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I've been thinking about this a bit recently. I bought a double bass that was owned by Jack Bruce (not in the putative sense most vintage instruments are sold) but with provenance from Bonhams. It's 100% one of his, but it means nothing to me really. I bought it because I needed a great sounding classical bass and this was checked over by a friend and was given the OK. We assumed it would be out of my price range, but in the end it sold for half the original Bonham's sale price. I guess my point is that the "value" of celebrity ownership is probably temporal and that the celebrities of today are unlikely to mean much (if anything) to the generations in the future. Maybe a few will, but ultimately, we're all shadows and dust. Or 3 generations from irrelevance, as my mum put it when we were enjoying a walk.

I play in a wedding band, part of the fun (for me) is getting close to the original sound. I use a classic octave-fuzz-chorus combo and I've had various synth pedals over the years. A pedal board is just something I always have, I use the same one for every gig, a standalone synth would be another thing to take, set up and require space. I have seen other wedding band guys do a great job with keyboard synths, and others doing a great job with just a bass into a DI. There are no right answers, but a lot of the fun (for me) is trying out different things. I'm sort of losing patience with the tracking for faster songs with the mxr, so I think I'll try the FI VIP next, @Quatschmacher any ideas when the new presets will be available?

But I don't. I have a Helix Floor which is essentially its own pedal board. Any additional pedals would either be free-floating which bring their own unreliability or would require me to have a board big enough to hold the Helix, whatever synth pedal I decide to use and its PSU (and main power distributer for both units). That makes it bigger on stage and bigger in the band transport. One of the reasons my band gets and does as many gigs as we do as because we can have a relatively small on-stage footprint and economical transport. Even so it's sometimes pushed to the limit. I've done a couple of gigs where I have been sandwiched between the headliner's equipment and the front of stage wedge monitors with just enough room for my feet and the Helix. Anything more and I would have been out of space. Also by limiting the amount of gear we take to gigs we are able to get the whole band, or equipment and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. At the moment everything fits in when packed in a specific way. If my pedal board case was larger than it is currently, there's a good chance we may not longer get everything in quite as comfortably. Also who is to say that someone with a more conventional pedalboard set up already has both room and PSU capacity for an additional synth pedal. Based on my reasoning above if I'm going to bring additional gear I might as well bring the right gear, and not extra stuff that is still a compromise. Many of my bass synth sounds use cross-mod and AFAIK none of the pedals offer this facility. As I said, if I we start to get regular gigs on big stages and more time to set up and sound check then I'll start bringing keyboard synths for me to play. As an aside one of my all-time favourite bands, Polysics, made the decision that when they played outside of Japan there were a number of their more popular songs that they would not perform because they felt they couldn't do them justice with the stripped down equipment rig they used on international tours from both a cost and logistics PoV. This was somewhat disappointing for me as an audience member.

A much more accessible chart today. The complete Steve Rodby part for the tune 'Afternoon' from the 2002 Pat Metheny Group album, 'Speaking Of Now'. I am hearing it in a gentle 12:8 because of the triplets throughout. Could be 6:8 or 4:4 swung triplets. https://bilbosbassbites.co.uk/afternoon-pat-metheny-group/

Baby You're A Rich Man - Beatles

Semantic point as we have to define value in this context. Intrinsic and extrinsic. If we agree that the manufacturing process adds value then ownership and age can do too.

I disagree mate, it adds price, not value

What people sometimes forget about celebs buying vintage instruments is that they add value (which we can’t). A big standard 70s jazz is £3k. One owned by Geddy Lee is £30k for example. Buying them up also gives the impression they’re rare, which they’re really not. I can see the value in a completely original pieces, because they genuinely are rare. But the rest of them, not really.

I got a set of XT 45-100 "Used like New" yesterday for £19. The code worked and they're like new. £27 is the usual price.

Have to say the one for sale at Tom's looks to be a pretty nice example aesthetically speaking

@BigRedX - you're obviously happy to use a keys synth and all power to you! But a couple of points in your post: - you say a pedal with an external PSU gives rise to "complications and unreliability"? I'm guessing maybe half of the bass players on this forum use pedals (typically on a pedal board) with an external PSU week in and week out, and we do so without any issues? - if, as you say, the audience doesn't notice the difference between us playing a song without any synth, then they're even less likely to notice the difference between a keys synth and a quality bass-pedal synth?

I regularly see the Hamish Stuart Band/360 band and his bassist is Steve Pearce - a top echelon session player and one of the best bassists I have seen live. He uses one of these. Mic'd up but you can still hear it.

My exes, original '55 on the left, Fender Custom Shop (ex @AndyTravis) on the right

IIRC one of the members here was forbidden by his BL to use an old bass in a function band simply because it looked tatty 🤔

Gig last week. Sounded very 'Rick-like'.