Stub Mandrel

A different America that is blindingly good... hope I don't get lynched for mentioning the Nice...

I did think of sticking it on my website...

Saxon, Black Star Riders and Girlschool on the same bill. Must get a neck brace...

Who needs genres...?

Dress to the left, bass to the right. You know it makes sense... Left leg resters? Come the revolution you'll be first up against the wall, together with guitarists who use a footrest and people whose strap still holds the bass up when they sit down. We know who you are!

Yessongs Because it has all the stand out tracks from the previous albums and most of my favourites. I think my collection covers from The Yes Album to Going for the One. I lost enthusiasm when they stopped having Roger Dean covers (always a sign of good music- Greenslade, Babe Ruth, Uriah Heep etc. etc.).

Proper kettle leads can take higher temperatures and have a little cutout. Ordinary ones without the cutout won't fit into things like kettles, ovens and fryers that get hot. But you can fit the high temperature ones in ordinary low-temperature goods. Not a lot of people know that. From wikipedia: C13 C14 14 (H) 4 (V) Yes I Yes 10 70 Very common on personal computers and peripherals. Commonly but incorrectly referred to as a "kettle cord", but kettles actually require the C15/C16. C15 C16 14 (H) 4 (V) Yes I Yes 10 120 For use in high-temperature settings (for example, electric kettle, computer networking closets). Also used in Cisco Catalyst series switches, Cisco MDS9500 series rack-mounted SAN switches,[15] HP Procurve switches, Dell PowerConnect switches and early Xbox 360 power supplies. C15A C16A 14 (H) 4 (V) Yes I Yes 10 155 For use in very-high-temperature settings, such as some stage lighting instruments. Similar to C15/C16, but the top is narrowed to exclude the C15 cord connector.

I hand painted and tie-dyed this one myself over 25 years ago - and it still fits! We got a bit psychedelic at times (when I could get away with it)...

Didn't Paul McCartney play one on 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish'?

60s psychedelia. Space rock. Add flange and phaser as well... 🙂

Well this amp is the one that just keeps on giving. Removing the power amp board revealed the FETs have been replaced. Probably the consequence of running it off that high power PSU. Both fets had 'rubberised' insulators, one with compound on one without, but they looked like the work of the same person (the part numbers for both fets are written on the board in the same fat felt pen). Probably along time ago, as the original Hitachi fets, now obsolete, were used. I replaced all the insulators with mica ones and servisol heatsink compound - best to have them all matched. Also redid the compound on the heatsinking. End result, offset voltage still 0.2V, low enough to be acceptable. That's 1/100th of a watt wasted compared to 16 watts when I started, and there's now no visible displacement of the speaker cones. Most importantly, with parallel fets each one now has to handle ~75W instead of 150W, which is probably a good idea when they are individually rated 125W. Best of all, I've learned the amp inside out and if it DOES fry in the future I'm confident at worst I could rebuild a complete replacement amp from the ground up.

Paid in Air Pounds.

During the descending line of Sunday Afternoon I made the mistake of dropping a bit with each note. Two octaves later I was in a most undignified position...

... or an OpenReach engineer...

I that case you should know this , but for younger forum members let me give my perspective and perhaps explain why not all watts are created equal. The short answer is marketing. Keen to flog more product, Amstrad came up with the ideal of 'music power' which rated their stereos according to their capacity to handle transients, like cymbal crashes and rimshots. This made them appear at least twice as powerful as amps rated by their 'RMS' capacity. From then on, it a simple 'wattage rating' has never been enough to accurately judge how loud an amp is in a real setting, because manufacturers use all sorts of formulas an ways of assessing power... The longer answer is a mixture of practicality, psychology and marketing. Some truth in Amstrad's approach - music (at least in the old days before the 'Loudness Wars' has its peaks and troughs. The volume of an amp isn't just its ability to deal with brief transients, it relates to the bits in between as well. Imagine a valve amp and a transistor amp, both being fed a pure sine wave such that they are almost starting to clip. Lets assume this is at the same power level for both amps, so on paper they both have the same continuous RMS power. Now play bass through both amps and turn up. Push the valve amp into clipping on the loudest bits and it will sound rich, push the transistor amp into clipping and it will sound harsh. This means that you can't have the transistor amp turned up as loud for the quieter bits as the valve amp, as the transitor amp sounds overloaded when you dig in. So the amps have identical wattage ratings, but the valve amp can be played in a way that is louder. Effectively it is compressing the signal upwards at the cost of distortion, but a type of distortion people generally like. Also, some amps have power supplies with undersized transformers or smoothing capacitors, so when played hard the voltage 'droops' and overall power drops. Other things affect volume; it's easy for a well designed speaker cab to double the volume. There's a famous test on line where a Fender HRD (40W), Vox AC30 (30W) and marshall stack (100W) are compared and they come out in that order - yes folks, the AC30 is louder than the Marshall stack. 124.6 db, 124.1 db and 119.5 db. https://www.harmonycentral.com/forums/topic/931152-marshall-100-watt-stack-vox-ac30-fender-hrd-how-do-they-compare-in-volume/ It's not just speaker design. I have a Vox Valvetronix which is marketed as a 20W amp, but it has a 'power control' (it's a modelling amp) and you can actually turn it up to 30 watts... so not all headline wattage ratings are exaggerated! The biggest pitfall is that, at usual volumes (i.e. not dead quiet or super loud) a doubling of perceived volume requires a ten-times increase in power. I've played a 1-watt battery powered amp through a JCM800 1x12" cab and it was way to loud to play in the living room. Anyone with a Blackstar Fly (3W) can test this! Most bass amps fall between 150W and 500W, with outliers at 100W and 1000W and above. The difference between 150W and 500W RMS is pretty small and in practice the extra volume is largely down to the same thing as that valve/transistor comparison - the more powerful amps have more headroom, i.e. you can play them significantly louder without distortion. As for Trace Elliot watts, I think the legend (or myth if your are a sceptic) is down to four things: Good power supplies that can sustain the rated outputs and don't 'droop' excessively. Mosef amplifiers that, perhaps, clip less harshly and sound closer to valve amps. Well designed cabinets with quality drivers. None of those three is exclusive to Trace Elliot, but then: A penchant for making amps with the wrong power supply when components run short, meaning there are 'under-rated' amps out there that really do sound louder than their ratings. Sporry if anyone thinks I'm teaching egg-sucking...

Probably Sound Chaser, I just learned the first bit...

A better question might be 'what's the hardest bassline you have learned/tried to learn?" There are gazillions of basslines I haven't a hope of playing.

You fit an SVT in an MX5? Sir, I takes my hat of tou you, I does.

I suppose a high point for me was being in PMT trying out acoustic bass and beings ask 'do you want to try it plugged in' and then 'do you want to try another one' - I assume I wasn't scaring away customers! Maybe it was just because I wasn't slapping...

Matter of priority...

Reading that I'm not alone with babywipes and mineral oil!

LOL! Have you ever seen the Hamster's live? 'Snail's Pace Slim' ( Barry Martin) sprayed his fingerboard with WD40 between every song although (a) I suspect a degree of showmanship and (b) he's a guitarist anyway...

I find learning complex stuff harder than playing it, if that makes sense? The fingers are faster than the brain...