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Refin on the way. My '97 USA P is due back to me next week from David Wilson who stripped the original black and repainted LPB. Here's some WIP shots from David - interesting that under the very tough poly black (factory original as I know the bass's history from new) it was sunburst - so even in the 90's Fender were still repainting bodies when they had their colour stocks wrong. I did find the original black amazingly resilient. I'd given it some fairly serious knocks over time and never broke through the black surface. Anyway, it's now nitro LPB so much less tough, a lot less paint on it so it might be a little more alive and rather more delicate. More pics later.

Four days in and I've failed spectacularly - I wandered in Oxford PMT today to kill time while my wife was having her nails permed (or something) and wandered out an hour later 1800 quid lighter and the owner of a rather splendid Sandberg bass - so that's me out for the year!

Big thank to to the many on here who helped on my other thread. In the end, I bought a Spector Legend after a wee haggle with Kenny's Music in Glasgow. Very impressed with their service after my experience at Guitar Guitar where I went in to buy a bass they said had been sold when it hadn't - wee bit of insider trading? Anyway, went in to look at their Spector NT Walnut and it was a thing of beauty with a great neck. This being said, it had a small electrical issue and so I tried... Spector Legend Custom NT Walnut Spector Legend Classic Tobacco Stain Fender Player PF Precision in Silver Fender Jazz Vintera in Gold To be honest, the last three impressed me immediately. I was surprised at how much I liked the Vintera neck and the Precision sounded like a Precision! I eventually chose the Spector because it was more versatile, had a lovely growl when required and a tone boost. The cheaper price saved me at least £200 too and being stingy this helped. Now, I usually get a No 1 or 2 haircut, but Spector provide some useful accessories including a cheap lead (don't bother Stuart!), some Allen Keys (have I lost them already?) and a haircut guide. According to their chart, I'm not allowed to play their bass in public until July. Hey ho!

I'm concerned that as I get older I might become less adventurous, more (small c) conservative, and happy to settle for tame little rigs. So I'm working on this three amp, three cab set up. Not only is it enormous fun, but actually sounds fabulous. I think of it as the Big Man Ting, Jamaican slang for no joke, which this rig certainly is. BMT also refers to Bass Middle Top which loosely is how it works. Trace head into 1X15 with eq pushing 60 and 100hz. BX4500 into 2x10 with tweeter bass cut mid boosted. TCE BG250 into 1X10 with horn bass cut to the bone treble and mids pushed. I shall be using three different effects set ups too but not finalised what will go where yet. I suspect I'll dirty up the top and use HPF on top and mid. Envelope and distortions on mid only to preserve the bottom end - that kind of thing.

Unless you have a double neck in which case it's exactly the same instrument

Happy to join the 'New Year New Rig' gang...

I haven't forgotten the build diary I started for the Matt Freeman body, but I haven't found the right bit of wood so it's on the back burner for now. I'm going to do something much more interesting in the meantime. This bass is going to be made mostly of walnut, with a maple fretboard and some other maple detailing. 4 string, 34" scale - I'll be using it for Drop Bb tuning in the metal band I've just joined, with Ernie Ball Beefy Slinky strings. It'll have through body stringing and a similar open headstock to my last build. I'm going semi hollow again but with a more modern "f-hole" style the last one. The body will be single cut, which I know is not great for balance, but I've wanted a tele-ish bass for a while and I'm determined to give it a go. The neck will be pretty slinky and I'll try and make the headstock/tuners nice and light to mitigate it. I'm going to use two jazz pickups wired in series, out of curiosity more than anything else - probably wired to just a single volume pot - this bass will not be required to do a whole lot in the way of of subtlety. But the most exciting part for me is that I'll be making the pickups myself this time. I cobbled together a P-Bass pickup a few weeks ago, totally winging it and using a power drill for the winding, and was very surprised to find that a: it works and b: it pretty much sounds like a P-Bass pickup, albeit not an amazing one. I had no way to accurately count the turns, so did it by eye, but have since discovered an app for my phone that can count the turns by sensing a magnet stuck to the chuck of the drill as it passes. What amazing times we live in! There's not much to see except a rough drawing for now, but I have most of the wood so will start in earnest this weekend.

Good God man! What are you doing? You’re removing all of my arguments for buying new basses in one sentence! Burn him, he’s a witch!

We are bass players! If I was waiting for paying gigs to support my GAS, I'd probably still be playing a Columbus Jazz Bass copy.

