Stub Mandrel

Bass display unit:

Just got back from jamming with my brother, I was using the Embassy through my Elf/PJB C2 and he had a 50W orange valve amp and his new Coronet. Epiphoine love-in 🙂 The word 'girth' was used a lot.

It's here! Lighter than I expected. Had to drop the action a bit (the 'specified action' in the manual is a joke!) Needs the nut cutting and slight truss rod tightening but I'll let it settle for a week first. No buzzes and the intonation was set spot on. No scaggy fret ends. Finish is flawless but i will have to take the pots off to remove the last of the sratchplate film - it's caught under the lovely little knob pointers. These are a great detail along with the lovely chunky strap buttons. Body is contoured and very rounded, just like the Coronet. Very bright stainless roundwounds. The blend control works backwards (IMHO). Tone control effective, apparently Epiphone use a custom potentiometer contour. Ridiculously loud output from the 'probuckers'. Real solid growly tone, just like the Thunderbird with probuckers, which is exactly what I was looking for. Neck is a bit of a baseball bat, again like the Thunderbird, but I like my basses to have different feels, that's how I justify having them all. Can't wait to add lemon oil and make the frets fall out. Main reaction - this is very, very different from my Fenders/Squiers.

Bearing in mind I didn't give a toss what they looked like, they were two bits of bare chipboard with white contiboard sides top and bottom. A mate scribbled 'HELLO' on them so I painted over it in white.

Hawkwind Live Chronicles - Extended Edition with all the extras 🙂

I made myself a pair of speakers when I was a teenager. Saw me through Uni and lasted many years, but ended up in the loft when I got a pair of Kef Coda speakers. I found them in the loft, but the surrounds had crumbled to dust (shouldn't have stored them next to the Ark...) Less than a fiver for replacement surrounds off ebay. Fiddly, but as the spiders were OK not impossible to jiggle about and centre them. Apparently my grampy used to recone Goodman's speakers in his shop, using bits of camera film to centre the voice coils, so somewhat in a family tradition.

Particularly impressed by the wood grain matching front and back.

Louis Sullivan would surely approve.

Looks inspired by a Coronet. Oh yes definitely Coronet DNA in there, even a P90 a like on some models. I do like Coronets so I like this bass:

That's actually, like, wow.

Two obvious inexpensive but good short scale basses with contourd bodies are the Jaguar Short Scale (now out of production 😞 ) and the gorgeous Ibanez Talman SS.

YouTube is full of pre-teen virtuosos playing long scale basses. Don't forget uprights have a ~41" scale length... I like short scales, and I am 6'2" with long fingers (take note, ladies).

I'm working on a new concept called 'Gufftronics' that produces a range of tones depending on what you have been eating in the previous twelve hours, with the added advantage of vocoder-like tone shaping. The only downside is you need to have your nether regions connected to the pedal by a long plastic tube, but this is hardly worse than a guitar lead and doesn't seem to have been a problem for the vocoder.

When I started to learn, a mate loaned me his precision(!) on the condition I used one finger per fret. I have big hands and it stood me in good stead, but in practice I change my fingering between 1fpF and 1,2,3 (not 1,2,4 which I find clumsy, you don't need that extra strength of two fingers on electric bass) according to what I am playing. Most tab seems to be written for 12,3 or 1,2,4 and has lots of hand movement. 1fpf allows much more economy of movement and I find it a lot faster and cleaner no having to hop between strings so much, but sometimes more compact fingering allows you to sit in the groove and relax or to power through some fairly static straight eights. So, my suggestion would be to learn both techniques and use what you feel comfortable with when it feels most comfortable. I am sure changing styles over the course of a practice session or song or set has to be good for avoiding injuries and for improving your overall playing .

I made this a long time ago. I mentioned it once or twice and someone asked for a picture/details, but it was locked deep in a storage container at the time. It was meant as an attempt at building a practice amp but also to see how 'pro' I could make it look. This is with the grille (made from an old fireguard) removed. I have some proper grille cloth on order to replace that on an old guitar combo and when that arrives I'll use the offcut to sort this one as well. The drivers are 4" 8R units rated 5 watts each (10W max) that were (IIRC) intended as woofers in two-way hifi units my brother built, then moved on from. I think I got some vague guidance on enclosure volume, which I possibly ignored. A few years ago I dug it out and greatly improved the bottom end by removing the huge amount of wadding stuffed inside, then further improved it by cutting a fairly random 65 mm hole in the back. This made the open E sound louder when not covered up. I finally dug it out again a few days ago, and added a 60mm long tube to the port. An A/B experiment showed that it made the bottom end better so I didn't bother with any further experimentation - it's hardly a stage amp! The amp is an own design preamp (pretty clean CMOS op-amp based I think...) and very good bipolar transistor power amp design from Michael Tooley. I added my own three-stage LED monitors - on, medium and high, set subjectively. It has a very clean sound without much colour and could probably be improved by a better designed preamp with some built in overdrive or using it with a DI pedal or emulator. The only thing bass specific about it is the EQ which is (IIRC) I slightly shifted to suit bass guitar. There is a tiny but audible bit of mains hum (despite a transformer with integral shielding in the bottom of the cab, well away from the inputs), so I think the PSU smoothing caps need to be replaced or improved. Not sure of the power, but volume-wise it's similar to my Crush 20. Sound wise it's nothing special at all but it might be fun to bring it to a bass bash and see if we can blow it up.

4x4 anyone?

Weird and possibly wonderful: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265392801756?hash=item3dcaa4c7dc:g:JUUAAOSwggBhhV9W

Great restoration.

"Selected lightweight obeche body" = made out of floorboards. 🙂

First time round in eth late 80s/early 90s I did one gig with a 12" combo, then got an 18" cab, then switched to a stack of two 2x12 cabs. Could never understand why 15s and 4x10s were de riguer for bass and 12s were ignored. Very different now, so I was way ahead of the curve 🙂 Now my favourite setup is a 2x12 (vertical Bill, don't panic!)

Lots of Ten Years After I thought I'd look up the bpm: Muppets!

I've never heard of a bi-flex before. Presumably it can push against the plug to bow the neck, like a double acting truss rod. Begs the question, has anyone, anywhere, ever had to use a truss rod to increase the bow on a neck?

Hi Tension seem to have used Fenders in 1978.

Found this fantastic interview with Victor Wooten by 'Julia from Thommann'. Some great stuff and some sensible comment that every slaptastic shredder ought to take to heart.

A quality octaver could be your friend.