Leaderboard

This is my 1980 Wal Pro 2E, it had been sat in its case for the last god knows how many years in need of a good going over. The pots were knackered, the jack socket was shot to bits, it was basically unusable but I had other working basses and so it wasn't a priority. Eventually I came to my senses and gave it to Paul at Electric Wood to do his magic. I was expecting it to take ages, which I was fine with, but he turned it around in only a couple of months and then apologised for taking so long . He ended up doing a whole list of other stuff that I hadn't realised needed doing, but to his credit he stuck to his original quote. And oh my god, it sounds incredible -- I'd forgotten just how good. It'll be coming with me to the various Bashes this year, so you can see for yourself. And it'll be getting its first gig for at least 20 years at the end of this month, at a dementia research benefit with the ska band.

I was away immediately afterwards and so didn't get chance to post at the time, but there was a Mingus Tree gig in The Shed in Charlbury on the 14th. This style of music always seems to go down well with the local audience. There's one tune where the guitarist changed the intro, and I keep missing my cue. I paid particular attention this time and was bang on with the intro, then cocked up in the second bar once the tune got going. Oh, well. There was also a request from the band for bass guitar for a particular song, played in a particular way. Normally, if I noodled away on an altered scale throughout a tune it might be considered a bit dodgy, but this was exactly what they wanted. We even got a star turn from the BL's ventriloquist's dummy for one song...

You weren't far wrong 🤣 It's taking a while for me to pull myself together, not helped by having to be at work in my proper job at 8am this morning. Ouch. So.. yes. Matty Healy! Sting! Lewis Capaldi! The latter two were closely-guarded secrets, and genuinely took the audience by surprise. The bad news: they did self-contained performances that didn't need the house band, so I didn't get to play with them. The good news: they were amazing, so I didn't give it a second thought. We did two shows, each around 3.5 hours long (it isn't just music - there's comedy and that too.). We opened the show with Chris Rea's 'Let's Dance'. As well as being a bit poignant, it also captures the essence of the show and fits the band line-up perfectly. We had loads of dancers on stage, and it was a real high-energy start. From there we went into a reel called Rakish Paddy, again with the dancers aided by a quick costume change. After that, Cuddy's Cave, a beautiful musical poem... it's a love letter to the region by the wonderful Nev Clay. Over the next few hours we played songs including December 1963, I Can't Make You Love Me, Always a Woman and Hit the Road, Jack. It all went swimmingly. Of course our special guests grabbed all the headlines, but that's fine by me... the charity is going to benefit massively. Need to sleep now, 'cos we're doing it again in 2028. Here's a clip of the finale:

You know it's going to be a good gig when you can walk up to the bar with your bass and order a beer... The Plough, Newport Pagnell, last Friday night. Pub reopening! Went with the stingray. Cozy setup.... <squeeeze>

Friday night I had a last minute (8 hours’ notice) dep with tribute band Dire Streets, at Chipping Sodbury Town Hall. I’ve done quite a few rhythm guitar deps with them over the last few months, but I hadn’t looked at the bass parts for a year, so I took my iPad and read the dots where necessary.

On another side note i've just joined a blues rock band from Edinburgh area. They've seen me play with the Glam band so no audition required they said. They were just happy to get me the BL said. Guitarist is a mad Gary Moore fan so that should be fun. They seem to be aiming for that Eric Clapton, Cream, Gary Moore style of Blues Rock which can make for some nice interesting basslines. Dave

I owned a USA G&L Fallout a few years back with a tribute model as a backup. From a fetish the object point of view, I wish I still had the USA one with it's quarter sawn neck and fancy tuners BUT....sonically it was no better at all than the Tribute. My only basses now are 2 tribute Fallouts, one with flats one with rounds. It's a strange feeling, having played bass for 40 years; you feel there should be a justification for having a vintage fender ( those days are gone now for me) or some other bass with kudos. The brute truth is that in the band I'm in, the basses I currently own work better than anything else I've tried. At around £300 s/h each. OK I've upgraded the tuners, but for no good reason really. I think, like Danelectro guitars ( I read an interview with Lindy Fralin where he said the stock pickups in his Korean Dano where perfectly good enough), by their essence 30 inch scale basses are ' good enough ' at a lower price point than 34 inch scale. You can try and make them more ornate but perhaps the inherent lack of dead spots and the bloom of notes up the dusty end makes them great value and utility. Just my experience anyway.

.....aaaaand here's a whistle-stop walk from the rear of the arena, across the backstage village, and up to my little bit of the stage:

Finally someone suitably bonkers but with the right amount of pop sensibility for the job. Or maybe he'll do a 3 minute 100 oscillator drone piece?

