LawrenceH

[quote name='Kevin Dean' timestamp='1318551087' post='1403765'] I use the MB121h & I use a peavey XR1212 for the bands PA ,this has a Sub out this means that any signal below 100KHZ going into the PA can be sent to a powered sub .I,m thinking of putting this signal through my amp as well as my bass . Good Idea or not ? Thank you [/quote] You mean the Markbass unit? I guess you'd need an additional mixer with DI to do this? Unless you play an active bass in which case you could get away with skipping the DI. But it really depends what kind of PA speakers you've got, what other signal there is in the mix below 100Hz and how loud you expect it to be. The MB kit is good but it's not magic and can't reproduce real sub frequencies at high volume without suffering - it's only 350 watts or thereabouts into a 1x12. I have used a bass rig to reinforce the kick drum for small/medium pub-type gigs before and it worked well and it integrates really nicely with the bass guitar, but dedicated PA subs are a very different beast to bass combos. Unless you already have the equipment to experiment with this I wouldn't bother, it could cause more problems than it solves.

[quote name='dannybuoy' timestamp='1318455878' post='1402563'] I can play a power cord! [/quote] On your base guitar?

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1318445073' post='1402319'] D'you mean the kick drum? [/quote] Useful for sound engineers confronted with the typical rock line up. B is for bass, so we needed another letter for the bass drum...

T cut works ok but you can take off too much if you're not careful IME. Unless you're used to spraying nitro and have got it thin enough then you need to leave it a long while to dry before polishing (weeks)

Keep misreading this as 'Could you be the worst looking bassist in the world?' What about the most beautiful person playing the worst looking bass? (Yeah I know, the other way round is a lot easier, but a lot meaner) Who's got the biggest contrast between their own gorgeousness and the hideous malformities of their instrument (bass, stop sniggering at the back there)?

[quote name='gamester4520503' timestamp='1318342442' post='1400847'] Thanks again Dave. Just about to order crossover components - aiming for a crossover frequency of about 1200Hz with a couple of second orders. The wood has been cut to size, just need to get everything fitted. Can anyone recommend a good place to get speakers from? The LA6 CBMR is about £50 online, just want to see what other options are out there. [/quote] Lean Business are normally pretty competitive, and fast in my experience. They've got the LA6 at £45, dunno about shipping though. http://www.lean-business.co.uk/eshop/eminence-la6-cbmr-8ohm-6-150watt-mid-range-speaker-p-754.html

[quote name='EssentialTension' timestamp='1318276260' post='1400047'] ... because he's brilliant and out of tune. [/quote] He probably is brilliant to be fair...but for me he's in a box with Dylan, Springsteen and assorted others who I will never, ever enjoy listening to no matter how hard I try. Different strokes. Plenty of great jazz with rather sketchily intonated double bass. But on fretted electric, you can always add a bit more 'vibe' just bending the note. There you go, problem solved. Until the engineer autotunes it out again.

[quote name='bigjohn' timestamp='1318269738' post='1399930'] Go listen to some Woody Guthrie. [/quote] Ugh, why on earth would you want to do that? Digital tuners are great. Players with cloth ears aren't. Now AUTOtune, that's a whole different kettle of tuna, that has definitely contributed to a sterilisation of pop music IMO.

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1318103532' post='1398205'] I might do it tomorrow. I would like to record the before/after samples (will leave the not very new strings on, for now) and when that happens I will post them here. [/quote] That'll be dead handy - far more so with older strings, get a much better idea of what the pickups, as opposed to new strings, do for an instrument IMO.

[quote name='notable9' timestamp='1318067155' post='1397720'] And I may even de-relic the thing one day...we'll see. [/quote] Haha, genius!

[quote name='bubinga5' timestamp='1318032360' post='1397558'] why is there no music like this any more..????????!!!!!!!! [/quote] Because D'Angelo lost the plot in about 2001? (Sadly!)

