I never was into basses until coming on to this forum, you guys are converting me, who knows I might even get BAS AGHH!
Looks Cool
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I never was into basses until coming on to this forum, you guys are converting me, who knows I might even get BAS AGHH!
Looks Cool
Love the colour on this Waz, well done mate
Thanks euroa & Dedman. This was probably the easiest of the 4 builds I have done so far and really happy with the colour as that part of any build does not always end up how you pictured things in your mind before starting.
Thinking of doing a white one with all the ashtrays to match my Tele :)
Sounds good but too much gorgeous grain to hide if using Ash. Maybe a translucent white on Ash would look cool.
Finally figured out how to do a half decent video on an iPad and just spent past few hours working out how to invert it as the iPad was upside down! Also took about 1.5 hours uploading on to YouTube.
The reason for a sound demo was to provide a before and after example........here is the before with the stock Chinese pickups.....
http://youtu.be/MfCBb4b2pcE
Attachment 14016
Edit: Would love to know how you guys embed the video without using a hyperlink as I have had to do here?
Fitted some Entwistle JBXN (Neodymium) J Bass PUP's a week ago and just finished off a demo vid this afternoon.
http://youtu.be/pGnlkdXbK7U
Attachment 14028Attachment 14029
The neck PUP sounds the best as it is quite meaty yet retaining crisp highs whereas the bridge PUP was mostly brighter overall.
The easiest way to embed the video is to copy the link like you have done, then just above the comment box you will see a tab that looks like a film strip. Hit this tab and you will get a pop up box appear where you can insert the link you copied.
Give it a try
Fine tuning & tweaking day yesterday.
Attachment 15052Attachment 15053
Not much required on this build other than new strings, strap locks, and was also going to swap stock nut for a graphite one but once strings were off and having a closer look decided that plastic one could stay for a little while longer until I get a bone one as the graphite nut looked just like a black piece of plastic and probably sounds no better.
Edit: Decided to go a slightly heavier gauge on the strings, particularly the high G and found the intonation travel not long enough as that saddle had to come a long way forward with the saddle resting above the mounting screws and still a fraction flat of the 12th harmonic. All other strings required a bit of re-intonation but not as much as the G string. May need to swap back to using 0.45 instead or find a suitable replacement bridge which is what I am currently researching.
Looks and sounds great!
Though it could simply be a camera lens distortion issue, a quick measure up of the photo seems to show that the nut to 12th fret distance is a bit longer than the 12th fret to bridge distance (on the G string anyway), which is unexpected. Have you done any measurements on this at all? How does it compare if you use a tuner to set the intonation by tuning the open string and then fretting on the 12th fret? Same issue?
Hi Simon, things measured up perfectly with lighter gauge strings where high G was 0.45 but had to shorten things up a fair bit moving up to a slightly thicker gauge. Always use an electronic tuner to tune and check intonation and have found myself too far forward on the treble side. Stock bridge measures 80mm wide by 45mm deep and that identifies lack of depth as the issue. Could always revert back to lighter gauge strings but now looking at bridges with about 50mm to 60mm depth to give me the string gauge flexibility. I will use some masking tape as marker reference points once I get around to doing the re-fit to save time and also help with positioning.
That should do it.
You can pay an awful lot for a bass bridge. I once bought a collection of bass parts from eBay to put together a P-bass. It was from someone who played in a Shadows tribute band (so you can guess the body colour), who had bought the bits but never got round to putting them together and had since bought a fiesta red P-bass. I wasn't taken by the bent tin bridge that came with it, so I looked on eBay and managed to pick up a used ABM lock-down bridge for £40/A$64 when they were just under £200/A$320 in the shops. Made a big difference to the sound and really evened out the string-to-string response. Not sure I'd be tempted to pay quite that much for a new one when there are very similar models for a lot less money, but it shows that spending a bit more can make a big difference.
Sounds like you scored a bargain there Simon.
Have been playing both the J Bass & the Tele a bit tonight and took these shots of the measurements to high G bridge saddle and also to the 12th fret with the long ruler placed against that string and butted up against the inside edge of the nut.....
Attachment 15063Attachment 15064
As you can see in the first shot scale length for these is supposed to be 34" yet the high G saddle is about 1/8th of an inch short of that and still a little bit flat thus requiring a small amount less string length. 2nd shot is taken above the 12th fret which should be 17" and if taken along edge of fret board that would have very, very close.
Fairly satisfied that original position of bridge was OK for the lighter gauge and have today ordered a Gotoh style bridge that has 8mm more forward travel and that should be sufficient for this set of strings. Funny how camera angles can distort things?
It's weird that G saddle is forward of the 34" position. It may be a peculiarity of that particular string. Unfortunately, bass strings aren't cheap, so it's not as practical as on a guitar to simply try another set of strings on.