Some things were just meant to be, and stars do sometimes align. I say this gets a pass, as @Machines didn't go shopping for a bass - in fact, an award might be due because of his going to pick up a g****r in broad daylight.

Thanks, I spilled my coffee from laughter. He has a wife, you know.

Did he own it when he went in the shop? No. Did he own it when he came out the shop? Yes. Stwike him (fwom the wegister) centuwion, vewy woughly!

Got a good gig coming up this weekend Daryl at The Ferry in Glasgow. Not the best paid but its a venue we've tried in the past and got offered a support slot for silly low money and we said no. This was originally a friends gig but they had to cancel and offered to put us forward for it. When we heard what they were getting paid we initially said no. The venue then called me and asked if we could compromise a bit to similar Glam bands and we decided to give it a try. Its an old ferry that used to cross the Clyde and now converted as a venue. Not been in it before but friends that have played there said its pretty well run gig plus you get free food and drinks after sound check. Only downside is we have a Status Quo support band so that'll be interesting as we don't usually have support bands because of the costume before we go on means we can't arrange the stage when they've finished. The venue have taken that into consideration so we'll see how it pans out. Dave

Decision made on the ziricote / sapele build. After a lot of back and forth about whether to clear it in nitro, I’m keeping this one natural. It’s currently in the process of being oil sanded through to 3000 grit, and once fully cured it’ll be finished in a satin to mid-gloss wax. The ziricote has so much natural contrast and character that burying it under heavy gloss just didn’t feel right. And the sapele back is starting to show some lovely chatoyance as the oil builds — that subtle shimmer when the light moves across it. The neck will be glossier, so there’ll be a deliberate contrast — tactile body, slick playing surface. Still in progress, but I’m liking where this is heading. MGCS – Made to Play. Built to Last.

Sounds like a good gig Dave. I've got my first 2026 gig Thursday night at The Fox Town in Mequon. It'll be a half hour commute. I'm not sure if I'm driving or riding in the van. It's an upscale bar / restaurant that does a fantastic job with local bands. Nice room with a very nice stage. We'll be providing our own sound. We'll bring minimal lighting and smoke. The place has a built in crowd. This is our second gig there. Last time the place was packed. Daryl

Audience video (James East) from Facebook, our first encore. A few fluffs but I hope it gets across sound, energy and excitement! 🙂 Baz took over the lights and got a bit over excited! Waer Pigs.mp4

Nothing in the g&l cheap as chips category on ebay. But then I could get an L1000-alike pickup and whack it in to the NEWPORT. It could go between the two present pickups. The bridge one is not for me anyway. But I would have to have some sort of chrome covers. I suspect I need to get out more.

I must admit, the notes up the G maintaining a big fat thud is interesting. That is not my experience with longer scale basses. But this could be the Tru Bass strings I have on it. Thumpalicious. Who knew there were different flavours of fun? I could quite happily try one of the Fallouts with their big fat L1000 pickups. I shall wander over the ebay.

Can’t remember but @funkle has a great thread Here on building a Wal’ish bass where he tries various pickups and preamps in pursuit of the Wal sound. There are also a couple of other Wal’alike builds in the Build Diaries section with at least one using the Lusithand pre. I have an early Overwater original series 5 string that has a filter based preamp and I think John East built the preamps for Overwater, but I am sure his newer designs will be more advanced.

Lovely stuff. I'm so glad Paul inherited the business from Pete so the legacy could carry on it the hands of someone who gets it.

Because of where i live in countryside i've never really had a social side to bands in 26yrs of living here. The only social side to the Glam band is we always have a great laugh together at rehearsals and gigs but we don't meet up to socialise as such, not even a coffee and a chat which is odd but it seems to work for us. Same with the punk band i was in. Dave

I emailed La Bella to ask whether the Super Polished strings would be available in short scale, and I've just got an email saying they hope to launch by the end of the month! I really like those so I am excited!

Spent 6 weeks touring around the French & Swiss alps over December/January, & my BB 615 was one of my picks for the bass I was taking! (That, along with my G&L, but the Yammy came out on top… because the G&L weighs about the same as a small black hole)

I did have a Celtic/Gaelic rock band thing too but over the past 3 weeks i'm getting nowhere with them trying to get a first meet up just to see what everyone looks like and thinks. Just no enthusiasm for anything. I've tried on several occasions to arrange a meet up for a chat but no replies. I've more or less given up on them and will wait till the end of this week to let them know i've decided to go with the Blues rock band. I can't be bothered with time wasters in bands. Its my pet hate. You either commit to a band or don't bother getting involved. Why post an advert for band members if you don't want to actually follow up on things. Dave

The last time I watched Eurovision it was being presented by Katie Boyle ...

