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I'm currently brushing on many many coats of water-based polyurethane lacquer. I had two-thirds of a tin of Mann's Extra Tough that I needed to use up, and I don't like using spray cans more than I have to. This also has the advantage of being innocuous enough in terms of smells that I can use it indoors when it rains. Once I've gotten a good thick layer on, I'll sand it down to a smooth finish. It sounds like an odd way of doing things, but it's worked for me on the last seven or eight instruments I've made.

After some fettlement… yup. Very happy to have an 1100s back in the fold. Wish I could remember where my old sunburst one went.

Could only find these photos of his parents.

I asked on my local bass group if anyone could photoshop black hardware onto it and some joker did this for me. 😂😂😂

I have a feeling I'm the winner. The actual area I generally use for a workbench is the bit of the keyboard drawer between the mouse mat and the edge, although I do occasionally move the keyboard to give me a bit more room. The settee to the right is a two-seater submerged to the same level all the way along. It looks very slightly messier than normal because Mrs Zero's watch is sitting on the keyboard being charged.

My ability was never going to justify the cost of a 'real' one (or the amount of use it'd get). So, a Chinese SUB with a Stinger preamp and Nordstrand MM4.2 pickup, converted tounlined fretless, with a new rosewood fingerboard. Close enough for me to noodle on at home. Now, wherever did I lay my hat?

So I sold my Musicman USA Sterling and went on the hunt for another bass. My nearest shop is now RichTone in Sheffield (great guys there) and they had loads of 2nd hand basses (£1300 Shuker anyone?) which I had a good go with. I was interested in a Sonic Squire P and they got one out of a box for me. How is this only £170? Compared to my Fender P (player model) it’s very good quality (better in some respects.) and sounds amazing. The colour is wonderful - I love surf type colours. I was interested as it has a Jazz neck on it - I assume so new players have an easier time with their first bass - and it feels great, nice and thin in all directions and is a lovely Matt finish. I don’t like roasted necks and this one is lovely and light coloured and matches the blue really well. Tuners and bridge are just as good as my fender, fit and finish is about the same tbh. Might need the odd tickle here and there but it is very playable out of the box no fret buzz and set up well (for me anyway). The controls feel really nice and it has a good range of tone. Only negative is that the scratch plate is poor quality. Single ply and very plasticky and not well finished compared to my Fender but that’s a cheap change and not really essential to how it plays and sounds of course. Plans are to change the hardware to black so I’ve ordered a Hipshot black bridge and string tree, just deciding which tuners and knobs to order. Not sure whether to go for a 3 ply black or silver metal pick guard or maybe a carbon fibre look one like a Dingwall. Will get some more pics later if anyone is interested. I will update as I add more bits to it.

First coat of black on the headstock... that took over an hour... Also made a start on the French polish - testing it out in an inconspicuous area first - the neck ferrule holes...

A Thursday night gig for The Desperate Cowboys at The Golden Eagle in Derby. There’s not much space for bands to play in, but as a three-piece it was bearable. A good crowd for a weekday night, car parking right outside and a ten minute drive from home. Taylor mini-bass through a TE Elf and Barefaced One-10.

This is just my take on bass life, I'm not telling you what to do. Nostalgia is expensive. I have one rule - if it's not getting played, it's getting sold. I've sold my first bass. I've sold my "year of birth" bass. It's just stuff. They're just things. There's no mojo, there's no magic, it's just my brain being its usual soft and squidgy self. If it doesn't bring joy, get rid. Basses sitting around idle is a sin - get 'em sold to someone who'll hopefully play it to death. Or keep it. I'm shrugging now.

Referring to 'top' and 'bottom' strings in terms of relative elevation in conventional playing position, instead of musical pitch.

Personally speaking, having a job, wife and children are 3 good reasons for my wanting to be IN a band.

Keep hold unless you need the money.

I've moved a couple of redundant basses over the last month and took a punt on this gorgeous Lakland 44-60. Cracking bass, first outing is rehearsal on Thursday 😊.

Well, I feel I am just chucking this out into the ether but I finally got round to doing the modifications to the Acinonyx that I described in my last post. It turned out to be quite challenging for me and Tony (the luthier) but it is finally done. Yeh! The challenge for Tony was getting hold of blanks large enough to accommodate the Acinonyx scratchplate in one piece. It took a couple of passes on the CNC machine because a bit slipped and caused a gouge in one plate. Prior to that there had been a scaling issue with the CAD/CAM software that caused a perfect but scaled down version of the scratchplate to be cut: about 90% of the full sized plate. 4 blanks later we finally got the finished plate but in a slightly thinner material, although still 3ply. It took me quite a long time to get round to wiring it up and at that point I discovered that the control cavity wasn’t quite deep enough to accommodate the depth of the Oak-Grigsby 4 position Tele switch, or the varitone. Eek! The original cavity is 30mm deep and the body is 40mm thick. I needed about 3mm more depth but I also had to allow for a layer of copper tape shielding, plus insulating tape on top of that to prevent the possibility of anything shorting out in contact with the shielding. I very carefully created a 5mm trench along the centre of the control cavity with a very sharp chisel. One slip and I could have gone through the back. Fortunately I didn’t and there is no give in the back: phew! I slo had to scallop some of the bracing in the body route to accommodate the edge of the volume pot. Again a sharp chisel and a steady hand required. Once that was done I was able to squeeze everything into the control cavity and screw the plate down flush with the top. The first time round squeezing all the wiring in caused a wire to come away and only the front pickup to work but after re-soldering, I was more careful second time round. Anyway the final article is below. I think the perl plate looks much better than the original. The chicken head knob is for the varitone switch that has 6 positions ranging from 0.010 to 0.1 uf. I am toying with the idea of putting the OEM chicken head knob back on the volume control. I am also considering making up a circular plate to go round the varitone with position markings on it. I would use one of the prototype plates for the material. The Tele switch has 4 positions: 1 bridge pickup, 2 both pickups in parallel, 3 neck pickup, 4 both pickups in series (“all-in”). I am pleased with finished article: it is much easier to get the “all-in” setting than messing with the original buttons. The varitone has more tone variations than the original buttons and they are easier to select. There are no buttons in the way of my picking arm. If anybody is interested in getting a custom plate, now the outline has been digitised, Tony can do one to your specs. https://tonyedwardsguitars.co.uk.

Blown away by these. The 101 is the most accurate Moog reproduction I’ve tried. Stunning work. The 251 is great at condensing the original CP-251 features that you are most likely to use with a pedal. It’s only downside is that it does not have expression through. I have already suggested this to the builder for future mods and they seemed keen. With expression through, the 251 will become a seriously powerful addition to many pedalboards.

It'd be interesting. I'm not exactly in a rush. My ideal situation would be giving it to one of my friends kids who is an aspiring bassist and seeing them play it when they do a set at Glastonbury! We can all have fantasies...

I'm not sure whether this should be in this thread or the "Rehearsals" one. I've been sort of recruited to a(nother) band and last night was our first go at playing together. It was a combination of band rehearsal and jam night, with the next one being in a weeks time at a different venue. We did it at the Shirley British Legion which is where I go to an open mic night, and as we had one attendee from the open mic night who did a few songs, I think we can call it a jam night. Plus we did a lot of jamming. So it looks like Magnolia Protocol is now a band.

Was this at Pirate studios 😎

This. 22 years ago I bought a Wal 5 string mk 3 for peanuts, played it for a few years and sold it for a bigger pile of peanuts. I wish I'd kept it. It would have been worth dozens of bags of peanuts now!!

Just got my SUB back. Stinger preamp and Nordstrand MM4 pickup. 10% of the cost of the Pino one, for 10% of the ability!!

Even the one person with a “use it or sell it” animus is shrugging. I’d say keep it

Will post a few pics a bit later with the progress - have stripped all the horrible rattle can paint and original finish and am now sanding through the sealer coat to get back to the wood. Front and back are back to the wood, I just need to do the sides and a few little nooks and crannies and then I can start doing some finish sanding before it goes to the local luthier for its refinish. Having seen the wood now, I think I am going to be boring and go for a natural finish - it's a lovely 2 piece matched grain and would be a shame to hide it, but I am going to speak to the guy about doing what he called - a dirty stain. Staining the wood darker, sanding it back but allowing some of the stain to remain. It should look a bit a smidge darker and it will hopefully bring the grain out and make it pop a bit more. Am doing a bit of sanding later so will upload some pics.

I have a stingray clone that I’m attached to, but don’t play much as I mainly play 5 string now. I’m attached as partner bought it for me. yours is more valuable; I invite you to consider those people on here who sold 60s and 70s basses for peanuts but now wish they had not done so. correlate much? you can always sell it if you get desperate for cash but if not, rationalise it as an investment and just keep it ticking over maintenance-wise.

Yeh, I know what you are thinking, a pigeon? where is the other one. Well, at that moment he was out in the hallways, but now he is back on his clock stand where he belongs. I still don't have a camera, but in general it looks like this:

This has been on the site a few times, not least last month when I tore it all apart to install new racks, cabling and new toys, so it's a bit neater than usual. Too small to let it get messy though.

Ah thanks so much for coming in. were all so glad you came away with this lovely bass. it really means a lot when customers come to the shop and try things out. and even more when they come away with something so nice. all the best! Bass Direct

Updated @Lozz196's status. Also removed @Oliver bowen, who was never part of the thread in the first place but got added to the P31 update in error. He would be wondering why he has a second mention in a topic he has no interest in if he had actually visited the forum since he joined in 2024. Maybe we should start a "BC Abstinence Thread" for such people?

Despite not being able to do any deals with AB for the last few years ,he does know how to advertise his basses with all the pictures and the demos

It's interesting how difficult it is to be really sure about the power calculations. The manufacturers don't help much either. Advertising the RCF speakers as being 2000W being a case in point. Firstly that is some sort of peak power and the RMS power will be half or a quarter of that depending upon which brand you are talking about and what level of distortion it is measured at. Secondly the speakers like most modern speakers are managed by DSP. The bass unit it the 932's will probably handle only 3-400W thermal and less than that at low frequencies due to excursion limits. The speakers are protected by the DSP computer so they never go beyond their design spec so 300W peak is more reasonable other than something that lasts a few milliseconds. The limit on the compression/horn driver is going to be 50W at most. There's also an expectation that the speaker is for music not test signals and music has quiet and lout bits and it is probably designed for something like a duty cycle of around 15-20% with the design assumption that that is worse case and the real usage will be well below that. I'll give some examples: my RCF 310's 400W RMS 800W peak are marked on the back as 230V 200W maximum power. My 745's have a 3amp fuse and a maxumum draw of 700W. Those are maximum ratings under worst case. My TE Elf, 180W into 4ohms is rated as 20W average power. That's a 15% duty cycle into 8 ohms and 12% into 4ohms Another way of looking at this is to consider sound levels. The average sound level at a drummers ears is just over 100db. If you are operating with everything balanced to the drums then your PA would need to be around that sort of level too, maybe 6db higher if you are all going through the PA. From memory those speakers give 98db/W so 9W would be needed for them to produce 106db at 1m. That's loud enough to cause instant, permanent hearing damage if you are only 1m from the speaker. Even 90db can cause permanent damage after 1/2 and hours exposure (RNID) It's unlikely that your speakers are using more that 10's of watts in normal use. What this all means is that your 2000W PA is only going to consume 100W per speaker and your backline probably something similar even with a worse case 20% duty cycle. That's well under 4 amps. I doubt many of you use more than 400W of led lighting and this too has a duty cycle, because it does colours, not white light and because it flashes, so unless you run continuous lighting or old fashoined incandescent bulbs you'll probably be running the lights on 2amps current. Your single 13A fuse is never going to blow and there is no way you will disturb a 30A ring main. You probably won't blow a 5A fuse but I don't think I'd try that. I haven't blown a mains fuse in 15 years since I moved to plugging in to a single socket for everything.

I've just seen the new Ibanez Prestige range. This thread is keeping me honest. <repeat> I don't need a new bass, I've fixed mine. <until false>

A well organised and attended outdoor festival. Ideally? Something like Wacken.

At this stage I think its just down to if the Anagram has the features you need right now. Its far too early to see what their feature release cadence will be or where the platform will be a year from now. If you're ok with the footprint of the QC, its a pretty mature ecosystem which already does a lot. The capture collection is vast too, I found everything I was looking for, even less common stuff. I'm intrigued by the Anagram but not really interested in any of the stock preamps/drives and most of the stuff I’d want is absent from the NAM captures. If the capture process was a bit more refined and they had a better variety of non-darkglass stuff covered out of the box itd be a far more tempting proposition for me personally.

The Bugera Veyron M arrived yesterday (very well packaged I might add). Tested it last night and all works fine. 2 noticeable things. It's loud. Also it sounds really nice. Had it set up in the living room and my wife suddenly said "that sounds good". (Although it may have been a comment on my playing 😄). When I've had a chance to use it properly I might even do a new amp thread. Thanks again everyone

We're playing on Saturday, you'll love it.

Only had a couple of hours with it, and just got in after giving the basses a run out on it, and yeah, glad I pulled the trigger. This a really nice amp, (and many a really nice amp has passed through here I can tell you). It's got more authority than my Thundefunk and is sweeter sounding. Close though. The TF really holds up well. It's got easy the authority of my Walkabout, but more defined. M6 carbine is more brutal and has more presence, but the Glock is really useable, beautifully precise. and made my basses sound the best I´ve ever heard them.

Picked up a new guitar from GuitarGuitar Epsom yesterday, a Gibson Les Paul Standard ‘60s AAA Bourbon Burst (a GG exclusive model.) The AAA flame top is gorgeous and although it added to the price, I have no impulse control (I blamed my medication for that and the missus understood). GG had thirteen to choose from on the website and this one just seemed perfect, it was the lightest one at just over 9lb and it had the nicest flame in the top. My own photos wouldn't do it justice, so I’ve nicked the pics from the shop’s listing. It came strung with 10s and plays great straight out of the case with a super low action. I’ll probably swap to 9s at some point and might have to raise the bridge a touch then, but I think with the lighter strings it’ll feel even better. Tone-wise, it’s lovely. The ‘60s Burstbuckers both have their own vibe, and they sound fantastic whether clean or with some dirt.

Are they still in business? They seem to come and go, moving production around. Wasn’t it meant to be coming back to the UK? Perhaps that is why there is a 12 week delivery time. I imagine that is going to be quite heavy given the neck through design but always good to have another medium scale on the block. This one is serious money though, so I would definitely want to try it before buying.

Here's mine showing the song that I am currently working on: This workspace is shared with my day job where I do graphic design for packaging hence the rather tidy nature of everything. Most of my programming is done with the mouse and QWERTY keyboard and the guitars, basses and controller keyboards normally only come out when I am actually doing recording for the purposes of making something for release to the public.

I think we have 2 winners, amazing mess guys, congratulations! 😂

Small crowd of smiling dancing people. Happy bar manager who asks when can we come back

I'm off out being the house bass player at a funk jam tonight. I had toyed with the idea of taking a P bass with recently installed rounds (which I don't normally use), but have settled on a Jazz with LaBella flats, just because I don't get to play the jazz live so much, and it just sounds great with these strings on it. I agree with @Misdee too, amps have much more influence/affect over tone than they used to. Tonight I will be using a GK Legacy 800 into a Barefaced cab, and I'm very much looking forward to it.