SumOne

109 Overall. I'd expected to do better at beat alignment as I've spent about 20 years DJing beatmatching with vinyl, seems it's easier to do that with a banging 4/4 than with a beatless orchestral waltz though!

I got annual membership for Scott's Bass Lessons when the first lockdown started last March and found the combination of that and working from home with it easy to pick up the Bass for quick breaks has meant a lot of short bits of practice time when I wouldn't usually have been able to. The 'payers path' part of those lessons has been quite addictive working up through the levels. Having paid for 12 months membership has been incentive to make use of it, and to try and get through as much of it as possible in the time.

I recently got my first Sandberg - a california tm5 sl. The build quality on all the important things is good and it's my favorite Bass I've owned. Great playability and sound. I'd recommended it. However, to be honest there are a few minor things that aren't quite up to the quality of my previous more expensive Dingwall or cheaper Ibanez. Battery compartment pokes out a bit and has the sort of opening you get on a £10 toy, slight gap where the neck meets the body on one side, pickguard raises up at one part, pots don't all have the same resistance, needs tuning a bit more often.....all minor things though.

Thanks for the SBL Functional Theory and Sight reading lessons, I keep going back to them when I feel I should be focussing my practice and knowledge rather aimlessly playing riffs and noodling!

I just got a Sandberg California TM5 SL and it's my favourite Bass I've ever owned. I'm loving the thump of the MM pickup, and the warm tones that can be got from the Jazz pickup, and blending between them, good slap tones too, and nice muted sounds in passive with the tone down, and big dubby bass that can be added with the active EQ. Good neck and fretboard (although I've never understood the need for position markers down the middle of the fretboard- can't see them when playing), good ergonomics, comfortable and nice to play. And 3.3kg?!? I never had much of an issue with Basses being too heavy but it's so much nicer to practice for hours with a lighter Bass. I worried low weight would mean neck dive but I don't notice it doing that, not any more than any other Bass I've owned. My only gripe is a bit of a gap (only about half a mm) between the neck and body where it joins on one side - it doesn't seem to cause any issues though, and the pickguard raised up in one part, and generally the hardware doesn't feel quite as high-end as the Dingwall Combustion I traded it for (or even my previous Ibanez which was half the price). And in an ideal world I'd like a mid EQ with 3 way mid frequency switch - that's one of the best features of the Ibanez SRMS805 and I think it's an option on the Lakland 55-02 via an internal switch. I say 'favourite' rather than 'best' Bass I've owned because the Dingwall Combustion is objectively a better engineered Bass, but it didn't have the variety of tones I was after and was more effort to play; it was 4.5kg, had a slightly uncomfortable reach down to B & E string 1st frets, and it ideally needed plucking in line with the offset direction of the pickups rather than vertically down the strings for consistent tone (if you plucked vertically down from the B to the G you'd go from being in front of the pickup on the B to behind it by the time you get to the G) . But if you were after a high quality well engineered Bass for something like session recording or technical stuff that prioritises note clarity and hi-fi tones, and great sustain, fast playing with lower action, and more consistent string tension and timbre then the Dingwall is the winner. What it comes down to for me though is what's comfortable and fun to play and gets the sounds you want, and for that the Sandberg is my favourite. Some Basses feel like an piece of engineering, others feel like they have character and should be named- this is one that needs a name....Maroon 5 if someone hadn't got their first, or perhaps Sandburgundy.

Nice one, yeah looks like 19mm is just about be do-able. I had a 16.5 Ibanez that was too close, and now have 19mm Dingwall that is good spacing for me - considering getting a TM5 but the string spacing is my only hesitation....that and the fact I'm also considering a Lakland DJ5 or 55-02, anyone here have experience with each of them that would recommend one over the others?

With the TM5 it seems string spacing can be from 18mm-19.5.mm. But does anyone here know if you could have the 19mm+ spacing between all strings? It seems like the obvious answer is yes, but I've been caught out with this before on an ibanez - individually strings could be moved the maximum distance apart, but having all five of them that far apart meant the B and G were were easily slipping off the edge of the frets.

