Archive for November, 2006

After reading this story I decided to cancel my Bank of America credit card. I’m taking my business elsewhere to a bank that doesn’t abuse its customers.

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?