Leaderboard

just finished putting this together. jazz neck, custom shop 62 pickup. 3D bridge. Flats Haven't plugged it in yet. my first p bass looked like this, includinf the schaller bridge. It's a nice weight, about 4kg I reckon. Northwest body and neck, sourced from here

Over the last few months I have been busy with a side project. I have always wanted to build the 3 Joe Strummer Telecasters (one is an Esquire to be precise) and I have now made enough progress to start showing them off a bit. The bodies need some relic work and I may change the bridge on the black one to a 3 saddle one. No idea what I will do with them when they are finished though. Jon

A detail like that never stopped the tonewood devotees! 🤣

Keep the 'Ray & the MIJ Jazz, and sell the Limelight & the '73. If your kids do grow up sufficiently wrong to want to be bass players, the last thing you'd want to do is let them loose on an original, good-condition 1973 Fender that is worth a stack of cash. Sell that to someone who will appreciate it for what it is and look after it, & if they do go mad, buy your kids a £100 Harley Benton that will play & sound about 97% as good as the Fender.

Given Jaco's strings never actually made contact with the wood of the instrument at any point, surely the type of epoxy used, how thickly it was applied and the percentage of resin to hardener is what's really important here? Jokes aside, in the video with Jerry Jemmott, Jaco sounds like Jaco playing a J bass with a fretted all-maple Precision neck. How you play is going to get you closer to the Jaco sound than any tonewood witchcraft.

Our SansAmp DI's are tube amp emulators. They are designed to sound like a vintage tube amp. They can be set totally clean or overdriven if desired. The original intent behind the design was for the product to be used like a typical direct box. You plug into the Bass Driver and the parallel (uneffected) output goes to your amp. You would use your amp as you normally would but the DI to the mixer has the ability to send your uneffected buffered signal (boring) to the board or the sound of a tube amp instead. The blend control allows you to add in the uneffected signal with the tube emulation. This is a common technique that was used in studios for years. The engineer would mic up a bass amp and take a DI of the bass and the final sound was a composite of the two sources. Somewhere along the way players started using our SansAmp's in front of their bass amps like stomp boxes. It can work either way. You just have to decide what you are trying to do. Our original Bass DI didn't even have a stomp switch or controls on the face of the unit. It looked like most direct boxes and had internal controls.

My pedalboard is finished... well for now at least!

You can't claim its science without evidence, maths or theory to back it up

Absolutely this. Great minds and all that.

So. Tomorrow the nice man in a van collects my bb1500a from the wonderful @tredderswho collected it for me from the seller who wouldn’t ship. I’m even more excited with the reports that it looks basically new, and plays perfectly. Worth the wait? We shall see…😋

A strange one for me today... A gig with band I regularly dep with, who specialise in playing Eagles / CSNY stuff. In a pub. In a Newcastle suburb. ...at 3:30pm. On a Thursday afternoon. Yep, just a normal midweek afternoon pub gig. And there were people there to watch us, too. So confusing. I was home with a Chinese for 6:30pm. Wouldn't mind doing it again sometime, actually. Anyway, this is what I used:

Yes, the sort of money that changes hands for Hifi stuff is obscene, and second only to Basschat's illustrious marketplace.

I have a TT4 passive with the Black Label pickups and I'm a big fan of that combo. Does things a J bass does very well and mine is 8lbs (3.6kgs) so very comfortable. I have V/B/T rather V/V/T as I prefer 1 volume for gigging. The pickups are quite hot but I've lowered them down a bit and the sound is sweet now.

Yeah, it was 2014 I believe, and a collection only ebay deal. Sold it for twice that some time later when between jobs, and regreted ever since.

