Leaderboard

Take 5 minutes for a story about a very fine chap. Before the start of the pandemic I ordered a Moollon PV having been in Seoul to visit YJ and Andi Roselund at the Moollon workshop a few months before. I was really taken with the PV's tone. So the Pandemic hit and after working in a factory building respirators for the NHS through most of it I then lost my job. Not good karma. Sadly having paid my deposit I wrote to YJ and Andi saying that I could not afford to continue with the purchase and I heard no more. A few weeks later I saw a red PV up for sale and thought no more of it knowing I could not afford another one. 2 1/2 years later I got a message from Andi saying that YJ had not sold the bass it was still there available for me... Jaw dropping moment. They never got the email and YJ hadn't sold it - he kept it for me. What other maker would do something like that? I had in the meantime managed to get myself back on my feet and could complete the sale. Last week I took delivery of the bass I ordered three years ago. Delivered in pristine condition and sounding like a complete beast. I'm overjoyed to have this bass. I thought I had lost it and out of the kindness of YJ I do. What a bloody awesome bloke - unreal. The bass BTW is staggering, the low end is so deep but articulate and the higher register is thick like a short scale. Its ridiculously good, and oh the colour.. Red............ Red...... Red........

We headlined at a gig tonight. Not a lot of punters, mainly the other bands there, but we had a blast. I think my right arm feels a bit sore from how hard I was hitting the strings. Home now and I've had some toast and the cat has had a good fuss on the sofa. Bedtime methinks!

This month is a bit of a milestone for me as it marks 50 years since I first picked up a bass. For a while before I’d being trying to find a musical instrument that I actually enjoyed playing. But for Christmas 2023 I acquired the albums ‘Quadrophenia’, ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘Innervisions’, and with John Entwhistle, Paul McCartney and Stevie’s left hand for inspiration, for my 16th birthday I got a bass, an amp and a ‘how to’ book and never looked back. For a while I was very serious indeed, but then motorbikes, and then family, came along, and my bass sat unloved in a corner of the spare room for many years. But about 15 years or so ago, I got the bug again, and I’ve been in your typical dozen-gigs-a-year dad-rock pub covers bands ever since. And loving (almost) every minute. I guess that there are many others on Basschat who could tell a similar story. Think I’ve a couple of years left before I’ll have to quit regular gigging as age catches up on me, but I plan to make the most of it!

A big shout out to @rwillett, for kindly donating some 3D-printed pickup plates for my DIY bass to set off my rather funky attempt at a cover over my homespun windings - it looks the biz now. Many thanks, Rob! (...plans inhand to feed-forward the kindness)

Just on the way home from a bloody marvellous Katy Hurt gig at the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden. Was hot, was rocking, was great fun. Roll on the two Northern dates in a fortnight. And hopefully many more as the summer gets into gear…

"This is a local gig for local people! There's nothing for you here!"

Not a bass (obviously) but: My first electric instrument was a Jazzmaster that I got in 1984. Nobody was buying them then so it was dirt cheap. A few years later, I unscrewed the neck and found out it was dated 15 June 68, three weeks from my date of birth. I still have it. I didn't know this was a thing until I read this thread!

Quite silly but amusing.

