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Just done a recent bass trade with Ben. All good and a trustworthy bass chatter - deal with confidence.

Of course, one of the "interesting" things Fender do to muddy the waters is that the specs always tend to vary across the ranges - the neck shapes are different, different finishes, etc. so it's not that straightforward to directly compare them. I do think at some point in my future I'm going to go on a quest to try some "expensive" Fender J basses and I'm genuinely not sure what to expect. I do worry that none of them will match up the awesome cheapo Vintage (JHS) jazz bass that @mcnach stupidly sold me, then I stupidly sold back to him, then I think he stupidly sold it to someone else 😝

This piece is usually classified as a "zamba", an Argentinean folk music genre (not to be confused with Brazilean "samba", way more popular worldwide). The song is called "Alfonsina y el mar". Hope you like it.

I've got one, it's actually a decent bass, sounds good with it's Powersound pickups. I paid the princely sum of feck all, probably worth a bit more but not much.

It's Firewood. Well - 5-string version of the same thing, for sale in Slovakia. And here's one in Poland. I'll stop now. I think the light's attracting them.

I gigged my sub £1k Mexican Player Plus Jazz V just last night and it did everything I needed it to do. Would it have done more if it was a £4k Custom Shop model? I vote no. I like my Fender but at heart I'm a Warwick fan.

I've always liked a pickguard on a pickguard, especially if they're both machined from a half inch thick slab of plastic with a beaver held by the tail, a la Flintstones.

So I’ve just done some more digging and found this old post on reverb,made by a company in Korea called G.I.G the standard,I’ve never heard of them

Massager of ego, provider of possibly illicit wares. Maybe not so much the band tour manager, that’ll be the proper logistics guy.

The original Artist line Starstreams (A1H & A2S) are also Japanese made, and come with Gotoh hardware and Aguilar pickups & preamp. They then had the cheaper Indonesian made versions, which from what I hear were nowhere near the same level of quality. I bought my last A2S back in March directly from Vox for £299. It was such a ridiculous bargain, just the price of the Aguilar gear it contains would have cost me more than I paid for the entire bass! I'd love a headless one but those new ones are 34" scale and yep much too pricey for me.

I think you might be right. The Grover tuners and truss rod cover fit the bill. The R font is different to the usual R they use but not too far away from the R of the late80's logo. Never seen it used as just the letter R though and never seen that headstock on a BC Rich, but it looks like the Outlaw body shape to me.

This has been my experience, if I needed to buy a Fender blind, I'd happily buy and MIJ/CIJ, less so a MIA, even less so an MIM, and infinitely less so a Custom Shop given the price:risk ratio

Like some LEGO Mark

I'm totally with you on this.

No idea at all - pretty sure it's not weirdy MIJ - but it's awesome and I want it. 😎 I think it's a custom one-off, that said there's something a bit Ibanez SoundGear-y about the bridge, pickups & control layout, so there may be a donor bass involved. The bass with the 'R' on the head mentioned upthread was a BC Rich Ironbird - that's a coincidence, the font's different & this ain't no BCR!

A few things to unpick. 3 tour managers? Separate sound guy for the vox and band? Joey W on drums! Bonehead in the touring band!

@itu Thank you for that. I went straight to Bourns and they have pots they say are specifically designed for guitars. That gives me confidence. The selectable pots I can see being very useful on active setups to be very sure about the adjustment position. I may approach this passive setup slightly differently. I'd like, if practical with passive pickups, to wire them to run together in parallel or series. I could perhaps use a tone pot for summed output, freeing up the other to have maybe a variable series/parallel adjustment, or switch if I'm dreaming. I'll need to design the circuit. I've found my college folder from 1999, which shows 6 ways to earth an electricity network distribution sub station, and work from there. I seem to recall a Dingwall demo where the pickups could be set series or parallel and it seemed to make my favourite two sounds of the setup. I'd appreciate if anyone could let me know if there are examples of passive guitars or basses wired like this to build my hopes and dreams upon?

Here is a 2025 list of some of the free Drum plugins knocking around: https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2022/02/25/ik-modo-drum-free/

Donna Lee

If you buy a car, a TV, or a washing machine, the more you pay the better the features, at least within a brand. It's simply not the case with Fender, where you can find a Squier that blows a Custom Shop out of the water. A good example for me is my Classic Vibe '51 Precision which plays, feels, and sounds as good, if not better, than my old Custom Shop relic 51 that retailed for almost 10 times more. There is variability in wood for sure, but far too much of all of this is smoke and mirrors; Fender would love you to think that a Custom Shop instrument is infinitely better than a Squier, but they know damn well the differences are often random, and that the purchase of a FCS instrument is often as much about bragging rights as about quality