Surely if there is a difference at all, in any one case it's going to be dependent on the type of bridge - high mass or not, how much it changes the break angle on the string. I guess it could change the compliance a bit. The bridge saddles forming the pivot point are still anchored in the bridge either way though. Be very interested in the results if you do give it a go.

I'm a bit puzzled as to whether the problem is occurring at the nut or the bridge. But if at the nut, then likely either it has been restrung with the tuner windings pushing the open string in the wrong direction (up the tuning peg rather than down), the nut slot hasn't been properly cut or you're using too thick a string guage for the nut which is preventing the string sitting down as it should.

You people must have much better monitoring than me at your gigs! B***ered if I can hear what note I'm on half the time - at darker gigs in the past I've had to try and work my way up the bumps from the open strings!

[quote name='mcnach' timestamp='1317305521' post='1389295'] Ah, Thomann's customer service delivered, once again. It seems ParcelForce was teh company at my end, not DHL as in teh past (?) and the driver left it with my next door neighbour. They gave me his name. I just had not had the chance to ask him yet. Ok, so all good... I'll be able to pick up the pickups tonight or tomorrow, and this weekend I have work to do on this Jazz [/quote] Can I ask, have you managed to fit these yet? Very interested to hear how you get on with them

What Lozz and Jimmy said, choose a mic to fit the voice (and the situation). SM58s are great but it can be a total PITA mixing a backing vocal prone to sounding nasal through a SM58. Better with a 57, remember that presence peak in the 58 is there to sit the voice above the mix which isn't necessarily what you want with backing (esp if the lead is also using a 58!). The Shure betas are nice mics. The Sennies are ok but I think they can sound thin/harsh on similar types of voice to those that don't suit 58s well. I always liked using condensers/back electrets (Shure 87s, AKG C1000s) but you have to adapt your thinking about mixing slightly, e.g. a lot of people struggle with HF feedback on these not realising just how much more HF you can roll off on these, without it impacting significantly on the vocal clarity compared to what you'd get with a dynamic. Oh yeah, and stands K&M all the way or super cheap studiospares ones used to be ok.

[quote name='shippo' timestamp='1317737419' post='1393910'] Hey all Ive got a 35 year old fender precision that Ive been trying to clean the grime off all day and I'm getting no where fast with soapy water, a cloth and a light scourer pad sponge, or furniture polish. There is YEARS of dried on sweat all over it which is really unpleasant (mine and no doubt previous owners that I havnt wiped off properly ever) Any suggestions on what I can use on the body that isnt going to effect the finish of the guitar? Ta! [/quote] Something like isopropanol (electrical contact cleaner) is a great solvent but you want to be sure it's an inert poly finish and not nitrocellulose which is more reactive with organic solvents. A '75 P could have either. Similarly white spirit isn't bad (or acetone, but this will dissolve nitro pretty fast). If there is wear down to the bare wood then you might need to sand and refinish, this would typically be more of an issue on maple necks rather than bodies though. T cut is an abrasive and again will eat through a thin nitro layer pretty quickly,though a good cutting paste carefully applied should work pretty well.

Obvious but perhaps worth pointing out, if you reshape the horns (particularly the upper) you will alter the balance of the instrument on the strap unless you make compensatory alterations elsewhere. Shortening the top horn will tend towards neck-dive.

Unlined fretless playing is far too dependent on the quality of the stage sound to be feasible in many live situations - bad enough with fretted bass in some cases! I find it quite funny that all the responses have tried to change the OPs opinion rather than answer the question. My guess at a price btw is around £150 - £200 but hopefully someone'll be along with a more accurate estimate

