EMG456

Beautiful vintage style Stack Pot control plate and shielding kit from [url="http://basschat.co.uk/user/7835-kiogon/"]KIOgon[/url] of this forum. Thanks John!

So, this is the body with about 8 coats of Colron finishing oil on it. I botched it up the first time and had to take it all off and start again. The best method I found of applying it was to pour a small amount of the oil onto whichever side of the body you were working on and spread it out/ rub it in using a lint free cloth – in my case an old t shirt. Wipe off any excess with nice smooth strokes and leave to dry for 6 hours before adding another coat. The instructions on the tin said to wipe the excess off after an hour but I found that by that time, the oil had formed a sticky mass and was impossible to buff out to a smooth finish. By doing it in one process, you get a very thin coat each time but the actual finish is surprisingly good – glossy but you can still see the texture of the grain- I’m liking it!

So, with the neck away to be rebuilt, I now need to get the body sorted out. It seems to be finished in the sort of orange coloured stuff you usually find on garden sheds and fences so that needs to be sanded off to reveal what we have underneath. Now this bass has definitely had a life and when this project is finished, I want it to reflect that so I’m hoping I’ll be able to clean up the body whilst still retaining some of the battle scars. Firstly, strip out the control plate and pickups. I had to undo the jack socket nut before I could lift the control plate off because the earth wire from the bridge to the jack was so short. I’m going to fit a stacked knob control plate like the earliest Jazz Basses so this plate and pots will just go away into a box and kept should I ever decide to sell the bass again. I am hoping to re-use the existing pickups but I’m not a fan of the exposed pole pieces sticking up quite proud of the covers – the edges are quite sharp and I find that they can catch your fingers. The plan was to fit some kind of spacer under the cover so that the pole pieces would barely protrude. Unfortunately as you can see, it looks like the good folks at Matsumoku saw fit to pot their pickups in epoxy so that’s not going to be possible. Oh well, when it’s finished I’ll make a judgement call on sound and feel and if I don’t like them, I’ll look for a pair of DiMarzio model J’s to pop in. [size=4][color=#000000]With the hardware removed, this is what we have.[/color][/size] And the back... [size=2][color=#000000][/color][/size] [size=4][color=#000000]I start with the sanding block and the wood is starting to appear out of the murk. It seems that we have a four piece ash body so I’m quite happy with that.[/color][/size] More sanding and the wood is getting lighter and lighter looking. You can clearly see the original sunburst finish in the neck pocket, control cavity and pickup routes. The bass will be fitted with a tort scratch plate so most of the battle scars on the front will be covered over but any that won’t be, I’m hoping to preserve under the new finish so I need to be careful how far I sand.

Well, you won't be able to source double ball piccolo strings so unless you have an L2, you'll need a single ball string adapter. Apart from that, set action and intonation and I guess that's it. Or you could go halfway house and use the top 4 strings from a 6 string set- Status would be able to sort you out with those in double ball format. Cheers Ed

Pete, I was at the gig on Saturday- top job! You had a great sound and played all the bits I was hoping to hear- from a performance point of view, no one would even have suspected you were under the weather! I guess anyone who has done regular gigging over an extended period will have had to play through some kind of illness or injury. My best was tripping and falling down the last three stairs whilst carrying my amp rack out to the car on the way to the gig. 'Twas very painful but managed to finish packing and drive to the gig. When I got there, I couldn't walk and had to play the gig sitting down. Managed to drive home again in constant third gear trying to gauge the traffic lights so as not to have to stop! (Was my clutch foot which was the problem) My wife took me to A&E the next morning and x-rays revealed that I had torn all the tendons in my left ankle- they told me that it would have been better if I had broken the ankle instead. Was on crutches for a few weeks and to be honest, the ankle never fully recovered. Even better was the tale of a band I was in back in the late 70s. The drummer tripped up on his way from the house to the van and was rolling around in agony. We told him to man up and get on with it and he ended up playing the gig with what turned out to be a broken leg (bass drum!) It's true- the show must go on! Hope you're feeling better soon. Cheers Ed

OTOH it might just be an age thing! :-0

If you're up for a headless bass, Status will make you one with the "Bendwell"- a little depression between the zero fret and the string anchor which reduces their 34" scale down to about 32" and allows you to bend open strings/ harmonics as if behind the nut. Cheers Ed