Had me scratching my head too as with the lighter gauge it was spot on???
I did read somewhere that string thicknesses do affect the intonation and thus requiring string length to be adjusted which makes sense. It just requires a bit of experimentation in either direction to figure out which way is correcting the problem. Usually Flat means string needs shortening which is what I did on this baby, and yes remainder 3 other strings also required some fine adjustment too.
Edit: D'addarios are not cheap but these ones feel as smooth as for a set of round wounds so no chance of changing these in a hurry.
I have a set of Bass strings on my Squire P-Bass where the thickest low E-String is a 105 gauge, as far as I can tell, the intonation is pretty well spot on, I'll post a pic so you can see where I have all the saddles positioned.
Incidentally, I have a set of Elixir Strings in 42 to 09 gauge on my Hot Rod Strat, and I have the low E-String saddle set so that it is as far back from the neck that it can go, but it still reads as being slightly sharp, my conclusion is that they positioned the bridge-routing a bit too far towards the neck than it should have been.
I'll also post a pic of where I have the string saddles positioned for the Hot Rod Strat.
Here's a pic of the bridge on my Squire P-Bass guitar, the little black mark near the number 17 indicates where the scale length measurement is for the distance between the nut and 12th fret ( I used my longest metal ruler which is 600mm in length and has scale markings in both mm and inches, I used the inches scale for the measurements in this case), the bridge is made by Gotoh:
Attachment 15065
Here's a pic of where I have the string saddles positioned on the HotRod Strat's bridge, as you can see, the saddle for the low E-String is set pretty much close to it's limit for lengthening the string, and it still reads a bit sharp:
Attachment 15066
Well, the frequency of a given length of a string is all related to the square root of the string tension divided by the mass per unit length. So for a thicker string, the mass per unit length is increased, so the tension also has to increase in proportion to give the same frequency. On wound strings, the core wire really provides most of the tension element, whilst the wrap provides most of the mass. Different manufacturers will use different combinations of core wire diameter and wrap thickness to give different tensions for the same overall string diameter.
The actual string length is always slightly hard to define exactly because (and especially with thicker strings), there is a small part of the string at the two fulcrum points that isn't really vibrating, so the overall string length becomes slightly shorter. This is one reason why the bridge saddles are normally further back than you'd expect from measuring the nut to the 12th fret distance and doubling it. As the non-vibrating length of string is always the same length for a given string, then the proportion of the string not vibrating is higher with the string fretted at the 12th fret, than with an open string - or conversely, the length of the vibrating string is proportionally shorter when fretted at the 12th fret, so the bridge saddle needs to be moved backwards to compensate.
It's an iterative process, because as you move the saddle back, the overall string length increases so you then need to increase the string tension, measure again, then adjust position, increase string tension, measure again etc. Almost impossible to get it perfectly in tune.
So maybe Waz, there's some slight variation in string thickness on your G string that means the bridge end of the string has a slightly higher mass per unit length than the nut end of the string. But without cutting it up into little equally sized pieces (a feat in itself) and weighing them on a very accurate scale, you'll never know for sure.
The Doc's photos illustrate my point above well. The thicker strings gave a longer 'non-vibrating' length, so the saddles step back nicely according to string type and size.
(Obviously the 'non vibrating' string section isn't all non-vibrating and increase from zero at the fulcrum to a value at some point along the string where it can said to be fully vibrating, but it's easier to imagine if you just say 'non-vibrating').
That distortion in the camera-angle could be something like parallax distortion, I could be wrong though.
There's a very small amount of curvature in the picture, probably due to the wide-angle lens of the camera, but as the 12th fret is fairly close to the centre, any distortion should be the same on both sides of the picture. Also, as we now know that there is a slightly shorter distance from the 12th fret to the G saddle that from the 12th fret to the nut, it's probably not distortion at all.
Here's my Fender P bass bridge that has recently had a professional set up. Uses medium flatwounds. Intonation is spot on
http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/2016...ceb8a754fa.jpg
Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk
I've got Roundwounds on my Squire P-Bass, can't remember what brand the strings were though, the action at the 17th fret is something like 3.5mm or so, I might consider tweaking the truss-rod a bit to get the action a bit lower so that it makes it easier for me to play it, I'm also going to upgrade the pickups to a set of Neodymiums cause the current ones, which are some Stewmac Golden Age pickups, are a bit wimpy.
Are your pickups set as high as they can be without affecting the strings?
