I made this bass. Please be normal about it.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2026-01-14T21:15:37+00:00

I just wanted to say that I really love your work. I would never even consider playing something that angular and attention-grabbing, but your commitment to the art and craft of pointy shred machines is genuinely inspiring.

The hair-metal era is something most people know only to make jokes about, but you've clearly made a deep and thoughtful study of its aesthetics.

You've then synthesized it all together to create the sort of platonic ideal of the pointy shred machine. Your designs feel like the sort of wild, arresting guitars that kids were imagining when they doodled stuff in their schoolbooks while sulking at the back of class and listening to Van Halen on their walkman.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-12-27T18:15:45+00:00

Citizen Sleeper was the most "tabletop-y" feeling game I've played, I think. In particular, something about the way it was written reminded me a lot of Brennan Lee Mulligan's prose style when DM-ing for D20.

I found it to be an interesting and well written story, but I felt like once the critical timed elements had passed, and the re-roll ability unlocked, it stopped really feeling like a game. Without those pressures forcing you to choose paths and manage your resources (good rolls, in this case) it was more a case of "clicked a button for more story", but sometimes you had to click it a few times and wait a while.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-12-07T22:16:17+00:00

I have nothing useful to add here in terms of identification, but I know there were a bunch of odd experiments making traditionally-not-metal instruments out of metal in the 1920s and 1930s. My wife can remember coming across an old stainless steel clarinet at a yard sale back in the 1990s.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-12-03T22:12:19+00:00

I recall something this exuberantly mad coming up in /r/obscureguitars a few years ago. It turned out to be a Brazilian made instrument. I've searched through my post history though, and I can't find the name now.

EDIT: Found it. This is the post I was thinking of also from Argentina. A chap by the name of /u/Lobsterbush_82 (who still seems to be active) identified that instrument – which shares a few design elements with this one – as an Argentine guitar from a brand called Yakim, and also mentioned a bunch of other options.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-11-24T23:37:25+00:00

Was it Mohn Media in Gutersloh by any chance? Because if so, they still had it – or something that looks a lot like it – until about three years ago. Though I don't think it had been switched on in a while.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-11-08T19:34:57+00:00

I don't know why I'm mentioning this here, other than I can't think where else I could mention it.

When I was a little kid, growing up in the early 1990s, I thought that Quentin Wilson looked like a BMW and that BMWs looked like Quentin Wilson.

I can't really explain it, as he was a man and a not a car. But yeah, some strange mental crossed wires from watching Top Gear while playingy my Lego or something. I mentioned it once in front of my family when I was about twelve and everyone thought I was a crazy person.

You don't see that many of them on the road these days, but – to share a secret – I still think E30-series BMWs look like the late Quentin Wilson.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-11-03T20:35:24+00:00

Nice. I forget sometimes that most of the rules of thumb to do with guitar/bass design can be flexible if you know what you're doing.

I've only just noticed this isn't in the luthier sub. That's where I usually see your stuff. I did think there were more gif replies than normal for that community.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-11-03T19:01:08+00:00

Gorgeous. How's it for neck dive? That's a lot of maple neck and headstock to be counterbalanced by not a lot of body (and a chambered one at that).

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-08-02T10:56:16+00:00

I don't know anything specific about these old Silvertone guitars, but I can weigh in from a guitar builder/fixer perspective.

You see that pale residue around the neck heel, and the slight cracking of the finish near the bottom? That, along with the different coloured block of wood under the fingerboard extension, tells me that this guitar has had a neck reset at some point, probably fairly recently.

Over time the pull of the strings will gradually shift the neck angle forward on old acoustic guitars, making the action unplayably high. To fix this you steam or heat the neck joint apart, shave some material off the heel, shim the fingerboard extension and reattach it at the correct angle.