Interesting how many things turn out to be a shared interest between like minded people - I like to think it's "great minds think alike" rather than the other one! Anyway, yep - great synths and hugely underrated at the time. VZ-10M rackmount expander here. Cheers Ed

Phone them. They are great people to deal with but a bit old fashioned when it comes to email. I know- it's the 21st century but there you go! Cheers Ed

If the screws have just unscrewed you hardly need a new bridge. This has always been a problem with the old BBOT bridges, particularly those with the plain baseplate. As you play, the saddles can move slightly side to side and this can cause the screws to undo. As the previous poster says, nail varnish or if you want to be a bit engineerish about it, a little bit of Loctite will do the trick. Cheers Ed

Or get a headed bass with a compact headstock and fit ferrules to hold the extra 4 ball ends. Use a standard 4 string headless tuning system at the bridge end to tune the octave strings. Still going to need a new bridge though, or at the very least custom saddles. Cheers Ed

Palmer was a bass player in his own right and has a bass credit on the Riptide album which "Addicted to Love" and "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" singles were lifted from. I don't know which tracks RP played but it certainly didn't all sound like Bernard Edwards to me. RP's bass of choice at the time was a Steinberger L2. Cheers Ed

In fairness, at the time the SBs were really a mass production "take" on Alembic basses and I would guess that most SB1000s (mine certainly) were bought because they were affordable and had most of the attributes of the unaffordable Alembics. They were also manufactured to exacting standards by Matsumoku. His big innovation which doesn't seem to get mentioned these days, was the tapered thickness of the body which down at the bridge end was noticeably thicker than up at the heel. This changed the weight distribution of the bass and meant that a SB balanced better and had no neck dive despite the long scale and 24 frets. His Atlansia instruments are certainly visually interesting but are definitely not designed for the mass market! I wonder how they play... Cheers Ed

[quote name='NancyJohnson' timestamp='1396949394' post='2418940'] I bought an Aria Primary bass - a 1978 Precision copy - in a three guitar job lot for £50. It's an outstanding bass. I thought about looking for a Jazz version but too expensive...I think I saw yours on eBay a while back. [/quote] You got a fantastic deal there! Yep, mine came from the bay in November or December. With the postage I paid £105. Anything from Matsumoku of this vintage is really well put together with quality materials so it stands a great chance of being an excellent bass. Cheers Ed

[quote name='Bigwan' timestamp='1396881679' post='2418319'] If it were me I'd replace the board altogether. Probably be a better job than defretting, slimming the board to the neck and refretting it again. [/quote] Well, I hadn't really intended to spend much on this but there were a few things about the fingerboard that led me to the same conclusion. So the neck went straight off to my pet luthier- Jimmy Moon in Glasgow. The old bass I'm using as inspiration for this one had one of those extremely dark, almost black Brazilian Rosewood fingerboards that Fender put on in the early 60s. It's not possible to obtain that wood any more so Jimmy has sourced a nice dark ebony board for me and will polish it up to a nice sheen. Position markers will be clay dots and I've supplied him with a set of the Gotoh vintage style reverse wind tuners to put on. Should be very nice- ETA for the neck is sometime in May. Cheers Ed

Vintage Tort pick guard for my 70's Aria Jazz Bass. Custom fit to a template I provided and delivered within 4 days. Excellent job. Many thanks.

Beautiful basses. Does the blue one have gold hardware or is that just wishful thinking on my part? (Looking on my phone so can't zoom in!)

[quote name='paul j h' timestamp='1396879417' post='2418268'] Another Joni fan here, I think Hejira and chalk mark in a rainstorm (which is also a great album title) are my two favorites, fabulous bass playing, beautiful lyrics, everything that is great about Joni. [/quote] Chalk Mark is probably my favourite Joni album too - fabulous songs - Lakota, the Tea Leaf Prophesy, Beat of Black Wings etc etc. I honestly don't think she put a foot wrong musically till the Taming the Tiger album. A strong return to form with Travelogue and I confess I don't know much about the last album. She's a bit of a nifty painter as well!