[quote name='Killerfridge' post='1327328' date='Aug 4 2011, 04:31 PM']No-one is claiming that the strings do not vibrate the wood; one could reasonably assume that this would in turn affect the string. The problem is when people start making claims that this difference is audible (alder sounds mellower, ash sounds snappier etc) when put up against the plethora of different electronics and hardware that are involved in shaping the sound of an electric instrument. I understand that acoustic instruments have resonating chambers, and that this has a real effect on the sound of the instrument. What I feel (IMO) you are doing is over-extrapolating from this, and coming to a faulty conclusion. And as a side note of interest, could you explain how you got to the figure of £50,000 for a pilot study? (not doubting you, I would just like to know where figure came from).[/quote] How is it faulty though? I have never said 'alder sounds mellower' because I think it's likely to be more idiosyncratic than that. In fact I have explicitly said that I think often the tones will be very similar in the real-world. I only stepped in because people appear to be over-extrapolating this to claim that wood has no effect on tonal output of a bass, which would defy the laws of physics. By the way the resonant chamber acoustic is actually in some ways a far more complex model to examine the effect of wood type, because the chamber size, shape and construction will have a really big effect on its properties - a solid body is in that sense much simpler. There are lots of cases where the basic tone of the instrument is so buried under electronics that of course you can barely even hear what instrument is being played - but a clean tone into a reasonably flat, low distortion system, well it would be astonishing if a change in something that contributes significantly to the vibrational decay characteristics of the string wasn't audible when looking at the extremes of variation in what constitutes 'normal' wood. Whether it's important to you is another matter - a bridge pickup will nearly always sound like a bridge pickup because it has a characteristic comb filter property that is dependent on it's position relative to the string. It can only pick up what the string actually outputs though (which means obviously that strings are very important). Why is the simple example of a dead-spot shifting with altered neck mass not enough to demonstrate that the properties of the thing the string is mounted to make a significant contribution to the sound? I was pleased with that example because I thought it was so straightforward! The £50,000 figure for initial studies: a typical post-doc researcher wage is over £30,000. You will need a budget for materials, test equipment and an appropriate space to do it in, which would involve among other things an acoustically treated listening room. Then at the end you have publication costs of several thousand (yes, even though the journals are expensive to buy, scientists have to pay to publish their data). Basically, most of the money would just get eaten up by overheads and set-up costs. You could do it for a lot less if you already had a university department or similar to do the work in, and just gave it to a hapless PhD student! But I honestly can't see anyone supporting this because the data on wood properties is undoubtedly out there commercially and the rest is reinventing the wheel. It's too much of a school 'science project' A final point - why are people so focused on the contribution or not of the body wood (eg in that talkbass video) when the neck makes up such a notable proportion of the total vibrating length?

[quote name='lanark' post='1327177' date='Aug 4 2011, 03:32 PM']True that - and to take another tack - just because they'd sound different doesn't mean that it's the type of wood used. A better test would be to take a basic body and add new pickups, new strings and a new bridge and see if THAT sounds different - and see if it's MORE different than the difference between the oak / alder bodies with the same equipment attached. Then ask yourself if you should take wood into account as anything other than i) a solid base on which to attach the things that make the noise and ii) to look nice. Anything else is snake oil.[/quote] Hmmm, there is a big difference between the questions 'is wood a contributor to tone?' and 'is wood the most significant factor?' Clearly the answer to the second question is no - pickup position has a demonstrable (and predictable in nature) large effect, it's characteristics as a filter do also, and the mounting wood is only one of several factors contributing to the acoustic resonance of the system as a whole. But basic engineering/physics tells us that it is a contributor. I am honestly disappointed to see that talkbass experiment still being used to assert that wood has a negligible contribution to tone. It's just not the right experimental design to address that question at all. What it does show is that you don't have to spend a lot of money on body wood for an instrument, and that in a lot of individual cases the tone of two nominally identical instruments (but for the body wood) will be similar or at least neither will be subjectively better than the other. That is in itself a useful conclusion, but it is not an answer to the question 'what contribution does wood make to tone'. What puzzles me is where people are disagreeing. Is it that it's hard to connect the idea of an electric instrument to the general physical models that describe it's behaviour, or that people actually don't believe Newtonian physics is any good, or that people haven't ever seen any data demonstrating variable acoustic properties of wood (even aural appreciation of the sound a piece of wood being knocked will do for these purposes) ? Or is it that different people are asking different questions? I think that last is the case with lanark's question, but maybe for other people as well.

