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In my experience 'the mixer' is usually the lead singer, who more often than not owns the PA. I feel your pain.

We've found our man.

And here is the Beedster II: An all maple varnished fretless Shuker Precision neck with wonderful rounded edges coupled to (what seems to be a Northwest) two parts swamp ash body (nitrocellulosic natural finish), fitted with two Seymour Duncan SJB1 pickups (CTS pots), Gotoh lollipop tuners and a Fender (slotted grub screws) BBT bridge with threaded saddles. This fretless is fitted with Thomastik flat wound strings and is a real delight to play with an ultra low action and very straight neck (the double action truss rod is just very very very slightly tightened), loads of mwah when needed, but also more double bass tone on the neck pickup with the tone rolled a lot off. So a very versatile bass and, to me, better sounding than all the fretless Jazz Basses I had and that neck is just pure joy to play. Furthermore it's not a relic sunburst à la Jaco like mainly all fretless Jazz Basses... Yes I was having an overdose of these and needed a more sober classy fretless. And even if I'm a Jazz Bass guy, I've always preferred the width and feel of the Precision Bass neck. Thanks Chris! 😊👌🏻

So, played them for a good few hours at rehearsal yesterday, and I'm warming to them. The slight stickiness went pretty quickly and once I was actually up and playing with others, they felt fine - as @Sibob says, like a well-played in roundwound. The sound was great, though - from sounding really toppy and bright at home, they fit really well into an ensemble context, with a really strong fundamental tone. I'll be sticking with them for now (not least because of the price!) but I'd say they managed to improve on rather mixed first impressions.

There are two different schools of thought. I take the view that I’m there to make people listening happy, either tgey or a landlord are paying. My personal level of perfectionism takes a back seat. However l also get the “get it exactly right” mentality

I love it! 🤣. If it was priced accordingly, it could be brought back up to spec? (Apart from the ferrules 😬). Gut feeling it plays nice. Are you happy to share how much you paid for it @ronswanson?

A very long day. Had a full rehearsal, setting up the whole PA, monitors etc. We seem to have a serious problem with the mixer...and a gig on Friday. Otherwise it was a fun day.

Any recommendations for laser cutting steel for a neck plate?

Wow, the soapboxes came out faster than usual for a BC thread 😂 Maybe i should have put this in off topic 😎

Bit of an odd gig last night. The rain maybe didn't help and apparently there was some boxing on and a local music festival. Maybe 30 people in. They appreciated us anyway. Acoustics very difficult to manage and a few times I couldn't hear the guitarist clearly enough which led to a couple of very bad bum notes and a complete restart of one song - I can't actually remember ever having to do that with this band. I need another clip box for the lights. Carrying cardboard boxes across the carpark in the rain doesn't do them any favours, and I really need to reduce the number of trips.

Never too old to learn Rob. Dave

I bought the Beedster II from Chris. Everything was fine as usual. The fretless bass sounds excellent just as Chris said. Cheers.

i just used 12345 in the zip code and it worked

I wouldn't jump to go down the mixer route yet as I've found most preamp pedals (I have 5 and all do) will drive an active PA cab. I'm sure someone cleverer than me (i.e. all of the above contributors) will know how many mV etc you need.

Yep those exterior patches are pretty horrible - I'm actually guessing that's a skint owner repair somewhere back in the distant past rather than a professional fix. They certainly look very old. I see a fair number of guitars and basses through my workshop that started off high end - and then as they got more battered - gradually moved down to less and less well heeled musicians. There's an old saying 'don't buy a luxury car from someone who hasn't been able to afford the maintenance' and this is sort of true of musical instruments too - especially the more complex and difficult to repair ones. Because of the possibly necessary cheaping-out on the repairs in its past this poor old bass is going to need a lot spent on it. It would be a shame however to see it some sort of sterile ornament in a corner.

I believe standard (i.e. deceptive) practice for the specs of power banks is that they tell you the mAh rating of the internal Li-ion cell, not the output. So it may actually be 20 Ah from the 3.7 volt cell, which would be about 75 watt-hours, which after boosting up to 20 volts gives you three and a half amp hours or thereabouts. If everything else performs as specified then I guess it should work, but not for as long as you might have wanted.