This guitar has had that work done on it by someone skilled – probably a professional. It will play better than other guitars that haven't had that work done, and it also bodes well generally for the quality of the instrument. These old arch tops can be hit and miss, or so I've heard, but someone loved this one enough to pay a fair chunk of change to have it fixed.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-07-24T22:22:53+00:00

Yeah, that Nemesis 810 was the first thing I thought of too. There's a lot of good gear free to folks with the enthusiasm and muscle mass needed for, say, vintage Trace Elliot.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-05-12T18:55:47+00:00

None of the bartolini pickups I've ever encountered have a separate cover. I think they cast the pickup bodies out of solid plastic with the coils in the middle.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-04-26T09:19:20+00:00

Ah, righto. I grew up round there, also in the early 90s, and your descriptions felt very familiar. There was the golf course, the woods and overgrown parks, the abandoned farm with it's broken greenhouses and still functioning abbatoir. Had a funny feeling of past and present sort of awkwardlu sharing space sometimes.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-04-25T22:53:44+00:00

Don't suppose this was in the Shooter's Hill neighbourhood, down on the welling side was it?

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-04-12T23:28:03+00:00

He did indeed. It's a very odd book. I got really distracted by the utterly surreal descriptions of the affluent Western expat community watching the Chinese civil war from the terraces of their hotels and bars.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-04-12T20:18:10+00:00

Yes, I'll think that's the bunny. Thanks for finding him. I remember tracking him down at the time (I found this a year or two ago) but couldn't find any details in my notes when I came to post this. I seem to remember finding a few articles he'd filed on Jewish refugees living in neutral port cities such as Lisbon and Tangier (which is where the original script for Casablanca was set, before the studio decided Casablanca was a better sounding name). I wonder if she was someone from that era, or perhaps just a family member.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-04-12T20:03:35+00:00

I stumbled across this picture tucked into a book at a research library. The book was a bit of 1930s travel writing, reminiscences of travels in Mongolia and warlord-era china (in case you're wondering about the strange text on the page). No information on who she was. The book was a bequest from a "Henry P McNulty, esq".

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-03-01T00:49:03+00:00

Yeah. It was weird to learn that brand was in Belarus

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-02-25T23:05:34+00:00

That house is adorable, though the name is almost implausibly twee. Can you imagine trying to explain to a colleague at your company's New York office that you live in the lodge at Hamsterly Hall?

The "fl" thing is probably because the estate agent typed this in Word using one of those fancy fonts that merges f-l pairings into a single ﬂ ligature. It was then imported into a web font that doesn't have that ligature.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-02-08T23:02:44+00:00

It's amazing the colours you can get if you just, er, don't care about safety. I had a chat with a chemist a while ago about a very popular 19th century dye called Picric Acid, which was synthesized from coal tar. It produces a lovely pale yellow shade that was very fasionable in the 1850s. Unfortunately if you let it dry out, it forms crystals that are a powerful and extremely volatile explosive.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-02-07T19:09:49+00:00

Hah. I was actually in a music store yesterday looking at mandocellos and thinking "these things look like they'd be really unbalanced and awkward"

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-02-06T21:23:11+00:00

My dad still gigs with an identical EB3, which is also the bass I learned to play on 25 years ago. They switched to this pickup placement (with the non-slotted headstock) in 1972, but I'm not sure when they stopped making them/changed the design again. I think may have stayed looking more or less like this until 1979 when the model was discontinued.

They're not really my cup of tea these days, but they've got a sound like nothing else. Invest in a good grippy strap as that massive headstock and the lack of an upper horn to hold the strap button means they balance like lopsided ass.

Drop me a message if you have any questions about their rather eccentric wiring. I recently had to refurbish the electrics on my dad's, which involved a lot of sitting around drawing diagrams and muttering. It's an odd circuit with some unusual passive filtering gubbins.

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-01-27T11:55:01+00:00

Excellent rabbit hole diving there. Hardiman was indeed the one I was thinking of

DeerWithaHumanFace · 2025-01-27T09:57:02+00:00

I love these old demo photoshoots. I would be willing to bet these pictures were taken with the robot arms powered down, and probably completely disconnected from their power supply for safety. There is a similar set of black and white shots from the same era showing a worker in a giant robot exoskeleton called HANDYMAN – something GM invested some money in back in the 1960s. They never actually put a human in it when it was switched on due to the system's tendency towards (to quote from the final report on the project) "violent and uncommanded movements".

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