[quote name='Vibrating G String' post='1326390' date='Aug 4 2011, 01:32 AM']I don't think verbosity is a satisfactory proof. Others may disagree. If you're a "research scientist" you may be familiar with the concept of data and not just conjecture leading to a conclusion.[/quote] I'm sorry but that is ridiculous. The principles behind vibration analysis are very well characterised, with huge amounts of data already in existence for loads of different materials. The maths to describe mass-spring-damper models has been understood since the 18th century! As for data - despite the fact that it would be completely reinventing the wheel, I outlined a basic overview of the experiments required and gave an estimate of the cost to do pilot studies up to a publishable standard. On the other hand I asked you for a link to evidence that you assert is out there and you didn't provide it. Rather than addressing any point directly (like why mass-spring-damper models are or aren't inappropriate for describing a guitar, or why you think all pieces of wood have identical resonant frequencies, or where the energy magically comes from to maintain the resonance decay characteristics when a guitar is acoustically amplified resting against a table) you choose the route of ridicule. [quote name='Vibrating G String' post='1326391' date='Aug 4 2011, 01:35 AM']I think that one line kills any hope of sounding scientific.[/quote] Err, why? The main reason I said that is because a) If I tap a few different bits of wood I hear different characteristic resonance properties, which will fall into the output bandwidth of a bass guitar and b ) I understand what a transducer (pickup) is. [quote name='Killerfridge' post='1326393' date='Aug 4 2011, 01:40 AM']We must not also forget the null hypothesis - until someone provides data to show that tone-woods have an audible effect on the sound of an electric instrument, we should assume they do not. The burden of proof is on those making the positive claim, not those who don't believe it. ... And I have to agree with G-string - you can't just assert your way into a conclusion. That's exactly how pseudoscience works (see water fondlers and spine wizards - if you follow what they say to their conclusions, they must be correct, but actual scientific evidence points to the contrary)[/quote] Not exactly, because this is not new science in that sense...it is an applied model where all the science that describes the system is already defined and tested and there is an awful lot of direct measurement data on vibration analysis as applied to wood. So in this case Occam's razor applies. You expect the model to behave as predicted by it's component parts. As for making assertions, well, I feel I've backed them up by linking to well-described physical principles, referencing simply verifiable examples and then outlining further experiments that would generate hard data, and made some reference to the appropriate methods for then analysing that data.

