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I’ve got a few of the lads to look after mine for me 😁

You appear to have affixed your strap locks to a Liquorice Allsort...

I miss the days when mainstream pop stars, sneered at by 'music lovers', were actually crap-hot musicians. Looking back, we didn't know how lucky we were.

Good work on these Ped, they're Kraken!

Hi Everyone! New to this site and so I thought I'd start by sharing a purchase I made back in June this year. The 2020 Sterling by Musicman Stingray 34 with swamp Ash Black body and roasted maple neck. This is my first Stingray Bass as I usually play Jazz Basses. Had seen this on the official Sterling site and was blown away with how great it looked. A 'BFR' inspired design they say on the site. Purchased it from a site called Project Music who had only one due in so snapped it up pretty quickly. As I say, my first Stingray so other than a 1990 USA Stingray I borrowed and played for a couple of week's I don't have much to compare it with. I'll start by saying it's loud, very loud although I do usually play passive Basses and one other active Jazz which has nothing on this things volume. 3 band EQ seems fine, plenty of tones can be dialed in easily. Not sure whether the bass boost lacks in the real boomy end. The body looks great with the white grain showing through and is well finished. This is a lump of a bass! May remove the clear scratch plate as after cleaning the bass after use there is quite a bit of dust build up underneath which can become visible. The roasted maple neck is lovely and plays really well. Had to file down the nut edges as they weren't particularly well finished and sharp to touch. I guess that's the real difference when it comes to Indonesian made vs USA made Musicmans. And of course love the all black hardware. Been very pleased with it so far. Not had the opportunity to gig with it as yet due to you know what but have used for online recordings and jamming at home and really feels great to play. Any Stingray players out there recommend any mods at all? I've read that people tend to swap out the standard preamp for something a bit hotter like Aguilars OBP 3. Anyone ever done so and felt the benefits? Have added some pics 😊 Let me know your thoughts, Q's etc Ozzy

Hi guys! Waiting for the sound test, here is the unboxing of the brand new Harley Benton, the MB-4 model (music man style) in the exclusive satin total black version. In the coming days, a review and a series of dedicated bass covers will follow. If you don't want to miss any updates, I invite you to subscribe and follow me to my youtube channel ... enjoy!

Yep, basses are basses, two bits of wood that anyone with some decent tools could build and some bits of metal that are likewise not hard to engineer. A £300 bass in the hands of a pro will sound great, and not hugely different to a £30k bass. Contrast with the difference between a £300 and £30k acoustic instrument such as violin, double bass or mandolin and there’s no contest. I’m a half decent violinist, and recently played my usual instrument, a 100 year old German blonde, with a very high end bow. I could play lines at twice the speed I can with my usual bow. Give me a Squier or a Fodera, I’ll be able to play pretty much the same stuff at the same speed and it’ll sound pretty much the same

I agree with Baloney Balderdash that it’s very much a distorted P Bass sound, although a particularly good one. Some other examples of distorted Ps: All a bit different obviously, but all with similar DNA.

The band itself were excellent. I saw them at a college gig many moons ago (they were supporting The Fall) and they were tight as a ducks 4rse. Couldn't stand the bloke whinging into the mic' at the front of the stage, but the musicians were impressive.

Well today I had a delivery from Finland. A brilliant hand made pair of Aria SB-1000 pickups, and a delivery of Jascar gold fret wire. One of the pickups is for Marks Zoot ZB-1000 custom build (as is the gold fret wire), the other pickup is to go into my stock in-case anyone else facies a Zoot with an Aria flavour.

Ta daaa!

An old band I was in used to go on to the Muppet Show theme.

Ah - M63 I've got to that age where the phrase "I used to..." is a common phrase. Like, "I used to do astro photography". Back patio, lot of patience and a very, very steep learning curve: And if anyone had told me a few years earlier that it was at all possible to take something like that with relatively modest equipment against the glow of light-polluted Derby... Great, great hobby. Rubbish, rubbish country to do it in

Great bass!! I'm a fan of the onboard the three band eq. The mid in particular is very useful to get the bass to sit in a live mix. (I use a fretless Ray34). I don't think you'd gain much by swapping the pre until you've tried it in context. If you want to try some variables in the meantime and have cash burning a hole in your wallet buy a load of different strings and see how differently the bass reacts to them all.

To know whether it was alder or ash.........

I’ve scratched both my cheap bass and short-scale itches by buying a Harley Benton 30” scale P bass. I consulted our own @Paul S, who is an owner of one, and he was very positive. So I did it. For £79 plus postage it’s remarkably good. It was adequately set up straight out of the box and just needed tuning. No rough edges on the frets. The bridge is solid and fully adjustable. Strings and pickup poles properly aligned. The pickup sounds good to me (bearing in mind the so-so round wound strings fitted). Tuners a little weak and perhaps heavy as there’s a slight tendency towards head-dive. However, overall it’s amazing for the price and I won’t hesitate to take it to band rehearsals and also gig it. I’m not planning to make any changes to it. To me, adding to the cost of the bass would defeat the objective of having a cheap bass. I’ve got enough higher-quality expensive ones already! To anyone considering a short scale - I now have a bass I can keep out of sight in the boot of my hatchback. Very useful for those times I have somewhere to go and need to park the car before and after rehearsals. I’ve added a photo of the shorty next to my US P deluxe so that the size and shape can be compared.