2002 Squier Affinity Precision, my very first bass! I got this as a Christmas present along with a Fender Rumble amp, best Christmas ever. Stock aside from some copper shielding and the pickup is the one from my USA P as that now has a Di Marzio. Fender flats.

Eh, I just put it down as today, I do an end of month report each month, I'm not going back and editing January, I'm doing this for free!

I must admit, I'm a bit envious! I've got a great blues band of a similar ilk, which has just about wound down as two of the key members because they are just too busy, not to mention that the main dep guitarist is unavailable due to a serious back issue. The Zep tribute hasn't got a lot of gigs booked for this year and I would love to fill up the diary gigging with a blues rock band like that, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of opportunities at the moment.

Brilliant. Dave

I've set one up, played it a bit and it was very good. I don’t want to get into comparisons with the Japan basses but the 235 I fettled was good and to be honest, anyone could have a career on it and be happy. I used to own a BB415, which is kind of the same but a generation earlier and that was my #2 bass for ages. Again, it was set up, fettled and made to play as well as any of my spendy basses. You can’t really go wrong with a well set up Yam at any price point. Even an expensive one is going to need some TLC “out of the box”.

I'm hoping for a flame throwing keytar and a 1000 Furby backing group. Matt

I've been browsing bass shops in Japan recently and I noticed the price of vintage Steinberger XL basses has gone up a lot lately.

That’s the ticket, turn every note into a dead note. Jameson never needed sustain!

Fractured Persona. Went to pub after. Fluked a win at pool against guitarist. Thrashed by drummer. Bit more detail - we shared out harmonies for the acapella ending of what we plan as a setpiece encore. Six voices, sounded incredible will be phenomenal if we can hit the spot live.

My XL2 was $A3600 in late 86. Just looked up todays $ on the RBA website - $A12000.

That's a very nice looking bit of kit. Love the personalised touch of the bird, although I personally would have had the backplate on the front, precisely because I don't really like the neck-through contrasting woods look! Wouldn't it be a boring world if we were all the same? You will, as others have said, not be disappointed! I'm currently trying to work out what I can sell to finance another ACG. I've been getting into fretless but much as I have a really great bitsa with a great fretless P neck and and some filter preamp goodness I always go back to the 'built for me' fretted ACG and realise how much more I get on with the feel and the sounds. So the only answer (ahem) is to get Alan to build me a fretless version of it! The fact that a Vigier, an alu neck Kramer and the aforementioned fretless, all of which are fantastic basses in their own way, will all have to go to finance it should tell you all you need to know about how great an ACG is. The asymmetricl neck profile and the flat board are what really do it, I think. It just feels so much more fluid to play and the bulge always seems to be in the right place, either allowing my thumb to rest in a more natural position and shifting the palm down a bit so it allows the fingers to move more freely or sitting right in the joint when I shift to a more baseball bat type grip for chords.

Yep, I played mostly 60's Fender Jazz Basses throughout the 80's, however, the decade for me was constantly peppered with owning and gigging with a bunch of boutique and vintage basses as well. Among the basses I owned included an '84 Ibanez Musician in Pearl White which I gigged with maybe two times - nice bass! Another local bassist (who was miles ahead of me) saw me playing it and offered to buy it, so I didn't own it for long. Like you, the bass situation was constantly in motion! There were so many cool basses to choose from at the time, and SO much innovation! Man, guitar players got skunked by comparison during the decade when it came to new ideas.😉 Nope, what bassists experienced in the 80's will never be repeated. I don't think ANY other instrument throughout history will ever match the incredible renaissance which took place in the 80's with the Electric Bass.😎

Our gig on Friday was a road trip from Lancaster/Morecambe up to Stockton On Tees in the North East. "Blues At The Bay" blues club. On paper, it looked like a 2 hour drive when I booked the gig, but Friday had other ideas, SNOW! Lots of back and forth on group chat and we decided to leave much earlier with a plan to go via Settle/Harrogate/A1. At the last minute I checked the route (I was the last pickup in the van) and the A66 had just re-opened, so we decided to go our original route. Stopped for a brew at a farm shop halfway and still arrived early. It meant we could have a leisurely setup before going off to eat before the gig. The gig itself was super. House PA and monitors, very intimate venue with just a 40 capacity, but it was sold out. A very appreciative and respectful audience. I understand that they often film their gigs, so I'm hoping for some good footage in the near future. 2 x Barefaced One10's, GK Legacy 800, '73 Precision. Rob