I went from a 4 string Fender Jazz to an Ibanez SRMS805 which is a great Bass and was quite an easy transition (fanned frets were no issue), only issue for me was the small (16.5mm) string spacing, but some people prefer that. They are about £900 new but you'd probably get 2nd hand for about £500 and it'd hold that value if you didn't get on with it and sold it.

I'm after a 70s passive Jazz Bass tone (playing stuff like Reggae , Funk, Blues) but in a 5 string (probably 35"+) with wide string spacing, about £1400 budget. I generally hear that Fender aren't necessarily the best for 5 strings and this review for the Lakland 55-02 got me thinking it's the next Bass for me: "Tonewise, this bass is a chameleon. It can mimic the P, PJ, J, Jaco and StingRay sounds to a certain degree. Lakland fairly admits that the bass was designed to mimic those classic models in the first place. The overall design of the bass and the advanced coil split capabilities of the humbucker offers a tonal versatility second to none. The humbucker isn’t on the StingRay sweet spot. Instead, it covers the 60’s and 70’s Jazz Bass bridge pickup positions. Therefore; the authenticity of it’s 60/70 JB is better than the authenticity of it’s StingRay sound. The neck single coil has a split coil design, but is still a single coil pickup. Therefore; it leans towards the Jazz Bass neck sound rather than an old mean P-Bass. Combining those factors, you are getting a 60’s + 70’s Jazz Bass in a single instrument, which can also get into the P & MM ballpark." https://www.lakland.com/testimonials/review-of-lakland-skyline-series-55-02/ Do you agree with that? Or the DJ 5 is the other one I'm considering. I know trying one out for myself is the only real answer but I'm trying to narrow down the field though seeing as I can't try out Basses in shops and I'm a bit impatient with Lockdown practice time on my hands.

Nice one, so you reckon the BT2 has enough mids and highs to be a decent PA? that's good to know....there's a BT2 for sale on here for £600 and I guess it should have at least a 600W amp (2nd hand for about £400) so I could have a decent Bass rig for about £1k that could also double up as a Reggae DJ rig (perhaps combining with my current PA amp and speakers for the DJ stuff, but ideally it could replace them to partly fund it....and as I think my wife might kill me if I fill the house with many more speakers!).

I reckon this is complete. I really like all of these pedals and there's no room for any more unless I level up my Tetris skills.

To confuse things ideally I would like to be able to use the Amp and Cabs not just to play Reggae via the Bass, but to also use with my Decks and DJ mixer (and perhaps combined with my current PA Poweramp and speakers) when I DJ Reggae. The DJ mixer has separate main output and monitor outputs so could possibly run the PA Poweramp and speakers via one output and the Bass Amp and Cabs via the other. Or possibly something like the Barefaced Big Baby covers the whole spectrum better and it could replace the PA gear, but them I assume a Bass specific Amp isn't going to be ideal for that.

No sign of a Dubster 2, but there is a Barefaced Big One which I've just enquired about - looks good. Almost anything would be an improvement on my current setup of PA Poweramp and speakers (saved slightly as it's fed via tube DI and a Cab sim pedals).

Nice one, I've got my eye out for a Dubster 2, they seem pretty rare though.

Cheers, that was my long term plan so am considering a bit of future proofing for the amp to handle it - my understanding was that they would combine okay but it looks like I'll have to give this more thought. (GAK's upselling pitch for the Orange 115 is "Combine with one of the AD200B heads and a OBC410 cab and you'll have a completely Orange, 100% floor-punishing bass rig!") .....I might not go for Orange at all though. I mostly play reggae/dub so eventually want to build up to something that can push out a lot of sub and rattle chests and assumed 15" were best for that.

