stevie

Bought a pedal from Nick and it arrived quickly and was just the job. Good man!

1. Yes, Ultralites make a big difference to neck dive - and to the overall weight of the bass. They are also very good tuners, irrespective of their weight. 2. I believe Schaller have a similar product, but installing lightweight tuners is the best way of solving neck dive IMO. 3. Yes, you will be left with some holes showing - but who cares? If you plan to sell the bass at any time, just put the original machineheads back and they will hide the hole you need to drill for the Ultralites. I'd never consider a bass without lightweight tuners again. They should be fitted as a standard to everything.

I'm experimenting with a Behringer parametric equalizer and an Ashdown MiBass. I can plug it into the input, like an effects pedal, and it works fine. I can also put it in the effects loop (which is between the pre and power) and it works there too.

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1334315717' post='1614310'] But if you were head of Marketing, and you were consistently hopeless at it, it would be justified :-) [/quote] For this kind of semi-impromptu sales pitch, a good salesman would normally do fine. You don't have to be a BBC presenter. These interviews have become de rigeur at trade shows and there's no excuse for not rehearsing your pitch. Nobody can be good at everything and sometimes it makes sense to get a professional in. Otherwise you risk looking like a tit.

I'm with Mr Foxen on this.

[quote name='DirkThrust' timestamp='1334263183' post='1613590'] Those Mibass combos look very interesting. The 550 with a 15" extension cab would make a cracking portable rig. [/quote] Agreed. I think they have a really good product there. The styling is well done and I love the stripy vinyl, although I can't find a lot on the specs yet. And they are considering building them in the UK (hooray!). I'm generally very positive about these. I actually bought a MiBass head despite the crappy marketing, and I don't regret it.

The new Ashdown MiBass combos might be worth waiting for. They seem to be very well designed and the MiBass amp itself is pretty good with some interesting features. http://www.notreble.com/buzz/2012/04/09/ashdown-introduces-mibass-combo-amps/. I haven't seen any prices yet though.

I've come across a few underwound pickups in the past on Squiers and Yamahas (to be specific). Replacing them with a proper pickup - usually a Duncan vintage - improved the sound each time. It's not absolutely reliable, but you can try measuring across the windings if you have a meter. The standard resistance is about 10.5k (from memory). Or just try it and see.

The new MiBass combos look really nice. Why does the company have to ruin it by letting Mr Edsel Ashdown go on camera? Try counting the number of times he says 'versatile' - and look out for the highlight of the interview where he tries to remember what year it is - and fails! It starts off with a great bass solo. Not. Why do British companies still think that it's all about being a keen amateur? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iDVXwwyjUU

By the way, there are people on eBay offering spacer rings if you don't fancy doing it yourself. It might have to be a custom size though, as they normally make them for the car audio brigade.

You need to get yourself a sheet of 1/2" MDF and cut spacer rings to bridge the gap. Inside diameter to fit the Eminence drivers - outside diameter about an inch larger than the hole in the cab. You should be able to use the existing screw holes in the cab to screw the spacers down. Glue if you want a permanent job or use foam for a less permanent job. Paint matt black. The drivers will now be 1/2" further forward than the old ones, which is not normally a problem - and you will actually gain a bit of cabinet volume.

There's an awful lot of guff written about bass pickups. On a 'vintage' type pickup like the SPB-1, all the manufacturers are using the same bits and winding to the same specification. You would therefore expect them to sound very similar - and they do. Take a listen here: http://www.atkinsonbasses.com/multimedia.html and see if you can tell the difference between a cheapo GFS P-Bass pickup and a 'booteek' Lollar at many times the price. Pickups that are physically different like the Quarter Pounder will sound different, of course, and cheap pickups that don't use enough wire sound weedy, but otherwise, the emptor should be aware that most of his money is paying for the brand name.

[quote name='ShergoldSnickers' timestamp='1333796707' post='1606560'] I think 4x10 is a format in danger of being left behind. [/quote] Interesting post.

I recently bought a set of these: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/270920824395?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649. That's a great price. They are excellent and are now on the bottom of my Ashdown cab. I appreciate the OP was looking for a trolley, but putting castors on the bottom of your combo is an option worth considering.

