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Lots of good advice posted above, Construction is key. so go try loads of secondhand high end basses, as suggested Bass Direct near Warwick should be on your list and Bass Bros are not far away so worth a trip in that direction. I did use one of these Aphex below, a suggestion if you get the choice wrong. I don't need now i have the right basses and cabs. But I'm have found a 1/4 sawn maple neck with swamp ash body the way to go, a light resonant bass is the start point. I am happy with my 5 string but is a very good Marleaux. I bought on here second hand about 15 years ago. and as a pointer I have recently bought a Sadowsky 4 string with the best sounding bottom octave E - E I have ever heard. Which makes me wonder what their 5 string are like. It is Ash and chambered. Good luck try everything.

I’m afraid I can’t help with the restoration, but it’s a bloody lovely looking bit of 80’s bass you’ve got there 😍

A good few years ago I joined a scratch band, and because no one really knew each other we exchanged emails as a means of passing around song ideas set lists etc, the drummer gave us his work email, but a later told us to stop sending him emails as his work didn't like it. Transpires he worked for a bank and they ended up firing him (so he says) for all these emails he was getting with dodgy attachments (mp3 files ie songs) He then ranted at all of us for losing him his job and demanded that we started getting at least 4 gigs a week because he was jobless and it was our fault. Given we were playing about 2 gigs a month at that point and happy with that we kindly asked him to move along.....eejit!

Spectors have a lot of their own personality, not surprised it sounded right despite the (slightly) different amp.

Yesterday I tuned my Euro LX4 down to C with a set of .110 - .55 strings. Played in to Reaper through my Two Notes Revolt on the Marshall (dirt) channel its sounding really very close to Rex Brown's tone in the last two Pantera records. It sounds awesome. I was surprised by this considering Rex used Ampegs and Ive not got a Haz preamp yet

Rock Me Amadeus - Falco

...in another band we went through two or three members after fall-outs due entirely to arguments in the car park after load out. I think it was just a case of everyone being a bit tired (and sometimes alcohol was involved). Decided that for the long term good of the band we wouldn't speak to each other during load out - just pack everything and go! Sadly COVID did for that band in the end as we got out of the habit of playing together and then people moved on to different projects.

I really liked the neck on a 66 P bass in refin sonic blue at Andy Baxter’s, unfortunately he wouldn’t budge on price at all as he had another person online interested whilst I was there in person trying it. I wasn’t after masses off but everyone likes a deal don’t they? Maybe thats just me. Sad to say I didn’t buy it as I was about £100 off what he was asking and that was as much as I could offer. Lovely old thing though.

If anyone is in Canterbury this seems a bargain. I'd absolutely get it for the head alone if I was closer, and also not tripping over nine cabs as it is!

Not last night, but last week. We played a garden party at the drummers house/garden, all fairly relaxed, and so I took the little Behringer analogue mixer. WE took great care in speaker and mic placement and for once had bags of headroom before feedback. Monitors nice and loud for lead vocals and although I could not really here the BVs well, I was not bothered, it was a bit of fun. We had a quick listen to the FoH vocals without the band usually, and it seemed OK. We usually wander out front during soundcheck, but not this time it was for fun... First set went down well, but the sound was described as "sizzley". I listened to the speakers with no signal and there was a pronounced hiss. Not too bad, I thought, so I carried on and set up a camera to record the second set. All was well, lots of nice comments. When I played back the video yesterday, I realised that the gain on the Guitarist's mic was up way too high and because the monitor mix was wrong, we did not realise that he was clipping badly. That was the sizzle reported. Another lesson learnt, thankfully not on a paid gig.

Any thoughts on this ridiculously cheap Darkglass clone?

There's no wrong answer from the replies already given. Buy the one that is so appealing to you that once you have it at home you won't be able to walk past it without picking it up and having a play.

This was a rig I had and would gladly return to it, if I had a roadie to load it!

EW = Exotic Wood, such as mango 🥭 😉

This journey, into bass playing? What made you pick up that first bass at the start of this long and winding road? I was given a musical aptitude test at school when I was in Y2 (age 6-ish?) and got picked to take violin lessons. Kept violin going for about 10 years, hit maybe grade 7 practical-wise and enjoyed playing in big orchestras with a G7/8 entry requirement and audition.. but played by a mixture of sight-reading and ear-training, refused to take grade exams or learn any more theory than was absolutely required, and almost never practiced at home. I give myself an A for blagging-it, looking back. In a Y9 music class (age 13-ish?) I had a classical guitar shoved at me and was taught the chords to play along to 90% of Everybody Hurts by REM, and that was enough to get me interested in guitar and signal the beginning of the end for the violin which, if I'm honest, I was mostly keeping as a way of avoiding PE lessons by that point. I bought a cheap electric guitar and amp (a Session Pro black and white Strat copy and a Peavey Rage) from the son of a friend of my mum, and proceeded to get absolutely nowhere with it because the focus of everything I read was learning ever more chords. Traded the guitar and amp against a bass working on the theory that it was more violin-like; 4 strings and focused on one note at a time instead of bloody chords. The difference in pitch and the idea of playing the 'bass part' never came into my thinking at all. Brought it home, tuned it up, sat on the sofa and proceeded to just play along to the football show theme tune that happened to strike up on the telly in the background. It made near-instant sense to me and I had a new instrument. Do you still have the same fire and enthusiasm? Do you still love it? Yeah, it's still my thing. My other thing is being the kind of computer geek that has an 8U rack of switches, routers and firewalls where most people have a BT smart hub on top of a Billy bookcase, so I need something mainstream-cool going on outside that. What has changed along the way? Your taste in music, taste in basses? My mum was (..and still is) into rock music so she passed that on to me and it's always been home. The classical years were great ear training but I don't seek out classical music. Meeting friends and playing in bands has forced me into some slightly heavier metal styles but if I can't hear a definite note from somewhere at all times then I just can't play along, so bands that are constant blast-beats with a wall of guitar-noise, flappity-fingered bass parts and growling/screaming vocals are still completely inaccessible to me from a playing standpoint. Basses-wise, I've gone from playing 5-string Vampyres and Warlocks for 10 years, over to 4-string Precisions and Jazzes for 10 years, and am now back to 5-string Streamers and Stingrays. Thought it might be Spectors and Ibanez SRs for a while, but nope. What was the first bass? And what’s the latest? First was technically a black/white/rosewood Squier P-bass Special, but it had issues which I now know were to do with the truss rod, and the shop eventually let me know the distributor was recalling the batch so I should return it. They fixed me up with a Yamaha BB N4ii in 'yellow natural satin' (read: wood), which was orders of magnitude better. Latest is one of the new '24-spec Warwick RB Streamer LX 5s in gloss white.

I sold a Gramma pad to Shep. An amazingly smooth and easy transaction as we only live about two miles apart.