, especially having dug up Theme 1 recently, and Kashmir, and Gimme Some Loving, Perfect Strangers and... I think I need one... 🙂

Just add an octave divider and you'll be able to stay at home while it plays both parts for itself...

Frequency wise, I'm unashamedly copying the Thumpinator. The HPF-Pre V3 is pretty much exactly what I had in mind, having one stage at 30Hz and the second stage 30 and up.

Thanks, there's some useful stuff there, including thoughts on cutoff frequencies.

Should I fit these with the round or flat side to the frets? 😜

Good point; I suspect that this happens when people decouple the switched -ve supply but don't decouple the +ve supply. This is what the datasheet shows, trying to minimise component count, but if the pump is at the end of a daisy chain some decoupling at the converter is going to be needed.

I've been looking into high pass filter design. I'm looking at a basic Sallen & Key format with two two-pole stages switchable for 12dB an 24dB per octave. The advantage of this is simplicity in design and also it's easy to make one stage variable frequency to tune the response (e.g. set one stage to ~30Hz and the other variable, say 20-50Hz). A two-stage butterworth or chebyshev filter would give a sharper 'knee'. This does mean looking at gain greater than 1. My thought is that the 'cost' of going to chebyshev is even higher gain and a less flat curve for the pass band. While 'gain is good', ideally a filter like this should have gain close to 1 for the pass band so what comes out is essentially what goes in. Too high a gain means it could run out of headroom on transients, which defeats the object of the exercise. I plan to use a charge pump to get +/- 9V to get plenty of headroom. My thought is the butterworth arrangement (very flat passband, relatively sharp knee) is ideal, and tune it to have knee at about 30Hz by tuning for -3dB in the mid-low twenties.

A few people mentioned cleaning off a sticky coating with isopropanol. I've had a few things with a 'soft touch coating' (e.g. a gps and a mini-speaker, amongst other things) that went the same way with age, so I assumed this was what they meant. http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php/Soft_Touch_Removal

The one I bought looks the same, but has hard plastic without a soft-touch coating.

I'm more worried about guitarist's nipple... may have to get a pair of pasties!

Can you see the bottom row when you are playing it?

Extreme relicking... Perhaps not fair to use a guitar with a tremelo? Surley the absence of frets has a huge effect on tone 🤣