slinkp blog

Gear

Basses and Guitars

L to R below:

• 1992 Gibson LPB1 bass, sounds fantastic, it's a bit heavy and tiring to play live, but it's by far my favorite recording bass for the past 10 years or so. Got this for about $550 on ebay in the early 2000s; I bought it on a whim unplayed, a lucky find.

• Gibson USA LP DC Junior Tribute bass, blue. Great short scale bass with great feel and tone. Now my favorite, and my daughter has swiped it from me to learn on! Got it for $650 shipped brand new on sale, they were originally $999.

L to R below:

• Gibson LPB1 again.

• 1990 Greco thunderbird clone, this was my favorite for recording for a couple years before the LPB1 took over. I like the neck a lot. Bought used online I think about $500 in the early 2000s. The balance on a strap was terrible - Thunderbirds are notorious for neck-dive - so I replaced the tuners with Hipshot ultralights and put a straplock (Dunlop dual-design) at the back of the neck, and now it balances very well.

• 1999ish Danelectro DC bass, weighs nothing, really fun to play and sounds cool too. Minor modifications: I replaced the terrible plastic strap pins, which kept falling out, by gluing in a piece of hardwood dowel so I could screw in something decent (Dunlop Dual-design again). Also, the pickups were very low output and the way they're mounted thy couldn't be raised very high or they'd become loose and just flop around; by stuffing some foam under them I was able to get them much closer to the strings. I don't remember where I bought this, probably online somewhere used, mid 2000s. It replaced a black one of the same model that I got locally on Craigslist. I used to play this live with Giggle the Ozone during my brief 2008-2009 tenure.

Below: 1982 Ibanez Blazer BL800

And my old faithful Blazer. I've had this since I was 12. Bought new at Sam Ash in Huntington, NY for about $200, I think they were on closeout because the Roadstar II was coming out. I've really put this one through the wringer as you can see. I'm getting a little tired of the puke paint job I did around '96. Originally it had only a passive P-bass pickup. I did the route for the bridge pickup myself, as well as the very poorly routed cavity for the added balance knob. It has Alembic Activator pickups and preamp, which is very flexible, apparently these are rare and crazy overpriced now. Currently my only active bass. I did nearly every Arms show and recording on this bass, plus all my old college bands including Snack Chunk.

Guitars

• Danelectro 59XT below - great player, nice sounds, the Wilkinson tremolo is a lot of fun and pretty stable for a non-locking trem. One of the few I've bought new.

• Seville mystery guitar below - I bought this from my uncle Jerry for $65 around 1990. My first electric non-bass guitar. I learned on this and wrote my earliest songs on it. It is literally made of plywood. I know nothing about the company or the model, except it's a cheap bolt-on Les Paul copy made in Korea at a time when inexpensive guitars were a lot worse than they are now. I believe my uncle got it in a pawn shop for probably about that price, and he put Dimarzio pickups in it to experiment with wiring, so it sounded pretty good. It spent almost two decades in storage in unplayable disrepair; I spent some time restoring and upgrading it, may put up a blog post about that. Now has Duncan P-rails pickups.

Also shown - small house cat, unknown make and model, vintage circa 2023, a real bargain at $100 adoption fee.

• Not shown - late 90s Danelectro U2 - not getting played much anymore.

Amps

This is the bass rig I've been really happy with for a couple years now. From top to bottom:

Salad: Greek.

Head: Genz-Benz Shuttle 6.0 is incredibly loud and portable, I love the preamp so much - it sounds great with everything flat but the EQ is also easy to adjust, there's hardly a bad sound in it. Nice overdrive which I use to get a little more "growl" and tame the dynamics a bit. I find that I don't need a compressor and it sits really well with loud guitars. I can finally get a DI sound I really like by running the LPB1 through this preamp.

Cabs: Euphonic Audio CXL110, sounds incredible but not really loud enough by itself. You could run anything through this speaker - vocals, keyboards, etc.

Under that is an EA CXL112, more bark and a lot louder than the 110. The pair of them together is great.

The thing about the low end on the EA cabs is that it is totally smooth down to low E and beyond. No booming resonant frequencies at all. Just tight and clear all the way from top to bottom. I've played this rig outdoors with no PA help and was amazed how much low end I was able to project to the audience.

Effects

I currently have:

• Some homemade pedals
• Keeley-modified Boss BD-2 overdrive, quite decent as a bass overdrive.
• Wampler Triumph overdrive - just got this, so far very good impressions.
• Digitech Bass Whammy
• EBS Multicomp bass compressor
• Danelectro Daddy-O overdrive, not used much anymore - nice on guitar, bleh on bass.

Photos to add!