chrisdesign's Live Rig

This bass is giant! It looks stunning, is solid as a rock, and can sound very good. However, mine can with too many issues.

The neck is 2” wide! The pickups are too narrow to capture the B and G properly. The preamp is forgettable and, according to some people, boost the wrong frequencies. On my model, an idiot in the factory wired the random red leads to ground creating hum. This is easy to fix by desoldering the red wires, but now I want to know what that red wire is for! There was so much potential.

To make this bass great: - ensure the red wire is desoldered from the ground - move neck strap button to behind the neck (reduce neck dive) - replace tuners with ultra light ones (reduce neck dive) - replace the preamp with a better designed one

What killed it for me is the weight. It’s too heavy to do a three your set.

The tone capsule saved my gig! The sound engineer refused to DI my Helix and insisted I run through a keyboard amp he mic’d up already. Short story shorter, I dialed in to a great tone with my tone capsule. The two mids and a bass are perfect, targeting the exact frequencies I need to modify on the fly. Also, the Q is wonderful. Cuts and boosts just sound right. I struggle to replicate them on a parametric EQ, and am thankful I have a tone capsule in my bass.

With these tones I can sculpt my sound really well, making my Thunderbird closer to a P-bass or Stingray. It will never be THE SAME, but it will be in close enough ball park for the audience not to care.

This is everything you want in a cable at an affordable price. What more can I say‽ I will buy more in the future.

I used Schaller for years until they failed me at a gig. The cup rotated so only the pin held the bass on. A terrible design flaw. Switching to Dunlops I’ve been delighted since. Their design is just more robust and less likely to fail.