Leaderboard

It's great that he's refunding people, but don't let that be an end to it. He's ONLY refunding people because he's been caught and the sh*tshow is being shared all across social media. He wouldn't have done so otherwise. Don't let this situation go. Contact the Fraud people, push the Police on it and make sure he NEVER does this again....

And today, with the bandsaw still out from cutting @Jus Lukin 's tailstock relief (photo in the morning once it's light) I got to work on the great big - but surprisingly light - lump of swamp ash: I've left around a mm or so wiggle-room larger than the paper template @Fishman sent me. Looking at the above, this is why I wasn't overly troubled by the sensitivities of re-bodying a classic - the shape is, I think you will agree, 'maybe, itself, influenced by the styles of the era in which it was built'

The Royal Philharmonic. Those bastards have been trading on the name for 100 years!!

I couldn't find him on Companies House and Funktion Junction Entertainment isn't a company. I am keen to track him down and see to what extent he can be banned from being a company director (if he is one).

I've been hunting for the perfect OC-2 ish thing for my board, and eventually decided the only way to figure this out was to gather as many of the options as I could. After some discussions on the 3Leaf and OC-5 threads I ended up filming some of the comparisons in the hope that it can be useful to someone in the same situation as me. The options available were: Boss OC-2 (the old faithful) Boss OC-5 3Leaf Octabvre Mk1 COG T-47 (2x T-16) (the current incumbent) Markbass RAW Octaver MXR Vintage Bass Octave I've tried to use musical examples for context. If anyone has any questions please let me know! I'm still gathering my thoughts and will report back a little later, including what happened when we did a blind test with my OC-2 loving friend. The current settings are always shown onscreen. I would also love to hear from anyone who has compared the Octabvre Mk1 to the brand new model, which i couldn't get my hands on!

Shall I merge this with the abstinence thread and be done with it 😂

they don't count, they're just a covers band 😂

Look at it this way, it's enough to get someone elected US president these days.

OK, I've pulled the trigger on an Ibanez SRF 700 Portamento. Should arrive Friday. With the new national lock down going to look at / pick up used gear is not going to happen. The Ibanez has a 120 day free return policy and I got it for a decent price. New year, new gear :woot:

NCD : Spector NS flight case, many thanks to the team at Bass Central , Florida. Sadly these are not available via the UK distributers although they tried but it wasn’t financially viable. The original TKL Kramer/Spector tolex case is still as new but the Gator version is definitely a step up from it , very surprised that these are not shipped as standard with US models.

I thought I'd give the ski slope one more try What does everyone reckon?

Dey Do Do Do (dat, don't dey doh) - The Police

I was one of the idiots who bought what I have come to regard as the mythical Timeshare Sansamp off this scammer. The thread I created is still active on Facebook ''Bass Market’ page. im happy to report that after many many emails back and forth between myself and Mick Mason, I eventually had a refund from him yesterday. It looks like another at least another two folks (who had also bought a Timeshare in this pedal) have eventually had refunds. There's one guy who hasn't yet but he's receiving help and support from those of us who've somehow successfully persuaded him to do the right thing.

I'm the fortunate owner of Travis Bean TB-2000 No. 883, originally bought brand new in 1978 from Nadine's Guitars in Hollywood, CA for what at the time was a precious amount to a 21 year old, $380 if I recall correctly. This baby has served me well, is such a unique bass with remarkable low end, clarity, roundness, and sustain. The TB-2000 is instantly recognizable as the instrument Wyman used to record the Stone's album "Some Girls" which included the hit song and classic bass line on "Miss You". This bass suites my sound perfectly & I feel very lucky to be it's one and only lifelong owner. Weight has never been an issue and when the neck is cold (depending on the weather) coming out of the case, once warmed up in short order it's ready to play to my heart's delight, completely uninhibited. Love my Travis Bean... Old No. 883 & will continue to play it 'till the day I die!

