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My 5 pc. classic rock cover band that I joined 8 months ago plays local dive bars and has been an established band for over 20 years. The PA system is an old Berringer system that looks like a guitar head, it doesn't connect to an I pad or anything and is not super powerful. The band leader who also plays keys runs the "board" The PA is used for vocals only and the band members are left to their own devices for the rest of the sound. Our live sound is mediocre at best, and the overmatched PA feeds back sometimes on gigs.
How important is the PA system to you?
When you are considering joining a band is the quality of the PA a determining factor?

I got a new bass!

This is a Bilt Rele 30”. It only weighs 6.8lbs. The body is made of sassafras with a lo-gloss black finish that really shows the grain. The neck is quarter sawn roasted maple with a rosewood board and vintage size SS frets and aluminum dot inlays. Nordstrand NM4 pickup. Black anodized pickguard and Hipshot vintage bridge. La Bella flatwound strings.

This bass sounds amazing and is super comfortable.









Short scale Bilt family portrait with my Zaftig. I got this one in 2023 and it’s still my favorite bass. 30”, semi hollow, Lollar Precision90, round wounds.

I thought about having the Rele painted like a twin to the Zaftig, Ric-like, but decided to go in the complete opposite direction, mostly black, silver hardware, all business. The back of the neck is not painted, finished with Tru-oil.

It's still hard to find, but it seems that this is going to be the next signature in Charvel's roster, III from Sleep Token.
I think is their first multiscale bass, and as far as I know it has alder body, roasted maple neck and fingerboard and Fishman electronics.
Sorry about the image, is the only one I could find.

Wow! Sire seems to be upping the game again. I like the look of the new double cut F10 with walnut top. I don't like the 35" scale, or at least I don't think I do. Unless it plays like a Lakland which doesn't feel like 35" scale to me (looking at you Spector).

Anybody happened to get their hands on one of these? They seem to be hitting stores now. I prefer the pickup configuration on the 6 strings with the tappable dual coil soapbars over the P/J of the 5 string. But I'm certainly open minded.

Thoughts?

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We have a booking later this month for which we have been asked to play a couple of patriotic songs. We're a four piece band....bass, drums, guitar and sax....any ideas on songs that fit the bill that we could play as a four piece?

Thanks!

Hello Everyone,

I recently picked up a TC412 to pair with my YBA100. It was about a 2 hour round trip but the price was right so I went for it. I confirmed with the owner that everyhting was good and he said yes, no issues with the drivers, nothing is blown. He did have it paired with an RB1001, which I believe is 700 watts @ 4 ohm, the cab is 1200 program, so it should have been a decent pairing unless he was really pushing it.

The top two speakers are making a buzzing noise.

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*Easier to hear on a phone speaker, or something with lots of top end. In the video it's a bit buried, but in the room it's very noticeable.

I immediately thought it was the grill, as all of my old Traynor cabs required the grill to be tightened down, but even with the grill off, the buzzing is there.

I stuck my arm in the port and found everything is connected, and nothing is rubbing (wire wise). Moving the wires around while playing seems to produce various levels of this rattle so I thought at first it might be the speaker wires rattling against the back of the driver. I popped the off the back panel and none of the wires were touching the driver. I even Velcro strapped the excess length to make sure it wasn't contacting anything but buzzing remains.

If I lightly rest my hand on the speaker surround, the buzzing stops. It also only occurs with lower notes.

I checked with a few more experienced friends and they all suspect speaker damage. Wondering if anyone might have any thoughts on this.

The seller is very nice, older fellow. I think a return/refund is out of the question, but he does want me to keep him updated on the situation.

Thx.

BN~

You know, I’ve been looking at 68-71 Tele basses and then used CS 51s. But then…I started seeing red! It’s a tad shinier than I’d prefer but still pretty cool. Up side to this is the neck isn’t as deep as the real 51s. Got it from Round Hill Music Co.

Hey guys, I haven't posted here in forever but I still play bass every now and then.
I currently own a fender AVRI 62 that I bought new maybe 20 years ago.

Even though it's a great bass, for years I've been wanting a jazz bass (or a sterling but that's another topic). I really like the tones on weezer's blue album for example, that sort of phasy midrange that the 2 pickups configuration creates is so nice and my p-bass just can't get these sounds.

