OK - Pac it in

I give in. I really was trying to avoid dots on the fret board, but I think that any other shaped marker will be very tedious after the first two or three have been done. Just dots on their own would be too 'ordinary'.

The whole point of making your own bass guitar is that you can create something that wouldn't be available off the shelf. So I am doing dots with a slight difference - Pacman style!

Pacman

As a youngster, I remember the first computers that I got to play with at secondary school which were Commodore Pets. We spent a few lunchtimes typing in games from magazines and always got unexpected results. I asked around and eventually understood enough to write enough BASIC to make a blob move about. This was developed over time into a really sluggish version of Pacman - 1MHz processors do not rock. I was well chuffed!

Anyway back to the plan...

Here is my paper cutout version of pacman, a ghost and some pac-food (or whatever the dots were called in the game). OK, it is a very thinly disguised excuse to get dots on the fboard whilst not losing too much face, but I like it - and it is more fun than my previous idea of a Penrose Triangle.

I like the idea of having pacman et al, but it is a bit inyerface all the time, so I want to make it a bit more-umm-controllable.

A few years ago, a local band, The Mafia, had all their gear stolen. That was about as bad as it gets for a gigging band, and many would have just thrown the towel in, but they carried on and have even paid off the loan. The night they were due to play, they phoned up a mate whose name totally escapes me and he turned up with a couple of guitars and some backing tracks. He was great, but the thing that impressed Chewie and me most (sad, but true) was the blue illuminated fboard dots.

Needless to say, Chewie's Ibanez bass is going to be getting some illuminated dots once the truss rod is repaired (currently in a machine shop). The old dots got mangled with the acetone trick, so some work would be needed anyway, but lights just make the whole experience more worthwhile.

So for moonbassalpha (which still has nothing to do with moons) I am also keen to illuminate the fboard, but having some electronic knowledge makes me want to go that little bit further. I want animation! I want pacman to chomp, I want the dots to move, I want the ghost to get angry, I want strawberries to appear at random. OK, no strawberries, that is a step too far.

Firstly the fboard has to be drilled. This was another job for the milling machine at work so I could be sure to get the dots in a straight line. I left the fboard on the slot cutting MDF to support it. The food dots are 4mm holes with a 6mm counter bore. This gives a ledge for perspex to sit on later. The pacman is 20/22mm and the ghost has two holes 16/18mm, one above the other.

I have chosen some tinted perspex, and the theory being that with the lights off, it will look like an ordinary plain fboard. With the lights on it will look like 1982 all over again...