Dom in Dorset

My biggest fear is that i'll absent mindedly end up doing this:

I've often sung while playing bass and in my current band I do lead and backing vocals. We started out with a fiddle player and had quite a folky feel but when she left I started adding some flute here and there to keep that element in the band's sound. Until now I've resisted the temptation to hand the bass over to someone else for a song , I've always found ways to fit the flute in without having to do that. Anyway , on a new song I have done just that so I'm on vocals and flute and someone else is playing bass. We are playing it tonight for the first time and I don't think I have ever sung in public without a bass or guitar - What am I going to do with my hands????

My fretless (I'll be playing her tonight): The neck was a £50? from CH guitars Body - scrap found on ebay £15, routed out for jazz pickups and a bit of plywood stuck under the neck to pack out the joint. Pickups - £10 of ebay from a scrap Lindo bass. Scratch plate - a bit of old plywood. It does have black knobs now, taken from a broken distortion pedal. Other parts from my spares box. Plays like a dream and gives me exactly the sound I was after.

Thanks, I'd been agonizing over what headstock for my Fenderesque Fusion Fretless jazz build until I saw your bass.

Would you mind posting a link to the template for the headstock? I could do with one of those for my own build. Nice work by the way, I had misgivings about the orange colour but itworks really well.

Glue...

Well spotted! Yes, Yandles, That's half of the piece that I bought , I'm going to try making a fretted neck with the other half as practice for building a through neck Thunderbird later in the year.

I found some time to rout out the neck for the truss rod. I was getting very excited about it until I realized that I've run out of wood glue, oh well tomorrow I glue... PS I'm thinking of a tele head stock.

these guys do a green tort http://www.chguitars.co.uk/hardware/scratchplates-brackets/pg6-jazz-style-bass-scratch-plate-1922.html

Looks like the pickup has been replaced, the one that's in there was made for a bass with much wider string spacing and doesn't fit the hole in the scratch plate.

Antoria

The only known picture of a no name jazz bass i played for years during the mid 1980's. I sold it for £30, I wish I hadn't as it played like a dream and was the first bass that I really got to grips with. I hadn't seen this picture until an old friend tracked me down. I'd always thought that it was a fairly standard fender copy but the pickups look like mini chrome humbuckers and there's something odd about the bridge (unless that's an ashtray style cover) It's new years eve at a caravan park on the Welsh border and I'm wearing a pink jacket.

I tried an affinity precision once and the only thing I didn't like about it was the pickups. The tone was muddy and not at all a classic P bass sound. I have a bass with a £15 budget P pickup in it and it sounds far better than the affinity that I tried. Spend your money on good pickups.

Top edge of the bass parallel to the bottom of my rib cage on fretted , for fretless it's a tad higher but still well outside the "Haircut 100 zone".

Fred Flintstone signature bass.

I find it fills the band sound out more, I use fingers mostly but also a pick and mute the strings with my RH palm on a couple of songs where I want that old fashioned flat wound sound. I think most of us spent the first week on fretless sliding around, after that I started just to use it for playing properly but with a different feel/sound. After a few years of experimenting (having tried and moved on from active acoustic,Precision, MM style) I settled on passive jazz as my weapon of choice. What I hate is when (usually none bass players ) say " have you trued that with a chorus pedal?" - No, I don't wish to sound like every band from the 1980's that I hated. And remember - the slide is still there for when you absolutely need it.

I thought Steinbergers looked awful and that I wouldn't be seen dead with one....until I tried , then bough the Honher copy. The only thing more cool than a Steinberger would be a double neck Steinberger, the onlyn thing cooler than that would be a Steinberger double that only has strings on one neck.

The fingerboard is now boxwood, it's very tough, tight grained and dense , it's also beautiful close up. I'll try and get a close up of the it when the light is better.

A lot of people are naming people who may not be great technicians on bass but serve other functions in their band : ie Rodger Waters, not a virtuoso but if he hadn't been in the band would they have come up with Dark Side or The Wall?

A set of michine heads, a bridge , a truss rod and a set of jazz pickups that will fit perfectly on the fretless bass I'm building, how my wife and kids got it so abolutely spot on I'll never know. It's as if I ordered them myself and they just wrapped them.

From the dim and distant past : Me - have you sent X that demo they requested yet, you said you'd sort it out a few months back? Anon - No Me - how come , that was months ago???!!!!! Anon - I haven't got any jiffy bags.

[quote name='lowregisterhead' timestamp='1356603608' post='1911472'] And on a more personal level, during a pause in our sound check at a corporate event, the guitarist of another band on the gig walks past me and says, with heavy sarcasm: "Ooh. 5 strings. Gosh." I managed to resist the near-overwhelming urge to pin him to the ground and break his arms... [/quote] No need , I would imagine the bassist from his own band will do that at some point.

It's a good idea to make your bass active if you like active basses, I prefer passive basses , the tones I like , no batteries to let you down, simple controls. However , I believe it is possible to fit an East pre-amp to a passive bass.without any modification to the body.

I played a fretless/fretted for a couple of years (profile pic) I did get into playing both necks in a single song , great fun and totally progtastic! The main reason I moved on was that I needed a better quality instrument, even building it yourself a twin neck isn't cheap, a high quality twin is serious money.

If you do an image search for "Bradley Wiggins Entistle bass" there is an interesting picture comparing the two, for some reason I can't post it here. Can't find a picture of the bass though.