Actually, no, the pickups are both set so that the tops of them are about 4mm above the surface of the Scratchplate, I'm pretty sure that Fender quote a spec for P-Bass pickup heights, my feeling is that my Squire P-Bass could do with a bit hotter set of pickups, maybe the magnetic pole-pieces of the current ones are a bit weak, the reason why I reckon the pickups are a bit wimpy is that when I plug the Bass straight into input 1 of my Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 Audio Interface, I have to crank the channel gain a bit, that's with the Bass going straight in with no other pedals or buffers, etc, connected, maybe it just needs a preamp, my understanding is that the Stewmac Golden Age P-Bass pickups are wound to vintage specs, as far as I know, there are no issues with the wiring (I actually did the wiring myself, using a wiring-diagram from my Guitar Player Repair Handbook), it's a simple enough pickup-wiring system that I'm confident I didn't make any errors, and the bridge is earthed to circuit-ground (I checked it with a multimeter set to low-ohms and I'm getting a reading of about .1 Ohm, so it's definitely grounded, well the strings are anyway).Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
Here are my bass bridges, a Lakland Skyline Bob Glaub (P-bass) and a (rather dusty) Peavey Cirrus BXP.
The Lakland's got Rotosound Swing bass strings on (45-105), the Peavey has D'Addario EXL 170s (45-100).
Attachment 15077Attachment 15078
I bought the Lakland from Neil Murray (Whitesnake, Gary Moore etc.). He'd been using it for 500 performances of the Queen-based stage show 'We Will Rock You' (he'd been the bass player in it for many years but it had recently come to an end). Came with massive strings and really high action, but a set of lighter strings and a truss-rod tweak cured that. Really nice bass.
Thanks guys for dropping by and adding those photos and words of advice an encouragement.
Gotoh bridge has been ordered from Real Parts and should arrive tomorrow. It looks identical to the one on Doc's Squire P Bass.
At the moment the setup has the correct staggered saddle positioning where low E is screwed way back. Just taken a bit by surprise how far forward the G string saddle had to be shifted as the height adjustment grub screws are now sitting awkwardly on top of the base plate mounting screw on that side.
Hey Ponch, have you checked that setup with an electronic tuner yourself as it looks ideal for a lefty with the G wound back the furtherest and the fatter lower ones more forwards? It could be spot on, just looks weird in the shots.
I was going to have to do some work on this axe over the weekend as the Entwistles are taller than stock units and sitting a bit too high which will require me to dig out a bit in the PUP cavities. Playing notes around 14th fret has the string touching front edge of Neck PUP so definitely sitting too high. Should also mention the pole piece adjustment screws are crap as some of them dropped down inside the PUP whilst turning the screw downwards??? Screwing them in opposite direction to raise them did nothing as they are now free wheeling down inside the bobbins? When things are apart I will have a closer look to see if they are now that way for ever? Doesn't seem to be affecting the tone or sound so not sure what they were doing other than acting as decoration perhaps?
They look cool, I'm not sure what model bridge I have on my Squire P-Bass, but it's manufactured by Gotoh, it seems to be a pretty good bridge, and I have never had any issues with it ever since I bought it, which is probably a good few years ago, I think I like the Squire P-Bass a lot more than my red Yamaha ERB-300 Bass, which has some dings in the body, there's also a crack in the body wood near one of the pickup volume controls on it, I might do some work on it at a later stage to fix it up a bit, and put some 105-45 gauge strings on it, the original ones were a bit too heavy for my tastes, and they required the truss-rod to be cranked pretty tight, the ERB-300 needs some work done on the nut cause the 1st fret action is a bit too low so the strings buzz against it a bit, might even change out the tuners for some new ones cause the originals are a bit rusty and grotty, could even give the frets a polish with my Dremel tool too while I'm at it, which reminds me, I need to buy some grinding bits for my Dremel tool, might check to see if my local big green shed has some in stock.
Well, I'd try raising them so that they are closer to the strings before you think about swapping them over. Just about all of the Focusrite interfaces have a poorly designed instrument input with very little headroom (most people with humbuckers can't record directly using them without digital clipping), so if your pickups aren't hot enough on their own without some gain, then it sounds like there's room for improvement. I've fitted some BareKnuckle vintage spec P-bass pups to a friend's JV Squire P-bass, and they weren't lacking punch. It's either that or you simply aren't playing the strings hard enough! I'm a guitar player so I do tend to play bass very lightly but a lot of the bass players I know really pull at the strings.Quote:
Originally Posted by DrNomis_44
If you've got a really big bass rig, then you can play lightly and let the amp do the work. But most bass players started off with small rigs and had to work hard to be heard above the guitarist and drummer.
You may need to add some more foam to the back of the pickups to get enough height. If so, look out for sheets of adhesive backed neoprene foam rubber on eBay. You can get a whole sheet for the price of a pre-cut piece designed for pickups. i bought a whole range of different height sheets and haven't regretted it. It comes in very useful.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
My experience with the Gotoh bridge has been a really good one so far, it's a good, solid bridge and has given me virtually no issues since I first bought it, so i reckon you'll like it a lot mate, I have the saddles for the low E-String and the G-String sitting on the base of the bridge, and the action is still about 3.4mm at the 17th fret, I think Fender specify 3mm at the 17th fret for a factory set-up P-Bass, although you might prefer a higher action.