Along with my basses, I have always liked my records. Around the time they suddenly became "vinyls" the prices shot up and I became accidentally fashionable. I kinda wish that hadn't happened, purely because it now costs me more. I don't really care about being in fashion or out of fashion - I'm 49 next month and I think I have always just done what I please for me. I like supporting the artists direct on sites like Bandcamp and the one plus side is that there have been some really colourful packages on recent releases. I still stream stuff when I work out and I like CDs in the car. I never really went in for snobbery. I like the ritual of putting an LP on. If your mega expensive Sonos reveals me to be a cloth-eared idiot, I can live with that.

Reading this part I`d say this is the one to keep: 2002 MIJ 62 RI Black Jazz bass, now with US pickups etc - my absolute favourite bass to play (and look at) - I don't think I'd ever find another as good and with such a perfect neck.... not a massive amount of money in it either.......it's a beaut. Sometimes it`s not the one that costs the most which actually has the most value, value being its meaning to the owner in this case.

Hopefully the following information will help others get paid by Greene King more promptly and avoid unnecessary frustration. Before the event, I was advised we would be paid within a couple of days. Three weeks after the event, I am still awaiting payment and have had to fight my way thru numerous steps using the Concur system. Today I obtained useful information directly from a manager at their Head Office (not Concur). All such payments go thru the Concur system, no cash, no exceptions. That said, it should be possible to get paid in about 1 week. The steps appear to be as follows: 1) Set up a supplier account in advance including your bank info (some simple verification is required). 2) Create a "Request" in advance describing what you intend to supply (a "Request is like a "Purchase Order"). 3) The "Request" should then be approved promptly by both the pub landlord (or suchlike) and then their manager. I was delayed unnecessarily by both parties and recommend strongly you insist the order is approved in advance of the event. This is an agreement between both parties to pay a sum for a service. Any suggestion that you may not turn up is nonsense as they can refuse to approve any payment later on. 4) Immediately after the gig, create an "Expense" (an Invoice) from the "Request". You need to upload an invoice which must contain the amount, same supply details, full address of both parties, invoice number, same date as the "Request" and perhaps other details. 5) Within 3 days the "Expense" should be approved by a Concur auditor. 6) The approved "Expense" should then be approved for payment by the pub landlord (or suchlike). 7) The payment should then be received shortly (after some 3 days). Lessons learned: 1) My expectations were set incorrectly. There was no way I'd be paid in a couple of days. 2) Your account and the "Request" should be set up and approved by two parties in advance - not afterwards as advised. 3) Upload a proper invoice promptly after the event to create an "Expense". 4) The system is new to Greene King and some staff are not progressing approvals in a timely manner. Don't hesitate to call Concur support or Greene King directly to chase progress. All parties, including you, have a vested interest in making the system work without unnecessary frustration and maintaining good relations.

So, getting ahead of myself here but asked my local luthier about making a '61 spec neck and here's a body he can attach it to. So, '61 neck, Walnut/mahogany body, Weather Report pickups.

I watched countless videos of single coil and double coils Ps and what sounded nicest to my ears were those with the Seymour Duncan SCPB-1, so that's what I went with in the end. No electric funny business after all, which is quite unlike me. The Warmoth stuff has been good to work with. The neck pocket is snug, though would have been too tight if I had sprayed the neck with lacquer instead of an oil finish. I've rolled the fretboard edges and had to slightly widen the output jack hole but that's the extent of the woodwork, pilot holes aside. Fret dressing and polishing was straightforward. It's coming together nicely. Schaller tuners, brass nut, old Gotoh bridge leftover from a previous upgrade to another bass, SD pickup and shielding done. Just the pots, output jack and associated control plates left to do from a functional perspective before I string it up. I'll add a bridge cover and Cabronita-style mint scratchplate for the sake of aesthetics too.

My latest vinyl purchase. The Hobbit in 4 LPs (apparently an unabridged version would have run to 18 LPs). Who remembers Nicol Williamson? Great actor.

