Obrienp

Interesting! I guess that, plus the positioning further from the neck, is what makes the sound less like a Gibson mudbucker. The name “Bi-Sonic” is misleading then. I may have gone too far towards the mudbucker tone with the humbucking P-127 then. However, I have the ‘60s British Invasion bass tone in my head and a lot of that was achieved with Gibson humbuckers.

Well I’ve got through stage one of fitting the DiMarzio P-127 set. This was not without a few tech issues. I was delighted to score 3 CTS 250K audio taper pots with long shafts on FleaBay for just under £10! I have not seen these on sale in the U.K. before (250K with long shaft). Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get them to go through the f-hole, however I tried. Ditto full sized Alphas. The only mini pot I had in my parts box was an Alpha 100K B but having got everything else into the bass, I was keen to have something to play, so I put it in but using screw terminal blocks to connect it up. I am now waiting for a CTS 250K A mini-pot. The P-127 is meant to be pretty hot, so I was kind of expecting the 100K pot to tame it. It still has a lot of grunt but does sound a bit blunted. I am reserving judgement on whether the P-127 is going to give me a tone close to a big humbucker. It certainly has some of the qualities of the D-145 mudbucker I have in another bass. It’s definitely punchy and has more bottom than your average P. I am reserving judgement until I have tried it with a 250K pot. One thing that seems to be a bit worse, is the amount of hum coming from the bass. I added some copper tape to improve the shielding in the pickup cavity and I may have made the hum worse. I am not sure if the earth wire in the cavity is connected to the ground properly. I can remedy that when I change the pot. It seems that the chrome pickup covers act as an antennae for interference when I touch them. I need to make sure they get grounded properly. Here is a pic of the P-127 set in situ. I need to realign the treble side to eliminate the slight gap. Fortunately the rails are not touching the chrome covers. More to follow after fitting the 250K pot.

Bardzo dobrze!

Thank you again for the advice. I’m pretty sure the switch is Barefaced OEM. I found a video of Alex demonstrating the procedure for opening up a Two10S and the switch assembly looked the same. It was meant to be a demo of installing a switch kit but he used a Two10S and just discussed how to install the kit, rather than actually doing it. I don’t think I would have found that too helpful, if I was about to try to do it. However, he did mention that the coil and magnet assembly tie-wrapped to one of the speaker frames should be removed. It’s still there in my cab, so it’s obviously a conversion that wasn’t executed perfectly. I’ve been searching for written instructions on their website but very few of the technical links seem to work anymore. An email to Alex is in order.

I bought an Ashdown RM 800 from Paul. It was a very smooth and easy transaction: great comms, well packed and promptly dispatched. The amp was as described and I am very happy with the whole transaction. Buy with confidence.

Thank you for the suggestion. Fortunately, it was just a little damage to the ply where the feet were located: the two on the front side of the cab, so I was able to inspect it thoroughly when I removed the drivers. The only internal bracing is the internal baffle board assembly, as far as I could see. There is certainly nothing loose inside. I reinforced the area where the ply was damaged with some rectangles of 8mm ply, glued and stapled. I am pretty sure that is not moving and the buzzing is not coming from that area. TBH this cab always vibrated a lot at volume. I guess that is what comes from the lightweight construction: 10mm ply throughout. I always put a non-slip mat on top when gigging it. The buzz is something I hadn’t noticed before but I haven’t used it for a while. I have been using my LFSys Monzas, which are made of thicker ply and don’t vibrate as much. Now I have heard the buzz, I can’t un-hear it. I probably do need to consult Alex but I wanted to get an impartial view first. Unfortunately, the cab isn’t insured and the incident with the feet happened a couple of years ago.

Thank you @Phil Starr for the advice. Unfortunately, it looks like that DPDT switch (which, as you say is very standard) is attached to the PCB stuck on the back of the unit. I am not sure whether it will be within my capabilities to replace it. That PCB is mounted on a 50mm chunk of ply attached to the metal plate. Not sure why they did that. I assume it was to give it sufficient mass to resist vibration but it also protrudes a long way into the cabinet. I would have thought creating a long lever would make it amplify any movement in the plate. One supplementary question: should there be any wadding in the back compartment of the cabinet; ie the space behind the internal baffle? Would it help reduce the resonance if I put some in? I would be careful not to block the port that is at the bottom of that compartment. At the moment the cabinet vibrates so much (when I hit Eb, E, F) that the amp starts to dance about on top. Thank you for your forbearance. As must be obvious, this is far from my area of expertise.

