Archive for the 'Bass' Category

I recently re-strung my baritone acoustic guitar with a Nashville tuning. Imagine taking a regular guitar tuning, and raising the E, A, D and G strings up by one octave. It’s effectively using the “higher” strings in each pair of a 12-string guitar’s 6 courses.

Thanks to DR Strings, my guitar now has a beautiful high-end shimmer that works well for chords. I plan to use it (at jam sessions with friends) and see how it works with other (normally-tuned) guitars.

I have more fun playing the guitar in a complementary role, by using altered tunings, different chords or different approaches. When you have a bunch of guitarists all playing the same chord in the same way, there’s nothing original. And where’s the fun in that? But if you listen to music that has more than a few layers of acoustic guitar, you’ll usually find that the guitarist(s) will play each track in a different way, to avoid the dreaded “sameness” and give the whole piece a richer tone. Sometimes it means using a different chord (barred rather than open), a different tuning (Nashville versus standard), or simply a different strumming/picking approach.

This is why I still play acoustic guitar, even though bass is my “main” instrument. Acoustic guitar is in my roots - my dad used to play years ago, and I myself learned guitar before I became a bassist.

If you’ve seen my previous post about my new Warmoth Gecko basses then you may appreciate some of the things I learned when assembling and finishing these instruments.

Warmoth packs all their shipments extremely well, inside heavy cardboard boxes with adequate “packing peanuts” for protection. Both my shipments arrived safely and with minimal shipping damage to the boxes; the contents were in pristine condition.

When you unpack the contents, be careful to handle things at first. You probably aren’t used to holding bass parts that aren’t part of a guitar, and a little mishandling can have drastic results. Take your time to savor the moment, and enjoy the sights and smells that greet you as you take in the experience of seeing your guitar/bass components in person for the first time. There are few things that smell as good as finished wood products.

You may be tempted to attach the neck to the body right away, and move ahead with assembly as quickly as possible. Not so fast, I say. The first thing you should do (after unpacking and checking all the contents) is to get out your drill, and install the strap buttons. This doesn’t make sense as a first step, unless you’ve gone through the assembly of your first instrument, and realize that, due to the shapes of the upper body horn and the placement of the neck, you may not be able to use your power drill to tap the hole for the strap button on the upper body horn. The neck just gets in the way! So do this first - trust me, I’ve been there - and you’ll be happier later.

Whenever you have to use a drill with any part of your Gecko neck or body, WORK SLOWLY and carefully. Measure twice, drill once. Use a pencil or a suitable marking tool to create a small impression where the drill bit will contact the piece. The last thing you want is a drill skating around and causing nasty gouges on wood, or even worse, scratches on a lovely gloss finish. Some Warmoth enthusiasts have suggested that you start the drill in reverse, and drill very slowly, when drilling into a gloss finish. You may want to use a nail-setter or another tool to start the divot without cracking the finish. For drilling into raw wood (as in a Gecko neck) you can usually get by with slow, careful work, or by taking the drill bit between your fingers (not in the drill) and giving it a few gentle turns by hand. (I used this technique to drill the pickup mounting holes in one Gecko bass - working entirely by hand was actually easier and safer than using a power drill.)

Pay close attention to the shape of the neck heel and the body’s neck pocket - none of the sides are parallel. Gecko neck joints are usually very precisely made, and must be installed carefully. On one of the Gecko basses, the neck heel and pocket were SO tight that I had to work very slowly. In order to speed things up I tried to insert the neck just below, with some of the neck overhanging the cavity. It worked but left some scratches on the satin finish of the laminate top, near the neck pocket. Make sure you start at the correct position at first, and don’t think that you can take advantage of the angled nature of the neck/body joint to get a rough partial fit and then slide it into position.

Before you attach the neck, you may notice that your body’s finish material (satin or glossy) may have accumulated in the 4 holes for the neck mounting ferrules on the back of the body. If you have any hope of getting the 4 ferrules to lay flat in their places, you should take a utility knife and gently remove the accumulated finish material from the sides (and perhaps also the bottoms) of the ferrule cavities. I ran into this issue with both basses, and it took some time to get the ferrules to lay completely flat. (If your Gecko body arrives unfinished, you should be aware of this if you decide to apply any satin or gloss lacquer finish. This should not be a problem if you plan to apply an oil finish.)

