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To be fair, not every Porky Prime Cut sounds good, I spose they did the best they could and scrawled their X on it! And most of the singles I've got from that period were Porky's so I thought he only did good stuff, ie what I liked. Seemed just about every decent punk and new wave record was a Porky!

Which is the point I was trying to make earlier in this thread. It was fine if you were a big selling artist signed to a major record label , but for those of us without record label backing, trying to make our recordings available to the public and maybe played by John Peel or Tommy Vance, meant having to use a budget studio, and then getting our record pressed at a some cheap pressing plant using recycled vinyl as this was the only way we could afford to release it. Compare and contrast with a digital file whether it is on a CD or a download there are a lot fewer obstacles to audio fidelity. The music I've released on digital formats sounds loads better even though much of it was recorded at home rather than at a proper studio simply because the production process doesn't place limitations on the sound.

I agree on not de-fretting. The BBNE2 is a neck-thru design, making a fretless neck for it isn't an option. It's also a high-end and quite sought after bass that could be difficult to resell if de-fretted and you'd have the cost of re-fretting if you wanted to reverse the job. If money is no object and none of this matters, go ahead and defret. It's a different decision for different people.

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft. Carpenters

My shitty vinyl effort is a Porky Prime Cut! Back in those days I think almost every UK pressing I owned had been cut by either Porky (George Peckham) or Bilbo (Dennis Blackham).

I recently bought a blue Aria TSB550 fretless. It had a seized truss rod. Now it appears the nut at the headstock nut isn't straight and after a few weeks of WD40 down there, still no movevment and we are thinking that it's cross threaded. Even if we get the nut off, it would never go back on. I'm thinking to remove the fingerboard, replace the rod and re-attached the board any hints and tips are welcome and I would like to do the work myself TIA the BC massive

Mike Starr tone thread? Im with you on this one. Absolutely unacceptable.

Add ‘Dude’ into the equation too….

Would? Is one of those really simple but extremely effective bass parts. Really fun to play with a band.

I did it to a p bass USA reissue in 1990. I pulled the frets with pliers, filled with a tube of plastic wood and it worked perfectly These days I would do it differently. I would buy a tool specifically for pulling frets and run a soldering iron accros the fret to be pulled a couple of times

Copper foil helps - but it's not as efficient, and it gets crap quickly with gain pedals. And you never really know about interference levels at a new venue until you get plugged in and maybe find out it's going to be a horrible night. Can't be dealing with that!

Add doozy into the equation...

The pots on my trusty headless Hohner B2A have become unacceptably noisy. The serial number suggests it is from 1987 so that isn't surprising. I do find this bass useful for travelling or jam sessions where there is no space and it sounds good. I am trying to replace the pots but have hit a few issues. The original pots have a 3/8" threaded shaft so the holes in the body are about 9.5mm diameter. They are long shaft mini pots e.g. total length about 27mm and body about 17mm diameter. 2 x A500ohm for volume and one B500k ohm for tone. I have spent hours looking for the exact replacement pots and they just don't seem to exist. Modern mini pots generally have a 7mm thread which is loose in the hole. There isn't room in the cutout for full size pots which do have a 3/8" threaded shaft. I can probably make a short bush to space the shaft out with some 3/8" brass tube 18SWG brass tube, but that will be a bit fiddly. Also the inside of the body cutout is not parallel with the outside so the pot doesn't sit flat. I might be able to get a chisel to it, but again rather fiddly. A drastic approach would be to take a fretsaw and remove the cutout entirely and replace it with a home made brass fascia plate which I can paint to match the black gloss guitar, but that is likely to look a bit of a botch.

"Dimed". Just say "full" or "maximum", we're British [1], not bloody Yanks. [1] Most of us, anyway

Well, my point is that the sound quality defines the quality of the content which reaches your ears. However, I do get what you're saying; I've been to a couple of Hi-Fi shows where a lot of suppliers were playing lounge jazz, which simply bores me.

@DTB, have you tried to ask Yamaha if they could make a fretless replacement neck for this bass? Another option might be to order a fretless neck by some luthier (if I remember correctly, Jon Shuker could make one). In my view, it might be worth a try instead of making changes to your beloved bass that might turn irreversible.

It's the old "Garbage In, Garbage Out" ... If it's a poor recording and/or a poor pressing it's never going to sound good! Saying that, I occasionally have a singles night (!) where I flop out my 7 inchers from the late 70s/early 80s, and while not having the absolute fidelity of something like Al McDowell's Time Peace, or Nazaire's"Who's blues?", they don't sound bad at all, especially things like The Monochrome Set's "He's Frank" or DAF's "Kebabtraume"... They, however, have the immortal words scratched into the end groove - "a Porky Prime Cut". Always wanted to have a record of my own mastered by Porky!