Oh dear. My finger slipped and I accident my ordered the G4M…, I did not want SWMBO to know so I did click and collect from a local post office. I will do a review/NBD with pictures in a day or two but i ritual thoughts. It looks almost ad good as it does in the pictures. The finish is good on the body with just a couple of tiny blemishes that measure less than 1mm across. The neck joint is a good fit, no gaps although the lower part of the body at the neck joint is not perfect. The neck is a lighter shade than I expected but hey. lt looks like there is no finish on the neck but it is a colourless silk finish and is much nicer than a traditional gloss lacquer. There are no sharp feet ends although they look like they could do with a polish. A quick look seems to suggest there are no really high frets. It is a precision, so the neck is 42mm wide, I am used to 38mm on my Fender Aerodyne, Sire M2 and Peavey Milestone 4. At first look I think the string spacing is the same as my other basses , the extra width allows more margin at the edge, so that the strings will not go off the edge of the fingerboard when playing enthusiastically. There is very little relief on the neck, I will sort that out tomorrow. To be fair both the Fender and the Sire need the relief adjusting. String height is too high but all my basses were like that when I got them. The pickups are way below the strings and I hope that it’s why the volume is so low. Sorting out the relief and then the string height should take care of that. One of the areas I hate in most basses are the machine heads. The Grnder ones on My Aerodyne were far from ideal and were replaced with Goto Res-O-Lites. The Sire had awful machine heads, they did keep in tune but there was som much backlash, that it was hard to tune initially. They were replaced with Hipshots. The initial impression on the G4M is quite good. Little backlash although the tension on the four is not consistent. That can usually be adjusted. The Low E is slightly wonky but it can be rectified easily, It is quite flat, stated as 15” radius. My Aerodyne is 7.5” but it seemed OK. The nut is not plastic but it works so I won’t touch that. As with most budget basses, the strings are not to my liking. They are extremely light gauge strings, maybe because it is described as rock/metal bass. There seemed to be a lacking in low end but the E string is only 90 thou so I am not surprised. If the pickup is lacking once all those things are rectified, A Warman or Tonerider will not cost the earth. I will do an NBD/Review based on these notes but I will expand.

Mr Amazon did one of his regular pilgrages to lay gifts at my feet (more or less). So I printed a drill template to make a stitching cut in the aluminium, then cut through all the holes with my new blades to leave this. This looks like junk and I did wonder if I had cocked it up. So used the blade sander (wonderful tool) for the first time and gently smoothed and smoothed and came up with this. I was amazed how well it came up. I can now start assembling this properly. This is it fixed to the body of the guitar The photos show every blemish, but not a problem. The intention this weekend (apart from a trip to Malton to watch eldest daughter play her first senior womens game) is to get the pockets copper lined, the control panel for the tone and volume printed, to check the height on the strings, and possibly get the pickguard cut and fitted. The last might be a step too far. If this all works, glueing on the body is an evenings work. Progress at last rob

Ya, when i lives in SF i had a B18N which i had to leave behind when i moved to London (along with my MB Bass 400+ and my TE quatravalve) and i always wanted another tube amp, just for home practice. I wouldve taken the pf20t or the 50t. The volume is more than enough for my usage on it. Ive got more powerful amps if i need them. And yeah, the fact that you can run it direct with no load is killer! It is the most beautiful amp ever created. I think these newer ones are even cooler looking. And the fliptop always impresses! Absolutely love it.

Not yet but my aim is to have as many basses as my age ( I'm not there yet by a long way !) and this policy always gives you scope for a new one each year.

To be fair, sometimes in complex music people get hung up on the 'nerd' aspect of it. "oh listen to that Coltrane solo where he alters the modality of the root chord with a subverted inflection to a half diminished interval, very reminiscent of Stravinsky" really sounds like you know what you are talking about compared to "That sax solo sounds incredible, i have no idea what he's doing but it sounds so cool over the piano". That approach alone will put people off. But thats all very Off topic. I'd say there are bass players I don't get, but in a similar way theres pizza toppings I don't like. I avoid both but sometimes I may be puzzled by their popularity, but I also know they aren't 'bad'...unless its Tuna that has no place on a pizza and no good will come of it. Jonny

Thank you everyone for your kind words and thoughts - it has really helped me get through the day...