Body cavity shielding is critical. This can mean the difference between 60Hz hum and silence. There are numerous websites that go into detail about how to install copper foil in a guitar’s body cavity in order to minimize interference. Read them all and study them carefully. Hopefully you ordered your Gecko bass with Warmoth’s recommended shielding kit, which comes with an adequate amount of adhesive-backed copper foil to do the job with a bit left over for patches or extra spots. Take your time, do this right, and you’ll be pleased with the results. Be sure to use a paper template to determine the shape of the flat foil which will cover the bottom of the cavity. It helps to make this slightly larger to effectively cover the silly (IMO) routes which Warmoth usually installs, if you wish to use a “blade-switch” or pre-amp in your Gecko bass. I have found these extra routes within the body cavity to be useless to me, but you still need to make sure that your copper foil shielding covers these without leaving gaps. It can be tricky; practice.

Make sure you have some good Philips screwdrivers (or bits, if you’re more into those). If your driver is stripped or worn out, there’s a good possibility that it could slip out at a critical time and cause gouges or scratches on your lovely new instrument. Use good tools in good condition to avoid these kinds of accidents.

When using screwdrivers to attach hardware (such as tuners or pickups) make sure you use the appropriate bit size, and make sure that you keep constant, firm downward pressure on the screwdriver. If you allow the screwdriver to slip while you’re tightening the screw, it can strip out the Philips slot in the screw, which can make the screw nearly impossible to tighten (or loosen) later. Work carefully and keep in mind that you’re working with fairly soft metal.

For the electronics cavity, it makes things much easier if you pre-wire all components onto a temporary mounting plate before installing any pots or toggle switches in the body itself. Before soldering, you should definitely check to make sure all your pots and toggle switches will fit in their respective holes. If any holes are tight, you can use either a small knife blade (e.g. Xacto) or a 3/8″ drill bit to GENTLY widen the hole. As with the neck pocket ferrules, there’s a chance that some gloss or satin finish has accumulated in the edges of the pot holes and must be removed.

When soldering wires together, there are two generally accepted ways to insulate solder joints from coming in contact with each other (or ground). The first is black electrical tape, and the second is shrink tubing. I heartily recommend the second way. On one Gecko bass (and on another project bass) I used electrical tape, which was hard to apply and kept loosening due to poor adhesive. I tried using the heat of the soldering iron to “seal” the tape edges together, which didn’t work well either. If I had to do it all over again, I would have used shrink tubing for everything. Remember to cut and slide a length of shrink tubing over the wire BEFORE you solder it! Shrink tubing also works well on the output jack, but you really only need to apply to the signal (tip) of the output jack, since only grounded wires will be in the nearby area.

If you buy pots from various vendors, you may be left with extra half-inch “lock-tight washers” that you don’t know how to use. You should save at least one of these for each bass, and use it as the “hub” of a true star-grounding system. Be liberal with the application of ground wires, and solder each one securely to a different notch on the lock-tight washer. When you’re done you can then guarantee that you won’t have any ground loops, which can be a problem if you use an active pre-amp. Plus, it just looks cooler to see all the ground wires coming to one place, and makes it easier to attach more in the future if you decide to change your wiring around. The ground wire from the bridge and from the copper foil shielding should also attach to this washer.

I’ll be updating this post as more things come to mind.

So by now I’ve built and assembled two Warmoth Gecko 5-string fretless basses from parts, and I think I’m getting pretty good at the process. You can read the details on my Instruments Page on my old, clunky, static HTML website (which I’ve been meaning to rewrite one of these days but never get around to it).

Warmoth makes it really easy to put together a great-sounding instrument. The parts fit together perfectly, and the woodwork is high-quality. They sell just about everything you need to build a 5-string bass, but I usually source my pickups from other vendors. (Never been a Seymour Duncan fan, can’t explain why.) One bass got an ultra-rare set of Lane Poor soapbar passive pickups, which I bought on eBay several years ago and kept around for just such an occasion. The other bass got a pair of Bartolini P2-shaped “Classic Bass” pickups with dual coils, so I get a lot of tonal variety by switching in and out the coils.

I purchased my Warmoth parts from the “Showcase”, which has a wide variety of guitar and bass necks and bodies, which have either been built “speculatively” from smaller lots of special woods, in the hopes that a buyer (like me) will see something unique and special that catches their eye; or presumably other parts which were one-offs or built for a customer whose order was cancelled. Either way, the Showcase pieces are usually very special, and feature wood combinations which are usually not generally available. I took advantage of the Showcase uniqueness to buy two bass necks, made primarily of bubinga (with a bloodwood fingerboard) and rosewood (with an ebony fingerboard) respectively. The construction was top-notch, and I’ve got to say that these necks (and their corresponding bodies) were beyond any other instrument manufacturer in terms of quality, with the possible exception of Carvin.

