Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: SirLoin on November 17, 2007, 06:55:43 AM
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First off i'de like to thank HT & HTC for AH2..That said,any of you blokes had an invention idea and how far did you get with it?
Here's mine..The Hybrid Electric 5 string bass guitar. Bass-ically it's a 5 string(low B) bass guitar where the bottom 3 strings are fretted and the top two are fretless.
I'm looking for a dirt cheap 5 string with a good neck,and either filing down the frets on the D & G strings or ripping them all out and putting in shorter ones.
The 3 fretted strings(B,E,A) would give you a full octave of low end clang in a single position,with the ability to extend into melodic fretless Jaco-Land when the urge hits.
i drew a picture of it and it looks like a monster.
4 & 5 string fretless guitars are very hard to learn intonation on(like a viola etc),so hence you hardly ever hear a rock/blues band with the bass player pulling off slide melodies and vibrato.
Also the fretted strings give you perfect intonation to reference from for the G & D strings(much like the pickup serves as a perch for your right thumb),and the shortened fret ends could also help locate by feel the right place for correct intonation.
i'm gonna talt to a luthier first and make sure my idea ain't whack..but what u guys think?
And more impotantly,have you ever invented something?
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I invented the internet, way before Al Gore did.
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it is do-able.
but your best bet, would be get a new bass and have a Luthier make a new fret board made to your specs, to put on it. keep original fret board in case you want to switch it to sale bass at a later date.
or better yet, get a Luthier to make a new neck with your fret board design and head, etc. then when ever if you want you can easily change from one to the other yourself, just by removing strings and 3 or 4 screws (depends on it's design) then changing neck and shims (if needed), install screws, strings, tune, etc.
cheapest bass would be make your own, using a 2X4 for head, neck, fretboard, and body, all in one piece. (didn't say it would sound good). and buy the electronics, tuners, switches, frets, etc., cut out whats needed in 2x4 to install them.
hmm oh back to your main topic (I think)
I have invented lot of things, not going to mention here (for more than a few reasons). no patents on anything.
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(quote) any of you blokes had an invention idea and how far did you get with it? (unquote)
Several times. In my mind. Until Google showed I was several years or decades late. :(
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I'm not a bassist. Having little understanding about the fret/fretless pros and cons I'm working from the assumption that frets work best in a more percussive, faster playing style with the advantage of having the frets as a positional reference (G, G#, A) and a fretless allows for smoother note transitions and more refined fingering.
If that's the deal then how about just inlaying the top neck binding with fret markers to give position at a glance and doing away with the frets altogether?
Or do they already do that?
I play 6 string, the idea of eliminating frets is a bit alien to me, though I have seen fretless 6 strings, they just seem like a novelty as I don't know of anyone playing them regularly. I kinda always thought frets on a bass were kinda like "training Wheels". And the old school or purist guys would tend to a fretless instrument . Probably way too simplistic.
Anyhow I bet it would look cool.
My only "creation" which I'm sure has been done before was a "potless" strat.
One on/off toggle wired straight to a bridge position Hot Rail. Killer tone but it has to go thru a gate and you gotta be careful where you point it. Did some direct recording and that worked well.
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I invent lots of things. But I get nowhere with them because right after I finish putting it together in my mind I get so overwhelmed with my genius I dismiss writing down the thing because no paper or digital media is worthy of displaying such masterpieces.
plus i like being poor.
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Originally posted by Thruster
I'm not a bassist. Having little understanding about the fret/fretless pros and cons .
Here's one of the "Pros"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5UqDqwzagU
The greatest bass player/showman there was...He works the crowd for 2 minutes & then turns up his two amps...His bass btw was a fretted Fender Jazz with which he ripped out the frets with a set of pliers and filled in the gaps with epoxy.
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When you said Hybrid, I had visions of a .40 size glow engine from an R/C plane hooked to the back of the guitar revving away. No cables, ma!
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Originally posted by Chairboy
When you said Hybrid, I had visions of a .40 size glow engine from an R/C plane hooked to the back of the guitar revving away. No cables, ma!
i have seen a .60 sized flying R/C lawnmower...R/C flying bass guitar?:D
I would use two brushless electric motors for that and a double neck.
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Yeah Loin , I know about Jaco. Caught him YEARS ago with Bruford and .......
can't remember.
No matter, I know you will probably scream heresy but I never really got into that whole vibe. He always impressed me as a master class noodler. But that's what a lot of that genre sounds like to me. Technically skilled, well in command of his instrument but not engaging to me.
