Rosie C

I'm playing at Easter Sunday morning service and looking forward to it. Looking through the hymns, we're doing "How Deep the Father's Love For Us". A little bit scary with its alternating 6/4 and 4/4 bars. Does anyone have experience of playing it?

Excellent on so many levels! How would one order a CD?

Number one for me has to be The Birdie Song. Something I thought was consigned to the 1980s, but since taking up piano accordion, it seems to be a go-to song for accordion players, and does nothing to enhance an instrument with a poor reputation already

Good point! The original plan was to drill more holes into the sort of "bent plate" bridge you get on Fender basses, which would have taken up space. But now we're looking at a solid aluminium bar to fit onto the existing bridge 'bolts' - so there'll be much the same space as now.

I dropped off the donor guitar today. We made some decisions too, including to not bother with a bridge pickup - make a nice big pick guard to cover the hole, and concentrate funds on a good neck pickup. As I usually play acoustic mandocellos, even the relatively mild neck pickup is a big change to my sound - so I'm not going to miss a bridge pickup. We looked at a Seymour Duncan 'rail' pickup, but there's a couple of cheaper options too. I was thinking of some sort of decal on the pick guard to divert the eye from the large gap that might otherwise look just like it's covering a missing pickup.

I tried several times to play 6-string guitar and just can't. I tried playing this SG today... still can't. But I bought a mandocello in December 2022 and went from zero to playing a gig in about 4 weeks... they just suit me somehow. I will definitely post a video when it's finished.

It's not quite day 1 of the project as I've spent a while doing research. I play mandocello in a renaissance-folk-rock band. I have two mandocellos - both acoustic with pickups, both really quite loud. I started off thinking an all-electric would be good for quiet practice, but the more I looked at donor electric guitars the more I thought I wanted to work on a more 'rock' sound. So today I bought this 6-string donor. In red, devil horns shaped body, in the Angus Young / Epiphone SG style. Rather than a full 8-string mandocello, I'm going with a single C string on the bottom, so the tuning will be C-GG-DD-AA. The plan: remove three tuners on the lower side of the head. Dowel the holes, make good & re-drill for four tuners - making 3 on the top, 4 on the bottom. make a new 7 groove nut New bridge & saddle - probably modified bass parts New larger pickguard to surround the new pickups TBD: Pickups. Hofner bass pickups and Telecaster neck bar pickups are on my list Edit to add: I fall in the "expectant customer" category. I'm doing as much of the work as I can, but the skilled work will be done by my local guitar technician.

That's what I did - I kept my favourite bass and a little practice amp. It gets played much more than I expected, even though I was having a break from bass!

Three times I tried to learn 6-string guitar, and after getting RSI on the final attempt I had to admit it just wasn't meant to be. Then someone suggested mandocello and it just suited me from day one. I have a traditional one, and a "guitar-bodied" one. But hoping to commission a fully electric one this summer in a Hagstrom H / Epiphone SG style.

No bass in church today, but there were donkeys! Our church did a combined Palm Sunday procession with the local Methodist church, singing accompanied by drum and mandocello. The songs were "Make Way", "Hosanna" and "You Are the King of Glory".

Yup. We played Atomic in a pub gig in London. Years later I told a new bass tutor I could play it. Then I saw the actual bass line and realised I must have played something incredibly simplified as it was way above my level.

After a 9v PP3 failed while on stage, I rebuilt my pedal board with a lithium battery from a power drill. A full charge lasts maybe 100 hours. It took a bit of time to match batteries with power distribution and connections but has proved very reliable.

Thank you! I expect it will become a summer project, and yes I think you're right it's the "low mids" rather than the bass I need to look at. I'm not sure what frequency range the "sub out" jack on the PA pushes out, I'll try to find out.

I just checked our other case, the catches are on the lid, but they're on the case on the larger models. Strange.

Just a perception really that the PA is a bit lacking at lower frequencies and that there's a fuller sound when I plug in a bass amp. I might need to make some with and without recordings to make sure!

I did think the plywood could be a tight fit to the inside of the case, then I could use expanding builder's foam between fibreglass and plywood. But rattling of catches and handles is a good point and not something I'd thought of! You're right, it may be too small. I can get a larger case and while that would give me other problems stacking, they do come with wheels!

I'm thinking how I could use a cabinet like this 6U one to make a bass speaker cabinet. It would suit the rest of our band's gear, and we lug an empty box around anyway to stand the PA on. Not for playing bass guitar, just to boost the low end of the PA for guitar/vocals. I'm thinking of 2 x 8" drivers, and wondering what the best approach is. Making a conventional box out of plywood and just fitting it in seems safest, but I'm wondering if I can do something that just uses the plastic shell? Edit: though it occurs to me that buying a second hand combo amp that fits the space would be cheaper and quicker - if a bit heavier.

I have a Platinum Stage for sale in the Marketplace section of the forum 😎

Renaissance-folk-rock, a niche genre mostly represented by Blackmore's Night. But there are others. Not the top three, just a selection of three: Elflore: The Geyers: Blackmore's Night:

I used to be in a band that was about 45 minutes drive for rehearsals. That got a bit of a drag after 6 months. It was also problematic that the band took on gigs in about a 1 hour radius, and almost never in my direction, so most gigs were 60-90 minutes drive. Now I'm more flexible on genre if I can play locally - my current bands are 15 minutes away.

I bought this from Thomann, but it is incompatible with the t.bone headset I bought. They've refunded and said not to bother returning it. So free to collect from Chepstow, or I can post to UK addresses if you cover the postage.

We accidentally did a gig in London - supposedly for a friend's party, we weren't expecting the venue to be anything more than a backroom of a pub. But we turned up to find proper stage, sound & light guy, light show, PA speaker stacks that were taller than me., monitor speakers, the drum set got mic'd up and 300+ people turned up. We finished with Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" and out in the crowd was a sea of lighters. Although we didn't formally split up, we never rehearsed or performed again... deep down we knew we'd peaked.

The first problem we had was all the headset mics we looked at need phantom power... and our PA doesn't have it. If going wired they all need a little pre-amp adapter, which adds more to the price, more to go wrong, etc. I looked at wireless, but that was another minefield.

We're just starting with headset mics, I have a Sennheiser ME3 the BV singer is using a Thomann own brand one.