I don't condom what you've just said...

Delilah - Alex Harvey......

Good call to put the link in there @Maude . There will be young people here that don't know what Le Mans used to be like in the 60s, have no knowledge of the GT 40 , or even what Gulf fuel was I have a Gulf car for my Scalextric track:

Some songs that people know but don’t rave about so that when the band come on they’re not overshadowed by the recorded material that has preceded them.

It's like faded Gulf racing colours. I like it. https://images.app.goo.gl/Xgxudw79Apbqnj5y6

I haven't finished it yet but I came across a pod cast where Guy Pratt and Martin Kemp are hosting and they're interviewing John Taylor. He was talking to his peers as if it wasn't an interview, just a chat, and it was really insightful. He talked about wanting to emulate the great recording rhythm sections and how he and the drummer (who's name I have forgotten) and nobody else in the room would spend ages just practicing fills to get them perfectly tight so that they could smash it in all rehearsals and song writing sessions. That struck a (bass) chord with me as a brilliant way to practice with a drummer rather than trying to improve and stay on each others rhythm changes. Made me respect him as a player more than I already do.

I wanna hear me some of that!

Excuse me! I'm quite capable of buying crap all year round, thank you very much! 😁

Blimey! I’ve just finished listening to that for pretty much the same reason! (don’t think it was take 10, mind!. It always puts me in mind of this featuring Phil Chen on bass... Hope it does the job!

Pickup position is number one in my book. Then the response of the bass is influenced by construction and stiffness of the body/neck.

Saw him described - by a vegetarian - as the type of vegetarian who makes you want to go to McDonald’s just to fosters him off

’83 MIJ (the new arrival) left, ’84 MIT right. Black is beautiful, though In fact I slightly prefer the BB1200S’s dark translucent green. Both BB300’s are quite early examples (note the pot placement and body shape) but the MIJ is clearly the superior instrument. Light weight, nice neck profile, no neck dive. Just lovely. Full BB collection? Well: BB1200S x2, BB300 x2, BB735A, BB235. Got some of them at home, some at the studio, taking a group photo as soon as I get them all in one place.

From the Sandy Insta Nice custom bass!

Here's a Bass Whisperer review. Sounds good to me.

OK - well this morning was the chippy/dusty process of bringing both the top and back pairs down to their finished thicknesses. Just a quirk of physics - the pretty powerful industrial vac I rig up to the extractor vent on the Makita thicknesser still has a tendency to clog up even though I am thicknessing at less than 0.5mm per pass...and yet it will suck up three XL rubber gloves without a blink of an eye These will both darken when finish is applied, but these are the faces that will be seen at the top and the back. The back will also have the multi-laminate neck running in between the pair: In between the two will be a 2.5mm constructional veneer of black walnut (on its way) which should give a pleasing demarcation line. The two mahogany wings will be hollowed and - if I remember correctly - we are going for a modern 'F' hole a little bit like @Len_derby 's 'Swift Lite' lightweight build from a year or so back: In terms of immediate next steps - other than ordering the neck and fretboard timber - it will be to join the top. Those of you who have seen my previous builds will know that I'm a bit unconventional here. Instead of using a template, I hand finish the top and then use THAT as my routing template for the rest of the body later in the build. There are - from my point of view - sound reasons for me doing it pretty much the opposite way to any other builder in the world. That might be a point of view of one, of course

https://soundcloud.com/nigel-jewell/chase-me-with-your-shipt-bag For some reason when the track is embedded it's not there - but is as a link??

All locked-up on the Skegness Riviera... 😎

I wouldn't get excited about mine, it's pretty much dog poo. 💩

Six months into (premature) retirement and two weeks into lockdown 2 I found myself running out of things to do and also drifting towards depression. I had given myself five things to do - bass practice, sax prax, getting better at watercolour portraits, riding bicycles and writing my maiden novel. The trouble is I am irredeemably shite at the first three things, it's winter, and the novel will never happen - and it's miserable being made aware of this (again). Realising depression is not a good place to go, I took stock and realised that one way of putting off re-realisation of the shite threshold is to pretend I'm starting from scratch. So today I dusted off the Ed Friedland walking bass course, Scott Devine's technique accelerator course and started Scott Paddock's excellent sax course right from the start. So far so good. I am posting this primarily as a motivational pressure on myself to avoid back sliding. YMMV.

I think the thing about his sound was about how well it fitted The Stranglers. His playing style and sound gave the band a different edge, made them stand out from the crowd so to speak.