Leaderboard

I started up an 80s band some time ago. We are still "forming" finding the right songs and so forth but it's feeling good. So I wanted an 80s bass and having sold off three basses at the end of last year I was feeling good and came across an Ibanez Musician from 1980, fully original. Struck a deal and it was delivered yesterday by the owner and used last night at band practice. First impressions: chunkier neck than I'm used to but not unmanageable. Weight is ok and a decent strap. Lots of knobs! These are a bit excessive I think: vol vol tone, three way pup selector, active/ passive switch, bass, mid, treble... So for ease of use it's both pups on full then using the active to find the sound. I played through an Ampeg head and Trace cab with the EQ relatively flat. This bass cuts through the mix! Gorgeous consistency all over the neck in terms of tone and volume, lovely for high fills, really nice sound for finger pops that I can't seem to get with other basses. So far I'm chuffed. Terrible photo, but I've been too busy playing it to just admire it.

Well, it turned up just before lunch and I'm very impressed! It's very green. Almost purest green. A slight tweak of the truss rod and it's good to go. I do find the jazz bass shape very comfy. Maybe because my first bass was a jazz. It's reasonably weighty at 4.44kg (9lb 8oz). Neck is a good shape. There's something on there that's rubbing off as I play which is a bit weird, but at least it's coming off. The pickups don't sound bad at all. Did I mention it's very green? For £63, I'm very pleased!

Finally got the top coat on and the other bits attached to the speaker. It's basically finished. As it's really a deep black, there's not a lot of detail that can be seen on camera. The Gnome goes on the top or at the back You can see the rails here for front and back with the grab handles Here's the grill attached It definitely has a chunky Lego or kids toy vibe to it That's one down, I need to mull on the lessons learnt and then do Cabinet #2. Rob

All excellent points! The EBS and Orange blocks both do the breakup with completely different character so it'd be great if they re-visited Peggy! Struggle to work out why they made the new Mesa blocks seperate clean and drive blocks instead of 1 block like the original amp. I spent a good while with mine last night and started to get my "I'm seeing digital so I'm hearing digital" head on - So I pulled out the old board with a Tonehammer Pre on it for comparison, thinking I'd hear/feel something different and it'd be the death of the Anagram... didn't quite work out that way. There was little to no difference in response between the Anagram and Tonehammer (this was using the Super Cali amp block without cab block), I think the Anagram may be the closest to analogue feeling I've come across for base clean tones! What a belter of a unit this is!

I asked chat GPT to interpret this… What on earth…

I would take a look on this: https://www.jerzydrozdbasses.com/akcndfr54jdhrei567/Ultimate_Guide_ver100.pdf

The great Bill Hicks said this: That may or may not be factually correct, but if so, it may account for why statistically no-one on Planet Earth has ever heard or cared about a single note I've ever played, not to mention the hundreds of songs & pieces of music I've created! And that's because the smallest amount of tangible intoxication - whether from restricted substances or alcohol - utterly severs whatever connection exists between my brain & hands, and I literally cannot play. Muscle memory vanishes, the flow of learned song structure evaporates, my knowledge of the fretboard fades into the noise and it's all replaced by uncoordinated, stumbling, incoherent, atonal, unmusical nonsense. And giggling. Lots of giggling. Some may say that's just my perception, and my playing's actually better if I'm wasted (and they may have a point), but it has meant I've actively avoided mixing drugs/alcohol with music since my late teens/early 20s - and have been able to coldly (and sometimes furiously) observe other people, including former bandmates, spectacularly f*cking things up onstage, while plainly having the times of their lives, thinking everyone else was too, and that the garbage they were churning out was being channeled from some higher astral plane. Man. So I dunno if you're right, Bill.

You are Lord Percy and I claim my £5.

All Fender guitars and basses with an indestructible finish that cannot be relic'd. Its an unacceptable fashion that must be stopped.

I don't normally do these type of posts but it's been a good number of years since I owned something with such a wow factor. A few weeks ago I had an incident that left me without a working bass at a gig. Luckily I was able to drive 10 miles down the road from the venue and borrow a bass. It was an unusual one that I hadn't heard of before, built by the Bass Workshop and it was a simple P bass with one volume and no tone control. Now I've been a Jazz guy for quite a few years now, in between the odd Stingray or Sterling. I've always wanted to like p basses but could never find anything that I liked. I now found myself in the unusual position of having to use a bass that I'd never played before, with old strings, no tone control, badly needing a set up and not even close to what I had brought to the gig - my Warmoth/Status Super Jazz with EMG JX pickups and a 3 band EQ. I found that I really enjoyed playing it. I think that I had missed the interaction of digging in and getting a more gnarly sound. It didn't matter how hard I played the jazz, it always sounded good but I couldn't get that digging in clanky growl that I could only get from passive pickups. That set me thinking so I decided to get my Squier 40th P bass out of the box, set it up and took it to the hogmanay gig. Absolutely loved it. I had one of those rare moments where the sound was amazing, not quite 100% what I wanted but close. I decided there and then that I'd like to get myself something special and maybe keep the Squier as a back up bass. I only had one prerequisite - it had to be white. After much searching I found a Japanese imported special edition 60s P in white pearl at Fender Fever. Anyway, it arrived today and I have just taken it out of the box and it's even more spectacular than it looked in the pictures. The rosewood board is so deep and rich in colour. It's probably the nicest rosewood board that I've ever seen that wasn't on an actual vintage 60s Fender

The Norfolk special

I can state with confidence now that this wasn’t an error.

Same with the Ozrics! Excellent gigs...

Ashdown to make a combo that rivals the Fender Rumble 500 & 800, both in power and size/weight.

Was there an ant infestation on the floor that everyone apart from Dawn spotted? 😅

Personally, I think there are a few parameter-based things rather than modelling, that make the Anagram sound arguably "better" than my Helix LT. The default settings on the Anagram usually sound great. As has been mentioned before in this thread, many of the Helix block defaults are at "what were they thinking?" settings. Almost every effect block in the Anagram has a clean blend. The Helix often requires you to insert effects on a parallel path just to make them usable for bass. The anagram's parameters are pretty self explanatory for each block. The Helix replicates real world devices, including sometimes misleading parameters, or strange behaviour, and they take a while to get your head around. The cab blocks are usable without much tweaking. It took me years (literally years) to get a usable tone out of a cab block in the Helix. I do wish the Angram cab blocks had hpf/lpf in them, though. PS. Now that DG has demonstrated they can build amp blocks that do drive when pushed, I wonder if they'll revisit the Peggy block or make a new one.

I’m sure there’s a market for a bass ‘arpeggiator’. I just play the root note and it kindly fills in with a suitable walking pattern or fill. Not that I’m lazy or anything…

Thats not unreasonable.

I don't think Fender have produced quite enough minimally different variations of the Precision and Jazz basses yet, so I think they need to get on that

I suspect that the broad glamourisation of drugs in music is down to journalists making things more fabulous than they are. "Ooh look at then being naughty, they are getting away with it and are epically cool. I wish that was me". Ask anyone who has experience of heroin (other drugs are available) addiction either personally or within their family, and I can guarantee they will not be saying "yeah, but the songs made it all worth it". Have some people produced interesting stuff while using drugs? Yes. Would they produce interesting stuff anyway? More than likely, this was just a different flavour of whatever would be. We only read about the tiny percentage of people who have "done the thing" and " produce the thing". The rest of the people who have "done the thing" and produced "not the thing" are not eulogised by those who write about it - the tastemakers/gatekeepers.

Hi, my name is Steve. In the early 80s I worked for a couple of years or so with Ashley Pangborn in his small workshop in West Norwood building Pangborn guitars. When we eventually parted company he gave me a fretless warlord which I still have to this day, although I rarely play it and will probably sell it. We first met by chance in a music repair shop (Touchstone Tonewoods in Reigate I believe - so long ago), where he was buying some potted active bass/treble units to put in his guitars. As I was a qualified electronics engineer interested in guitar electronics (I was there buying some fret wire) I tapped him on the shoulder and suggested I could make these also. That began our working relationship for a while. I taught him proper soldering and electrical shielding etc. and he taught me some of the rudiments of guitar making. I actually made some of the fretboards and help assemble and setup finished guitars (Chieftains mainly) and did most of the electronics assembly etc. Profitable business was difficult in those days. Ashley was so talented he really needed to work for someone else and be left to only concentrate on guitar making and not business/accounting/marketing etc. Not long after I left I believe he shut down and ended up working for a famous US brand in Germany making specialist custom instruments. I went back to my usual industry where I worked in Aviation and Airport IT systems until I retired last year.

Why not 🙄

A third of the full price but the increase isn't the only reason, just the one that has pushed things past the tipping point. It's always been a big ask of Mrs S and the Scrumpettes and it felt an awful lot easier when we started in 2017.

Rest of the band watching the bassist set up the PA after they've plugged in their cables and the drummer has got in the way.

Epiphone should bring back the vintage pro Thunderbird. Thats the bass i most regret selling. It sounded amazing and I sold it to the bassist in Hawkwind. Ive seen several pro bassists using them. An Epiphone RD in black so I can pretend to be Krist Novoselic's much shorter (im only 6'1") brother. Similar quality to the Thunderbird vintage pro.