I am really good friends with Jeff. Infact just spoken to him recently. [he is living out at Clacton] Not doing any Bass stuff at the moment. He built me a couple of Basses in the late 80's [one was a great 6er, also his repair work was great] If you want to speak to him PM me your name and number, and i will pass it on. He likes his privacy these days. Garry Hi Gary, My names Jack Finch & Jeff was my grandad unfortunately he passed away in 2013. I’d love to know what you know about him and if you know anyone that has one of his guitars? My Dad Lee Finch unfortunately, didn’t get to keep one of his guitars as it was so sudden. Reading this makes me so sad & I just know how much it would mean to my dad if i could get hold of one. Funnily enough, Dave Swift was using my Grandads guitar on BBC live on the NYE countdown! I would love to hear from you! Kind Regards, Jack Finch

If Thomann stop selling to the UK, the next largest stockist of Harley Benton is ' @stewblacks Bass Emporium', so all is not lost.

I missed out on a bargain sansamp from some bloke called Mick on Facebook.

Over the last 6 months or so I've been creating a little home studio is the tiniest of rooms (about 8 times as long as the lower bout of a concert sized acoustic body and about 4 times as wide, so its small!!) It currently houses 16 guitars/basses, 3 amps, a drumkit, a full Cubase recording set up with midi keyboard, monitors, vocal mics, ukuleles, various percussion items, a Helix LT etc etc. So everything one needs to record almost anything! And a fair bit of my Lego collection! Just for funzies, has anyone else shoe-horned this much into a tiny room? Everything, including the drumkit is direct into DAW, so the sound quality of the end product is actually surprisingly good! I mean, its not quite Abbey Road quality, but it's far from terrible!

Ah finally a place I can call home 😂 Out - Gibson Thunderbird 2003 , Custom built Gold P and Ashdown ABM600 In Bergantino IP310 from Owen, 1988 Battered Stingray, 4 packs of Bass Boomers and 4 packs DR Sunbeams. Im also trying to not buy a US Ampeg SVT CL 🤷‍♂️ Sorry, not sorry

Gong! Although the new line-up is approoved by all PHP's...

Another song I loved as a kid. This had a real other-worldliness about it. Something different going on. I think Errol Brown was a really underrated songwriter. Can’t think of many songwriters who have a breadth of work, in terms of Top 10 singles, that can be unashamedly ‘pop’ one minute and then cover subject matter such as suicide and interracial relationships the next. A talented guy...

Bravewood eh? Now I’m scanning your collection for swaps... damn this thread, it’s like reverse psychology 🤔

I’m in. 2020 was nuts for purchases, so a dry 2021 will be a doddle 😉

Woooahhhh! Who says I’ll fail like? To be honest I’ve already traded a Bass, sold a bass and bought an amp this year 😂 I was probably out not long after midnight 😂

Shall I just mark you as “out” now?? 😂 and while I’m doing that I’ll do the same for @AndyTravis & @walshy... no hope. Unless I win the lottery and get a Ken Smith and a Sadowsky PJ then I have no need for anything and have every confidence I’ll make it through 😂 honest! 😂

We are now entering the next phase of 'Adventures in Hofnerland'. I spent a long time to-ing and fro-ing over whether to try and find all genuine parts to make it as original as possible, or just get the parts to make it a decent usable bass whilst looking period correct, a resto-mod if you like. Unfortunately for @Shaggy he kindly messaged me to let me know of a Hofner pickup on ebay, I then proceeded to bore him with the details of my dilemma. 😉 And now I'll bore everyone else. 😄 Whilst a proper restoration would be lovely, sourcing genuine tuners, pickups, electrics, knobs and scratchplate would likely cost more than the bass was worth, or what I could buy a genuine one for, and it would still have a badly molested body which is painted the wrong colour. Also I have my Club for proper Hofner tones and my 4005 for that retro 'pickups at both extremes' tone. So sympathetic resto-mod it is. If the correct parts ever came my way it would all be easily reversible anyway. I've ordered the chrome mini humbuckers from Warman, as the Hofner staple pickups are mini humbuckers and these have very similar specs, some switches and pots and my scratchplate material is here. The pickups are four wire jobbies so the plan is to install two slide switches where they were on 185s and wire one pickup through each switch, the three way switches will give me single coil and double coil in series and parallel mode. These will be wired through two tones and two volumes (one for each pickup) with one of the pots being a push/pull which will put the pair of pickups in either series or parallel with each other. This should give me a much better range of tones than the standard ones but still retain the core original tone. If I can work out how to wire it up. 😁 Hopefully everything will be here by the weekend and I can get to work. Here's a few more pictures showing the body with the white scratchplate, to show how creamy beige the body is. The body, scratchplate material and neck, to show how the colour scheme should fit together, the cream and brown is meant to reflect the neck inlays. And another of the pickups which are on their way, I've ordered the chrome surrounds as well but not sure what they'll look like, I'll see when they turn up.