Thing is I'm broke and I'd hate to sell my p-bass only to miss it a few years down the road. So I was wondering if in your opinion a cheap jazz bass, something like a harley benton MV4JB or similar, would be a worthy addition to get that jazz bass tone? I know it wouldn't have that nice nitro finish and might require a setup but I'm ok with that. I'm not looking for a pro instrument, I just want that jazz tone on an instrument that is fun to play.

What are your thoughts, any suggestions?

Hey everyone! I've tried to look for info on this topic on various platforms, including Talkbass, yet I haven't found a definitive answer to my exact problem, so I thought some of you could help. I recently acquired a GK 200MB (the combo amp from the 80s, predecessor of 150MB) which has this hum, even when it's in off position. So the hum isn't distractingly loud or anything as it stays the same when you turn the amp on, but for some time I thought that there's some sort of fault in the power section and the amp is drawing current even when it's off. I contacted GK and they told me that it's probably got something to do with the line out section, which is grounded, thus creating an internal ground loop. Do you guys have an idea if this is something that can be treated, or if it even needs to be cured? I'm worried that if I leave the amp connected to a wall socket, it's drawing power thus creating heat, thus creating a potential risk of fire. My local go-to amps repair person told that they don't know how to fix these old GK amps (understandably, since I've heard it's a notoriously finicky build).

It’s a very sad day everywhere with the announcement of Dolly Parton’s passing. RIP

Seems like a deal for new.

Seems like its sold out.....

Moderators, feel free to move this thread if there is a better spot for it.

I work for a medium volume music retailer in a small city of 33,000 that primarily services school band programs. One of our more important clients is interested in obtaining some bass guitars for their fledgling jazz band program.

As an educator myself and based on successful sales experiences in the past, I am deeply inclined to recommend 7endar or Squid derived products for school band programs; in particular jazz and precision based designs. The reasons for this are numerous and not the point of this thread. Responses along the line of "I know those designs are great but this is equal or better" are not pertinent to this conversation. I apologize in advance if this hurts any feelings.

Now as we all mostly know 7endar, and by extension Squid, have become onerous to deal with on a number of levels. Again not the point of this thread. But all of these factors rule them out as potential options.

The problem i'm trying to solve is finding a manufacturer/wholesaler of FSOs that will work on reasonable terms with a mid size distributor like us. No crazy buy ins, modest sales targets, and a quality entry level product line that meets or exceeds 7endar or Squid. Our market does not support the $1500 and up price point. We need to be able to carry products that retail at less than $1000 without the obligation to sell more expensive instruments.

We currently have reached out to Sire to inquire if they can help us. But I am wondering if anyone here has suggestions for another company that we might contact?

Hi since quite a bit I want to buy a jazz bass, I would love to buy this bass I found online is a fender Vintera II fiesta red with certain mods:

Lollar Jazz Bass elements

Stacked knob configuration with a fase switch

Original fender custom shop pick guard.

The guy is asking 900 for it.

Is it worth it ? Or do you have any recommendations for me?

Wanted to give a quick shoutout to Tom Robotham at Trudeep Bass. ( For some context, I am a relatively new bass player, but have been involved in music all my life at individual, band, and orchestra levels. After switching from guitar to bass a few years ago, I became hooked and currently play a custom Manne 6 string and a Sadowsky custom shop 6 string.)

Since starting to play bass, I have been on somewhat of a pursuit to find the tone and clarity of sound that I heard in my head along with a solid impactful bottom end to compliment the bass. After trying many amps, I settled on the Jad Freer Sisma playing either through the tube preamp or bypassing the preamp direct depending on the tone I wanted and Analysis plus cables. The story of trying different cabinets is a long one, but basically I tried and or owned a bunch including Bergantino, Ampeg, Aguilar, Barefaced, Phil Jones, Markbass, Mesa and a few others. While I liked some things about many of them and enjoyed playing several, there were always compromises in areas that I wished were different.

Then I found Trudeep Bass. I called and talked to Tom at length and decided to give the 9PM a try as a "practice" cab or small room cabinet to see how they were.

WOW! This cabinet is only about 11x12x16 with a 9" woofer and midrange and weighs 29lbs, but puts out unreal bottom end for such a small cabinet. The sound is very accurate, super tight and the bottom end extends way beyond what this size cabinet should be able to reproduce well. The only tradeoff that Tom had to make is that the sensitivity is not super high, but my Sisma has absolutely no issues driving it to where I want it volume wise.

