Ok, nothing wrong with a short scale. both my active 5 string and bass 6 are baritones. I’m longing to have a cello or viol da Gamba. I think I could get lost in one of those for a while. Just keep playing and wipe off the strings after every play. Bass strings are to skin cells as a cheese grater is to. … well, skin cells.
Have fun
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Hey, I have the option to buy a defective GK MB combo 110. looks like a nice amp. The thing can be turned on but there is no sound. I have to suggest a price. Anyone fixed something similar here? Do you think this will be a difficult repair? and what do you think I should offer?
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I have no experience with power amps.
I took a look at this. If you haven’t already, please visit
https://www.gallien-krueger.com/mb-110-specs
Norm Stockwell demonstrates the basic features. You can look at the manual, too.
My thoughts:
- Does the power button settle on green and stay that way?
- Are you able to check that the amp is factory-configured for your own region?
- Can you get speaker output by feeding line level sound (from a smartphone audio jack, say) into the aux input?
- Can you get audio by connecting headphones?
- Can you get audio from the DI XLR output?
Don’t make an offer if you aren’t allowed to try these steps. Don’t make an offer unless you can afford to be stuck with a pretty doorstop. If you can’t hear it play you don’t know the state of the driver.
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If you’ve read the manual you’ll know the colour should be blue. If there are power problems the ring around the button glows red.
Mea culpa.
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My bass needs a name. Anjo azul. There, done.
It’s Portuguese for blue angel because I kinda like Brazilian jazz, bossa nova and whatnot, and this is about the bluest object I’ve ever owned.
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Thank you for the list! I asked some things but then I also checked that the board has a lot of smd parts, so I decided not to go for it. 
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I’ve reached the point in my career as a bass player where guitarists (well actually my son who plays electric guitar) start saying silly things about bass players, to my face. I’m looking at the bass line in Starship Trooper (Yes) and just about anything in the funk or jazz genres. And I want to be in that groove.
Making the muzik!
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This is leading me to strange places. The other day I started practising with a tone row (Wikipedia ) called “Hippo Mayonnaise” (internal link) that @Caustic posted in the early days. It’s quite challenging to play well at my skill level, but I already have some ideas about rhythmic variations. Steve Reich watch out!
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Oh wow yeah I forgot about that lol
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Well it fills my immediate need for learning how to play every chromatic note on my bass. And playing rhythmic variations will help me to get my groove together.
(Definitely need to optimize that!)
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I’m learning about slap bass.
I honestly didn’t know what that term meant a few days ago. I did some adjustment to my bass’s action to make the slap thing work. I think I need a tad more neck relief because some of the frets near the middle are rattling when I use them since I adjusted the saddles to slapping height. My bass was knocked around a lot and had its strings cut, shortly after I acquired it, so I’m still adjusting it. I’m using this as an opportunity to learn basic setup skills. I really like this part of learning and I love how it affects my playing experience.
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Soon, you’ll learn that bass > everything else
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I’m curious about fretless bass, so the other day on eBay I let my finger descend on the ‘Buy it now’ button for a defretted Cort Curbow that seemed to be calling to me.
I have some misgivings, which are best kept private. Over the last decade, Ebay has been a good environment for buyers in my experience, and the seller only sells basses and has a 100% reputation.
It’s due late this week so I’ll find out soon. The body of the Curbow design is bizarrely small (it’s luthite (Wikipedia link), not wood) and the fingerboard goes up to 27th fret on the E string. Somehow even with a maple neck it’s said to be well balanced.
No sign of the Curbow’s original Ebonol (Wikipedia link) fingerboard in the photographs. It’s supposed to be tough, dense material and typically takes a highly reflective sheen.
And despite diligently searching on the Internet Archive and elsewhere I can’t find what the notation ‘Curbow 4 AL’ signifies. According to one source, the first four digits of the serial number are YYMM, which would date it to June, 2004.
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Well it finally arrived (Mail Day Thread link) and it turns out to be a real beauty.
So obviously after playing around with it for a bit I took it apart.
The action needed lowering especially since it’s a fretted bass that’s been defretted. The previous owner had simply lowered the bridge harnesses as far as they’d go, but this still gave an action that varied from reasonable at frets 1 to 5 to utterly ridiculous at fret 12 and suborbital by fret 24.
I removed the strings and examined the bridge. It really was as low as it would go. I reassembled the bridge and moved on to the neck. A thin cardboard shim I tried was too drastic, making the E string buzz on the fingerboard even at maximum saddle height. Some sources suggest sandpaper shims (a good choice because they stay put and the sand is incompressible.) I took Neve for a walk and now I’m plotting my next step.
The person who filled the fret slots clearly didn’t want fret lines. Not even on the top edge of the fingerboard. For now I’ll be going with stick-on edge dots, but placed at the correct fret distances instead of behind the fret as is customary with fretted bass. Once I’m happy with the intonation I intend to mark fret lines, probably using a white acrylic marker pen and a straight edge.
O anjo azul, my gorgeous blue Ibanez, is hanging in my wardrobe. Why do I feel guilty about this?
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Nice bass!
Give your fretted one some love too, it’s good ear training for playing fretless
(as long as your basses are in tune )
About the buzzing e sting: did you check the neck relief? Maybe the neck is just little bit too straight.
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Not yet. I did look at the truss rod. That’s a task for tomorrow.
To be absolutely clear: without the shim (a card placed towards the bridge end of the neck pocket) I had very high action. With the shim, the strings are too close. I will operate on the assumption that the shim is too large until this is proven to be false.
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Yes i understand that, i also advise not to change the relief just yet unless you’re positive that that is the issue 
Also about the shim:
If you put it just at the bridge end of the neck pocket you are changing the angle of the neck in relation to the body and this will rise the high register and the edge of the fingerboard a little bit higher than it normally would be.
If your e string buzzes against the part of the fingerboard that is over the neck pocket, it can be because of the angle.
I had a bass with this problem and i had to make a shim that covered the entire neck pocket. It solved all setup problems for that bass.
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I replaced the card shim with thin sandpaper and got a pretty good saddle range from that. Testing at fret 12, I was very pleased to see that the intonation was already perfect. While I was doing this the white acrylic fine marker pen arrived, so I marked the positions of all 27 filled fret slots at the top edge of the fingerboard. I probably won’t need to adjust the truss rod. My current impression is that this is a very playable instrument. I liked the feel of the fingerboard as soon as I first touched it, and I like it even more now that I can play it in tune without playing blind man’s bluff.
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Glad to hear it all worked out
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It’s called Kimberly after the Patti Smith song about the birth of her little sister, which I’ve long admired.
Here somebody produced a bass cover of the song in the form of a DLC mod for an X-Box/PS3 game called Rocksmith.
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