I just got this from an audio blog: "Many sound engineers will say that “underpowering”, or using amplifiers that are too small for the speakers, is worse than “overpowering” them. Although they have good reasons to say such a thing and in practice speakers do tend to break mostly when the amp is being driven beyond its operating range, the truth is a bit less straightforward than that; basically, overdriving a small amp can actually release as much power to the speaker as a big amp, and it isn’t the distortion per se that breaks the speakers but rather the increased power of the signal at different frequencies............It’s usually a good call to err on the side of caution by choosing a bigger amplifier than strictly required; it will happily output the correct power cleanly, and if it eventually runs loud enough to break the speaker, that’s a good sign that the speaker needs to be replaced with something bigger. A smaller amp would have been clipping at that point, and most likely would have eventually broken the speaker anyway." https://proaudioblog.co.uk/power-ratings-2-why-speakers-break/ So I guess although something less powerful than 1000W would be probably plenty, it's not necessarily a bad thing to get the 1000W and just keep it turned low. (this one I've got my eye on is a fair bit cheaper 2nd hand than the 500W brand new).

Nice one, cheers. Yeah I wasn't considering the Watts per speaker rather than per cab but that makes sense. There's a 1000 Watt Terror for sale at what seems an alright price (£400) which I'm considering as long as it's not overkill that's going to blow any speakers I get in future.

Do I understanding correctly for this example: 4x10 600W 8 Ohms + 1x15 400W 8 Ohms = Two 8 Ohm cabs wired in parallel have a total impedance of 4 Ohms. Orange Terror Bass 500W is 250 Watts into 8 Ohms or 500 Watts into an 4 Ohms (but that is split 250W per cab). So that Amp only ever actually powers each cab up to 250W, meaning the 4x10 will only ever be powered to less than half of it's capacity and the 1x15 at less that two thirds. ......so potentially something like the the Orange Terror Bass 1000 Watt version wouldn't be complete overkill (as long as not turning up beyond about 3/4) because it actually gives a maximum of 500W power to each 8 Ohm Cab?

It has a footswitch to change the order of the loops - so one loop could have chorus and octaver (that you can click both on/off with one footswitch) and the other loop could have distortion, you can either have chorus and/or octaver feed into distortion or click to reverse it and have distortion feed into into chorus and/or octaver....as you can have several pedals in each loop it opens up a lot of combinations, it took me a while to work out what pedals always sounds good in front or behind each other to put in one loop and which ones sound good either way around and need to go in separate loops. Or if you don't think the reverse thing is that useful for you and you just want to turn on/off several pedals in a loop with one click it's probably worth considering what loops you would like your pedals to be in (I guess the compressor and tuner probably won't be going into loops). Bright Onion do everything from 1 up to 12. Or perhaps you'll want to blend in your clean signal to loops. There are pedals for that by Bright Onion, or the Boss LS-2 or the EHX Switchblade or tri-parallel mixer, or Old Blood Noise Endeavors Signal Blender. I went through all this about a month ago, my conclusion was the dual reverse was mot useful to me but if I had the ££ and pedal board space I would have gone for the Boss ES-5.

Not many loop switchers do the reverse loop thing so it depends if that's something you think would be useful. Personally I thought 2 loops with the reverse was more useful to me than 5 loops with no reverse. As far as I know the ES-5 is the cheapest option for 5 loops and being able to reverse loop ordering but its cost and size are disadvantages.

A loop switcher is indeed what you need to turn on/off 2 or more pedals at the same time with one footswitch. Bright Onion pedals are good for this. I got to a similar situation about a month ago (9 pedals) and I got something slightly different from them worth considering: The Bright Onion dual reverse looper https://www.brightonion.co.uk/dual-reverse-looper/ for £65. It was handmade and sent to me within a few days (you get to customise your LED colours). It's good. I have octave, chorus, envelope filter in one loop and distortion pedals in another: can get a couple of pedals in a loop ready to be switched on/off with one footswitch rather than tap dancing, and cuts pedals out of the signal chain when the loops aren't activated. Plus you can reverse the order of the loops with a footswitch - that opens up a lop of options. I heard good things about the Boss ES-5 which can do all that with 5 loops, but that costs £330 and I didn't feel I had enough pedals to justify it.

Latent Lemon https://www.latentlemon.co.uk/ (within that link it says '........also stock pedals from my most excellent fellow UK builders Tate FX, Zander Circuitry, Raygun FX, Bad Penny FX, Hylight') Bright Onion do switchers https://www.brightonion.co.uk/