Please Finish The Shit, Already!

 ...vs. Jamerson vs. Weymouth vs. Dixon vs. Bootsy vs. Watt.

Probably Carol Kaye though.

This has been a wacky summer. Almost no fishing, and when I did go I snapped my Orvis rod. Again. Almost no mountain biking, due to the daily rains mucking up the trails. Almost no music playing or practicing, due to travel and work and general house projects. 

It would give me a great deal of pleasure to finish something other than replacing the wax ring of the basement toilet, so I'm going to at least get this fretless across the finish line, because it is going to be a little easier than the Peavey.

The bag of plastic nuts I had for my Peavey (I will be carving out a synthetic bone for that) just so happened to fit the fretless, so with just a little filing it fit right in. A quick bolting on of the neck and I took an old set of strings and strung her up. I should state that this has the absolute worst tuners I've ever seen on a $40 bass, and that's saying something. With some lube here, and some tweaking with pliers there, they managed to work.


Another bit of luck was that I had these EMG pickups around I used in another bass for awhile. You see, when you are in the middle of band volume wars and you are cranking your amp, the nice thing about active pickups is that they are dead silent when not being played, rather than having your rig hum like a beehive when you take your hands off the strings. Also, no need to worry about a groundwire to the bridge or shielding the body.



I wanted to do a quick setup, but nothing worth having comes easy, am I right?

When you do fretless (and I had the same issue with a Squire Fretless Jazz bass) you have to file the nut down, way down, even if you shim the neck (I did) to the point where you are filing into the headstock to get a good breaking angle and get the string height low-ish at the first fret. The result of the nut being too high is improper intonation. Notice how my F is not happening on the 1st fretline:



I wonder if Jaco had this problem when he ripped out his frets decades ago, but was just good enough to ignore the lines and play by ear? I'm starting to think going with no lines, or just using them as a general reference but playing by ear, is the way to go when you play far down the neck. Intonation at the 12th fret is just fine. Maybe that's why Jaco noodled around there so much!

Anyway, traditional P-bass knobs are on the way, I will keep noodling with the setup, and post some smooth "mwahh" bass noise in the near future. Otherwise, I'm calling this one done!




Next Up: My Fellow Patriots



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