I was very impressed with this bass, but after a year or so, I began to have problems with the active circuitry. The output jack started to fail, and I began to have a lot of problems with the battery running flat. Because the battery was mounted behind a plate (held on by 7 screws), quick battery changes were impossible, and I was not happy to gig with the bass because of this.

One weekend, my Dad and I did a 'DIY' modification. We exchanged the failing jack socket for an XLR socket, and built an adaptor (that sat on the pedal board with the J-Station) that sent 9v from a transformer up one core of the XLR cable, and received the audio back down the other core. This meant that the bass was still active, but powered by a mains transformer (and so there were no batteries to go flat). This worked very well, and resolved all the problems I had with the bass.

My favourite guitars from my ‘childhood’ (well, since Secondary School anyway!) had been the Steinberger guitars and basses from the 80’s. I’d been looking for one of the Hohner copies of the Steinberger bass when I’d gone to Music Live, but they are now firmly ‘out of fashion’, and so I ended up with the Bass Collection instead.

I found an article on the internet saying that Steinberger had sold the rights to the old designs to Gibson, and that they were starting to remake Steinberger guitars from the Gibson factory. The Steinberger Spirit range were the cheapest – but apart from being wood (as opposed to Graphite as the original Steinberger’s were), were very similar to the ‘real thing’. Also, the Hohner basses featured active pickups (which I was not keen on, mainly because of the problems I’d had with my Bass Collection bass), and the Steinberger Spirits had passive pickups (e.g. no battery).

There was only one UK supplier for the Steinberger Spirit guitars, and they were always out of stock. I tried ordering one from a German website, and got quite excited when they accepted the order, but then sent me an email the next day to say delivery was expected in approx 6 months!

Then, a few weeks later, I found a trader on eBay who was importing them from the US and selling them. I range him up, he confirmed he had one in stock, and so out came the credit card! Two days later, I was the (very) proud owner of a Steinberger Spirit XT25 Bass. Yes everyone looks at it very strangely, but I love it. It’s easy to play, has some great sounds in it, stays in tune relatively well, can change strings seconds, and is smaller and lighter than any other bass I’ve played. I even managed to modify my Warwick Bass Case (which is a large rectangular case that I bought for taking my Bass Collection bass) to house both basses in it together.

My Dad has always played flat wound strings on his guitar, and suggested that I try them on bass (I’m playing mainly Soul / Motown music, so the warmer sound would be more appropriate anyway).
When looking for new strings for the Steinberger (obviously I needed double ball end strings), I stumbled across Nylon Strings on the Status website. Not only were these flat wound, they were black (which look really cool) and cheaper than most ‘normal’ strings. I tried a set – loved them, and now I play these strings on both my basses (they do them in ‘normal’ as well as ‘double ball end’). If you don’t want to play any serious ‘funk’ (you can pull and slap them, but there’s not much top end in the sound so you don’t hear very much!) then I’d recommend these strings to anyone. They look great, they’re cheap and they are really kind to the fingers when playing.

The more I played the Steinberger, the more I loved it, and I never really played the Bass Collection bass at all. I still took it with me as a ‘backup bass’ in case of problems / string breaks (although the string changes are so quick on the Steinberger, I could probably change a broken string between songs if necessary anyway!).
I read a number of articles on the internet about people that had ‘de-fretted’ bass guitars, and I thought this might be a good way to get more use out of my ‘spare’ bass.
After much reading of websites such as www.talkbass.com I decided to take the plunge, and convinced my Dad to help me:

 

I've been seriously considering defretting my Bass Collection 5 string (it's become my 'backup' bass since buyng a Steinberger, and so never actually gets played).

I tried (half-heartedly) to remove a fret a few months back, and there was no sign of movement, so I put this project aside for a while.

I recently found out my Dad had a new collection of soldering irons (he does a lot of modelling), inclding a very large one (that is hot enough for small welding jobs!), so I thought this may be the answer.

