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Well done @Chiliwailer great piece of work, worthy winner , and by a margin as well this month ! if you send me a picture I’ll post it this evening

Agree, for me it was about 80/20 neck/bridge that got me where I wanted to be.

Me too, I own an EHB and also a Sire cheapy 4 string (M2) and am a fan of both. Gut feel the M6 is probably just as well made and specced as the EHB and given that its literally half the price of the EHB looks like a good deal.

I don’t think they are being shady, just not up to describing it correctly. I recently spoke to Steve at ATB guitars who had some errors in their Vintage bass listings and corrected, human error 🧐

I’m a firm believer that with a Jazz type the last place you should default to is the traditional both pickups on full / centre detent… since I’ve never liked that scoopy sound and prefer some punch I’ve much preferred the neck pickup with some bridge blended in as required for some bite. Or somewhere around 75% neck for a more biting sound. The both on only ever gets used for some ballads… But that’s just me. A few weeks ago i was chatting to the house bassist at our jam night who was complaining she couldn’t get enough punch for some rockier stuff (she’s a jazzer at heart) and lo and behold, she pretty much always just had both pickups full up and never used the neck pickup much.

I hate when that happens. When I was a student in the late 90s I encountered a 70s Fender Jazz in a secondhand goods shop in Leeds which was on sale for £750. I had some student loan money burning a hole in my pocket but unfortunately not that much so I had to pass. Ah well.

My point is that having gone to the trouble of actually making a multiscale bass with so-called custom pickups to then ergonomically compromise it seems an odd choice and reflects the fact that the market is still developing. Perhaps its just a matter of time as the multiscale market appears to be growing if recent new models by Sire (M6?) and others are anything to go by. Mind you, the new ones all seem to have the same issue - the market will decide, I guess. My instinct is that very few players swap the pickups on their basses (more likely to swap the bass) and I think the 'standardisation' argument has already left the building years ago - my Ibanez pickups are already 'custom' so the point is moot anyway. Its like arguing 'everyone should have a P-Bass because I've got one'. I bet some enterprising individual with a 3D printer could knock something out that would be an improvement ....

If anyone is looking for the actual most compact and decent stand in the world, check out the Ibanez PT32 It fits into a slim gig bag pocket. Really neat design, and very stable (still wouldn't use on stage)

Any Old Iron - Stanley Holloway, Peter Sellers, Davy Jones, Chas & Dave, Roger Daltrey & more

Sorry, but I own the ULTIMATE guitar stand. It even has a sticker telling me so.

Some of you will know that @Phil Stayt bailed my band out last weekend by loaning us his RCF Art 310s. Yesterday I battled monsoon and heatwave (typical British summer day) to travel fro Poole to Chard. As you would expect Phil and I spent a few hours discussing speakers. In particular we compared my cube shaped 8” cabinet with his easy build 8” cabinet. My cab was designed to go with my Ashdown After 8 that I had extensively modded and called the After 80. Having been blown away, week mildly amazed, at how my 8” and the 6” cab Phil built, with Fane drivers worked for bass, he did an optimised version of the 8”. Yesterday was the day we compared them. Both cabs used the Fane Sovereign 8-225 driver. Phil will explain why but basically it was the same driver in each cab at substantially the same tuning and cabinet cabinet volume. However the new cab was closer to the traditional cab rather than the cube of my cab. Apart from small issues caused by a cubic cab, we expected the cabs to sound the same. As the saying goes, every day is a school day and the cabs sounded quite different. The difference was that my cubed cabinet had the driver quite close to the floor. Once the other cab was laid on its side so that both drivers were at a similar height above the carpeted floor, they sounded very similar. There was little difference to the low end but being nearer the floor/carpet really attenuated the upper frequencies. We are all aware that rooms with lots of soft furnishings sound different to hard floors/walks but I was quite shocked at the difference.

Anything Goes - AC/DC

Frank Skinner (voice of Ozzy's audio biography) on when he first met Ozzy. Frank: I used to be in a band who played Paranoid. Ozzy: So did I!

The guy in the store told me that the pickups had been changed before he even plugged it in. I think that it is a website description error rather than a case of the dealer being deliberately shady.

In all seriousness though, its versatile as F#ck pardon my midlands accent roll back on the fat MM for huge farting bridge pickup goodness, solo the P for well, that P sound, blend them together for a full fat bigger than Jazz, Jazz bass sound. one good thing about the John east stuff is the active blend so i dont think you get that standard scoopyness, I dunno, I'm not that technical. If I had a fender style bass, deffo get the J-Retro, anything else the uni stuff, think it's more of less the same, just form factor etc. Just enquiring with Chris at Alpha now about my next build! wallet forgive me!

One of the benefits of working in an Engineering school - ready access to 3D printing. Replacement pickup ring for the Peavey T-40 pickup - the original one is a little bent and won't sit flat on the deck so I thought I'd give a homespun replacement a go. Top surface is dimpled - I could sand/polish this shiny, but it might match the top surface of the P pickup, so I'll leave that decision for when it's all mounted up.

Sounds like this!

That’s been on there for quite a while and still advertised as all original parts. Did they mention that to you when in the shop

Best Bass is the one that you want to pick up! It Started with a GSR200B, then another, then came the SR a 600, then a 300 then more... I likes an Ibanez.

Belated congratulations! Lovely example of the marque.