That all makes sense but it's a separate issue to driver choice. The cabinet should have the equivalent of two ports 4" in diameter. By the same token, jack inputs should ideally be changed for Speakons and the cabinet should be damped and braced at its weakest points. But we're now into the realm of redesigning a cab without knowing anything about it. I'm a great believer in premium drivers. There's no point paying £100 for an adequate driver when you can get a great driver for just £60 more. The Eminence Legend CB158 would work. It's £90 but it's not a patch on the 18sound (and not available in 4 ohms anyway). Still, it is better than the Delta 15LF, although that wouldn't be hard.

2Hz. Do I get a prize?

It's unsafe to assume that Fender knows how to port a bass guitar cab? Just editing this, because I think I see where you are coming from now. Bass guitar cabs are all tuned to around 50Hz, give or take. There is a certain amount of wiggle room - tuning to 40 or 60Hz is not going to make that much difference. The tuning frequency is a characteristic of the cabinet - not the driver. So, when you change the driver, the cab tuning frequency doesn't change. As long as the driver is suitable for the cabinet size it will work. You can therefore fit a variety of different drivers to the same cab and they will all perform. They may sound different but you won't need to change the tuning unless the tuning was badly out in the first place.

If Redlawman is bothered about the tuning I'm sure he'll ask, but he hasn't done. He asked for a driver recommendation. And I think we can safely assume that Fender knows how to tune a bass guitar cab. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1333726600' post='1605806'] Sealed cab? Gogo gadget WinISD pro.[/quote] It's front ported. Redlawman actually mentions this twice. [quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1333726600' post='1605806'] Edit: Short summary: putting a state of the art driver into a not state of the art cab is a bad plan. Suitable driver for the cab is going to yield better results. [/quote] According to the manufacturer's specs, the driver I mentioned is recommended for a cab between 80 and 140 litres. The cab as described ("largish 15 smaller than an Ampeg 4x10") is within that.

Lean are selling a 4-ohm 18sound *NEO* driver for £160 at the moment - the 15ND830 . It must be old stock because the 8-ohm version is £75 more. The direct link won't copy, but the site is at: http://www.lean-business.co.uk/eshop/. It's a bargain. I've never used it personally but the spec is right and 18sound speakers are state-of-the-art. Very few (if any) commercial bass cabs use a driver of this quality.

[quote name='Coilte' timestamp='1333709292' post='1605504'] This is a good exercise, except for one caveat. OP, this is known as the "one finger per fret technique". It is a very economical way of playing, but be [b]very[/b] careful when applying it to frets 1-5. [/quote] +1. Using one finger per fret near the nut can cause wrist pain if you have small or normal sized fingers. Some teachers advise linking the fourth and fifth fingers together for support and only using one finger per fret up the neck where the frets are closer together. It definitely worked for me. I think Dave Marks has a lesson on his website that discusses this.

On the piezo front, my web researches indicate that you need a unit with a CTS (Motorola) piezo element. It's not always easy to tell, as there are a lot of copies around. The Monacor MPT range seems to use them, as do these ones from CPC, which seem to be quite popular (and cheap): [url="http://cpc.farnell.com/_/mpt-001/piezo-tweeter/dp/LS02371."]http://cpc.farnell.c...ter/dp/LS02371.[/url] There's no harm in using two, but because a bass guitar produces very little energy at these frequencies (unless you play like Markus Miller all the time), you are very unlikely to overload a single tweeter. Two would be more sensitive though.

[quote name='JTUK' timestamp='1333702915' post='1605384'] Would I go back to a 115..? no, The biggest single factor was that it wasn't useable on its own. [/quote] I'm currently using a single 15 and, even though the frequency response is flat to nearly 4k, I find it difficult to hear what I'm playing when I'm up close (for obvious reasons). However, I hate the idea of having to carry four magnets around - so I've added an eight-inch midrange in a separate cab, crossed over at 800Hz. The on-axis frequency response of the pairing is virtually identical to that of the single 15, but subjectively there's a lot more top-end clarity which is audible up close and throws better in-room. I previously used a 2 x 12 which was a lot bigger, but this is a much better solution IMO. There are lots of ways to skin a cat.