I hope this isn’t hijacking this thread but the conversation by @Phil Starr and others about internal acoustic damping is very timely for me as I am trying to sort out a few little issues with my Barefaced Two10S, which has caused me to remove the drivers at one point and notice the internal damping material. I took the drivers out as I was implementing a long term fix to the anchoring of the feet on the long side of the cab (horizontal position). One had been torn out and another bent at an angle (over enthusiastic helper at a gig). I did a temporary fix with filler but the screws had started to work themselves free recently. On inspection the thin ply had been weakened around the screw holes, so I decided to use threaded captive nuts and reinforce the two damaged areas internally with rectangles of 8mm ply (glued and stapled). In the process I noticed that the white damping material appeared to have come away from where it had been stapled (staples still there but material scrunched up). I put it back where it had obviously been and re-stapled it. This formed a lining on four sides against the internal baffle board but not on the speaker baffle. It covered the slots in the internal baffle board. Is this correct? Strikes me it must be restricting the flow of air into the reflex chamber in the back of the cab. Should it be like that? On reassembly (with new speaker mounting bolts), I tested it with a Mark Bass LM111 500 with gain at 12 o’clock and EQ the same, filters off and master at about 11. I immediately noticed there appeared to be a distinct resonance around Eb, E, F accompanied by a sympathetic buzzing from somewhere on the cab. I eventually tracked this down to the switch plate on the back. The retaining screws weren’t that tight and couldn’t get proper purchase in the 10mm ply, so I eventually resorted to T-nuts and hex bolts, plus rubber draft excluder to make a gasket. This improved things a bit but did not eliminate the buzz. It really is in sympathy with the cab’s resonance around E: high pitched on a high E and low when I play open E. I think it is actually coming from the DPDT switch itself and that is probably something I need to seek advice from Alex about (new unit is around £120 😱, well that is what the switch conversion kit costs). All the above said, I noticed that there is no damping material in the back compartment of the cab. I am just wondering if putting some in might damp down the resonance around E, or will it just mess up the function of the reflex and port? Apologies, if I should be posting this in a different thread. incidentally, I am interested in making my own little low wattage cab like the BC 8” cab but I want to embed my HB GPA-100 power amp in it somehow, without it overheating (convection cooling). More of that later, when I have sorted out the Two10.

This is probably not adding any value to the conversation but here goes. Isn’t the body shape essentially the same as a Jaguar bass? The difference is in the electronics, so apart from that aspect, I struggle to see how this could be described as a prototype. Sorry, I know that didn’t add any value but it did seem like a poor excuse for shoddy work. I’m glad the luthier is sorting it. Hold his/her/their feet to the fire. I still think you should be given a part refund/discount for the inconvenience. I hope it works out for you.

Good on you mate. I hope said luthier sorts things out to your satisfaction.

What @tubbybloke68 said. I rarely need my second Monza but it is nice to have it for outside gigs to provide masses of clean headroom. It looks cool too.

Wow! £170 from Andertons! Not cheap. I have to turn the input gain on the amp down when using most of my passive basses at jams, because they start to overdrive the preamp. I guess it just depends on what pickups you have in your basses. Most of mine seem to have a lot more grunt than your average Fender/Fender clone, if the jams are anything to go by. That includes my Maruszczyk Elwood (Jazz clone), which I always use in passive mode.

I hope this works for you and that you don’t regret it later. I am not sure that being 60 years old should come into it. I’m 70 in a couple of weeks😱 and I have absolutely no intention of stopping playing in bands. Perhaps you have been unlucky with the personalities in the bands you have played in? There could be a really fulfilling experience waiting for you, with the right people. Just a thought anyway. I wish you all the best for however it works out for you.

Agree with all the views about this being unacceptable. My experience of commissioning a custom bass, which was also a bit of a prototype for the luthier. He was having problems with his spray booth at the time. He made several attempts to get the vintage sunburst right. Showed me the second iteration, while saying I think this is too orange isn’t it. I was about to say actually it’s not bad and he said, I’ll strip it and start again. Third time round, it was spot on as far as I was concerned but he wasn’t entirely happy with it. He had other orders backing up and I said I could live with it but he insisted on giving me a 40% discount! In the end it came out about the same price as Fender were charging for a MIM Mustang P/J. That was with Babicz bridge, expensive machine heads, etc. Later, when I said I was getting a bit of hum (despite the whole thing being shielded with copper tape), he identified a possible phasing issue with the pickups and rewound them for free. He also gave it a free after care service at the 6 month point: dressed any sprouting frets from the fingerboard drying out, set the action, etc. In my view you should be looking for all the issues to be sorted and a hefty discount for the inconvenience. The luthier should pay for any return shipping costs as well.