[quote name='Vibrating G String' post='1325256' date='Aug 3 2011, 09:46 AM']Funny what gets completely discounted, like the player who's belly it's resting on. ... The research has been done and it's conclusive. It's available on the internet for anyone wanting to search.[/quote] I'd be very interested to see it, if you could link. I feel fairly confident in my ability to assess it - I've peer-reviewed papers for publication as part of my job as a research scientist. The effect of a player's belly - I'm sure resting against something versus free hanging would have a measurable effect under controlled conditions, if not always easily audible in the real world. Different from one person to another? At a guess not enough to be measurable unless you had an exceptionally controlled environment and testing equipment. But different resting against one surface compared to another? You can hear this effect acoustically when you rest a solid body instrument against something like a table and pluck a string - you'll easily hear it amplifying the sound. Since we (hopefully) don't believe it's possible to break the laws of thermodynamics, we assume the energy for this amplification to occur has to come from somewhere, i.e. from the string vibrational energy and will therefore result in altered decay characteristics of the string. These will be picked up and amplified - after all, the pickup is a transducer, not a synthesiser. [quote name='Doddy' post='1325579' date='Aug 3 2011, 12:54 PM']But,wouldn't the anchor points of the string be more important to the vibration than what it's mounted too? Also,as soon as you fret a note,you are effectively damping the string so the resonance characteristics have changed again?[/quote] To address the last point first, remember when you fret a note the anchor point is metal from the fret. The damping characteristics of the anchor point have a large effect on tone - for a clear example, witness the obvious difference between fretless and fretted bass. So the anchor points make an important contribution to the string vibration. But, considering the vibration you have to look at the system as a whole. This includes not only the anchor points, but what they transmit to and from their mountings - in this case the body of the guitar. Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this is to take the example of fretting at a deadspot on the neck played through an amplifier. Clamp a suitably heavy object to a neck to change the mass and the deadspot will shift - proving that the body is contributing to vibrational decay characteristics and this alters the tone through the amp in an easily audible fashion (you will get increased sustain where previously it was dying quickly). Now I'm going to go ridiculously and pompously over the top, so if you're not a geek then don't bother reading this (but also, please don't lay into me if you don't understand it ). Let's try and turn the rather vague 'does wood contribute to tone?' into a more scientific question that can be meaningfully addressed... Hopefully the examples I've given between them already demonstrate that the vibration of the system has to be considered as a whole and therefore the body inherently contributes to tone. If not I suggest a read through of the basic principles here [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration[/url] Don't worry about the maths, just the mass-spring-damper model, the different types of vibration and how the principle of conservation of energy applies. So, the question. Let's break it into separate parts. For each part we need to define our system of measurement, the other variables which must be controlled and also our method of analysis. This by the way is where the 50 grand I mentioned earlier comes in as doing these experiments properly is expensive and we are going to want to publish this in a nice, free access, international peer-reviewed journal so we have a handy reference next time this argument comes up: 1. Do different pieces of wood have measurably different resonance characteristics from each other within the audio bandwidth? 2a. Under what conditions are these differences audible on an electric instrument? 2b How does that audibility vary between subjects? 3a. Is there statistically significant correlation between these measured differences and wood types (as defined in different ways including species/variety and mass)? 3b If so, what is the nature and the degree of that correlation? Question 1 is pretty easy to address, just depends with what degree of precision you want to do it. Question 2 is ok but a bit expensive because we need to do randomised blind testing of subjects then try and correlate the results with the measurements in question 1. Question 3 is potentially very expensive, as we'll need a lot of wood and tons of measurements - what if there's a correlation but it's relatively weak? This will require regression analysis. I have made this point before and lots of people don't seem to understand the difference between correlation that is significant and correlation that is 100% equality. (By the way, there is probably a significant association between these people and those who think that the talkbass post with the lumber bass answers the question of whether wood contributes to tone. It's a nice demonstration, but it fails to answer that question). It's worth noting as well that if we understand and trust in science at all then the answer to question 1 is obviously yes, the answer to question 3a will be yes, and the answer to each of 2a and 2b will be 'lots'. The answer to question 3b is the main issue that's incompletely resolved. We could define a final extension to this question which would be 'what is the degree and pattern of variation observed in commercial instruments?' I expect most of the wood on bog-standard instruments fits into a rather narrow part of the overall possible spectrum of variation, but there will still be some variation as well as a few crazy outliers to keep things interesting.

[quote name='Doddy' post='1324818' date='Aug 2 2011, 08:29 PM']Just a thought here,but the pickups don't pick anything up from the wood,and if they did as soon as you cut it and put lumps of metal on it it would change the vibrations anyway?[/quote] But, the pickups pick up string vibrations, whose properties are determined not only by the string itself but the damping and resonance characteristics of what it's attached to. [quote name='Doddy' post='1324818' date='Aug 2 2011, 08:29 PM']I can't,and I reckon that the vast majority of players can't either. There have been many arguments over the years when someone says that "(whoever) played (this bass) on (this track)" only to be proved wrong. Even on here the other week in the Sandberg vs Stingray blind test,a lot of people couldn't tell the difference and had to resort to discussing the pickup settings to make themselves feel better.[/quote] I'm afraid this isn't very scientific either, there are far too many confounding variables - although it does show you that there are lots of ways to skin this particular cat so there's no need to get too fixated on wood species per se. If someone gives me a nice £50'000 research grant (minimum) I'm quite happy to do a proper controlled scientific study In all seriousness, that probably wouldn't be enough money for more than a couple of pilot studies...