Warmoth Gecko basses were also designed largely around the Kahler 5-string adjustable bass bridge. Some people don’t like these, but after installing and setting up two basses with these bridges, I really like the adjustability and the clean, polished looks. I’ve used other bass bridges that didn’t allow for this easy adjustments or just looked crappy. The Kahler bridges are pieces of useful art.

For these two basses, I decided to use all-passive wiring (i.e. no onboard pre-amps or active electronics). This is somewhat of a departure from my other instruments, which usually have a pre-amp. I’ve had all kinds of experiences with pre-amps, and replaced a few stock pre-amps that just sounded bad. But the kicker for me was (1) no batteries needed, and (2) after wiring up my Lane Poor pickups directly and playing through them, I was pleasantly surprised at the sweetness of the tone without needing anything to boost or amplify (or modify) the signal. The passive sound that I’ve found is deep, airy, expressive, clean and warm - all the qualities that I love about bass.

Both basses have a stacked concentric dual potentiometer, which handles volume and a capacitor-based passive tone control to roll off the high frequencies. One bass also has a HAS Sound bass midrange control which can selectively cut out some of the midrange and treble frequencies to create a clean, glassy, almost “acoustic” sound. The use of passive tone control allows for subtle and useful adustments to the signal without drastic effects. I don’t do slap bass and these are fretless, so I don’t need to boost the high end at all. Usually I find that just rolling off the high end a bit makes a big difference in warmth.

For pickup selection, I bought some high-quality Electroswitch rotary controls, and wired them up to allow me to choose which pickups (or coils) to use. This works better for me than using a blend potentiometer, and especially important with serial pickup arrangements.

Side note: Installing the pickups, wiring and controls has been a learning experience for me. I used to be afraid of soldering irons, and didn’t trust myself to make any modifications to any of my basses. That changed after I re-wired my Carvin bass and replaced its stock (tone-squelching) pre-amp with an Aguilar onboard pre-amp. I made a few mistakes but eventually got the hang of things. And I only burned myself once with the soldering iron!

In summary, I have become a convert to Warmoth Gecko basses, and if I ever had to replace any instruments, a Warmoth would be my first choice.

Would you like me to build one for you?

OK, I admit I’m a bit of a “gearhead” when it comes to basses, amplifiers, and other related possessions.

My old bass amp is a SWR SM-400 which was donated to me by a dear friend several years ago. It has served me well over the years, but it’s starting to show its age. The volume and EQ pots/sliders are starting to get all crackly, and the amp hum and hiss in the upper range is getting louder every time I turn it on.

Also, my favorite pre-amp, a Trace Elliot V-Type tube monster, is starting to have problems of its own. A while back, one of the input jacks stopped working for no apparent reason. This pre-amp also generates some hum and hiss of its own - maybe that’s just unavoidable when you’re working with tubes.

Finally, I guess I came to a realization that my rig was huge (and I mean massive!) and didn’t sound quite like I wanted it to sound. You know, we electric bassists can feel the acoustic sound of our instruments as we play them, and it’s tough to find a way to express that raw, woody sound through the pickups, cables, amplifiers and speaker cabinets in a pure and untampered form. I never felt that my old rig could express my sound properly. Even though it was “pretty cool” to have 3 cabinets and an amplifier, and having bass come from a speaker stack that approximates a “line array” does really project better than a single cab.

Today I received the first component of my new rig, a Carvin B800 bass amplifier. It’s small, relatively lightweight, and simple, and it can crank out a beastly dose of power. (500 watts into 4 ohms, or 800 watts into 2 ohms, which beats the SM-400.)

It has a 6-knob EQ section, with frequencies tuned for bass that are actually musical and usable. I thought I’d miss having a semi-parametric EQ, but so far it seems that the B800 just works and does so in a way that doesn’t take a lot of fiddling and fussing to get a good sound. The amp itself is very quiet, with almost no hum or hiss, and has a lot of simple but well-thought-out features, such a mute switch, a tube-less “drive” control, and a basic effects loop.

And, get this - it weighs about 25 pounds, and is mounted inside a nice enclosure with a handle, so I can carry it with one hand. That’s a hell of a lot better than my old amp setup, which nearly filled an 8-space portable rack and tipped the scales at much more than 50 pounds, and was awkward to carry after a late-night gig.

But the best part is the price. I got mine for just under $500 - which included shipping and an extended 1-year warranty, just in case something goes wrong. Carvin has always been a great value.