Right. Last part. I noticed when I was looking back at what I posted yesterday that the last picture doesn't quite show the body in its finished state. The upper bout inlay was missing. I now remember that it took me a week or two of procrastinating before I bit the bullet and actually carved that out. I was scared of screwing up the lovely walnut top after every other step in the process had gone so unexpectedly well. As it turned out, the process was fine. I used various sizes of drill bits to do the radiused corners, and to remove the bulk of the area that the inlay would cover. I then used small chisels and gouges to tidy up the edges. There's a wee bit of filler in one spot to cover the effect of an uncooperative bit of grain, but it otherwise went well. The inlay material itself is cut from a ~3-mm-thick offcut of ash I had lying around. Here's a picture taken during the finishing process. As with my other instruments, this is polyurethane lacquer applied with a brush and then later sanded down. I used the same lacquer on the neck, though I masked off the fingerboard. The reflective finish in this picture is actually just very hard wood that has been planed and sanded to a gloss finish. (I forgot to sand the saw marks off the bottom of the neck blank before I stuck the truss rod in, but it's not visible in the assembled bass.) Here's the finished bass. It has a pair of StewMac Golden Age jazz bass pickups (because they were on sale when I was buying some other things) and a basic vol-vol-tone control layout. The head-piece has turned out to be plenty strong enough to hold the strings in place. Here's view of the back, showing the control cover which I made from the same ash offcut as the inlay on the front. It's actually from a totally different batch of timber, but the grain matches surprisingly well. I had it set up with D'Addario half-rounds initially, but found them to be very dull-sounding. More flatwound than roundwound, I think. From the moment I first plugged it in, I knew that it blew my old Warwick Corvette fretless out of the water (not least because it was about a kilo lighter and didn't neck dive). Nicer feeling neck, lower action, clearer sound – the Warwick went straight to the Bass Gallery, who sold it on consignment a few months later. As a postscript, about a year after it was finished I was down in Brighton seeing some friends, and popped into GAK because I wanted to try out a Trace Elliot Elf. After noodling around for a while, I asked if they had a fretless I could try it with. The clerk gave me the only fretless they had in stock, which was – oddly – a Fender Custom Shop Tony Franklin signature. The neck and feel of this bass was a transcendental experience, and I realised that I'd set the bar too low by merely going for "better than my Warwick". When I got home, I removed the neck and reprofiled the fingerboard. I lacquered it with a layer of superglue (poor man's epoxy) and obsessively sanded and polished it until the neck was perfectly flat. I'm still not quite sure if I've managed to match that Tony Franklin bass, but I think I'm close enough that I don't mind the difference. Since then this has been my main at-home bass. I play my fretted bass in bands, because that's where the money notes are, but this is the one I reach for when I'm practicing and keep on a stand next to my desk. I'm considering spending some money this year on updating the electronics, just because they're not really up to the same standard of quality as the rest of the instrument. I'm tempted to go for some beefy DiMarzios or Bartolinis, and perhaps try out one of those Lusithand filter preamps, as they seem interesting. Anyone have any experience with those?

People who know me know that I like my basses designed before 1970, with 4 flatwound strings and not a battery in sight… so when this popped up locally for 2nd hand Squier Affinity-money I had to jump on it. A 1993 Ibanez Soundgear SR885BK, made in Japan at FujiGen. With the 2 AFR-J5 pickups and the 3-band EQ with variable midrange swoop (I think they call it the Vari-mid), afaik the only year they came in this combination. Decent bit of kit with Gotoh hardware and a very fast neck. Good enough to give it a try.

I recently collected this piece, having won it in a proper auction. It could be a very late '63 but is more probably very early '64 as it doesn't have the raised logo. It's a feather weight, as it's hollow. One volume control is seized but I'm going to try and take it apart and repair it. It needs a tuner ferrule and a screw for one machine head I've plugged it in and it has that sound. I may name it Paul, after my late brother who was born in '64

Well…after a bit of a wait, and a bit of Wayne Carini style “it’s all about the chase” behaviour… A mate had bought a 70’s one on a whim and I was absolutely smitten with it…but he wouldn’t sell. Off I set on my little search…found via the Shergold owners group on Facebook. Original 1980 case too. its very clean overall with some edge marks. Not bad for 44 years old.

