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Bought a pickup from @Grassie Perfect purchase, great item, fast shipping, and excellent comms. Cheers Grant, much appreciated 👍

My Gear4Music Chicago 5 string weighs in at 6.5 pounds and feels very good on the strap.

Germfree Adolescents - X-Ray Spex

NBD! Back with Yamaha again but went with the Ice Blue BB434. Sticking with 4s now. Might get a clear pickguard or a vintage white. 3.4kg bass, my shoulder is happy!

Stuff like that is eminently possible, but I can’t see that most folks would want it to come at the expense of the engage/bypass switch. Besides, that has other functionality (tuner and access to global menu) that would become inaccessible due to long-press-to-scroll if replacing it with program down.

GuitarGuitar now have all 4 different finishes of this in at £3499 (!!!) Doesnt seem like many (if any...?) have shifted from any of the UK dealers?

The Stanley Brothers - Mountain Dew

I'd done a cursory search, but hadn't yet tried various Reddit and Gearspace threads that might have been more promising. I suspected that it might be possible to recreate some things manually, but TBH that's more messing about than I am prepared to undertake for the sake of a few interesting looking Kontakt-based instruments. It a pity because the Logic Sampler instrument is great, but could do with some updated conversion utilities like the Akai sampler library one that would even allow the Mac to read Akai formatted discs to make them available for the conversion process.

I saw this listed on the Peach guitars website yesterday when I was ordering something else, I hadn't heard of it before but the demo sounded good and it looks practical, so I added one to my order. I'll have a play with it when it gets here.

Not who you were asking but the program change footswitch already lets you do up/down based on how quickly you click - not perfect of course, but once you get used to it it works well.

These are my favourite straps ever

I think I've bought a bass from the guy before - the Burny LP shaped confection which I put lipstick pickups in. He's a sound bloke, got a pretty nifty collection of instruments, had a fine yap with him when I was picking up the Burny. Should have just bought his one (as it looks minty fresh if I recall correctly), but then what fun would that have been?

Accent On Youth - Ultravox

John Shuker replaced a fret board and truss rod on a US Fender Stu Hamm Mk1 . Absolute fantastic work. John's work is in great demand so be prepared to have neck fixed by slotting in to his busy bass build schedule. Worth the weight!!!!

Correctamundo

Tom's Guitar shop in Greenwich Market has a 1956 Fender P Bass for sale, I've just seen the photos below on Instagram but it looks stunning, don't know the price but if anyone is looking for one !! John 😄

Presuming you haven't already tried this route, a quick AI search came up with the below. Not real-world examples, of course, but a starting point to investigate: Can NI Kontakt Player instruments be converted to work with Logic's ES24/Sampler? ChatGPT said: Short answer: mostly no, you cannot reliably convert a full instrument for Kontakt Player into the native Sampler (formerly EXS24) in Logic Pro with full functionality. Here’s a breakdown of why and what is possible: ✅ What is possible Export the raw samples from the Kontakt-library (if you have access to them). Once you have the WAV/AIFF files, you can import them into Sampler/EXS24 in Logic, map the zones, set up velocity layers etc. Logic even has an “Convert Audio → EXS Instrument” workflow. macprovideo.com+2Gearspace+2 You can create a simplified version of the instrument in Sampler using those samples — for example basic multisample mapping, basic key-range and velocity zones. 🚫 Why you can’t fully convert a Kontakt Player instrument Kontakt libraries often contain proprietary scripting (using KSP), advanced modulation, filters, effects chains, custom GUI elements. Sampler/EXS24 does not support those natively. So you lose a lot of the advanced behaviour. Many Kontakt instruments (especially “Player” versions) are locked/protected; you may not have access to the raw sample files or are prevented from repurposing them. There is no straightforward, general-purpose tool that reliably converts a full .nki/.nkm (Kontakt) instrument into a Sampler format with all features intact. For example, older tools like Translator existed for conversions, but they had limitations. Apple Support Community+1 The format differences: Kontakt’s architecture is far more advanced than Sampler/EXS24. Simply mapping samples doesn’t replicate logic, scripting, round-robin, advanced articulations etc. 🔍 My recommendation for your situation If you own the Kontakt library and access the samples, do the manual route: export or locate the sample files, import into Logic’s Sampler (or EXS24 if you’re using an older version) and recreate the mapping. If the instrument uses heavy scripting or you don’t have sample access, run it as Kontakt inside Logic (as a plugin) instead of trying to convert. Evaluate whether you need the full feature set of the Kontakt instrument — if you only need basic playback of the sampled sounds, conversion might be “good enough”. But if you need the advanced behaviour, stick with Kontakt. If you like, I can check for specific libraries (the exact Kontakt instrument you have) and see whether there are known conversions or cheat-workarounds for that library. Would that be helpful?

So, I've made a start at restoring this bass (or at least minimising my chances of catching ebola from it ). The pickup is with an electrical technician at work to see if it the coil can simply be reconnected, we got talking about it and it turned into a "give it here" type situation. This suits me - he's got much better equipment than me (much finer and temperature controlled soldering iron, magnifier light thingy) and well, it's his job so he's less likely to make an arris of it than me. As for me, I've dismantled the tuners and put them in a cola bath to try to clean them up, remove tarnishing etc. I've made a start at polishing up the tuner bushings (E string done in the photo). Going to do them in situ rather than pop them out - I dislike press fit bushings at the best of times and these old things are in there nice and tight. If I pop them out then there's no guarantee they'll go back in as nicely, so they're just getting polished as best I can where they are.