Sparkling...

We did our first gig of the new decade last night in our hometown of Hull. It’s always a bit of pressure on everyone after the December lay off, in front of some 1200 people who have followed us since we started out over 12 years ago. To add to this it was the first big gig with our new keyboard player too, so everyone very wired as we went on. Needn’t have worried though, despite a few ‘moments’ we managed to do pretty well, and the audience were so up for it and supportive which made it fly by. We had the PA stacks positioned differently from previous years, which meant there was more sound leaking on stage so I had to turn my amp up a bit more than usual. Made me realise that it’s always handy to have that extra headroom available. My GK 1001 / Neo 410 still didn’t break into a sweat though, so happy days.

Ok so cassette is not reel to reel for one thing. The noise floor on reel to reel is way way way lower than cassette. Tape compression and saturation is a huge part of the sound of vintage recording techniques. I can't stress that enough. People didn't have millions of plugins. They didn't even have dozens of pieces of outboard gear. Even Motown. They built what they needed themselves. Including the DI that Jameson used to get his bass down, yep Motown bass was DI'ed! But they did have tape, which as you start to drive it saturates really nicely and compresses too. But these days you can get lovely tape compression/saturation emulation on all channels. It's more the room and players IMO. Watch Standing In The Shadow of Motown.

Haha. It’s staying. Stress not...although I know there’s a queue of vultures lined up 😂

I’ve not been playing much over Christmas, busy with visitors from Australia, kids, a poorly pair of grandmothers (one who actually passed away On the 2nd Jan) and just loads going on in my head. i think I just got Bogged down in “do I need all this stuff...” territory. Appreciate all the replies and thoughts. think the fender Power Jazz selling has lifted the guilt complex a bit.

Indeed, one might argue that in some instances the seeming collision between presentation and expectations are transactional in nature. Let us imagine a faraway planet where androgyny is the norm. Mr David Bowie, struggling to launch his career, might have adopted a basso-profundo singing style, glued on a chest-wig and drawn further attention to himself by wrestling a tiger onstage while smoking a briar pipe stuffed with Capstan Navy Cut shag tobacco. Older inhabitants of Planet Androgyne might have pointed a scornful finger and said "Look at that! You can tell whether it's a boy or a girl!". The planet's youth might have risen in reaction against this simply appalling prejudice and in consequence purchased Mr Bowie's records by the barrow-load. Sales of Norfolk jackets and riggers' gloves might have gone through the roof until - horror - Mr Bowie might have ditched his 'genderised' look at the peak of its popularity and gone back to wearing shorty kimonos and mascara. All of which is to say that there's money to be made in looking different and provoking a response, though not so different as The Elephant Man, obvs.

Looks like a Dalek!

it was getting messy by this stage

I'm doing the opposite, I seem to play fretless like a fretted. The trouble is when I try and sound 'fretless' it all gets a bit early eighties and I feel like Alan Partridge playing Music For Chameleons.

This ^ There are things on one you can't do the other, however there is plenty you can do on both.

I've told the story many times about how my EBMM Sterling sounded more like the Stingray sound I heard in records than any Stingray I had owned, well: About 10 years ago I was fortunate enough to have a Warwick NT5 Thumb and a silver sparkle Modulus Flea bass at the same time. Try as I might I just could not get a sound I liked with the Modulus yet the Thumb sounded exactly like Flea's Modulus in the Off the Map DVD. More recently I have been struggling to get a proper P bass sound with my Player Precision and almost ended up selling it. I bought a cheap Behringer compressor sustainer and it has completely transformed the sound to the familiar, almost slightly overdriven sound that I know and love from all of those old Queen albums. This cheap, plastic £17 pedal is absolutely incredible and have it switched on all of the time with both my Jazz and Precision. I would say to persevere with what you have. I've had many Precisions and Jazzes over the years and never bonded with them but I am now at the point where I have no interest in getting anything else. I generally use the Precision for the first set and the Jazz for the second as I love playing both basses.

+1 The most annoying thing for me is all the motorway closures in the early hours that lead to huge detours. Getting home before sunrise in the summer feels like quite an achievement sometimes.

I have it on good authority that these suits were from Next.

Yes it is

@LeftyP Your bass gig is a mirror image of mine, I would be part of a pool of musicians and I would expect to play about once or twice a month. The songs are a mixture of modern and traditional hymns, and the level of musicianship is varied. I'm going to keep my playing appropriate to where I am and what each song needs, to go in tapping and slapping would detract from the words of the songs/hymns. Everyone's there to praise Christ and not witness my 4 string athletics.