In my opinion, Carvin really needs to promote this amp more, and get it in the hands of more bassists. It works well and it needs the exposure. Carvin has typically been seen as a “budget” bass amp company, and doesn’t have quite the visibility of the other big-name brands (e.g. Ampeg, SWR, Eden) or the name recognition of the high-end, high-price brands (e.g. Aguilar, Euphonic, Epifani). I mean, really, name one famous bassist who uses Carvin rigs. Go ahead, think about it - I’ll wait. Anyway, Carvin has this amp priced and designed just right - less expensive than the famous, mass market amps, and with a quality on par with or better than the higher-priced amps.

What would be nice - and this is just me dreaming here - would be an expansion unit for this amp, for those gigs where you need more power and more cabinets to push more stage volume. Having another B800 (or its big brother, the B1500) would be a bit of a waste, since you wouldn’t need two EQ sections and pre-amps, and that would be inconvenient anyway - why need to tweak two sets of knobs? I propose a single, mono-block amplifier only, of similar shape, size and design, which takes a line-in from the B800 (maybe tapped from the Direct Out or Effect Send jack) and pushes, say, 750 watts into 4 ohms and 1200 watts into 2 ohms. Just a suggestion.

Next stop is the cabinets. I currently have 3 SWR cabinets - a 2×12 “Bigfoot”, a 4×8 “Henry Jr.” and a 2×10 “Goliath Jr. II”. Each has a good sound for certain aspects - the Bigfoot is great for thick bass and low mids, the Henry Jr. has excellent upper mids and clarity, and the Goliath Jr. has punch and crispness - but I always seem to end up using at least two of them at any time to get the kind of tone that I need. And none of them handles the deep bass especially well - I don’t feel the fundamentals of most notes on the B string.

So I’m taking a risk and trying something totally different - an Acme Low B-1 cabinet is (supposedly) on the way to me, and I’m eager to try it out. It’s a rather small 3-way cabinet - roughly cubical, 16″ per side - and has great reviews from a wide variety of bassits. This will hopefully be a big improvement over my current cabinets, which I can carry to jam sessions easily. If this ends up working well, I may get another Acme cab for louder gigs. The Carvin B800 should be able to handle two quite easily.

At some point I expect I’ll need to sell (or give away) my SWR cabs, since I probably won’t be using them much after the Acmes have proven their worth.

My friend and co-worker has offered to buy one of my basses. It’s the Tobias “Toby Pro” 5-string fretted bass that I bought about 6 years ago, and to which I added my first set of Lane Poor pickups and a matching 2-channel Lane Poor pre-amp.

This is how I got so into Lane Poor’s pickups - they totally transformed the sound of this bass from a sub-$700 cheap Korean-made wannabe Tobias, into a richly detailed instrument with a complex, deep and growly sound. The Lane Poor pickups seemed to focus the sound back on the most important elements of playing the bass - the strings, the fingers, and the wood.

As a result, I used this bass heavily for some of my gigging and recording projects, and fell in love with the instrument all over again.

Normally I wouldn’t have considered selling this bass to anybody, but lately I’ve realized that as a daddy of twins, I have no time to go out and gig, jam or record, let alone practice any of my instruments just for fun. I’ve had to make some tough decisions, and I had already decided to sell one bass (more info to come) because I didn’t feel that I should continue to keep it.

So here I am at the crossroads. Do I keep this bass that I enjoy dearly, and whose sound still moves me, despite some of the inherent flaws in this instrument? Or do I sell it to a co-worker and friend who wants to start on the bass (coming from a guitar background) and has borrowed it and loves its sound?

I can obviously live without the instrument. More practically speaking, I have another 5-string fretted bass (a Zon) that sounds great and isn’t for sale, and I can afford to keep it (for now), so it’s not like I’ll be without a fretted sound if I ever need it.

And, I expect that I can always borrow the Toby from my friend, if I ever need its sound again. He’s a genuinely nice guy and he’d probably be happy to loan it back to me, if I asked.

But the Toby Pro was designed as a lower-end bass (or, if you want to be kind, a “starter” instrument) and as such it isn’t as nice as a better-quality instrument. I’ve played better basses (and own a few) and there are some key differences, that hold the Toby Pro back.

Finally, I must admit that I’ve been holding on to some spare Lane Poor pickups, which I purchased some years ago (after Lane Poor went out of business, but before the prices went sky-high and they became really hard to find) and will use in the future to build my “dream bass”. So I can build a better bass in the future, and still have the right sound for me.

On the other hand, this bass and I have a lot of history together. I’ve recorded tracks for a close friend with this bass, and the sound was awesome. I’ve used it playing live with friends, and it was more than adequate for the job. I know its sound and feel, how it responds to different finger techniques, and how it performs for various styles of music.

What should I do?