I had a lot of fun playing through this at last nights rehearsal. It’s the first time I’ve been in a room with amps and a drum kit playing rock music for about 8 years! After 5 years of silent stages, in-ear monitors and acoustic guitars. I had completely forgot how flippin’ loud it is 🤣 Still, the trusty ACS just about saved my lug holes. Dusted off the old faithful Jazz Bass which I’ve had since I was 13 and it all sounded blooming marvellous! It’s nice to feel bass again! This was my dream rig for about 10 years, of which I never achieved. I had the head with a 2x10 & 1x15 but could never justify the 8. I still kick myself regularly for shifting my old ABM rig!

Current update. Have put different strings on, and carefully tuned. Thus far the bridge hasn't slipped or dropped. I am going to monitor it but may still invest in a local luthier taking a look.

Thank you to Mike and the Scrumpettes for your work over the years. Hopefully someone can take things on.

These days, production costs in Japan are as high as any in the world. That's why production has shifted to lower wage economies like Indonesia and China. Japan does high quality engineering and mass production better than most and they know their worth.

Yeah you're right there, I'm a fan of every aspect of the pedal, just need to build some solid patches to suit my needs. And yeah in terms of tracking, I have definitely found a lot of patches have a certain sweet spot on the fretboard. I think my Future Impact will stay as the digital jack of all trades synth, quick access and adjustibility, and then the Squeezer can serve a very specific role playing to its strengths 👍🏼 rather than trying to get it to cover as much ground

It's a Sony, and definitely does not have 3 dB steps in vol. Do I have to turn on my B&K and measure the steps? No no... now you @Stub Mandrel have planted the seed... bugger.

I bet the local pizza place was grateful 🤣

Dear Bass-Bash buddies, I'm sorry to start your New Year with unwelcome news, but I'm sad to announce that the 2025 Bash was the last one that we'll be doing. As you know, our Bashes have always been massive value-for-money, largely because Mrs. Scrumpy and I were able to hire our wonderful hall at a much-reduced rate. For various reasons, we have both recently retired as Trustees, meaning that the cost of hiring the hall this year would be the full commercial rate of £232! Thank you all for making this such a joyous event over the years. If anyone else decides to continue with a S-W Bash, you can be sure I'll be there 🙂 Here's wishing you all the very best for 2026 and beyond! Mike, Gabrielle & The Scrumpettes.

A fender Mexican production jazz bass V based on the Roscoe beck, with the Same pickup configuration, asymmetric neck. Jonny

The Vester Chow Mein was infinitely better, IMO.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten Data's cat Spot.

First coats of nitro are on…

Smith 25th Anniversary

Don't let a three year old daugher choose a name. I did and our shorthaired cat went by the name of 'Fluffy' for 22 years.

Fender Precision Ultra V string. A new run of the Roscoe Beck V (nothing changed mind).

People who set the volume at odd numbers that aren't multiples of 5. What's wrong with them? They need locking up. My daughter set the TV volume to 7 so I disowned her immediately.

The biggest difference as the decades have passed is that drugs that were once prevalent in the music business to some extent or another are now widely available in society at large, and are commonly used by people in just about every walk of life, but particularly by people from lower social classes. The experience has been democratised. There are far more street drugs available on Britain's sink estates in 2026 than there ever was in the music business in any era. Drugs like cocaine that were quite elitist as recently as the 1980's/early1990's are widely available in Britain nowadays. Opiates the same. How musicians use drugs has become far less of a totemic issue because the rest of society has superceded them and established its own drug culture. No one is looking to musicians for an example of whether to use drugs or which drugs to take. Rather, musicians who use drugs are merely an analog of wider society nowadays.

Those are super cool basses. You know when you can tell something plays well just by looking at it! Folllowing on with the basses on the carpet theme here’s my herd - I tried to take a picture like yours from above but I couldn’t get high enough! I’ve got the Musicmaster (fretted) pretty bang on, setup wise, now. Labella flats (.050 - .110) and some truss rod fun and it’s playing really nicely.

Thomastik Superflexible aren't a low tension string, they're a steel core string with fairly high tension. They're one of Thomastik's older designs, named because the core is braided steel rope which is more flexible than a solid steel core, but the standard Superflexible set is still comparable to something like Spirocore mediums. Though there is also a Solo gauge intended to be tuned a whole tone higher, that will be relatively low tension for steels at standard pitch. So I don't know that what your experiencing is a "low tension strings" issue, or that changing to a different steel core string would solve it.