There's a U-Tube of a young player doing a Mozart piece I saw a while ago. Maybe it's the guitarist in me but I found that performance impressive. Very musical, technically complex, impressive.
But I think I get the fretless thing. Besides ease of play, is there any other reason for frets on a bass?
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http://www.warmoth.com/
Contact them, and see if they can make the neck for you.
I don't know if having a half fretless, and half fretted design running the length of the neck will throw off the action, or intonation though. I'm guessing you should be ok, considering that each string could be adjustable at the body hardware, but it might be uncomfortable.
Here's my favorite bassist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_wGFfrJv4Y
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Originally posted by MrRiplEy[H]
I invented the internet, way before Al Gore did.
Psh..I invented the internet, way, way before you did and Al Gore stole the idea for it all from you, who stole it from me first. Get it right. :mad:
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I was thinking the .40 would be running a little generator, of course.
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Originally posted by Thruster
But I think I get the fretless thing. Besides ease of play, is there any other reason for frets on a bass?
Not really..thats why the hybrid idea might work..it would make playing fretless easier with tonal reference points all the way up the neck.You would get piano like ring on the bottom end and viola like swell at the upper register...if anyone has a bass,pluck a low C on the E string & an E on the G string at once at the same time...Let ring and move this up & down the neck(keeping the third diatonic)...You would have only one string to worry about intonation on.
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My grandfather was an inventor, came here from Warsaw Poland as a kid. He invented sheet metal screws and the machines used to make them. The auto industry still uses his designs.
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Originally posted by VWE
My grandfather was an inventor, came here from Warsaw Poland as a kid. He invented sheet metal screws and the machines used to make them. The auto industry still uses his designs.
:aok
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Originally posted by BBBB
Psh..I invented the internet, way, way before you did and Al Gore stole the idea for it all from you, who stole it from me first. Get it right. :mad:
Its called the intardnet and you two are prime examples...
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Yea I used to have a lawn service in High School. Being I was just a teenager I had to figure out how to make things do with out a lot. I came up with an idea to turn a normal walk behind commercial mower into a zero turn rider.
I had drawings of how to do it and so on, and went up to one of the local mower shops to see what they thought of the idea.
Of course these guys tell me oh yea that's kinda interesting but it won't work. Being young and dumb I didn't think much about sharing my idea and I really had no way to do it. So I kinda forgot about it.
Next thing yea know 6 or 8 months later these A holes start selling a conversion kit based off my idea. They had gone out and applied for a patent and the whole 9 yards. Of course there was nothing I could do about it, I was just some 17 year old kid with a few drawings, no way I could prove it was my idea.
So needless to say I don't share my ideas anymore.. :cry
As a side note the idiots were offered a bunch of money from Toro for the patent, but they turned it down and planed to sell it themselves. Well sad enough for them and their master plan it didn't sell very well. I guess Karma is a biotch. :rofl
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Originally posted by VWE
Its called the intardnet and you two are prime examples...
:lol Your a funny guy. Don't quit your day job.
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The basis for multiplayable WWII first person shooters with WWII mod for Rogue Spear. It was created to fix the lack of multiplayable WWII first person shooters.
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Originally posted by Fishu
The basis for multiplayable WWII first person shooters with WWII mod for Rogue Spear. It was created to fix the lack of multiplayable WWII first person shooters.
What was the Mod? RS was one of my old school favorite games. I remember playing a WW2 mod for it prior to the map plug-ins being released, but I can't think of it's name.
btw did you play on the zone or mplayer? If you played on the zone I can hook you up with a forum that a bunch of old school RS players still hang out on.
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I have an invention going on... just gotta work out a few lil things and get it all legal then going public.
It's so dam simple and practical that when you see it on the market you're gonna say... "Dam why didn't I think of that?"
You'll buy a few, the wife too. Your friends will each have a few in the house.
Yeppers this thing will save you money and time. I should have done this years ago. Oh well never too late to be rich as Hell.
When you see it you'll laff for a few minutes... then reality will set in.
:D
Mac
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Originally posted by VWE
Its called the intardnet and you two are prime examples...
:rofl
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Originally posted by AWMac
I have an invention going on... just gotta work out a few lil things and get it all legal then going public.
It's so dam simple and practical that when you see it on the market you're gonna say... "Dam why didn't I think of that?"
You'll buy a few, the wife too. Your friends will each have a few in the house.