The thing about odd time signatures is that they're usually there for some reason like for example they fit the tune or the notes in a riff. If you can work out the reason and get your mindset going for that groove, it will soon start to feel quite natural and you won't need to be counting it out in your head. Just remembering back in the day before the CD, Genesis released an album ( can't remember the name of it just now) and the first track on side one was in 5/4. Apparently a huge percentage of buyers took it straight back to the record shops because they thought it was jumping.

[quote name='Annoying Twit' timestamp='1396875785' post='2418207'] The two 8/8 examples I gave sound very different to me. I just made a drum machine track to demonstrate. [url="https://soundcloud.com/annoyingtwit/four-versus-eight"]https://soundcloud.c...ur-versus-eight[/url] There are twelve bars. First four bars of 4/4, then four bars of 8/8, then four bars of another 8/8 time signature. It sounds a bit more like 8/8 if a bassline is added, but I had to keep it mega-simple or I'd play 4/4 by default. [url="https://soundcloud.com/annoyingtwit/eightplusbass"]https://soundcloud.c...t/eightplusbass[/url] However, I will admit that it's easy to count 4/4 time against all of these examples, even though the 8/8 patterns were designed to be as 8/8 as I could make them (bass drum and snare on the beats, three beats per bar). I think this is something to do with my/our familiarity with 4/4, particularly syncopated, time signatures and relative unfamiliarity with 8/8 time signatures. It's easier to make something more obviously 8/8 with a pitched instrument such as a bass, or fingerstyle other guitars. We don't seem to have so much problem distinguishing 3/4 from 6/8, as both of those time signatures are commonly used. If we say that music is in 8/8 we are telling musicians that it isn't 4/4, but unlike (say) 12/8, we aren't telling them where the accents are. This could be shown by accents in musical notation. Or, it could be up the musician to guess where the strong beats are based on the time signature and the actual notes in the music. [/quote] Thanks again - I now see what you mean although I'm sure that if you went into a session and were handed out the parts, these patterns would almost certainly be written in 4/4 - the notes, ties and rests would be identical in each instance, would they not? I would just have viewed that pattern as a syncopated 4/4 with an offbeat snare or a kind of pushed half- time. That said, as instructed by dad3353, I went off to said Wikipedia and now my head hurts. 2 and a half over 4, anyone? And I found Ravel's Piano Trio which is indeed written in 8/8 although I confess my reading is so dodgy that I can't get my head around the first bar! Anyway - brilliant! Thanks everyone - I learnt something new today! Cheers Ed

Right then – never done one of these before but I’ve enjoyed reading others’ adventures on here and seeing the outcomes so here goes. Firstly, a bit of background. A long time ago, when I was young and fairly foolish, I was looking for a bass to use for fingerstyle playing which my favoured Ricks at the time did not suit. I was also interested in the new “slap ‘n Snap” styles which were beginning to be heard (who knew?!). I found a likely looking bass in a local shop which the guy assured me was a Fender Precision although it had no headstock logo and I tried it and bought it for the princely sum of £125. When I took it to bits to clean it up, it turned out to be a 1961 Precision Bass. It had been sunburst finish but a previous owner had stripped the finish off and roughly varnished it. This was a common occurrence in the 70’s and I knew many Fenders that looked like that. Anyway, I refretted up to the 12th fret and it became a great bass to play – kind of like a comfy old pair of slippers! A major bass purchase in the early 80’s necessitated the sale of a few instruments and the Fender went to a friend who had had it on loan for a few months – he still plays it to this day. Now, I tend to prefer twin pickup basses but I always had fond memories of that old bass and a couple of years back, during a trip to London, I spied an early Jazz Bass in the Gallery which looked like my old P’s twin! It turned out to be a Bill Nash bass but it so captured the vibe of my old bass that it set me thinking... I could re-create the old P in J form. So I started out looking for a project bass to use. For me, the obvious choice given the prices charged these days for old Fenders, would be a Japanese built Jazz from the 70’s or 80’s. But these instruments are now themselves genuine vintage guitars and I didn’t want to take a perfectly good old instrument and hack it about so a waiting game ensued... and this is what I ended up buying. It’s an Aria Pro II JB 600 from 1977. It has had a hard life and has a few features which did definitely not come directly from the Matsumoku factory! Like the unusual tuning arrangement! Or the unique fingerboard customisation – yes, a 21 fret Precision board will just fit straight onto a 20 fret Jazz neck – no problem! But most importantly, all the demolition has already been done on this bass. It’s already an unloved and abandoned lost cause and nothing I can do to it will make it worse so it’s a real rescue mission – I think it will now be known as the dogs trust bass! More to follow soon... Cheers Ed

