LawrenceH

Hard to tell from those pics but it does look to me like the string is coming off the tuning peg towards the top, so there's not enough string angle over the nut to hold it in place. If you restring so that successive windings force the string down as you work towards the bridge end, then as long as you started winding at the bottom of the groove in the tuner it should be ok.

2mm sounds like it might be a bit much but I had success sanding down the pickup casing when in a similar situation on a jazz set. Would that be an alternative?

KISS is all very well with great music, and music where each musician respects the other, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse by mediocre guitardists (or similar) who just want a karaoke-style backing band for their own self-indulgent widdlings, with no real musical input from the other band members. I remember turning up at a blues jam night just to listen (at a place where I played regularly on a different night of the week) and really enjoying the playing of a particular keyboard player, thinking he was putting interesting and thoughtful lines in, sympathetic to the guitarist/vocals etc and adding to what was a very trad uk blues sound. Then I heard someone complain that all they wanted from the keyboard player was him to just jam his fingers down on a couple of notes with a hammond and leave them there while the guitarist played all the (not very IMO) interesting stuff! I realised that they viewed the 'blues' entirely as being that particular 60s British blues-revival style driven entirely by guitars, and anything where the other players attempted to start musical dialogue was seen as overplaying. I found it pretty boring after a while and left, about the time I realised that most times the bass playing was done by guitarists marking time until their next star turn. Music with no dialogue doesn't interest me unless the player involved is truly phenomenal.

My feeling would be somewhere around £500 to start with.

I'll take Eddie Hazel and/or Prince please

[quote name='Doddy' post='1097736' date='Jan 21 2011, 04:20 PM']Just wondering why you [i]need[/i] a 7 string? I can understand why you would [i]want[/i] one,but why do you need it?[/quote] Why do you [i]need[/i] an electric bass at all, when you could just use a strat + octave pedal? Or a keyboard. Or sing like Bobby McFerrin. Or just not bother playing music, that'd save loads of time/effort! On topic, I imagine quite a lot of people's tastes change as they develop - mine certainly do! A custom bass that might be ideal now may well not conform so perfectly to whatever crazy stuff I do down the line.

A secondhand Ahsdown Electric Blue combo will do the job nicely, there's a secondhand UK-built one (as opposed to later Far East models) in the FS section here for £90, 15" model I think? I used the 12" one for small gigs for ages.

[quote name='Grand Wazoo' post='1095287' date='Jan 19 2011, 03:50 PM'][...]the Mighty Mite would actually resonate with note very close to a low A (checked with a tuner clipped on the headstock). What that all meant was that once the MM neck was fitted, resonance and sustain, as well as the sound quality of the bass improved a great deal. I could immediately tell the difference even before I plugged it in the amp, it has a lot of twang even unplugged.[/quote] Funny how people tend not to talk about the contribution of the neck to tone other than the straight maple/rosewood/other fretboard comparison - I'm starting to think it's pretty significant.

[quote name='jimmyb625' post='1097187' date='Jan 21 2011, 10:23 AM']The wiring traces internally will take different routes depending on which selection is made (unless of course EBMM have also developed a way to have two objects simultaneously occupying the same physical space). Changing the routing will change the circuit response of the coil and the resonant frequency of it, so coil 1 in configuration A will have a different repsonse to configuration B.[/quote] This has strayed a long way from the realms of practical reality - these differences are absolutely nothing compared to just changing the length of the cable you use to connect up the bass! As long as your input impedences are equivalent then there's no difference as far as the circuit's concerned between measuring it by meter or measuring it by waveform. But that's immaterial anyway since all that's required is that the measurement conditions remain consistent from one reading to the next. Lemmywinks' summary has it for me.

[quote name='jimmyb625' post='1096383' date='Jan 20 2011, 02:27 PM']The reason I'm not interested in the pickup LCR values, is that I know they're irrelevant. Regardless of whatever they are for each coil (and there probably will be a slight variation due to manufacturing tolerances) I [i]think[/i] that any variation that may come through will be down to the wiring route within the GC. Because internally it will pass through a variety of switches (hazzarding another guess, I'd say they are probably connected through multiplexers), I'd say that there is a potential for the values to differ depending on the routing. I'm fully aware that the variations (if they even exist) will be very small internally, but it doesn't take a major change of values to alter the fundamental frequency of the circuit.[/quote] If those types of differences were enough to be audible then it would mean the actual GC circuitry was colouring the sound of the bass, something that would be generally seen as undesirable.. I am certain that the variance in your data will be far greater using an ebow than what you'd get from simply measuring electrical properties adequately - ie resolving power is greatly limited.

[quote name='mart' post='1096498' date='Jan 20 2011, 04:03 PM']Yep, that I understand. It's a more complex circuit that I'm trying to get my head round, but I just don't seem to be able to explain my question, so I'll go and think about it some more and see if I can either understand it, or explain it better! Thanks for your patience [/quote] The jaz bass circuit isn't any more complicated IIRC it just happens to have a physical separation between the coils (linked by the pickup wires). Having two separate volume controls won't allow you more control, it just means you have two physically different points in the circuit performing identical function. If you drop either one you end up shunting the combined series output from both pickups to earth - as soon as you enter series mode you no longer have control over the contribution of each individual pickup.

