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More red flags than a Soviet military parade.

More stable yes. Rock solid and rigid - no. Temperature and humidity affect all wooden necks. Extreme temperature changes can even effect graphite necks a little as all materials react to temperature in some way. I've had to do some truss rod tweaks during a series of outside sets on the same day in the summer as the sun hitting the stage moved and then began to set. There is a trade off - you could make a graphite neck with F1 car levels of tolerance - so not expanding / contracting by more than 0.1mm under load but then you couldn't adjust it to suit your tastes.

I wouldn't have purchased my US made Fender in the last 10 months or foreseeable future. Generally avoiding us brands where I can*. *after all, I helped bring down apartheid by boycotting South African wine...

Why is it that yesterday the B string started having all sorts of issues. Thought it was my preamp to start with but even when I turned the bass volume down I could hear it acoustically rumbling away. Relief was down to less than .15 mm fine for a week then overnight it changes. i couldn’t sleep last night due to pain so 4am I reset it all. Relief action pickups. Set it back to .3 mm which is probably a bit much for a fretless but it sounds better than before, although even though the pickups are set as before the A string is quiet again 🙄 i just don’t get it. Aren’t roasted maple necks supposed to be more stable???

That'll buff out

That was some road 😁....

My estimation is that they would be in line roughly with Overwater's pricing these days, I expect you could probably a bit more than that in 2026.

I hadn't seen this but owning a Noble and a Khan DI I'd love to hear how it compares! @knicknack I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Probably not a good comparison. It does bass bass better, but then it would do, it is tuned down to f# standard at the moment! I would say it feels more solid than most of the ibanezes (with maybe an exception of the 5005), playability would be fine if I had longer fingers!

They would almost certainly be used basses, I don’t think Sei are in the habit of building basses for stock. Si

I spoke to Martin maybe 2 years ago about the possibility of a new build. I only got a vague hint on price, but it sounded like for something that didn't deviate too much from their standard build (headless, 4-6 strings, one of their standard body plans) would be around £2.5k-£3k. I guess things may have gone up a bit since then?

Howie this is the first time seeing the p bass 🫨😍. Begrudgingly I understand why you wanted to keep the 80’s Bart’s for this bass. How different is the wenge fretboard in tone to the common fretboards? That Warwick must have a really meaty tone with those double jazz pickups.

I figure that noone is ever going to make more of an effort than an audition, so if he can't be bothered with that he will never be bothered. Sometimes you can mess stuff up playing, that is reasonable but the late and hungover at 3pm would be a no from me.

The Painter's Link - Kate Bush

Ah excellent, hadn't appreciated you're a Sei owner! What's your detailed thoughts on how it stacks up against your Ibby SR Premium for tone and playability? That will give me a very decent benchmark for a bass I know well.

Tried out a drummer last night for the metal band. We've been playing to drum tracks up till now. Really disheartening experience. He'd assured me he had two songs locked down, and was nearly there with a third (after the practice was postponed for a week and a half to give him more time to prepare). Turned up over an hour late because he'd slept through his alarm (practice started at 3pm, by the way!). Hungover as all hell - feel like I'm getting too old to deal with that - I've already got a kid at home. Maybe it's tough turning up and playing quite tricky stuff with new people, to a click track - and the other two in the band are divided as to whether to give him another go - probably because we're not exactly beating them off with a (drum)stick - but I don't see it working out. I'm conflicted now - maybe I'm inpatient or have unreasonable expectations - it might just take time to gel - but I really didn't get the impression he had the chops (or general reliability) to pull it off.

I don't dream of basses. I own, play and gig the best basses I can find, so every day I’m playing my dream bass. The next bass is always an upgrade, so the next one will be an even better "dream" bass. Currently I'm gigging a Mike Lull PJ5, which I've been playing for 15 years and a Sadowsky RV5 jazz, which I’ve been playing for 9 years. I've seen basses that are just as good, but "just as good" doesn't make the sale. I'm (happily) at the stage were better basses don't come along very often.

paint it black - stones

A quick glance at the big US retailers (i.e. Sweetwater, Guitar Center) suggests slim pickings in the budget bass sector outside of Squier and Ibanez. So I would assume there is still space in the market for alternatives in the low end, especially for comparatively exciting brands such as Jet, etc. However this doesn't seem to be in evidence from any of the big retailers, nor does there seem to be a big push to exploit their buying power into developing a cheap house brand such as Andertons have done with East Coast (or, indeed, Thomann/Harley Benton). Or is there some big selling budget line that I'm missing? In terms of consumer sentiment in the US, the sense I get from the news etc is that it's not great, but it's difficult to know how that translates into consumer behaviour. If you have, say, $300 to spend on a bass, do you seek out the best new value, buy used, or save up for something with the F logo? The last observation I'd make is that HB only ever seemed to dip a toe into direct US sales - it was all done through Reverb, so they weren't even operating their own storefront, and I think they only warehoused a selection of models there (that's the sense I get from some of the big YouTubers, anyway). It'll be interesting to see what comes out of NAMM in a few days in terms of budget brands.

Items for sale that are visibly dirty.

Green Door - Shaky

I think most of them are already sold. I found it pretty hard to get answers from them by email when I was asking about my sei

Just had a quick look on the Bass Gallery website and the prices of the sold Sei basses seem to range from around £1,800 to £3k. Hard to tell whether they were new when sold or not, but they look pretty mint. So maybe prices aren't a million miles from their old price list?