[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1396806174' post='2417546'] Please don't get the impression that I am being snooty at all about the Euro basses, or indeed the ones made in the Far East, I'm sure they are great . I just wanted to point out that my observations about the sound of Spector basses are derived entirely from the USA models because those are the only ones I have ever encountered . I would love to try a Euro model and compare, and I am sure the law of diminishing returns may well apply to material differences between the Euro and USA models . [/quote] Well, given the history between Ned Steinberger and Stuart Spector, I would not be at all surprised if it turned out to be the same people in the Czech Republic making the Euro Spectors that make the NS Design instrument line. I don't have any evidence of that - pure conjecture! If it is the case though, the fact that Ned has now even passed over the production of the top notch, multi- laminate wood/ carbon concentric neck upright basses to the Czech Republic suggests that you would be able to rely on the quality of the Euro basses being of the highest. Funny, I really like Spectors but I've never found a Warwick that I liked except to look at. Cheers Ed

[quote name='Annoying Twit' timestamp='1396864812' post='2418004'] It's useful to know the difference between simple, compound, and odd time signatures IMHO. E.g. 4/4 = simple, 12/8 = compound, and 8/8 = odd. For Ed: A simple time signature is one where the beats are divided into two. E.g. Odd time signatures have beats that are divided into different numbers of divisions. E..g 8/8 = 1 and a 2 and a 3 and 8/8 (another one) = 1 and 2 and a 3 and a 12/16 (I hope one example of) = 1 and a 2 and a 3 and 4 and 5 and The reason the two 8/8 rhythms aren't 4/4 is that they are odd time signatures, and we have already used 4/4 for the simple time signature given above, so we have to use 8/8. Try counting a 4/4 beat by reading out what I've written (but loop it). Emphasise the numbers and de-emphasise 'and's and 'a's. Then try the 8/8 examples. You should find that both the 8/8 examples are quite different rhythms than the 4/4. Similarly for 3/4 versus 6/8. Music written in 4/4 should sound different from 8/8, but admittedly I'm having trouble writing something for drum machines that I don't naturally count as 4/4 when I listen to it. [/quote] Very succinct - thanks for that. So are we saying that we are influencing the *accents* by writing in a different signature - according to how you suggest that you might count it out loud? If not, then for say 8/8, there is no reason whatsoever for not writing it in 4/4 as all of the note timings and lengths would be exactly the same. And if we are saying we *should* give it the feel it has when counting it out loud, how would I be able to differentiate between for example the two 8/8 examples you gave from just looking at the dots? This is interesting to me as one of the problems of standard notation and its application to pop/ rock/ whatever types of music has always been that the notes and timings were captured but the "feel" was not but I still don't see how you could tell the difference between two alternative types of 8/8. The drum machine thing is as old as... well drum machines but again, it's all to do with the accents. [quote name='Phil Adams' timestamp='1396865510' post='2418017'] I thought 3/3 was waltz time. See, I never said I know my time signatures. [/quote] No worries mate - I think you and me both are learning something new here! Cheers Ed

Well, my reading was limited to a brief period in the 80s/ 90s when I played to earn my crust but as one who my band mates tell me is notoriously picky about tempos, feel and the precise placement of notes, I'm seeing some things here which I've never come across before. [quote name='Phil Adams' timestamp='1396858569' post='2417901'] With acknowledgment to the scales thread. Obviously some are easy, 4/4, 3/3 etc. Or do we just follow the sticksman and hope he's right? [/quote] What is 3/3? There isn't such a thing as a "third" note - is there? Breives, Semi-Breives, Crotchets, Quavers, Semi- Quavers or in modern speak whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes - does the whole system not depend on each note being divisible by two to give the next smallest interval? And as for 8/8 - what is the reason that that wouldn't be written as 4/4? Any parts I ever had to play which involved a lot of 8th notes would be written in 4/4. Unless of course it was an unusual bar length like 7/8 or 5/4 etc. Quench my thirst for knowledge - I'm interested! Cheers Ed