Damaged Goods - Gang of Four

Yep, the epoxy is important and the neck is being made with that in mind. As for playing like Jaco... well that's never going to happen for me. If the resulting bass every produces that Jaco sound it'll be because someone else is playing it! And for those wondering why the hell I want a Jaco style bass when I don't want to/can't play like Jaco, it's purely because I like jazz basses and inspired by the philosophy/marketing b*llocks of SD I feel like putting together a bass to match the pickups. What's more interesting is why I feel 'connected', if that's the right word to these pickups given that Jaco is not a great influence on my playing. But there's something about Jacos life and approach to music that resonates and despite anything else has always drawn me to him. Not sure what it is, maybe it's just the immense talent and uniqueness coupled with his tragic story. And watching the 'lost tapes' documentary recently is responsible for me getting these pickups and kicking off the project.

Thought I had fallen into Guitarchat by mistake 😜

You muppet- why did you post that ? Now I have to clean my screen

Colour coordinates with your cats nicely too.

After about 10 years, I've just resurrected my fairly basic hifi, although with my brother's NAD2030 as my old Panasonic has volume control issues. Rotel turntable and Goldring Elektra cartridge, Kef Coda 7s. Pretty much the best budget setup of the early 1990s 🙂 I've got about 200 lps to enjoy. Every last crackle and pop 🙂 Sounds good enough to me, certainly better than what i've been hearing music through for a long time. Records are like old friends, and the ritual of placing the vinyl and dropping the needle is a pleasure in itself. I have also sourced a Phillips CD player for the modest CD collection I've accumulated.

Indeed - that was the point, it is a problem now but wasn't before brexit.

I grew up with vinyl so for me it's a nostalgic thing, so I'm a bit biased. To be honest I don't care which medium (cd, tape, vinyl! Blah blah) is the ultimate, so long as it's good enough. Hell, mostly I play spotify download through a getto blaster with no stereo separation, so that's my benchmark. But I like the physicality of vinyl, the fact that I'm not going to randomly skip tracks and listen to at least half an album before switching off. It's literally a more physical medium. And there's more room on an album cover art!

I love playing vinyl, I love picking up old original jazz records and listening to them how they were originally intended. They sound absolutely fabulous on my system, warm, rich and full of character. To me this is what vinyl is all about. I don't really buy any new releases as it's a bit pointless but I have bought a few older 80' albums or some of the half speed remaster's and they have sounded great.

When I was buying vinyl around the late 80s I found that the quality had already begun to diminish where what was for sale was cheap wobbly plastic. This was compared to the old 60s and 70s vinyl I inherited from family members who no longer listened to records. Most of what I have been buying has been on at least 180gsm vinyl so it's super thick. Once you squeezed too many tracks onto one side of a record the quality diminished as well as the grooves couldn't be deep enough so there wasn't as much bass as there should have been. Again, some recent reissues have been spread over two discs rather than the original one. A lot of the reissues are also remasters so they're not just the same as what you'd buy on a CD. Having said that there are releases that sound terrible and that haven't had anything done to them to make them sound decent. One of my favourite Genesis albums is Duke so I bought that on vinyl - it's completely bereft of the fantastic grinding bass on Behind the Lines that is on the CD and MP3 releases. Conversely Mother's Milk by the Chilis is incredible. The first time I listened to it I could hear a lot more on the vinyl than I could on the CD and the quality is superb. Same with Fragile by Yes. Personally, I listen to MP3s about 80% of the time. I might stick on a CD once or twice a month. Vinyl is more about the experience than anything else. I love to make myself a big pot of coffee and just sit and chill listening to an album. I find it very therapeutic

This is true, and has always been true for anything bought outside the EU. I'd love to buy all my gear direct from the US where prices are cheap but have always had to pay import duty and shipping. It's never made a lot of sense to me that the RRP of products in some countries of the EU is cheaper than it is in the UK (AFAIK we are still charging the same duty we were when we were in it). The big problem IMO is that VAT should not be applicable on 2nd hand gear (whether imported or not) on a private sale.

Cold and dry is OK, damp is kill.