Using this iron, we heated each fret, and carefully pulled it out using 'end wire cutters' (the type that look like small pincers), and they came out very easily and surprisingly cleanly - the only marking to the fretboard was from the actual 'teeth' on the frets, and these did not extend past the width of the orignal frets.

We looked at the options to fill the slots, and by some extreme good fortune, my Dad also had some 1mm square hardwood strips (again used for modelling), and with a little shaving on the bottom edges (to make it more triangular shaped), these were fitted into the slots.

At this point, subtlety left us, and these strips were fitted with a rubber hammer and a reasonably large amount of brute force.

NOTE: I do not recommend anyone takes a hammer to their own neck - we did it, and it worked very well for us, but if you do decied to try this, do it at your own risk (and don't blame me if something terminal happens!)

However, this 'lack of subtlety' worked very well, the wooden strips bedded securely into the slots, and even swelled slghtly to fill the teeth marks.

I spent about 2-3 hours sanding down the neck and was very happy with the feel of it. I added a coat of teak oil over it (which restored the colour nicely, and sealed the wood a little), and I then I re-stringed it with Nylon Flat Wound strings (to protect the neck).

I also took the opportunity to remove all the active circuitry from the bass, and convert it back to a ‘normal’ jack socket (to enable a simpler connection, and remove the need for the custom power supply I built). I’ve lost the tonal flexibility of the active circuitry, but for a backup / ‘special effect’ bass, I didn’t consider this much of a loss.

The end result is a very playable fretless bass. I still don’t play it often, but I can play it well enough that I could play it instead of the Steinberger if I had to. It feels different to play from my Steinberger, and takes a little adjustment to swap between them, but that’s more to do with the different scale length and the relative neck position (the Steinberger hangs very differently to a ‘normal’ bass guitar, and so your left hand has to adjust it’s position accordingly) rather than the difference between fretted and fretless.

Played with the Chorus pedal, and the Sub Octave built into the Ashdown amp, the sound is superb.

I had already been given an old bass amp that allegedly didn’t work – but with a little investigation I found the ‘pre-amp’ was faulty, but the power amp worked OK (and there was a line in socket on the back that I could connect to). Using the J-Station as a ‘pre-amp’ this became my bass amp for the first year.

 

Unfortunately, the J-Station wasn’t designed quite as well as it could have been.

Firstly, it was relatively noisy, with a lot of background hiss – especially when the amp was turned up at high levels.

Secondly, although it was a digital device, and designed to be used with both bass and normal guitar, the tone controls were fixed on normal guitar frequencies (even when using the bass amp modes) – this seemed to me to be a great waste of technology, as it should have been relatively easy for these controls to be adjusted to more ‘bass-friendly’ frequencies on the bass programs.

My next variation was to swap the J-Station for a Korg Ampworks for bass. This had much better tone controls, but still turned out to be quite noisy. The output from this was also very low, so I ended up pairing it with a Behringer MIC100 Tube Ultragain which gave me plenty of gain to drive the amplifier (and also the added bonus of a Balanced DI out for sending to the PA at larger gigs.

The background noise still annoyed me, and when the amplifier I was using started to give me some problems, I decided it was time for a ‘proper’ amplifier.

 

My Dad had just bought a Behringer Vamp rack mount pre amp for his guitar, and we were both very impressed by it. I already had a decent power amp, so I was considering buying a Bass Vamp to go with it for my new bass rig. The other option was to get a ‘proper’ bass amp, but as funds were limited, I could only consider the cheaper options.

 

While I was looking for somewhere that had a bass Vamp on demo that I could hear, I stumbled across an Ashdown MAG300 amp and 15” Speaker cabinet in a local shop. I’d read a little about the Ashdown amps, and heard they were the best of the ‘cheap’ bass amp options. I went in to demo this, with the intention of convincing myself that after 18 months of using various amp modelling processors, I would find one ‘traditional’ amp too limiting. However, within 5 minutes of playing it I’d decided that I loved the sound, and wanted one.

2 weeks later (after putting a load of ‘surplus’ gear from my studio on eBay) I raised enough cash for the MAG300 amp and 1x15 Deep Cabinet, and that’s what I’ve stuck with ever since.

Over approximately 6 months I experimented with various bass effects pedals, and settled on the following setup which I used for over a year:
Aphex Punch Factory Compressor – bought partly to smooth out my poor playing technique, and partly to help ‘tame’ the relatively loud B string (especially when played above 12th Fret) on my Steinberger. I chose this compressor because I like to have the LED display which shows me how much compression is taking place.
Korg DT-10 Tuner – I tried a few cheaper tuners, but this one is very good (even on the open B string), and easy to see / use on stage
Behringer BCH100 Bass Chorus Pedal – I don’t use it very often, but it’s a nice sounding Chorus effect, and it only costs £15
Behringer BEQ100 EQ Pedal – I bought this to give me an EQ ‘fix’ when I switch from playing with fingers to a pick – I found that playing with a pick meant all the ‘bottom end’ dropped out of my sound, so I used this pedal to tame the top end and add a bit of bass boost for those songs.
Behringer EQ100 EQ Pedal – When I converted my Bass Collection bass to fretless and started using both basses on stage together, I decided to get another EQ pedal to enable me to match the sounds / volumes of the guitars. This is actually a Guitar pedal (not bass) – but I got this on purpose as it has a different set of EQ bands (I thought it would offer more flexibility to have to EQ pedals with different EQ bands). Both work very well – can be a little noisy if used to ‘boost’ too much, but are almost silent if used as frequency ‘cut’ pedals. When I’m not using the Fretless, I use this pedal as a ‘boost’ pedal – it’s in line before the pre-amp so I can use it to send the Ashdown into ‘overdrive’ for those particularly ‘raucous’ bass licks !!

 

After I stopped playing bass regularly, the pedalboard didn't get to see the light of day very often. I needed a preamp for my keyboard to drive the powered speakers at the correct level, and although the Aphex Compressor could do the job, it wasn't ideal. As I now already owned the Behringer FCB1010 pedalboard (which I was using for my keyboard rig), my thoughts turned back to the Behringer Bass V-Amp effects units. The main reason I didn't buy one of these previously was that the combined cost of the V-Amp and the FCB pedalboard was more than I could afford / justify. Now I'd already got the pedalboard, I looked again at the Bass V-Amp, and managed to pick one up for a bargain on eBay.

 

This unit has the additional bonus of having guitar and keyboard effects as well as bass guitar effects. Although I'm not yet using it with my keyboad rig, the option is there for the future (and it is a useful backup preamp in case it's ever needed in an emergency). I've also sold my Zoom 505MkII guitar effects pedal (which was only ever used at home for jamming), as the V-Amp is more than capable of providing any guitar effects I may need.

 

I considered using the Bass V-Amp with my main PA Powered Speakers (and selling the Ashdown rig), but good as the V-Amp is, it can't beat the sound of my Ashdown! So for now, my bass rig consists of the V-Amp, the FCB1010, and the Ashdown head and speaker.

 

Unfortunately, after years of faithful service, my Ashdown Amp let me down at a gig. It blew a fuse (for no apparent reason, I wasn't even playing at the time), and then continued to keep blowing fuses when they were replaced. I had a brief look inside the amp, but as I'm not electroincs expert, I couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it. As I was no longer playing bass on a regular basis (and when I am, it's in a fairly quiet setting), I decided it was time to 'downsize' my bass rig (as space was a getting to be a problem in my studio again!). It seems the Ashdown amps are still in demand, and I sold the amp to someone who understood electronics far better than me (and I hope managed to get it working again), and sold the cabinet to another Ashdown player (who had the 2x10, and wanted the 1x15 to complete his rig). After a few weeks checking out eBay for bargains, I managed to find a 50w Laney bass amp (which is more than loud enough for my occasional 'Pass The Buck' gigs), and managed to win this auction for the bargain price of £8:50 !!!