It may be that the pickup is too high and the magnetic pull is affecting the tuning (fretting on the 12th fret will bring the string nearer the pickup, so any magnetic pull will have more effect on the string than when open). This is quite common on Strats. You may find that by lowering the pickup height, you solve the intonation issue.Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
Good point. Bridge already on it's way which is all good as I should have done that originally rather then persist with the cheapie stock unit.
Will attack Pup heights first to see if that is the culprit and then move on to installing the better bridge which has greater mass and should also mean better sustain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
Cheers, I'll give that a go before I change out the pickups, I do tend to have a fairly light picking-technique, about the only Bass amp I have is an old 30 Watt Peavey TKO 80 (the one without the EQ on it), I'm currently in the process of doing some work on it, and I'm looking at getting a proper Bass amp speaker for it soon, it currently has a 10 Inch Response HiFi Bass speaker installed in the cabinet, which I bought from my local Jaycar Electronics store, it was all I could afford at the time and I needed to replace the original speaker in order to use the amp at a gig a couple of days later, I am working on the TKO 80 because it seems to have some residual distortion whenever I play a note through it, I worked out that it's either the current speaker, or the amp is self-oscillating at a very high frequency, I have already changed-out the main supply filter caps on the amps PCB, and the grounding seems to be all good, maybe I need to replace all the other electrolytic caps, seeing as the amp is easily over 15 years old anyway.
The Entwistle JBX dimension drawings http://www.entwistlepickups.com/asse...%20drawing.pdf seem to indicate that the pole pieces run right through the pickup and out through the bottom. I can't find any pictures of the underside of the pickups on the web, so you'll have to tell us what the solution to the mystery is once you have them off to deepen the pockets.
Cheers Simon, will do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
That's something I have had first-hand experience with on my Gold Strat, I couldn't work out why I couldn't accurately set the intonation of the low E-String, then it turned out that the magnetic pole-pieces of the pickups ( three Entwistle ASN57 noiseless pickups) were the cause due to the pickup routing not being deep enough to accommodate them, the result was that the pole-piece for the low-E-String was too close to the E-String, if the tone of the string sounds a bit warbly, that's a dead give-away that the pole-piece is too close to the string, the magnetic pull tends to make the string vibrate at a lower frequency than it should.
So was this a random eBay/classifieds type thing, or do you know Neil? Did you talk to him or were you star-struck/too cool. I'm a huge pre-blues phase Gary Moore fan.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
A random eBay check. I have a general search set up for all things musical with one hour left to go, which I often run at the less popular times of the day. And I think I picked it up on one of those. Very little interest in the bass and I picked it up, including a case and big leather strap, for £440 (A$730) , when the list price was around £1000 (A$1660) for the bass alone. I've had some amazing bargains that way, especially on some items with badly spelled descriptions, or even incorrect descriptions. It had had a Hipshot X-tender fitted and the original pickups replaced with Bartolinis. It's a really nice bass (so it's being wasted on me). It also has had a second round string tree fitted to hold down the A string.
I picked it up from his house, so got to meet him. I did take along my friend Max, who does know him slightly and played alongside him on stage at a guitar show. He was a very nice chap, we stayed and chatted for about 10 minutes. But it wasn't until afterwards that I found out that another mate's band's drummer also played in Neil Murray's fun gigging band (they were both in the "We Will Rock You" house band). Had I known that, that would have been something else to talk about. But you got the feeling that he was about ready to retire from regular professional bass playing, so was selling off all unnecessary equipment.
@ Wazkelly One other thing you can try checking on your Ash J Bass is the neck relief, Fender specify a clearance gap of .012 of an inch between the top of the 8th fret and the bottom of the strings, you can use a standard set of Automotive feeler-gauges and a capo to check the neck-relief on your Bass guitar, the first thing that you do is place the capo on the neck just behind the first fret in front of the nut so that all the strings are resting on the first fret, next, select a .012 inch feeler-gauge, then fret the low E-String at the 17th fret, using the .012 inch feeler gauge, check the clearance at the 8th fret while you're fretting the string at the 17th fret, the .012 inch gauge should just fit between the 8th fret and the bottom of the string, tighten or loosen the truss rod till the .012 gauge does fit, then do the same for the G-String, I've found that the neck relief, and truss-rod tension also has an effect on the intonation adjustments too.
Hope that is of some help mate.
Thanks Doc. Got a work conference on this weekend in Brisbane so it may not be until Sunday night before I have any spare time to look at it.
No worries mate, hope the work conference goes well.Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly