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Just seen the ad for their new range of Squiers. A 40 year anniversary tribute range to their entry level instruments that in their words, were introduced after calls to "make Fender designed products available at affordable prices" They're £500 I've contacted Fender to suggest they call it the "Irony" series😉

It's strange how we tend to spend a lot of time effort and money chasing that "perfect" tone, but if you listen to the many isolated bass guitar tracks from great recordings, you'll rarely hear it. What makes the bass sound good is not how brilliant it sounds on its own but how well the mix engineer has blended it with the other instruments, usually making the solo'd track sound very different to the original recorded sound.

It's offending me less than the £15,000 Phil Lynott precision. But it's still taking the fosters.

At the time when I left school, becoming a musician seemed a complete impossibility. I was a fairly average bass player who seriously lacked self confidence. My mother was pretty unpleasant and criticised me at pretty much every opportunity and that just made me less confident. After uni I took a rubbish job just to keep her off my back. After 2 years I was so sick of it that I jacked it in and followed my then girlfriend out to Greece where she had found a job with one of the big tour operators for the summer. She hated her job and we fell out so she left for home. I took her job, which i had been helping her with anyway and stayed for the rest of the summer. I loved it and at the end of the summer I was offered promotion and winter work in ski resorts which turned into full time year round work eventually working as a snowboard instructor in Europe and then the USA. I did it for 11 years and saw the world, meeting my wife along the way. By this point my confidence was sky high and, when we returned to the UK in 2008, I quickly picked up music again. I now earn half of my income from music and set up my own pest control business that allows me to make up the rest of my income whilst being flexible enough to gig multiple times a week. I couldn't care less whether anyone thinks music is a valid form of income. It works well for me and my family and I'm happy. I know plenty of people with "proper" jobs who can't honestly say they are happy.

Thumbs up! - 1990 NT 6 CS + 1995 NT 5 Can upload more & in color if you guys want;]

I think the bigger issue is how have Fender, who were started on the basis of producing instruments in a cheap and innovative way, managed to promote themselves as a high end maker while having innovated almost nothing since the 50s. They maintain a premium price by continually moving the lowest end product to a cheaper location, and rebranding the previous base model at a higher price. I am not anti Fender, but we should be honest about what they are actually producing. Fender is the Ford of musical instruments - and we shouldn't think about paying Ferrari money for them

Yes, I've installed an elevator in our house so as I can listen to it. But it's what I like.

Every bass amp has a baked-in sound. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in having multiple makes of amp. You pick one with a baked-in sound that you find pleasing.

I am filled with loathing for the chancers you see on eBay and Facebook advertising HBs for more than the retail price of a new one. People try to blame the victims for not doing proper research before they buy, but blaming the victim is shameful.

IMO sterile. I don't know where you've read that stuff, but from day one the sound of the electric bass was defined not just by the instrument but also by the amp and speaker, and they were anything but clean.

With all the big makers, it's all so much about the RE; reinvention, reinterpretation, reissuement, rerendering, rebranding and renaming. If Fender were a car manufacturer, they'd be making eight ton vehicles based on 50s specs that returned ten miles a gallon, but they'd be called stuff like The Starliner Deluxe Tribute.

4'33 ～ John Cage

I’ve used loads of amps through the years - Ashdown, Eden, Hartke, GK, Trace, Glock… class A/B, D, valve… All have their own tonal tints and hues, the Glock being the most transparent/flat with everything at noon. I’ve found recently that the way I EQ that to my liking creates a tone very very similar to the Trace TE-1200 set “flat”. As @BigRedX says, find the one with the base sound that you like and use that. For me at the moment that seems to be the Trace, but I’m not making a rash decision yet because I’ve spent the last 15 years doing that 😅

So, it arrived today First up, many thanks to Mark at BD for getting it to me on the day I asked it to get to me, the hardest part of buying anything these days is the courier stress. Great comms and great service guys, thanks Second, wow, this is a very very well engineered instrument, the neck pocket is more what I associate with EBMM (in fact the neck itself is very EBMM in terms of profile and playability, both the fretwork and the lovely oiled finish on the back remind me of the lovely BFR 'Ray I had a whole back). The finish really is NOS with some very discrete checking and rubbing, and the bridge in the flesh is nothing like as noticeable as in the photos. It's pretty light and the action is absolutely spot on. So how does it sound? I don't have an amp at present so will have to run run it through my desk and monitors tomorrow to get a sense. But even unplugged I can tell it's very responsive and resonant, and I doubt the Fralins are going to make things worse somehow 👍

We've got a saying in the States about sphincters and opinions, I've got to assume you have a similar one on your side of the pond. That's especially true of Talk Bass. I had to leave there ten years ago lest I lose what was left of my sanity completely. 😳

Clever Trevor ～ if you have to ask...

This. I remember the first time I ran my bass direct into the board in a studio with proper monitors, not the little nearfield speakers everyone uses these days with their desktop studios (it was at the BBC studios in Maida Vale in case that's of interest). The sound was smooth, clean and even - all the notes spoke equally. It was also rather characterless and needed eq, etc to make it work in the mix. As others suggest, look for an amp that has a baked-in sound that suits you and go from there. Some are certainly more overtly baked-in sounding than others, but what you like and what suits the music you are playing is what counts, rather than how it measures on an oscilloscope.

To me, Yamaha is a prestige brand, just like Fender, Gibson,et al. From entry level to high end, they can give most other manufacturers a run for their money.

Don't Worry, Buy Nappies ～ Bobby McFerret

Does that mean that they're good for metal?

Some oversized radio style knobs on a Kay I've refinished/restored, inspired by the brass Westone Thunder knobs. Bought on AliExpress.

This is a design I drew up, a few years back, for a Zen Drive based pedal. My aim for this winter is to actually build it.

Here the clips : Precision and Jazz Basses

How could I have forgotten about the Queen of bassface? The marvellous Este Haim. She has great tone and groove and plainly really gets into her playing.

Go to a shop and play some. Buy the one you like the most.

I've had this sitting around for years, waiting for me to decide what to do with it. It's not really a Rick copy beyond the body shape but that meant that the retailer, a fairly short lived UK online brand called Wesley, rapidly got a C&D letter from Old John Hall & panic-flogged all their stock of these for £99. And I bought one. It's called a Wesley Europa, and used to look a bit like this: It's a nicely-made through-neck bass with a 3-band active preamp, 2-way truss rod, flamed top & wooden body binding. It's also got one of the most inappropriate afterthought headstocks I've ever seen on a Rick-style thing - and I've seen a few. It's a nice-playing & decent-sounding bass, meaning I did gig this quite a lot when I first got it, which quickly highlighted a significant problem - the finish that's been used everywhere other than the nice, shiny top. It's basically had a thin coat of matt black applied onto bare wood over the entire body & neck - and this just comes off, on your hands, on your clothes, anything you lean it against - everywhere, any excuse! I don't have any pics of mine at the time but this is one that turned up on Ebay quite recently - mine looked just like this after a few weeks of use! So I temporarily retired it with a view to refinishing it and maybe making that headstock a bit more palatable. Dismantling it & removing what was left of the black 'finish' revealed a rather pretty neck-through construction underneath: It also left me with a dilemma regarding the headstock - I've re-shaped a few before with pleasing results but there's so little space to improve this, the best I could come up with design-wise was pretty much an Ibby Soundgear lookalike, which hardly seemed worth the effort. Hacking the bloody thing off was a more appealing idea but way more complex than I'd originally planned. So as is my wont, I got bored & wandered off, and years passed, as they do. Converting this to headless stayed in the back of my mind & probably about 10 years on, I started seeing affordable & potentially useable headless hardware in the form of cheapo Chinese individual bridge/tuner units. I'd previously thought about that 'Overlord Of Music' Hohner clone system, but that would involve routing (I don't have a router) and relocating or abandoning the battery compartment, which is directly behind the bridge. Anyway, I recently came across some nice looking individual units branded 'Guyker', hit the buy button, and this is what turned up in the post a few days later, direct from Weifang, China, for the princely sum of about £45 delivered. They look halfway decent & seem to be pretty well-made, I think the machined components are brass under the paint, not sure about the cast saddles etc. The lack of thrust bearings is a bit of a disappointment but with a sufficiency of lubricant they should hopefully be functional. Setup is likely to be a bit of a fiddle with the saddles needing to be positioned by hand then locked in place with small & inaccessible allen screws, but likely to be a do it once then forget it task. The head-end string retainer won't win any prizes for stylish design, but it's very solid & the two clamps per string certainly mean business. The plan is - obviously, I hope - to lop off the ugly bit (which I accept might be subjective) and re-shape what's left to be functional and not look like a complete bodge/mistake. I've previously been nonplussed by, and critical of 'headless' basses that retain a sort of vestigial flap where the head should be (Laurus springs to mind) but paradoxically, that is exactly what I intend doing with this! There's an element of necessity - the string clamp requires a bit of 'head' to be mounted on, and I also need to leave space for truss rod access. While it's tempting to make this as minimal as possible, the proportions of this bass mean that the tuners will overhang the end of the body by a good 2-3 cm so it's going to have to live on a wall hanger or neck-supporting stand, rather than be bunged in the corner. So my necessary flappy end bit will keep enough of the 'flare' of the old headstock to do that. Assuming I can cut straight. So now we come the the nailing stuff together & hacking bits off part - I haven't done anything like this in some considerable time and it's a bit daunting! First things first - position the tuner units accurately. I marked saddle travel positions from the original bridge on the body - the new units have a little more range and will be a few mm closer to the bridge pickup, as G string intonation was at the limit of its movement on the old bridge. Measuring from the 12th fret after marking the new saddle positions, the mid-point between them turns out to be bang-on 17". Which is reassuring! Having measured everything (hopefully!) accurately, I made a template for screw hole positions for the individual units, giving 20mm string spacing, same as the original. Using the same template I made a plate to sit under the tuners to conceal the old bridge mounting holes and the earth wire which will link the units. It's less than 1mm thick and should not adversely affect string height. A minor irritation with the tuners is the presence of a screw which sits proud of the base of each unit. It limits the travel of the ball-end retainer to stop the unit falling apart - but also stops it sitting flush on the top of the bass, which is irksome. So in order to make them screw down properly, I'll have to create a row of rebates for the heads to sit in. Lacking suitable tools it'll be down to my ancient Dremel knock-off, a steady(ish) hand and a sense of relief that the resulting mess will be covered by hardware. OK, time to work some wood - out with the blowtorch and nailgun, and onward!

I really like working with this guy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/PickKnobs He loves doing custom work and the pictured stuff on Etsy barely scratches the surface of what he can do.

I bought a Bassman 50 watt new, in 1966. Even by the standards of the day it was weak, especially in the lows. Not surprising, as it was a re-badged guitar amp. The 'deep' switch didn't make the tone deeper, it just muted the highs. A 30 watt Ampeg B-15 blew it away on all counts. That's when it began to dawn on me that watts don't mean much.

Teenage Rampage - Sweet

Chocolate Girl - Deacon Blue

Inflation isn't always a good barometer as some things get much cheaper due to production methods, certainly beginner guitars are in this group. Comparing them to similarly specced competitors is pretty reliable and the street price of £450 is a lot of money for what is essentially an offshore bolt on plank with no expensive components.

That's the room modes that I mentioned. Parametric is about the only cure for those, and not without cost. They manifest as a product of the positions of the room boundaries, the cab placement and the listener position. Move any one of those three and the result changes, so using a parametric to kill boom where you're standing can kill useful frequencies in the audience. That's why I always adjust my tone from well out front, and whatever that happens to give me on stage I just live with.

The 70s PBasses do it for me in both vids, they just seem to have a bit more bite to them and sound like they're snarling their way through a song!

Very cool design! I like the LED placement. That also reminds me that I've used HR Giger stuff on some of my builds.

I wasn't refering to what is technically possible, obviously all threads can become locked if necessary. The wanted threads are different in that the whole forum is set up to not be replyable. And the downside of this is that any thread that you can't reply to can't get bumped so it was very quickly dissapear off the first few pages of the forum, so after a few days, the chances of anyone seeing it are pretty close to none - wanted is ok like that as people know what they are searching for, but for a normal thread it isn't really going to be seen unless someone does a search, and that only normally happens through google 10 years after the last post! This is of course just my opinion here, and if you want it locked then you can report your post and say what you want, then the mods can discuss it and see if it is something they wanted to do - I am not a mod so don't really have that much of a say (I am an admin, here to fix it when it breaks)

Congrats on making it to market Stevie!

You forgot Kathy valentine of the gogos and also Michael Steele of the bangles plus also tal wilkenfeld kate Davis plays double bass whilst also singing

I love both of those tracks - good job! You really capture an authentic feel. Good luck with the vinyl release.

I apologise because I forgot about this, but for @Reggaebass and @Nail Soup and anyone who might have been interested, the finished record sounds like this: and the B-side is like this: It got released as a limited edition 5” lathe cut which plays at 45rpm. Not compatible with all turntables (particularly automatic ones) but it sounds fine on mine. I know people tend to moan about lathe cuts not being super hi-fi, or how mastering in mono is a waste of time in this day and age, or whatever, but they can laugh at how basic it sounds or cry into their half-speed mastered Steely Dan reissues for all I care. 😂 DJs have already played it in clubs, it made a profit on the first day of release and as long as it makes folks do monkey dancing when it comes out of a big sound system I’m happy. A label in the UK has already sent off the masters for a vinyl follow up, so... job done 👍 If anyone has doubts or second thoughts about whether or not what they’ve recorded is good enough to release, don’t sweat it just do it. Go with your instincts and crack on. Don’t fret about whether or not your music sounds ‘pro’ enough. It probably is. Just put it out there. And keep doing it. Anyhow. Hope everyone’s doing alright and looking after themselves. All the best to yers!

Now, not that I am encouraging any GAS related purchases to a new forum member (I mean, I would never do something like that...), but oh look, there just happens to be a Jazz in Tidepool blue that came up in the for sale section yesterday....I mean, if you just happened to 'need' a matching jazz bass in the same colour.... jus' sayin'....

Pff.. Hugging? Don't need any of that kind of malarkey, we aren't guitarists!

Laura Lee of Khruangbin - plays some brilliant grooves.

At least i know what to avoid in the future. Very handy list 🤓