I can't face wading through all of the above so apologies if this has already been mentioned.

Hands off

Agreed. Do we know the names of all of his companies? I want to put the word out to my network to be wary. Also, this was his final message to me after I called him out. I said this on FB and will say it here: Thank you to you all for your help and support, I feel it really counted in getting my money back. You bunch of legends.

Ordered...jeezo, Basschat can be a dangerous place when you can be an impulsive buyer...!! 😂🙈😂

Sugababes. After individually leaving and being replaced, the original members subsequently reformed, but had to use a new name.

EU & China have recently announced a trade a trade deal. If WTO is so great, why did they bother? UK international trade Everything you might want to know about the UK's trade with the EU - Full Fact But it's wrong to say that all non-EU trade was done on WTO terms. Through the EU we had over 140 international trade agreements. Most trade was done through these. As a past leader of the WTO has said; UK has chosen to go from Premier League to 4th Division. As far a Thomann is concerned - If Thomann can't get a carrier to take your Yamaha bass from Germany to UK, then your changing to a Ibanez or Fender still leaves them with the same problem to get it to you. Germany can still get them. It's UK that has chosen to go to 4th Division.

Its what businesses have always been crying out for, more red tape. I am glad the government have finally listened.

It's not just a question of not wanting our money! It's whether the extra barriers that the UK Government have put in place make it still worthwhile to trade with us! For Thomann, as the world's biggest (probably!) musical instrument retailer they already have the UK Vat registration and the means to deal with that. They do enough business in the UK and have the mechanisms in place to keep trading with UK consumers profitable. But for smaller sellers that's not necessarily the case; firstly they've got to register with HMRC for VAT. They've got to take VAT from UK customers, do a VAT return to HMRC quarterly and pay their UK VAT bill. That's all fine if you're a UK business (arguably!), but as, say, a German business they already have to do all that with the German BZst - doing the same thing for another country for a few grand is probably not worth their while! Not only that there's also a sense of rejection on the continent - our Government hasn't really made itself friendworthy with some of its actions - people think "why should we bother with them if they're not interested in us?" Then businesses like ours will miss out... Our little orchid supplier, who sell us all sorts of exciting varieties that you just can't get from UK growers, doesn't think it's worthwhile. Our lovely French homeware supplier, who sells us all those particularly Gallic trays and cups, isn't interested either. We'll briefly suffer in the short term - our customers will miss those bits'n'bobs you couldn't get elsewhere - and we'll find something hopefully new and interesting instead, but the real question is why? For what? Have we actually gained anything at all, or is it just about a small section of or society now having the illusion of Empire Rebirth?

Picking this up later 😂

I'm far from an expert, though I've worked in 3 electronics companies buying heavily from China and the EU. China's and our trading relationship with the EU is apples and oranges. China/EU trade is facilitated by a colossal industry of brokers, middlemen and importers/exporters who deal with the bureaucracy. UK/rest of EU trade was much more direct, because it could be. Yes we've dealt with the rest of the world for years, but for the end consumer importing stuff from the rest of the world has been prohibitively expensive for all those years too. America, Australia, Japan etc. Places like thomann, gear4music and countless other businesses across all sectors were built around the assumption that this would never happen. For them, there is only damage control, and we as consumers are only ever going to have less than we did before. Also worth pointing out that yes, businesses trade with the rest of the world more than the EU but its 51.1% to 48.9% so we're still talking about basically half of the average companies business being affected.

