Let me start by acknowledging that you've all been remarkably patient, in waiting for me to post pictures as well as explain my electronics. Given that I've had the bass for just over a year (few days before Xmas), I figure it's about time... I'm sure you'll recognize the carpet, and I'd like to thank Mica for the photos. We should also cut her some slack, because on both occasions the lighting was really poor, and these are the originals with no attempt to cleanup in PhotoShop. But they're not bad, and I think you'll get the idea. Without further ado, allow me to introduce "my bass".
(sorry, it's a little wide) For those of you who might be browsing here because you're considering a Rogue, here are the main differences from the standard model, aside from the obvious things like ebony neck laminates, continuous plates, and the electronics. - The upper horn is about 2 inches shorter, and lower horn an inch longer, than standard. Otherwise, the outline of the body is exactly the same. You'll notice the lower strap attachment is positioned well up the side of the body, to compensate for the shorter horn. It hangs right at 1:30. - It has narrow ("classic") string spacing instead of the usual wide/comfort. This photo has the usual perspective problem - it really looks like a smaller body on a much longer neck. Also, the cone peghead was reduced in width, so that the strings run straight rather than fanning out as usual. Not that you'd be able to tell from a photo, but the neck is about an 1/8 inch thicker (the "Sterling" shape) than standard, because I wanted a little extra mass and stiffness. - As you'll see in other photos below, there is no "tummy contour" on the back, and the so-called "elbow contour" on the upper wing is much less pronounced than usual. The accent effect from exposing more of the core here just wasn't appealing to me, so we scaled it back (and the way I happen to play, it's my wrist that rides on this area - my elbow isn't anywhere close, but I guess I'm just weird). - Instead of the standard MXYs, I started with two FatBoys. Since then, I've replaced the neck pickup with an AXY, in which the coil is positioned off-center, as close to the bridge side as possible. And then of course there are all those extra knobs, but we'll get to that in a bit. Those are the most obvious differences in appearance; we're getting into the smaller details in the next bunch. - It's an oil finish. - The bridge is the "curved rail/concealed hardware" style, plain raw brass (no lacquer). - The accents are minimalist, just a single ebony pinstripe front and back (between coco bolo top/back and mahogany core). We also added the ebony stripe between the neck and body wings (known as "framing"), though it's almost impossible to see in these shots. - The front and back laminates were done with an "offset bookmatch". Take a look at the back, and you'll notice a small dark knot in the lower horn. Find the other half in the upper horn (almost lost at the edge of the glare), and also note how the grain bulges out where the body squeezes in. Apparently no one had done this before, but it seemed obvious that's what the wood wanted to do, with this body shape... The front pieces were also offset, as you can see in the photo below prior to cutting. They sort of evened-out a little in the sanding process, but you can still see it.
- Officially it's a 35" scale, but it came out a bit more than that to the center of the bridge, and with the saddles as far aft as possible while still setting proper intonation, I've now got an average scale length of 35 1/2. Mike suggested some bridge mods that would get it closer to 36, but I think it's long enough now. Nice thing about a fretless is you have some flexibility here :-) - Oh, and then there's the ebony nut (many of you have already seen the one on Valentino's masterpiece).
