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It seems the category we are in, bedroom players, hobby players and more serious players, defines expensive. No one can judge sound quality, or whether they would like one bass better than the other, from the price tag. If you have concluded that from my posts then maybe I should have been clearer. We all have different criteria for a good sound. For some it's a Sire, for others it's a Sadowsky and for some it's a custom Alembic. Owning either one is dependent on what you define as the sound you want to make. A Ferrari or an Aston Martin might be a status symbol, but I don't know anyone who bought a bass for that reason. Great players are great players but can still sound bad. We are all dependent on our gear, and quality of our signal chain, for our sound. When we are listening to good players using "average" basses, we are actually hearing very expensive studio equipment and the "magical" ears of top engineers.

Entwistle spent years and a fortune on hundreds of bases and never sounded any different.

I never believed in the "Every bass player needs a P bass" credo, but I still regret not buying this one. Never saw a nicer P bass in my whole life.

Lovely!

I worked in a music shop that was selling Tanglewood Curbows in the late 90s - red or blue with ebanol boards, singple pickups with slapswitch and matt hardware. I definitely didn't see any Cort branded Curbows until a number of years later. Read that the UK model was initially branded Tanglewood and later changed to Cort which would explain the situation. So Tanglewood being "pre Cort" is about right from my experience even though worldwide they were likely released at the same time, just not here in the UK.

Fantastic looking bass well done 👍

Lesson to be learned going forward - next time, as soon as the date is decided, make a thread?

Always wanted the cort. never actually owned one. The fretless 5 in “bubinga” on here a couple of years ago would’ve been perfect. missed out. BAH

100% ^^ How a particular bass sounds in the mix may actually not differ that much but, equally, there's an unmistakable signature sound to some of the greats eg John Entwistle. For me, the quality of the pups and electronics makes the biggest difference here. YMMV! Playability of basses on the other hand is another thing: weight, balance/neck dive, string spacing, neck thickness, how a bass sits on your frame etc. Can individually, and certainly together, make a real difference to how comfortable and enjoyable a bass is to play. Would it be fair to say, as a rule of thumb, that the really budget basses don't major on playability? But also that playability won't necessarily improve much beyond midrange bass prices and you then start increasingly paying for branding and/or craftsmanship of boutique basses?

… for anyone wanting a decent software synth, and not spend out on hardware just yet, the Moog Mariana is ace 👍🏻👍🏻. It’s currently on sale at the moment from the Moog website. The iOS version is £15!! Bonkers for what you get (but maybe easier getting a signal out of a laptop if wanting to use live??) https://software.moogmusic.com/store/mariana

Exactly what I was going to recommend. I recently put one on my main lead guitar pedalboard to mix in wet-only signals from two delay pedals. It works a treat and was stupidly inexpensive - less than £50 on Amazon, even cheaper on eBay. It’s a clone of the discontinued OBNE Signal Blender.

Also the Hudson Project bass

He's played a lot of different things including a Hohner headless in the 80s and a Precision.

I think that we can confuse what is an expensive bass and what bass a pro is likely to use! From my experience of many years of gigging, working on stagecrews and knowing people who do all of that for a living, I would say that the most common bass used by jobbing pro bass players is probably a basic American Fender Jazz! Add an extra point if its's from the 70s, you've had it a long time and it's got a few marks and simple mods. Other common ones would be a P bass, a Sadowsky or a US Lakland, followed by perhaps a Stingray or a Yamaha BB. If you were to spend £1k or so on a simple s/h Am Std Jazz, it wouldn't look out of place if you took it out on tour a week later!

Easily missed admittedly as it was buried in the 2025 thread. I think it's just one of those unfortunate things. I'll be there in 2027!

The "Pre-Cort" version would be those made by Greg Curbow in Atlanta. Greg teamed up with Cort to gain a wider audience for his ideas on ergonomics and synthetic materials. His own place was only building 10 guitars/basses a month but Cort's facilities could really ramp up production 🙂 That was around 2002. Greg passed away 2005 and Cort kept production going for a couple of years longer. I don't know how Tanglewood ended up with the design, they did a bloody good job, but it was post-Cort 🙂 Thought I'd a photo of my two together but nope. Cap on the Tanglewood was nuts 🙂

This is my second purchase from Paddy - this time I bought his Maruszczyk Elwood 5a, and the bass was absolutely as described, very well packaged, along with very fast delivery! Excellent communication, and a great guy to deal with. Highly recommended. Thanks!

I haven't seen a date posted? Their 2025 bash was 12/10/25...we're covering 2026.

Same here. It's the first song that I can vividly remember from Top of the Pops. I was 3½!

Don't rush, there are other possibilities like the Roland/Cakewalk MIDI to USB devices. I'll get back later as I have to leave right now.

I am not sure how much these comparisons really mean. There will be small differences but with the same pickups*, player, rig etc the basses will all be pretty much identical. What really matters is how comfortable the bass is to play, be that weight, shape, neck dimensions etc, then reliably - quality wiring and hardware may save some embarrassment, then aesthetics. An MDF table would serve the same function as a teak or oak one but might not look as nice or last as long. * Even this is relative and subjective. Most basses that are mass produced have fairly similar pickups eg I doubt if I could tell a Mex P from a US P or a Yamaha BB when played through the same rig. They would all sound like P basses.

At Uni we used to do the Mud Dance whenever Status Quo came on.

Would an xlr summing box work, they're relatively inexpensive, and if you have two di's as is, I assume its xlr? https://www.thomann.co.uk/millenium_sml_21.htm?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=1581403918&gbraid=0AAAAADuDMCU57eHmqef_rUhCGUicqqn-x&gclid=CjwKCAiAu67KBhAkEiwAY0jAlRdiNhOQNn9T7tm_T-zUQaP6qsRpFvsjZycqOZtSTa6cbfErjWwbhhoC5wEQAvD_BwE