Bottom line, this little cabinet caused me to sell 12" and 15" cabinets that I thought I would keep for a long time. Even comparing this tiny little cab to a very highly regarded 15" cabinet that I had, the low end was much tighter, punchier and even though the "flapping pants leg" effect was slightly less because of the smaller driver, I still preferred even the low end and certainly the tone of the 9PM over the 15" cab that I was using previously. I now have a 12AM cabinet on order from Tom and hope to get it in a month or two - they are not inexpensive cabinets at all, but if you are looking for the best bass cabinets that I have ever heard, I would give Tom a shout.

Hi! I want to share notes on a small project I've done lately.

Preamble: I have an Ibanez SRX400, whose output I needed to be able to switch from one jack (Main) to two (Main+Add) on the go. The original wiring looked something like this:


My first idea was simple enough:


It worked, however the signal's volume would split in two at soon as I engaged the second output. It made sense enough, but made me scratch my head for a while. Finally I thought that I should try to keep second out completely independent, which went like this:


Signal level is now stable no matter what mode is engaged. I hope someone finds this useful!

Took a sibling portrait and felt like sharing it with the guitar community here at TB

2026 ES-335 Figured
2019 Les Paul Traditional
2026 ES-339

I like having a pedalboard but I try and keep them fairly small with just a few pedals. I decided to add a couple effect options and upgrade my board. Previously I had just used a pedal riser, but now I need a little more space and didn’t love the options I saw available, so I milled my own. 7x13 6061 aluminum.

Here is the initial layout.

Making chips after having to true up the aluminum a bit




And the finished board. I’ll be sand blasting it and painting it this weekend!

Hello,

I have a 1965 Jazz bass with the original white tolex case. Overall it's in really good shape, but the black leather ends, white piping and stitching are just falling apart. The inside plush has also lost a lot of it's foam? support and seems to be shrinking on the top. I've asked other people before and they all mention going to a 'luggage' repair place to have it fixed, but I was wondering if there was any dedicated shop that can repair or restore the case. Thanks so much!!!

This season has had me dragging out a rack of bass gear again and got me thinking about looking into a lighter weight amp. I currently have a 32lb Ampeg B5R in a rack with a Korg Tuner, a Shure QLXD wireless and power conditioner, all prewired into a rack I can throw on top of the cab of day and I'm good to go. I'd really like to shave some weight off of that rack and possibly get a lighter amp. I like the sound of the Ampeg and built in DI that can be ran premaster volume. I bought it brand new when they first came out and t's rated at around 300 watts at 4 ohms and has always been more than enough on stages from a corner bar to a 10K cap arena. I want something that is designed OEM to be rack mounted. Not opposed to used. Given the above limitations/feature requests, what would you suggest?

Several hundred dollars off, free Prime shipping. the 1-15 is $599 too



In other news: Today I learned that this type of knob shaft is called Quincunx????
What kind of person would come up with that?

Hi all,

Just wanted to share this with you guys. I've had a brass Fender Hi-Mass bridge for while, and while it did the job, it was a veritable pain in the ass to adjust intonation on it since to the tiny holes where the intonation screws sit are way too small for my screwdriver, and since I have an aluminum neck on my bass, I wanted something even heavier to combat it a bit more. I also wanted a full brass bridge, and a lot of hi-masses have a zinc baseplate + brass saddles, so that disqualified a bunch of them. So I went looking and found this. This seemed super interesting to me, as I've always known Kahler more for their tremolos, for both guitar and bass, not their fixed bridges.

I asked Kahler the weight of this thing, but they didn't know (kinda strange but whatever.) I looked it up online and it seems that the non-resonator version of this bridge (here) weighs around 9.2-9.4 oz from my research. I figured that, since there's this chunky block of brass at the end, the Resonator should be heavier (maybe by 2-3 oz), so I took the gamble and bought it.

It arrived today. I weighed my old bridge, and these are the results:


Pretty standard stuff. I then weighed the Kahler.


That's heavier than I was expecting. That's almost a pound! The old bridge feels like a toy compared to this thing. I put it on, and it felt and looked great! The weight from the neck was counter-balanced a bit better with this thing on.


