therealting

A 25% advantage!

I’ve always found six strings easier to get on with than fivers for some weird reason, but am now almost as comfy with fivers.

I think it looks better with the nitro. Serious mojo!

@BassApprentice Ooh, always wanted to try those strings. Do you have any clips or videos?

1. Nope, humans can hear it fine if you have decent amplification. 2. Strings can be whatever you favour. As a guide, look at 5-string sets with gauges similar to your preferred 4-string set. 3. If you can’t get a stock black guard, there are lots of places you can get one made. 4. Hipshot do good lightweight tuners, Gotoh Res-o-lites are also fantastic. Depends what yours swap easily with. 5. Pickups can be a worthwhile swap if you know what you want. @KiOgon is the king of wiring harnesses here.

The Warmoth Dinky J is basically the Sadowsky shape.

@4000 Apologies for the poor paraphrase! That’s all fair enough. I’ve found that I tend not to favour the Jazz tone too much, in general a good P tone tends to do the trick for me.

I think a lot depends on what you like out of a bass sound, it’s certainly a lot cleaner sounding than - say - a Tone Hammer or a Darkglass. Tone is so subjective, for instance although I am a Dingwall player I can’t stand that grating bass sound that lots of NG2/3 players seem to want to replicate.

@Al Krow IMO the Sadowsky pre gets you a hefty chunk of the way towards the Sadowsky sound. The rest of the bass is fundamentally just a (very nicely) tweaked Fender. I’ve plugged all sorts of basses in including my two pre-CBS Precisions and the pedal adds that extra polish to them that I really like. M Roger is very open about it being an Alex Aguilar design. I think the Aggie pres have a wider sweep, but similar EQ frequency points. I do not find the lack of mid control a problem. Someone earlier said that they were unlikely to try a Sadowsky at a gig because they didn’t like how it sounded at home. To me this is like not wanting to try a Ferrari out on track because you don’t like trying to park it at a supermarket 😂

I own a Sadowsky MV4, and have had Sadowsky preamps put into two Dingwall Supers (a J5 and a P5). All these basses sound very good at bedroom levels. However, they sound absolutely superb in a band context - clear and precise, but still with plenty of warmth and punch. I liked them enough that I also bought a Preamp DI which lived on my board for years, only being displaced by a Noble Preamp a couple years ago. If you already have a passive bass you like, a Sadowsky Preamp DI is a very inexpensive way to get the Sadowsky active sound (footswitchable) and it’s also a very good DI with a tuner mute. The EQ points and curves just seem to work extremely well for getting the bass sound you want without getting in the way of everyone else even in a dense mix.

That’s actually one of the coolest-looking basses I’ve seen in a while.

Clean amps allow you to accurately reproduce the sound that your bass is producing, whatever it is. For some people, that sound includes flats as a component. All my Ps (bar my Yamaha BB435) have flats on them of various kinds, from TI Flats (smooth and mellow, on my 84 Squier Medium Scale) to D’Addario Chromes (more “modern” on my Dingwall Super P), to Fender flats (more dead with foam and bridge cover on my rather dark sounding 61) Ernie Ball Cobalts (bright on my 64). They all sound great, and completely different to the zingy Elixirs on my Sadowsky Jazz for example. A Noble preamp makes everything sound terrific, without losing the character of any of them.

I definitely don’t need this, but part of me really wants it... Waterstone Sam Hill 2-String Bass 2018 Gold Sparkle https://reverb.com/item/22394708-waterstone-sam-hill-2-string-bass-2018-gold-sparkle?utm_source=ios-app&utm_medium=share

Egilegor Basses on eBay. I specified a custom pickup spacing and they were very helpful. It did arrive flat, and my tech radiused it for me.

The Batt-o-meter just checks the battery voltage, so you can continue using what you have now with the security of knowing you won’t run out.

@TJ Spicer Get yourself a Keith McMillen Batt-o-meter and check before gigs.