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I have recently been given an artist endorsement deal. I'm actually chuffed to bits about this, even though I'm 50 years old and have been gigging for over 30 years. It's made me all excited!!

Yes, not surprising with 50+ year old instruments, but they vary so much with how they've been treated. I went shopping for an EB2 with my son in Nashville a couple of years ago. The first one I found was just dead wood. The second leapt to life in my arms and wouldn't let me put her down. Same model, same year (1966), same condition to look at. Chalk and cheese. Sorry, can't resist;

My wife just showed me this meme about babies with teeth that she saw on Facebook and I thought the baby in the picture looked kind of familiar.

I've been lucky to play headliner stages at Summerfest, the world's largest music festival for the past 7 years. Blue

A few less strings & some cheat lines and it might! Reminds me quite a lot of the "One Bass To Rule Them All" design idea I knocked up about 10 years back: Having since owned a twin-neck in real life, I'd scale down the body a lot to reduce weight. Done right it could be quite manageable...

Yes, it will be announced at NAMM. The unit is expected to ship in May for the US and Europe. If you keep in eye on our Facebook page that's where most updated information is.

Probably a bit of both I'm going to draw it full size over the next couple of days but I'm pretty sure the bottom of the neck pocket will end up at the level of the back wood. If so, the only thing I have to fillet is the top wood, starting from a rectangular 'neck pocket' shaped hole. If so, a bullnose router bit or similar isn't a bad idea to rough it out @Si600 , and remembering the apprentice school engineer blue fitting techniques- but using blackboard chalk instesd of blue and scrapers to fine finish it all off, @SpondonBassed .... So I might have to retitle to: "Andyjr1515, Si600 & Spondonbassed meet their Nemesis?"

Is that not just it's gravitational pull?

I'd ditch the four as it can't do anything the five can, logically if you need fretted and fretless and five strings then a fretted and fretless five string would be the best solution.

Following on from the end of last year's tour - this Saturday sees the biggest gig of my playing career. Not bad for an old duffer! We'll be on the Introducing Stage at the Great British Rock & Blues Festival in Skegness. Anywhere between 600 and 1,000 proper die-hard music fans there for the likes of 9 Below Zero, FM, Saxon and many others. Good fun this original music lark!

I've never done one of these before, but I'm just so delighted with this bass that I want to shout from the rooftops! It's incredibly versatile, with a really sensibly voiced preamp. The humbucker has a tonne of poke and there's no drastic volume difference when the preamp's bypassed. It's comfortable, with a lovely neck, excellent finishing and quality parts. If I had to find one quibble it would be the tuners - just not quite as solid-feeling as everything else...but that's pedantry. I know the marmite reputation of green basses, but green happens to be my favourite colour and I just love the styling of this instrument - just unconventional enough IMO. The icing on the cake was a fantastic deal from Sandy at The Great British Bass Lounge, who was a pleasure to deal with from start to finish. This one will be with me for a while. Cheers, Tobie

Interesting interview from bassist Klaus Voormann, who played on John Lennons' Imagine album. Comes across as a really nice bloke. https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2019/01/11/john-lennon-imagine-interview-voorman-keltner-molland/?fbclid=IwAR3d5WAvLWfq1SDBEzwMezeMROPQHg9dglUfsaG8drFoJBVJNsgftvMTEDw

The only thing putting me off a D-bird was the fact it didn’t come in a 5 string... This is terrible news.

... or use a shorter scale bass..? T'will sound just fine.

How about colour grain filling the oak? There is a book by a guy called George Frank who developed techniques for that back in Art Deco days, it's worth trying to get a library to track down a copy. He also uses techniques like charring/wire brushing and grain filling too. One I remember was wire brushed, black stained then limed and let to fully dry then light sanded before a red filler was applied which gave a background of black with red filled white grain, spectacular! Edit, this is the book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adventures-Wood-Finishing-Fine-woodworking/dp/091880406X

Yes, no room left in the car

I'm confused...you don't need to stretch, you need to pivot off your thumb...or am I missing something??? 😕😕