So yeah, just wanted to post this since there's basically no info about these bridges online. The only heavier bridges I can think of are the Warwick bridge + tailpiece combos and the 2TEK, but those don't retrofit to Fender basses without drilling new holes or routing.

Dowtuned and did a setup on this one to c# g# c# f# the day i got and i only use a 110 medium gauge gallienstrings MSB, and its so shaging good to Play on, this is by far my fav bass.

AND YES ITS A REAL NORWEGIAN FLAG.
AND YES IM NORWEGIAN.
AND YES THERE IS ONLY ONE TRUE BLACK METAL GENRE and that is my dear fellow bass geeks: TRUE NORWEGIAN BLACK METAL

PEACE&LOVE
WAR&HATE

Hello everyone,


My name is HAYATA, and I just registered on TalkBass for the first time.


I recently modified my Ibanez EHB1265MS, a headless 5-string multiscale bass equipped with Bartolini BH2 pickups.


During the modification, I was able to identify what I believe are the main advantages and disadvantages of the BH2, and I thought I would share my findings with everyone here.


Here is what I found about the BH2.

Advantages​

• It has a lot of output and very low noise, resulting in an excellent S/N ratio.
• It has a huge amount of low end and can produce an almost subwoofer-like sound.
• Because the bass is multiscale, the distance between the pickups varies slightly from string to string. This spreads out the frequencies affected by phase cancellation, rather than concentrating the cancellation into a single narrow notch.
• When coil-tapped and used as a single-coil, it can still provide a reasonably well-balanced output.

Disadvantages​

• The coils use a very large number of turns of very thin wire in order to achieve high output. The resulting very high inductance causes a significant loss of high frequencies.
• Because two coils are placed relatively close together within a narrow aperture, additional high-frequency cancellation occurs.
• Even when the pickup is modified for parallel wiring, the two coils still interact with each other spatially, so the notch around 3 kHz cannot be avoided.
• Even when coil-tapped, the high inductance still causes loss of higher harmonics. The result is poor resolution and an overall sound that resembles a speaker with a blanket over it.
• The built-in Vari-mid preamp is basically just an EQ, so it does not actually improve the fundamental quality of the pickup's sound. The pickup itself is still passive, not active.
• Because the EHB1265MS is a multiscale bass, standard 5-string replacement pickups do not fit. A 6-string-sized pickup is required, which makes replacement more expensive.

That's basically it.


In short:


The BH2 seems to have sacrificed high-frequency information in exchange for power.


For reference, on the EHB1265MS, the distance between the two pickups is approximately 80–85 mm, depending on the string. This means that phase cancellation occurs roughly across the 300–1100 Hz range.


The distance between the two coils within each BH2 is approximately 18 mm, which puts another set of cancellation points roughly in the 1.4–4.8 kHz range.


And on top of all that, there is the high-frequency roll-off caused by the high inductance.


So... yeah. We're pretty much screwed.

---

I also experimented with the BH2 to see if I could somehow make it sound better. I modified the wiring so that I could switch between series, parallel, front-coil tap, and rear-coil tap.


The results were quite interesting:

• In both series and parallel modes, the response starts dropping rapidly above around 2 kHz, with a pronounced notch around 3 kHz.
• In series mode, there is a peak around 4 kHz, while in parallel mode the peak moves to around 5 kHz.
• Switching from series to parallel does not make nearly as much difference as I expected.
• When coil-tapped and used as a single-coil, the response above 2 kHz suddenly comes back, resulting in a much more modern sound.
• With both pickups using their inner coils, the response naturally scoops the 600 Hz–1 kHz range, making it surprisingly easy to use, somewhat like a Jazz Bass.
• With both pickups using their rear-facing coils, the bass has a very clear low end and high end, resulting in what I found to be the most balanced and modern-bass-like sound of all the configurations I tested.

That's all I found.

Conclusion​

The EHB1265MS itself is a very well-designed bass in terms of its body, neck, hardware, ergonomics, etc.


However, in my opinion, the BH2 is the weak link.


If you buy an EHB1265MS, I would seriously recommend replacing the BH2 pickups with suitable replacement pickups as soon as possible.


The rest of the bass deserves better pickups.

Late to post vu5 here is my NBD that my lovely partner surprised me with for my birthday
Aesome tone beautiful colour and idk how she pulled 5his off with out me knowing lol