The Ibanez basses all tend to play well, I found the tone on my SR500 and the others that I tried a little bit dark for my liking but great if that's your thing. Personally if I was after a versatile-sounding bass with a modern active vibe then I'd definitely go for the Yamaha RBX374. An old teacher of mine had one for students to use, and I remember being really impressed. It was good enough that he'd often gig it if he fancied playing a 4-string, since his main bass was a 5er. Solid, thick lows and decent upper-mid bite. I still quite fancy one.

Spraying those pickup covers black would be a crime against funky retro goodness. Don't do it!

I just listened to the first vid linked and the one above and all I thought was 'oh that's some weird religious American guy playing bass then, that's probably the kind of thing they do nowadays' Not my thing at all but it's ok! Just extremely idiosyncratic. Even the timing has its own (admittedly weird) thing going on. Whether he can play with a band or not I dunno, but that's not the right criteria to judge those clips by. He doesn't lack for confidence though that's for sure. Otoh I sometimes wish I had that kind of cockiness! It'd be pretty useful.

Has anyone had a poke around inside a promethean cab yet? I'd be really interested to know what drivers they're using.

[quote name='Vibrating G String' post='1094895' date='Jan 19 2011, 10:42 AM']Wooten sells magic cables. Can't sell out any more than that. And I'm happy he makes his music pay.[/quote] A very fair point - the kind of product that needs endorsements like no other because there's nothing concrete that they can actually claim. I've also been a bit puzzled by the claim about the series order affecting the sound, I can't see how it would since all the electrical values would just be additive in the total circuit, maybe I've missed something a bit more subtle to do with buffers in the circuitry for each coil...but on the face of it this doesn't make sense.

I think it depends on the nature of the problems you have with the recording, punters are more understanding of video limitations than they ever were for audio-only recordings - and that applies to the sound off the video as well. Probably because lots of people have used their phones to record at gigs with crap results, and also because it's easier for an untrained eye to pinpoint visual recording limitations than an untrained ear wrt audio. Post a link and we can all get judgemental!

One thing I've learn from my own tortuously slow musical development is that if I don't find anything at all worthwhile in a piece of music, it's because I either don't understand it or |I haven't found the right criteria to judge it on. Even the most seemingly mediocre piece of disposable pop normally has something in it if I bother to look hard enough. Doesn't mean I have to like it, of course

[quote name='silddx' post='1093273' date='Jan 17 2011, 11:02 PM']What they should do is licence this technology out. Then we don't have to play one of those horrible MusicMan basses. We can have any kind of bass we want, ANYTHING! A bass that looks COOL! Made out of anything, and dial in the sounds we want. No more pissing about, and no arguments about a P Bass sounding like Guinness and a Jass Bass like bloody lager and lime.[/quote] Yes, they should, it'd be good.

[quote name='51m0n' post='1092668' date='Jan 17 2011, 04:06 PM']Anyone suggesting the wood has a bigger part to play in the amplified sound has been eating the funny mushrooms IMO....[/quote] But your test wouldn't address this issue because a P and a J are made of the same woods so of course it's going to sound really similar! And the pickups aren't really all that different either...

Hi Alex these are very good articles, but going back to what I said to you before, I think they would be even better if it linked to (separate) graphs/figures illustrating some of the points! Teaching scientific/technical stuff I've found some people are very visual in their understanding and will find that easier no matter how clear the prose - it also gives a great solid point of reference for otherwise interminable internet discussions

Any chance you could just swap the components with the older GK with the intact casing?

[quote name='TomKent' post='1092042' date='Jan 17 2011, 12:14 AM']So it's like the Variax with more options? I'd really rather take three or four basses to a session than one of these, as revolutionary and technologically groundbreaking as it is.. I don't like the look of it haha.[/quote] Not really like the Variax, this is an electronic switching system for conventional pickups but still using the analogue output. The Variax uses individual piezo pickups on each string and from then on is fully digital, using modeling algorithms to mimic the behaviour of different pickup configurations basically like a very advanced FX unit. The Variax doesn't suffer the limitations of the Gamechanger, which although versatile will still ultimately be limited by pickup placement and construction. The limitations suffered by the Variax are instead that it's digital and a little bit s**t So the Gamechanger's not digital and may well not be s**t but ultimately, if you want a particular sound on a session/gig corresponding to this or that 'classic' bass I suspect you're going to be better off taking that bass as this isn't going to be able to replicate it unless it shares identical pickup placement/design.

Your Ibanez isn't nitro so don't worry about that. I went on a mission to buy an acoustic guitar stand for a friend's birthday recently, I found it's worth trying a few to get one that's sufficiently stable. A few tripod-only designs like the one above I found were a bit dicey stability-wise, it doesn't take much pushing for the instrument to topple diagonally back. Plus if they don't actually hold the neck then although slippage isn't normally a problem thanks to the rubber grips, it's very easy to balance the instruments on them at a bad angle so that they fall more easily. The I went for in the end was the acoustic version of this: [url="http://www.djmmusic.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=KWE51"]http://www.djmmusic.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=KWE51[/url] Very stable and portable though still lacking neck support