StinkyBass gets a bath

[solarbird]

So I've been wanting a bass to screw around with and use in recordings, and I've been playing around with grabbing a used solid-body for super-cheap somewhere and restringing it GDAE and so on. But!

A while ago Brom gave Paul a mid-60s hollow-body bass he wasn't playing because, well, it was stinky. It was stinky because it had gotten all mildewy. Paul named it StinkyBass and put it downstairs and played with it some, but it was too stinky. So it stayed in StinkyCase for a long time, until I was talking about this and Anna remembered it it was there.

StinkyCase is now in another room wallowing in baking soda, and I'm working on fixing up the bass. It cleaned up pretty well on the outside with a couple of hours' work, but the inside of the hollow-body case is a problem. I went at it first with baking soda, then tried alcohol (with a rag on the end of a wire) but couldn't really get to the upper layer very well if at all.

Then I finally I remembered that UV emitter array I built out of UV LEDs to sterilise flutes! And have repurposed it for this:


StinkyBass in UV bath, Stage I
I've since moved the LEDs for better coverage. I hope this works. So far it seems to be, but I don't know whether that'll last - I can't be sure whether I'm just airing it out aggressively or actually doing some good against the mildew. Theory says this should work, but it's always hard to know. They're are all UVA emitters; I don't have a UVC emitter (and they're really expensive and large and frankly kinda dangerous). I also don't know how long it would take; internet data is conflicting! If I had a good UVC emitter the answer would be "five seconds," which is kinda scary. I had the lights in the position seen in this photo for about eight hours, which concentrated the light on the worst areas that I could see; they've been more centrally located since around 11ish last night.

Anyway, once scrubbed and oiled and restrung, StinkyBass sounds pretty good! It's a Klira "Twen Star" model 162, which is a German clone of some other bass from the mid-1960s, and it's not in bad shape. I like the hollow-body part, mostly because I can hear it without having to set up an amp. Since it's GDAE upside down, I can just invert my mandolin fingerings and everything works. Plus it's kinda old-school groovy, with this little violin-shaped body, which ties it back to the GDAE family again. (And I've had a sekrit TV crush on the ENOZ bassist since Series 1 of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱. *^_^*;;) So I like it.

Except for the mildew stink. That's pretty brutal. But substantially less brutal today than last night, which was substantially less than before the alcohol, which was substantially less than coming out of the case omg. Fingers crossed!

eta: I forgot. I'm kind of weirded out by how TOTALLY DIFFERENT the UV LEDs look in photograph (and live monitor) than in person. Also how much dimmer. These things are crazy bright. I'm looking at StinkyBass right now and I can see the purple coming out through a couple of layers of dryer sheet and screwdriver box. The camera hardly picks this up at all. This must be related to those flower colours I can never get right in photos either.

Comments

[403]

If it's that bad, then your bass must smell even worse than my old apartment. Yikes!

[403]

Oh, also: Humans can see a short distance into the near-UV, but cameras and the like aren't designed to do so. It makes a big difference.

[solarbird]

It's times like this when I don't entirely mind having lost a lot of my sense of smell in that automobile accident. Sure, it smells bad, but not like other people smell it!

[solarbird]

I suspect elves can see even further. But I dunno! Someone else has suggested I'm maybe a tetrachromat. But I think the UV thing makes more sense.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Mutantbass!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Tres cool! Yeah, the bass looks like something alien, with that Cherenkov-like blue coming out of it....

just a guess...

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

I know I see a bit more into the UV range than the average person* - you probably do, too. And cameras are probably calibrated more towards what average eyes pick up?

* I say this based on a thing at the Lawrence Hall of Science that would show the spectra of various elements, and there were bands on some I could see that were outside of the range that they had marked as what people see (and that people I was with didn't see them).

[maellenkleth]

jeez, yes, you are a tetrachromat. ^_^

suggestion?

[lisajulie.livejournal.com]

ping jonsinger about various forms and sources of UV and the utility and timing thereof for mildew extermination. He might also have other suggestions for dealing, high percentage peroxide, frex.

[brombear.livejournal.com]

I really hope that you can get the musty smell out of it. It deserves to be played! My biggest headache was being a lefty...but then again, Paul McCartney turned his upside down. I just didn't have time or a teacher when I got that one. Although, my favorite is a Les Paul style semi-hollow body that I've got strung with flatwounds.

[chirik.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't know you were (possibly) a tetrachromat. That would make you the third or fourth I know.

[solarbird]

...maybe? But I think it's more likely that I see a lot more UV than one would expect. There are definitely colours I see others don't - I've had arguments over it - but I don't know whether it's tetrachromatic or just idk ultravision or whatever you'd call it. ^_^

[solarbird]

Were it mine, modding it to include LEDs like this all the time would be on my agenda.

Re: suggestion?

[solarbird]

Oh I know a lot of ways to fix it, but the inside of this thing is raw wood, like you do. I wouldn't subject that to peroxide. (Or bleach, or several other things.) Too much damage.

Next trick (if needed) will be ozone. It's not awesome for life, but it's reasonable in short doses.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

ooooooh.

[chirik.livejournal.com]

Well, of the two other people I can think of off the top of my had, one commented about seeing kinda bluish-purplish colors (my terms, based on my memory of her description) where others saw grey.

It seems fairly clear some people do see additional color, whatever the cause. Some stuff I've read indicates it may be that we're all capable of seeing it, but in most people, it gets filtered out, whereas in others it doesn't.

I'm fairly sure I don't see additional colors, but at the same time blacklights fsck my vision right up, and complaining about this to one friend, it sounds like this isn't something she experiences, so ... well, everyone experiences the world differently.

(random thought: my hair is dyed several bright colors, all of which are blacklight reactive... it'd be neat to do something that looks flat if you can't see very far into UV, but exhibits interesting texture further in the UV range)

[maellenkleth]

Hee. When in undergraduate college, used to take crib notes with a UV-visible marking pencil (which was, and probably still is, used in automated millworking systems). Discovered the merits of near-UV vision while in upper-school physics lab class.

Thinking now: some articles out there about five years ago concerning the incidence, and rarity, of tetrachromatic colour vision in people; am not in a place to search references right now, but the key take-away is that in most humans, tetrachromatic vision is a low-frequency recessive trait, furthermore generally blocked by low-pass ocular lens filtration. I note that my UV perception, which was /okay/ and /useful/ in adolescence, is much better since I've had both lenses yanked and replaced owing to cataracts.

ymmv. good luck.