Finally, it appears someone took a short video but no photos What The Funk ( us ) at NYE Buckingham move on up.mp4

I found a tea chest floating in the bristol channel. It appears to hve been packed with plaster llamas, most of which have disintegrated. Can anyone suggest a way to safely dispose of the fifty kilos of white powder?

Bit fo a Trace fan, eh? That meets my 'frighten the cat' approval test 🙂 , although I'm not sure my big rig would work vertically...

And then there were 20...😄 Well if you're going to fail, do it in style eh?! So you've gone from Ibanez to Sandberg (I headed in exactly the opposite direction!). But we're still both using BF SCs and avoiding compressors like unnecessary plague, so all is not lost. Haha! Anyway congrats - and thanks for being first to drop on this challenge, it's very gracious of you to save the rest of us our blushes!

Here are mine - Brown: '86 MIJ. This one's got a Wizard 84 at the bridge, and the paint had been stripped before it came to me. It's my number one when gigging - it's lovely. Black: only just picked this up - bista using an S9 neck and an early '70s body (the bridge is mounted further back than usual which I think places it as a '69-'72). The neck's in good shape but the body's lived a life, including having a DiMarzio Ultra J added and the thumbrest moved above the strings late-70s style. It's not quite where I want it to be in how it plays, but it sounds wonderful. White: largely original '77. I've owned it for about 15 years and will never sell it. Sounds immense and plays well but it's not light!

This is our attitude too. I really like it as it means I look forward to every gig, filling the diary is pretty straightforward and we can cherry pick the venues that we like to play.

No, it's Tom Baker. Ah, Jon Pertwee. His son looks just like him, y'know. © Everybody's Dad 1966-1978

I don’t know if this helps at all, but I always find that when I only own my main gigging basses (all Rics) I don’t really play them at home, so I practice less. I only use them for rehearsals, gigs and recordings. Whereas if I have something a bit different in the collection, even if I don’t gig it, I tend to play it at home a lot more, simply because it keeps things interesting and changes things up a bit.

I few more,slowly taking shape and waiting for a few bits n bobs from across the pond.

It is. Had an hour with it earlier. Bonkers good. Plays so well

It's painstakingly researched, written with a light easy flowing prose, full of fascinating facts and manages to place the reader in another time and place. I love it.

I had the same set all through uni, they’re incredible strings. They must have had thousands of hours use in that time, bearing in mind I was doing at least ten hours a day practice. The gauges do on paper seem odd, they’re incredibly well balanced though. The low B is something like .136, which seems really heavy compared to the low E, it feels right though.

Yes it is.

My thanks to Mr @NancyJohnson and Mr @steantval for bringing illumination to a perplexing conversation I had this morning with my barber Colin, the proprietor of Hair We Go in North St, Wilton. As I reclined in the chair with a hot towel wrapped around my face Colin asked me if I'd seen "those three women on the telly on New Years?" Without waiting for an answer Colin continued: "Common as muck, they were, all dressed up in cheap mens' suits that fitted where they touched. So unflattering. I mean, you could see the size of their thighs. I know it's Christmas, luv, but who needs three pairs of nutcrackers? "And the colours? I nearly died! Salmon pink, mustard yellow and a sort of dull Prussian blue? I said to Audrey, Audrey luv, who's their stylist? Helen Keller? Audrey couldn't hear me, she had her fingers in his ears. The noise they were making I thought the boiler pump bearing had gone again. Right now, ready for your shave, Mr D?" I had no idea at the time what Colin was talking about but I've watched the vid and now I do.

It all depends upon your desk and how many auxes it has... but a set of ZS10s and a Behringer P2 is a brilliant entry (not entry performance) point for the money.

Just uploaded this from my NYE gig - enjoy. Maybe this explain my shallow stage comment earlier - we were pretty much standing on the dance floor!

I've owned a Modulus Flea... Blue sparkle with the Lane Poor pup. Dumbest thing I've ever done is sell it. It was a real rock star moment when you took it out of the case, especially at gigs.

It's all the people who bought Mesa gear in the Guitar Guitar sale now having to sell stuff to pay their VISA bills

I'm a Christian and have played about 500 services over the years on bass and drums. I have a lot to say but perhaps after your first service report back and I might be able to give you more tailored advice. Smile and enjoy. Peace Davo

Sound samples