It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
The guitar in my avatar is a fretless bass with a PJ pickup combination. My opinion based on my experience of the fretless and my Squier Affinity Jazz bass mentioned earlier is that their sounds are not as far apart as maybe you are imagining.
You mentioned you will be plugging your bass into your audio interface. There will be a wealth of plugins and more you can use to tweak the sound, so I suggest you choose the bass that feels right in your hands and sounds pleasant enough to you on the day. It will be better to have a bass you love picking up and playing over one that has a great sound but you just don't enjoy playing.
The Talman is eccentric but no less interesting for that. One variant has a triple coil pickup with clever switching for tonal variety.
I have mentioned Sire and the Anderton's deal but in the thread about the Sadowsky MetroExpress PJ Hybrid.
1) Humbucking "modern".
2) Single coil "traditional".
3) Single coil + low boost.
(Not necessarily in that order.)
Both single coil modes will be prone to RF interference and hum except when the balance control is around the centre position. If anything, the preset boost will increase the noise.
If the Ibanez bass at PMT was pre-owned, you have nothing to lose by modifying the switch wiring.
Last week, I bought a secondhand Squire Affinity P-Bass off eBay for £102 which included a Fender padded gig bag, leather strap and various picks.
Things I’ve learned this week.
Bass needs more physical stamina than I imagined, it’s tough.
I need to improve the strength in my pinky.
I need to play more lightly rather than plucking the string hard.
Consistent tone across all notes is harder to achieve than I thought it was, so I’m working on my right hand technique to make each note count properly.
Overall, I’m starting to get to grips with it, and enjoying it, but I have a greatly increased admiration of good bass players.
Rob
Chapman Stick technique is pretty much all hammering on and pulling off. I found it transferrable back to bass guitar.
@Whistler yes, completely agree. It’s much more about the pads of my fingers than my fingertips. My fingers are straighter and much more perpendicular to the board. It’s going to feel odd in a few months time as I can already feel the pads hardening rather than my fingertips.
Rob
My brother's next fad was Superwound strings with their exposed cores where the strings sit in the bridge saddles. Same thing. Broke one. Couldn't find replacements.
Fret not, the more the merrier.
Interesting to know that bass strings can be an ephemeral thing...
I'd go further and say that I don't understand the point of single coils on a bass at all - even though my favourite model of bass has single coils normally, my one doesn't! I replaced them with humbuckers and it sounds just as good, but now doesn't hum even with fuzz and distortion.
The Jazz Bass was actually a slightly odd backwards step for Fender - the P-Bass had a humbucker from 1957 onwards, and even though the two J pickups are RWRP, that means they only cancel hum when both are set to the same volume.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Another excellent point, I suppose it is the old adage that "we've always done it this way"...
Am I along the right line in thinking that humbuckers on a bass guitar are not as standardised as the single-coils in the main P and J basses? Or is the P bass pickup a humbucker typically?
Also, what is the reasoning behind having a blend pot in a bass with two pickups, as opposed to a switch and independent controls that you find in a guitar?
Full-width humbuckers are considerably less standardised though - many to the point of often being a problem if you want to replace them, as Funkfingers mentioned.
Because bass players more often want to dial in a particular sound and then leave it there, whereas guitar players more often want to switch between quite different sounds.
That said, I've never found blend pots that useful on a bass anyway - I find they tend to only have three really usefully different sounds, which correspond to the three positions of a switch! My favourite bass also has independent controls and a switch...
(Have I left enough clues yet? )
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein