I've recently experienced severe volume drop out with my Distillate. I'll be playing a normal levels for a while and all of the sudden my volume is 1/4 of what is was a few minutes earlier. I'm playing through a Yamaha 5500 and FX-1 using Phil Jones speaker cabs. The Yamaha is brand new so I'm thinking the difficulties are elsewhere but I don't currently have another bass at home to try to determine if its the bass itself or the difficulties lie somewhere else in the system. After unplugging from my guitar and plugging in again the volume will, at times, return to normal for a while. Other times this has no impact. I'm going to install new batteries in the Distillate later today, but when the batteries have worn out in the past I've gotten distortion as opposed to a drop in volume. Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot further.