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Messages - Psycho Bass Guy

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2206
Gibson Basses / Re: Nice price on Les Paul Bass at Bass NW
« on: January 30, 2010, 06:59:20 PM »
Video cameras and videotape, as late as the mid 80's, had serious problems with luminance and chrominance saturation. Any extremely bright light or reflective color would overload the optic voltage convertors in cameras and they would "hang" momentarily. Video tape would overload and 'ghost trace' hot images.

 Tube cameras can actually be burned out by sustained bright light. That happened to NASA alot in the lunar missions where they were relying on remote-irised cameras. In the time it took the radio signal to reach the moon and iris down a camera that was too hot, it was already burnt out. To see what it does to video tape, watch anything shot "live" in the 70's. The original Dark Shadows is a prime example.

As to the veracity of the story behind "TV Yellow," most things in black and white days were shot to film, which has no problem with white.

2207
Gibson Basses / Re: Nice price on Les Paul Bass at Bass NW
« on: January 29, 2010, 05:10:56 PM »
Rock music is steeped in its own lore, like the "brown note". These stories continue to live and be perpetuated, even though most of them are fallacies. When one digs to the very bowels of a story you usually come up empty handed.

The brown note exists, though it's extremely unlikely any rock concert could ever get low enough and loud enough to cause it. The episode of Mythbusters where they "debunked" it was set up to do exactly that. Their "subwoofer chamber" had two speakers facing each other, thus in the middle where they placed the test subject, the amplitude of the low frequecies was nulled. France uses servo-driven subwoofers with directional waveguides mounted in vans to disperse riots. Guess what happens to the people it's aimed at?  ;)

2208
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: oh.oh the Ohms
« on: January 29, 2010, 04:53:15 PM »
It's not that they are solid state; it's that most solid state amplifiers don't have an output transformer to feed back. There ARE solid state amps with OT's, but they are mostly very old and not common, however, there are current examples, the Warwick Jonas Hellborg being one.

2209
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: oh.oh the Ohms
« on: January 29, 2010, 08:11:29 AM »
or can i run a 4 and an 8 together?

That's 2.66 ohms and is usually OK for most tube amps that can handle 4 ohms. The fact that the speakers are hooked up in series/parallel internally in the cabinets means that the actual voltage drop will occur at differing frequencies. Going lower than rated for a tube amp is usually fine. In fact most of them short their output to ground when no speaker is connected as a safety measure because... if you present too high an output impedance to a tube amp (or output transformer coupled s/s amp) the transformer turns into a large feedback voltage generator and you get to kiss your output tubes, their sockets, and everything else in the immediate proximity goodbye.

An easy way to tell if your load is too low for a tube amp is if the amp starts distorting when you connect the lower than rated load, but sounds fine at a rated cabinet or the metal gray parts inside tubes start to change color and turn a shade of red or yellow. Going lower than rated does age the tubes much faster, but they live a hell of lot longer than most people give them credit for anyway. Usually if you're giving a tube amp too low a load and it's hurting it, the main fuse will pop before any major damage occurs.

2210
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 29, 2010, 07:58:12 AM »
You don't really need to worry too much about the speakers as long as the cab is sealed. It's still technically possible to blow them from too much bottom, but until you start throwing potentially more than twice their rated power at them, they should be alright. Back in the late 60's, ported cabs were juts getting into widespread PA and instrument use. I'd imagine the raw sound of an EB pickup could hang an Acoustic folded horn quite easily.

2211
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 28, 2010, 02:03:06 AM »
this thread is interesting reading:

http://bassoutpost.com/index.php?topic=1408.0

It seems to agree with my assessment: the choke filters out the extreme lows and upper midrange. I'll bet they were trying to appease pissed-off recording engineers and amp makers mad because the huge current of the sub lows from those big honking pickups was printing through their tape and blowing speakers, and the choke is a P-Bass "emulator." Split-coil P-basses are mostly low mids, not actual bottom, but most people can't tell low mids from true lows, so it has a reputation for having more bottom than it actually does.

2212
The Outpost Cafe / Re: Today's sheep and oatmeal news
« on: January 27, 2010, 04:37:33 PM »
My family name, Campbell, is pretty much a curse word in most of Scotland, because as I tell people, it's not the massacre of other clans; it's which massacre. Least I can say with pride that I come from a long line of SOB's, and I come by my personality honest.

2213
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 27, 2010, 04:31:25 PM »
Higher inductance should give a steeper filter corner on both the highs and lows, IOW, it will "do" more. Am I correct about the choke being the "midrange" position on the switch?

2214
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 27, 2010, 04:04:58 PM »
I looks like its being used as a big filter. If I'm reading it right, the choke setting on the switch is the "mostly mids." Is that right?

With 500K pots and a choke, those pickups have got to be insanely hot. Are there any published voltage output ratings for them or is it all just impedance?

BTW, I getting ready to do some recording, so if I disappear in the next few minutes, that's what's up.

2215
Gibson Basses / Re: You guys have probably already seen this but...
« on: January 27, 2010, 03:54:24 PM »
Don't think less of me, but I wouldn't turn her out.  ;)

2216
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 27, 2010, 03:47:54 PM »
...never fooled with a varitone in a guitar either.  If you can find a schematic, post it, and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on with the choke.

2217
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 27, 2010, 03:19:08 PM »
I've never messed enough with Gibson basses (I know that's near-heresy here) to even know that they used chokes.  I only knew that EB-0 had a bad cap because the tech at the store where it was had the plate off and showed me. He had planned on changing it, but I asked to play it first. They were selling it for $250 which was a steal even then (10-15 years ago).

I went to the ATM, but by the time I got back, it had already been sold... to George Gruhn, who had stopped by on his way back from a purchasing trip to Asheville. He knew the owners of the place, and they would always cherry-pick the best stuff for him and ocassionally give him a super deal like that EB-0 because he would come back and pay huge amounts of money for other stuff.

 At that same store, in rural East Tennessee, I have played a 50's Esquire and Nocaster, tons of 50's Tele's, and lots of weird basses and amps.  I got my first SVT there, along with my Traynor.  Us hill people horde stuff, but unfortunately, when a lot of the old players die, their families don't know what the instruments are worth and they sell them for nothing. The music store is also a pawn shop, so they get a LOT of traffic that a traditional music store, expecially one in this area,  would never see.  EBay has pretty much killed off most of that now, though.

2218
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 27, 2010, 02:14:51 PM »
...figures. That's where I ended up getting mine, too.

2219
The Outpost Cafe / Re: Micheal Manring
« on: January 27, 2010, 01:54:56 PM »
I just saw the Eddie Van Halen one for the first time yesterday. By the time he got to "Iron Man," I was cracking up. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdFJTbaFcZ0

2220
Bass Amps & Effects / Re: bought a few 16 volt caps
« on: January 27, 2010, 01:46:59 PM »
You will probably have to go lower in voltage than that, but the results of what you're trying should prove interesting.

BTW, where'd you find the 16 volt caps? I had to buy a bunch of low voltage stuff a few weeks ago, and EVERYBODY was out of nearly all of what I needed.

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