This is a good story. We were a few months into the "taking longer than expected" phase of construction (most recently due to The Flu That Shut Down Alembic, as I recall), when someone on the club started a brief thread asking about using bone as a nut material. I called Mica a day or two later and said, since it's a fretless, could we make an ebony nut? so I decided to push my luck, adding "Of course, I'd still want it to be adjustable..." . Thankfully, Mica's response was something like, "Why didn't I think of that?!". I left it to Mike to figure out what it should look like, and he did a really tasteful job. There's even a thin brass plate inlaid on the underside, to give it a little extra strength and bite for the adjusting screws. And check out the grain patterns on the peghead. We couldn't find any interesting leftovers from the body laminates, but they sometimes shave off veneers if there's extra thickness to start with. So Mica suggested that Kris dig into his private stash, and sure enough, we found several pieces that were clearly from the same board. Kris did a beautiful job of placing these, I think. I made one other change last summer, which was to replace the brass bridge block with something heavier. The original order called for 2 or 3 alternate blocks, they ended up supplying me with 5, and after that it just sort of got out of control... I'll start a separate thread one of these days to describe those experiments. ------------ Okay, now for the electronics:
Hmm, maybe that's not too helpful... but as you can see, with a few notches and some undercutting, they managed to squeeze everything into the standard body cavity. Those circuit boards are custom, of course, which is another long story. Okay, it's pretty simple , just a basic master vol/pan/bass/treble section, plus half of a SuperFilter that may be assigned to either or both pickups. It took many discussions and lots of thinking time to get there - we started with more modest concepts, like having a single low pass filter that could be assigned to one or both pickups; shifting the filter frequency range down by an octave or two; and so forth. In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious this was the only way to get the flexibility I was looking for, but the design and construction was a huge undertaking for Ron. The filter section is identical to a single SF-2 channel: frequency down to 45 Hz, low/band/high pass toggle, direct and filter gains, and of course CVQ. The filter is always in-circuit, but can be defeated simply by turning filter gain off and direct gain to max.
(By the way, in terms of color accuracy, if you kind of look through the glare, the top half of the body in this photo is pretty close to what it really looks like - fairly dark, but very warm looking. Of course, the brass is way too bright here.) To appreciate how flexible this is, it helps to follow the signal path. Start at the pickups, each with internal gain trimpot, and then go through balance (pan) - keeping the signals separate - and on to the filter assignment toggle. Let's say the filter is assigned to the bridge pickup. The bridge signal is split, with one path to the direct gain control, and the other through the filter (freq and Q) to the filter gain control. The direct and filtered bridge signals are summed, and then in turn summed with the straight signal from the (unassigned) neck pickup. Note that in this example, the neck signal completely bypasses the filter section, and does not go through the direct gain control. The beauty of this is that you have a 3-way mix capability as long as the filter is assigned to one pickup rather than both. Ron surprised me here - I was thinking there would only be a 2-way mix, filtered and everything else. Finally, bass/treble and master volume are applied to the combined signal, and we exit through the 1/4" mono jack (side mounted, you can see the edge of it left of the filter gain). Somewhere during the design, Ron decided he needed a bit more power, and since the battery compartment had already been routed, he just threw in a little power amplifier to get 18 volts (+/- 9) out of a single battery. Any questions? Fortunately, I bought myself an SF-2 and had about six months to experiment with it before getting the bass. It still took some time to understand - and there are huge ranges of tone I haven't even begun to explore - but for my purposes, I haven't yet been able to imagine anything I would prefer. It was well worth the wait, and I still can't believe what an incredible job Ron did on this. There are no surprises, like unexpected changes in volume, and of course it's dead quiet. Most of the time, I'm interested in sounding closer to an upright than electric, but that's not one tone - there are a lot of subtle and interesting variations. The thing I appreciate most about this setup is that it's easy to make (and reproduce) fairly sensitive adjustments. With the usual low pass filters, you are mostly limited to subtracting, as you roll off the filter frequency, though of course you can add a narrow boost with some Q. But with this setup, I find it easier to think about adding something: using a band pass to pull out some mids or highs from the neck pickup, for instance, or (my favorite) pulling in more lows from the bridge, and dialing in only as much as I want to add (or perhaps backing off a little on the direct gain, depending). I could go on, but that's probably enough for now. I'll just wrap up by saying that I'm keeping the SF-2 (don't have a preamp), but for several months now I've only been using one channel of it, and that's mostly to adjust the ELF output. With a little extra gain, I could plug straight into a power amp and have all the flexibility I need. Quite remarkable. Thanks again for your patience. -Bob (Message edited by bob on January 29, 2005)