Any number of stings on a bass is cool. All basses are cool, full stop! So, play the bass that makes you happy. That'll make you a better player, no matter how many strings you've got.

Here's my transcription of what I played on Fool For Your Loving, as accurately as I'm able. I hope it's useful! Fool For Your Loving NM tab.pdf

Well, I had a bit of success making synth sounds on my Boss GT10B by combining envelope, fuzz and octave but it couldn't do everything. And being impatient I got an EHX Bass Mono Synth which has arrived today. I've got an 80s band starting up, lockdowns interrupting a lot of it, and I really dont want to bring in more musos than we need, I want to keep the band lean, so the guitarist and I are working out ways to make good 80s covers that don't need a keyboard player. Hence the synth pedal... So far I have easily been able to get the "Danger Zone" synth sound and I've been exploring getting sounds passable for Sweet Dreams and Don't you Want Me. I've had less than 15 mins with the pedal, but here's the first impressions... It can't run off batteries. If I'd known I wouldn't have taken the back off. The monophonic Ness is a bit annoying. You have to really attack the string on some settings, no subtle or soft touch allowed or you won't get any output from the synth, even with the dry signal on full you'll just drop out unless you give the string a firm pluck. Having said that playing with a plec isn't the answer, you lose a lot of nuance. The tracking is not great. This wants long ringing out notes, not fast intricate lines. It feels like combining this with the attack I need to be very careful how and when I try to use this, it's not going to get kicked in to a song in a moment of spontaneous improv. The issue with the tracking is the complete drop out, if it just let the uneffected note out I could probably live with it. Maybe it's my technique/ approach. I'll persevere. I've been playing a fretless through it... I might get some Pino sounds, I might just be emphasising the pitch wobble too much. Will try a fretted bass through it later. None of the base tones sound like stupid gimmicks, which is how I feel about most synth tones on multi effect pedals. So with dedicated tweaking I can get some good stuff out of it. The controls are intuitive too, you don't need to be a brain surgeon to change it how you want it. I think this is a keeper for my 80s band. It's unlikely to get any use in my "function" band that has 2 guitars, the songs and the 2 guitars make any bass effects other than EQ and the odd bit of drive redundant. However, for some songs I think I can get close enough for authenticity, and that's what I was aiming for!

I picked up a TourTech TT12S Drumkit and a Fender Rumble 15 to play it through from a chap down the road for £120. Can't complain for the price and it just about fits in my tiny tiny studio/office/music/lego room! First music related purchase of 2021!

That looks lovely already. 🙂👍

Yeah. Like a Mos Eisley Cantina but with lower class of clientele. 😆

Right, having read the thread, jeez RATM, chill the fk.

From our friends at Ashdown HQ. Once I bought that, I though I really should buy an amp to go in it, else it would look silly, so they got me on that too. That was an expensive trip, seeing as Guy was servicing my ABM600 for free.......

All this about trading with the rest of the world, has anybody mentioned the environmental cost of this yet? Surely we need to be reducing our carbon footprint, not increasing it by buying or selling stuff to a country that’s about as far away from us as it’s possible to get? Especially if that’s just down to ideology, and nostalgia for a time when we roamed the world trading and pillaging.

I tend to have a few patches - scrolling colours, a big end to flash then a black which fades back up to pastels, perhaps certain patches for specific intros etc. I'll swap between patches for verses and choruses but keep it pretty simple. I have a simple rig - 2 x par 64 LEDs running as sides and 8 pin spots running as effect lighting behind the band, occasionally I 'll move these to the sides if space is a premium and there's no backdrop stand

Yep, I've had one for quite a while now. Sold my Darkglass M900 as a result and am now using it more than my other favourite, the ABM600 EVO IV...