Yeppers this thing will save you money and time. I should have done this years ago. Oh well never too late to be rich as Hell.
When you see it you'll laff for a few minutes... then reality will set in.
:D
Mac
You never call anymore!
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Originally posted by BBBB
:lol Your a funny guy. Don't quit your day job.
Uhh, you mean he HAS a job? :rolleyes:
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I had a bunch of geewiz ideas as a kid, but I forgot most of them. Here's one, though:
I used to look at the huge (this was in the mid 80s, my dad worked on all sorts of relatively extensive electronics hardware, and I was small) boards and cases abristle with components that my father used to bring home from work. To me they looked like miniature cities, water tower capacitors, integrated circuit factories, high speed highway and railroad paths crisscrossing everywhere through those urban landscapes, etc.. I'd spend hours looking at them in awe at the endless permutations. It got me thinking that highways as we have them could be a lot more efficient and a lot cooler if we made a few changes:
Cars could ride on common magnetic pulses the same way electrons ride the current in those circuit printed paths. Cars would ride up to the highways on their own power, but fall in line the once there.
It'd reduce accidents from human error, and would probably also improve mechanical failures' aftermath, considering all cars would have near-zero relative velocities.. e.g. There could be some scheme for cars to un-float back down into guiding rails if power was interrupted.
Traffic flow could be decentralized among all cars rather than slaved to a single controller, without much fuss if they all operated on a same standardized protocol for passing, exiting etc.
The real problem, which I only thought of a few years later, was how to power all this. It can't be worthwhile if for all its practicality, it costs more than the present solution + the cost of switch-over. The solution is pretty simple, maybe even without much more superconductive tech than we have now: space power.
At present (as far as I can tell), the biggest drawback to space beamed solar power is the risk of being on the receiving end of all that power.
A simple enough solution is that, such highways being most interesting in long-distance applications, they'd easily have free room somewhere along their paths (a little off from the highway itself, most probably) to accomodate power beams away from any population or vulnerable infrastructure.
In any case, a large part of any damage can be prevented by just turning off, or diverting the earthbound power beam anytime it'd diverge from its target down on the ground.
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Yup, Well I have the idea for one anyway.
But then I found out how much is would cost to get a patent.
So now its going to stay locked in my head. And companies will have to continue to loose thousands if not millions of dollars every year untill someone else with the financial resources comes up with the same idea
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Originally posted by DREDIOCK
Yup, Well I have the idea for one anyway.
But then I found out how much is would cost to get a patent.
So now its going to stay locked in my head. And companies will have to continue to loose thousands if not millions of dollars every year untill someone else with the financial resources comes up with the same idea
If it's that good approach a venture capitalist.
shamus
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Originally posted by moot
I had a bunch of geewiz ideas as a kid, but I forgot most of them. Here's one, though:
I used to look at the huge (this was in the mid 80s, my dad worked on all sorts of relatively extensive electronics hardware, and I was small) boards and cases abristle with components that my father used to bring home from work. To me they looked like miniature cities, water tower capacitors, integrated circuit factories, high speed highway and railroad paths crisscrossing everywhere through those urban landscapes, etc.. I'd spend hours looking at them in awe at the endless permutations. It got me thinking that highways as we have them could be a lot more efficient and a lot cooler if we made a few changes:
Cars could ride on common magnetic pulses the same way electrons ride the current in those circuit printed paths. Cars would ride up to the highways on their own power, but fall in line the once there.
It'd reduce accidents from human error, and would probably also improve mechanical failures' aftermath, considering all cars would have near-zero relative velocities.. e.g. There could be some scheme for cars to un-float back down into guiding rails if power was interrupted.
Traffic flow could be decentralized among all cars rather than slaved to a single controller, without much fuss if they all operated on a same standardized protocol for passing, exiting etc.
The real problem, which I only thought of a few years later, was how to power all this. It can't be worthwhile if for all its practicality, it costs more than the present solution + the cost of switch-over. The solution is pretty simple, maybe even without much more superconductive tech than we have now: space power.
At present (as far as I can tell), the biggest drawback to space beamed solar power is the risk of being on the receiving end of all that power.
A simple enough solution is that, such highways being most interesting in long-distance applications, they'd easily have free room somewhere along their paths (a little off from the highway itself, most probably) to accomodate power beams away from any population or vulnerable infrastructure.
In any case, a large part of any damage can be prevented by just turning off, or diverting the earthbound power beam anytime it'd diverge from its target down on the ground.
U should have entered the Science Fair with that one..
:aok