I have no experience of buying Retrovibe gear but the basses look interesting to me. If you don’t have the energy to source the parts, put them together and sort out the problems that arise, they are probably reasonable value. In defence of the parts they sell, you can’t really expect a small operation like Retrovibe to be able to commission Chinese manufacture of their own designs. They don’t shift enough units to put in a sufficiently large order. I noticed that their Mudbucker, for around £45, looks suspiciously like an Artec unit you can buy on Amazon for around £25. I suspect that there is some factory in China that churns out these units and puts them in a catalogue for resellers to put their own brand on. Artec probably put in much larger orders and therefore get a bulk discount. Caveat emptor I guess.

I had a ‘51 P pickup that comprised two coils side by side. It was made by a guy in Spain: Jess Loureiro. You could wire them in series, or parallel on a DPDT switch, which I tried. It was pretty pointless TBH. It sounded thin and horrible in parallel IMO but great in series. P.S. Now I think about it; not totally pointless because it was pretty hum free.

Yes. A 480 in walnut would make me look but still, probably not for the money they are currently asking.

Streuth! Two steps backwards: Quick march!

Shades of Spinal Tap “The End Continues” but it should be a cheese sandwich.

Good call. I had the EHB1000S for a while and only sold it because I had a Cat bass incoming. It obviously didn’t sell well enough for them to continue the 4 string version and the new 5s are beautiful but expensive. The neck was a bit wide to be ideal for me and if I wasn’t looking at the fretboard constantly, I often ended up playing two frets out. The ideal Ibby for me would be a short scale version of the SR500 but without the neck getting too wide at the 12th fret. I say that because the Mezzo was actually wider at the 12th than a full scale SR and the my Talman had a baseball bat of a neck, as well as being a boat anchor.

I would call that medium scale, which puts it right in my bag. I love all those ‘80s medium scale basses from Japan. That one is pricey though. I guess there isn’t sufficient market for them to consider reintroducing them but I’m surprised they haven’t jumped on the short scale band wagon. Shorties seem to be riding a wave of popularity at the moment and a well designed Yamaha SS would surely sell well.

Yep, I guess it is meant to be retro, or something. It means that I can reuse it with the P-127 set. I have to though, because they cut a big hole in the top to accommodate the extra width. If you want shiny P-bass pickups, I guess the DiMarzio Billy Sheehan Relentless middle set would do it. £122 from Thomann, plus delivery!

At least that one is walnut, so presumably light by Ricky standards but the price is eye-watering. I doubt it will hang around for long though. Somebody will have the cash. I’ve just discovered a mate has a band saw, table router, drill press, band sander and is just completing a CNC machine in his garage/workshop. He’s one of those folks who makes valve amps for fun and has built his own Moog-alike synths. I am wondering if we could tackle a Rick-alike shorty together. I am sure it would come in a lot cheaper than the 4030S.

They are really good basses. Much better value than any Squier IMO. That’s not saying Squier bad, it’s just Sire seem to have hit a purple patch in terms of design, features and manufacturing quality. I have the fretless version of the U5 and I can endorse everything you say about them. It is the first value bass I haven’t seen the need to upgrade; even the machine heads are standard but I use a grippy strap to counter any neck dive. I have put black nylon tapes on it but that is just to make the fretless experience even better.

First instalment of what I hope doesn’t become a saga🤞. Checked the existing pups under the covers. Pictures below. The originals have fixed plastic covers and the lugs are marginally bigger than standard; see comparison of a Tone Rider cover and the OEM pup. They have foam rubber pads stuck underneath with embedded springs (old school and good). They are slightly longer than usual. Perhaps intended for Jazz pups. Anyway, that was encouraging enough for me to pull the trigger on the DP-127. £105 plus £10 postage (!!) from Thomann: can’t see any in stock with UK outlets. I’ll have to do a complete re-wire now, so will put a full size CTS pot in for volume and a Pure Tone jack socket. I already have an Artec varitone style control in place of the original tone pot. I had a really nice varitone made up by my Humble Workshop but I couldn’t get it through the f-hole. Anyway lots of fiddly fun to come😏. I’m just a little worried that the aperture in the OEM chrome covers might not be wide enough to avoid contact with the blades in the DP-127. I might have to get my metal files out 😰. Further report to come.