I hope you managed to fit in a cup of tea between finishing the SwiftLite 2 and starting this one Andy 😲 Here we go again....😎 Following

Ha - I had similar! Went into Sam Ash, struck up on a conversation... played some bass that appeared to really float his boat... and low and behold, talk about the gigs I was doing and onto endorsement talk. To be honest though, I didn't really dig the setup as much as the rig I was using so it would have been a complete enwhoresement... which is dead against my ethics. EDIT: Larry was (and I am sure still is) a top bloke to talk to. He seemed generally interested in me, what I was up to and the like... I'm sure I've got the obligatory pic with him somewhere on my computer. (With the Jack Bruce Warwick that had just been played at some Cream reunion or something... funnily, the one he let me play to test out the rigs...)

Mount the body at an angle on the table and use the horizontal arbour (sic) with a fly cutter to cut the curve...

I have every confidence in you Andy. I would imagine you'd work the final shape of the cradle much as they used to with white metal bearings; by hand with a scraper to take off the witness marks left from rubbing the mating surfaces together with Engineer's Blue. Just don't use any Engineer's Blue in this process as it is a bugger to clean off of metal, let alone timber! Joking aside, I'd think that you'd have to have a little movement in the joint to allow you to identify the high spots. Rubbing the pieces together with no highlighting agent should work okay if you can see the shiny spots where contact is made. Interesting problem.

With the other team I usually play with it's art galleries, second-hand bookshops, vegan cafes, and early nights. With these guys I suspect it will be endless motorway miles, sushi, early morning radio interviews, and trying to cultivate inner peace because there certainly won't be any outer. Different strokes! We've got a week away in February that will be the main stress test run but we've already done a few mini tours and a bunch of festivals so I'm not expecting any nasty surprises. I'm just going to pick up a cheap laptop and a kindle so I can try and catch up on a bunch of reading.

I think my biggest to date was playing at the Suwalki Blues Festival in Poland in summer 2016. We played to about 1,500-2,000 people in a park in the middle of the town. I was depping on bass for a blues guitarist called Aynsley Lister. A cool weekend away!

Ah...but if it all fails, I have to buy @fleabag a new neck....

At the moment I'm not planning modding the neck. If I was, then yes, I think something on those lines My thought at the moment is to shape the body a little bit like @eude 's erstwhile Shuker and carve a cradle for the neck to slot into. Do I have proven skills to be able to do that? No - not yet Could this end badly? Please refer to the title

Things come full circle a lot quicker thanks to the internet. There's still not a lot of bolt-on single cut basses out there, compared the the more usual set-neck or neck-through anyway, and I believe that Shuker was the first Jon had made, and certainly one of the earliest ones here in the UK, so it's probably engrained into the search engines now. Eude

Well hello there! That bass used to be mine, and that's my photo! Small world @Andyjr1515! It's a Shuker Single Cut 6er, my first foray into the world of custom basses. I sold it, about 8 years ago I think to another member on here who doesn't seem to be around any more. It was a lovely lovely bass, but I hadn't quite figured out what I needed in a custom bass at that point, and things like nut width aren't exactly easy to change. Anyway, that would be a fine way to put together a bolt-on single cut, but I can appreciate how tricksy it will be to have the body follow the taper of the neck beyond the fender block. You could however try something like this super sexy ACG >> Just use the neck bolt pattern as it is, and then the rest of the single cut shape beyond that point is purely visual, rather than part of the joint itself? Just throwing it in there If anyone can figure this out it's you thought mate! Eude

“Make do” with an NE2. 😂😂😂

Start with 1, 4 string fretted most useful and stick with it until you are so good you need a better bass! 😎 By then you might know what you NEED/ It's all you need 😄

nee naw, nee naw.... THIS IS THE THREAD POLICE. PUT YOUR HANDS UP!!!! YOU ARE BOTH ARRESTED UNDER SUSPICION OF THREAD HIJACKING!!!

So this is the neck @fleabag is sending me: And this (again, can't credit anyone because it's just a stock picture) kind of shape: But with a few tweaks, some aesthetic and some to fit front and back onto this piece of lovely English Walnut: ...cut down by @scrumpymike 's late great mate, Merv, and also used on Mike's Rascal conversion: And this is as far as I've got design-wise: Who said precise technical drawing was dead?