Good question. Spec sheets are simplistic guides for what an average designer might expect to achieve when designing around it, but there are a lot of specs that are not on the spec sheet because they become more application specific and depend on the skill and experience of the designer in order to exploit more performance. For example, one of ICEPower's older module families did not specify 4 ohm BTL operation and in fact warned against it, yet in spite of all the other manufacturers who had no first hand experience with the platform (and end users with even less knowledge and experience) expressing their doubt and prognosticating that it couldn't possibly work, that the amps would blow up by the thousands, I developed a pair of simultaneous technique that we at Genz Benz/KMC received a patent for that allowed this module family to work without any issues (performance or reliability) into 4 ohms BTL. I worked with the engineers at ICEPower to validate the design (so that our contract could include ICEPower's warranty of an off sheet application), and we built close to 10,000 amplifiers using this technique and have had way LESS issues than other manufacturers attempting do do this their own way once they ran into the patent. These amps are now approaching 18-20 years old, and through my factory service program I replace maybe one or two power modules a year (less than 2% of amps serviced under this program need new module). This IP transferred over to Fender when we were acquired, around the same time that Fender introduced the Rumble V3 series. This is similar to how we obtain a 2 ohm rating on all of the Subway 800 models, 2 ohms was an off-sheet application that required design validation in order for the modules to be covered. Again, well over 10,000 amps with no problems. This is not accidental success, it's the result of understanding to a very deep level the underlying technology. Making a mistake in this sort of application can be very costly, in fact it can ruin a company, that's why we analyze and test and test and test... I typically use the 10% THD threshold in most of my bass amp models because there are elements and techniques that I use in both the preamp and power amp circuits to emulate various aspects of pre and power tube performance. Since tube circuit performance generally includes the addition of harmonic components (the particular harmonic series that's generated varies depending on what's being emulated, the pre and power tube emulation is different too), these added harmonics show up in the output measurement as THD. Most players seem to prefer somewhere between 5 and 20%THD when driving their amps hard (towards rated power), so I chose a mid-point value that represents the average player's sweet spot. This agrees with the experimentation we did when using a Bass 400+ and allowing a group of players to drive the amp where they felt it was in their sweet spot, and it was all in the same 5%-20% range. This is exactly why there is a notation in the specifications that the THD number in the rated power spec includes preamp AND power amp, the rated power is with full context, it can't be separated out.

Well that was bloody awesome. We got to the Earl Haig early, to find two big projector screens up for the rugby, but didn't affect us setting up. Used their (big) PA with our desk, spent a lot of time with everything miced up (me post-preamp DI'd). Sounded awesome but with the stage volume was comfortable with no earplugs. About 20- people stayed on from rugby and we had at least 120-, maybe 150 people in. It can feel a bit empty on a Sunday sometimes, even with a crowd, but not today. Lots of musicians and music lovers in, including my brother, some of my friends and members of two of my other bands. First half, mostly straight classic rock, so no dancing but rapturous reception. Brief beak, then second half, still rocky but some more danceable stuff, so dancing from about 1/3rd through. You'll get the gist if I say our encores were War Pigs and Alive, and the song that got the most comment was Devil Woman. Afterwards, people were queing up to shake hands and say how much they enjoyed it. We did get (very gently) told off for going 20 minutes past curfew 😁 Baz was taking photos, so I expect some awesome shots in due course. Devil Woman.mp4

Well....Back in to The Bungalow on Friday evening and first night of a Mod weekender. Great venue to play! Always a well stocked beer fridge in the green room! A couple of members down,one of the singers was on holiday and we recently lost our keyboard player and also his replacement! To lose one is careless...two is....something! We also have the drummer handing in his notice as he has changed jobs. Decent turnout for a Friday and we seemed to go over pretty well! Sound guy had issues with the bass amp,DI would not work,so he stuck a mike on the cab,then the thing cut out on a song in the second half. But we made it to the end! Jack Flash!.mp4

We supported the band Space last night at The Station in Cannock. The sound engineer was a great kid, didn't roll his eyes at volume levels or anything, he just worked around everything; the footage I heard sounded a good mix. Space are a nice bunch of people, not sure how many are from the '90s lineup as it's not my forte, good players though and people with music taste that was broad. They went down very well, their audience were pretty receptive to our set also. Still enjoying the 8x10 fridge and LaBella flats. Freezing cold load out last night! No gigs for a few months now. I may try and make a case for click track syncing up the samples and whatnot from seeing Space last night. Our drummer would be fine I'm sure. Will see what the others think.

Definitely out!