Paging Todd Bradshaw....

Non-Rickenbacker Basses, Fretless Basses & Effects

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jps
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Paging Todd Bradshaw....

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teb
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Re: Paging Todd Bradshaw....

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Pretty wild. Too bad no sound clips, and tuning with turnbuckles might be a bit of a pain, but you have to give them credit for trying. It reminds me of a boat I once built, in which I installed a big hollow flotation tank in the back end with a small round inspection hatch in the top. On the first voyage to a local powerplant reservoir lake, I was rowing a couple hundred yards from shore on a nice, quiet weekday afternoon and my boat started to make very strange, rather loud whirring noises. This was a rowboat and it had no motor, no electronics and absolutely nothing on it or in it that makes noise. It wasn't leaking, it wasn't sinking and by that time I wasn't even moving. A couple minutes later the answer came into view - a fishing boat moving fast about a mile away. My flotation tank was acting like a big acoustic guitar body, picking up the underwater sound of the boat's propeller and amplifying it. Over the next couple months I found that on calm days you could hear the high-pitched sounds of motorboat props coming from so far away that you couldn't even see the boat yet. It was pretty neat, but I kind of felt sorry for the fish who have to listen to that stuff all the time (if fish have ears).

This was the boat with the wood and fiberglass tank in the back, under the mostly decorative top covering boards.
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jps
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Re: Paging Todd Bradshaw....

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So you created a large fishing stethoscope, how cool! That probably creeped you out hearing stuff coming up from the bottom of the lake in pursuit of your boat. Imaging the sounds of whales..............
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teb
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Re: Paging Todd Bradshaw....

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Once I realized that it wasn't something wrong with the boat, it was actually pretty cool. With all the curve in the bottom, the compartment sat out of the water - but with the entire boat being wood cored and fiberglassed inside and out, it was well connected to the floor. Kind of a neck-through construction, as it were. If I did it again, I'd string a couple of strings over the "sound hole" so that I could broadcast back into the water and entertain the fish.

When I first started playing bass in junior high school, I didn't have an amp for two years. I had a Hagstrom solid body bass and in order to hear it, I would rest the headstock up against the hollow-core door of my bedroom as I played - and that's how I learned to play bass. If I kept the record player at a reasonable volume, I could play along with stuff like the early Animals, Zombies, Yardbirds and other groups that tended to have good bass lines and hear what I was doing. Kind of the same principle as the "acoustic boat".
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jps
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Re: Paging Todd Bradshaw....

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Now we need to see a boat made out of hollow core doors! Complete the circle. :mrgreen:
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