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To my utter amazement it's not metaphorically, no. We're doing 18 EU and UK dates as baby support for Pink this summer; UK dates are two nights in Glasgow, Cardiff, Liverpool, and two nights at Wembley. I'm as baffled as everyone else to be honest but pretty sure our agent is getting a pay-rise this year.

What, kinda like this? Since I don’t play 5 strings or fretless these two would do me quite nicely. And have done since 1993 and 2001 respectively!

couldn't have been that bad if they asked you to come back for another go, take 'em up on the offer!

Great cabs... gigged mine with zero problems for 7 years solidly.... enjoy 👍🏻

Just caught this video of Mr Phil Mann using an Old Smoothie...

I built a bass from a kit supplied by Pitbull of Australia. The strings supplied were quite uncomfortable. They seemed more abrasive than other roundwounds that I have used so I changed them as soon as I could. I don't think it's the same Pitbull though. It's likely to be a completely different company if you are finding their strings good.

Can you scarf joint the Sapele strips to the headstock wings to get a little more strength? Sounds like your well on top of it. Funny things guitars, so easy to mess up on, not like standard furniture where you can work it out beforehand so you don't make them at all

Congrats dude! That is awesome news!

Really, no. Big old slab body and droopy mr blobby headstock. No, far from pretty, and that jazz pickup gap is screaming at me. I would say that it looks functional. The ones with the metal pickup surrounds look better (and would cover those unfinished pickup holes), and I guess in black it wouldn't look so big. I am sure it is very good but.. no.

First of all - I'm really sorry to hear you are suffering with depression. But it's also good to hear that you've got the medical side of things sorted, and that you've been to your doctor I've met many people who have not sought out advice from their GP's or who don't really address their problems, and that's a far worse position to be in. Re the flu you've just got over - I've just had a cold, which lasted around 3 weeks! It wasn't awful, I've felt worse with flu - but fighting any such illness is draining physically for your body. So it's quite natural that you don't have the energy for other things in life. We all go through phases like that anyway. I'm sure it will pass with time. Dan Dare has a good point, re investing "all of yourself" into one thing - he's right that if something goes wrong, it can have a profound effect, but also you can be drawn in so much that you fail to see the wider picture. Of course, everyone is different, and we each react differently to a given situation, and what works for one doesn't always work for others. My advice to you would be.... small steps - in everything Don't "overload" yourself with practice / rehearsing. Try just doing 20 or 30 minutes here and there. Sometimes, I'm so busy that I don't get much time - so I just do a short spell of jamming along to one or two songs on YouTube. I really love the Firestick I got a few years back, because I can jam along with music videos on my TV. Maybe try a few songs you haven't tried before? Or perhaps a song you haven't heard in a while, but enjoy listening to - and don't beat yourself up if you can't work out every note... just work out what the root notes and structure to the song are. What songs make you feel happier, or do you just like listening to? Getting out & jamming with others can go either way - but I would recommend giving it a go... but perhaps you need to find a new open-mic or jam session - somewhere you've not been before? When going through a divorce (years back) I set myself the task of getting fitter - but I did things in small steps, each having a realistic goal... like jogging around a certain circuit. First of all, take a couple of attempts to complete the circuit without stopping. Once I was able to do that, the next step was to extend the circuit. The next was to reduce my time by 20 seconds, then by another 20... but each time, making the next goal an achievable one, rather than trying to jump too far ahead with unrealistic targets.... Whatever you do - best of luck with it. So many of us have been there, or near to where you are now. Let us know how you get on EDIT: Once you start achieving "other things" - things that only you have control of, you may feel more positive about playing music....

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Genius. Sheer genius.

I'd suggest the song or band is boring rather than the bass line! Some bass lines are repetitive but I still enjoy playing them, if you're in a good band with groove!

Very expensive, that works out at about £120 a cubic foot, similar to Teak, it should be closer to £30 a cube, try these https://www.hoylehardwoods.com/