Have got Absolute Radio on and a couple of tunes ago they played the irksome Rehab by Amy Winehouse. Never got all the fuss about her

The "la, la" part would do a great job for my mobile alarm song. Tommorow i have to wake up at 7am and i will try it out !!! 😝

Not just basses…sorry

Likewise; not a trend I’d seen before until BC 🤔 I suspect (but stand to be corrected) that’s it’s probably a male, slightly OCD thing? Any of our female colleagues on here deliberately bought YOB basses? Alembic, Travis Bean, boutique-era Kramer and BC Rich, many of the better Gibson designs, Hamer, Ovation, Wal, John Birch, Electra, golden-era Ibanez - to my mind a fabulous era for bass design and manufacture 🙂

I would love to have one of these, or the 50W PF-50T version. Love the fact that it got a transformer DI out, meaning you get the full poweramp and transformer sound from that DI, and could just run it into a poweramp if the relatively low wattage of the amp is not enough, but still have the sound of the full amp. I actually once owned a 60W Ampeg B-15, the 1968 version of the B-15S, which I very much regret being stupid enough to sell, it was a phenomenal amp. And despite its age, and taking quite a bit of abuse in the about 12 years period where I owned it, I never had any issues whatsoever with it. Congratulations! Edit!!!: Also these amps look damn cool, got to be the coolest amp design ever!

I've just installed the Android Tonelib-Zoom to try it out with my MS-60B. Hopefully Tonelib will update Tonelib-Zoom to cater for the recent releases, on both Windows and Android, and maybe they could teach the Zoom developers how to program for Android.

That's a truly awful excuse for Zoom's failure to support Android. The app is a library app, it's not an audio app. There are defined classes to deal with everything that would be required of it, so there's no excuse for not producing the app. And just because you've got a crap tablet doesn't mean that 99.999% of Android users don't have tablets or phones that work an awful lot better - my elderly cheap Huawei tablet, for example. Other manufacturers support Android - Behringer do for the X-Air series, Nux for their Mighty Plug, M-Vave for their wireless MIDI.

It wasn't the pickups themselves. It was the ears where you'd put the screws through the pickups into the body. What it meant was that even discounting the difference in depth, they didn't fit without being filed down. I just thought it was weird that it wasn't on their website as there was no way they'd properly fit a Stingray route without some filing.

Quite right. The only fish that is permissible on a pizza is anchovy.

The cats woke me up before five this morning to let me know that they wouldn't survive until a more reasonable hour without food. I used the opportunity to get the frets in. I covered the tangs in wood glue to fill any voids left in the fret slots. I also added binding to the headstock, I'm trying a partially bound style. Dolly and Tammy on the brink of starvation

Just found a PF800 on Reverb so I’ve gone for that !

8 notes in a bar is acceptable if you're playing a whole gig while you're in there.

I had a practice tonight with my old band as I am depping for them in a couple of weeks. The good news is I've finally found my sound that I have been striving for. The difference is going back to round wounds after quite a while with flats. Retrovibe T-rod, D'addario 35-95 round wounds, Evo 500 iii, Barefaced 210. On return home I told my news to my wife 'Ive finally found my sound' and her reply was 'good perhaps you will stop buying stuff now'. Happy times!

Well I suppose as it's the Internet you can either only ever play root notes or be a flashy show off. I'm obviously one of those flashy show offs as I have been known to quite often play as many as 4 notes in a bar... I once played 8!

We rehearsed last night, but it was a bit different to the usual in that we are preparing to go into a studio to set up tomorrow evening and then record all day Saturday & Sunday. These will be band promo tracks, but we also have two guys filming it to sync with the studio recordings and also to edit in footage they shot of our first gig in front of an audience last week. I'm sharing lead vocal duties in this band too, so we practiced my tunes last night without singing a word of vocal, to get the band really tight, and then I will overdub my vocal later. Very strange, but I definitely played better bass when I wasn't singing at the same time. I'm buzzing about this new band, we've got some nice gigs lined up, and everyone in the band gets on really well and is a great musician in their own right. I feel rather blessed. Rob

Not sure I get that reference, Steve.. 🤔 There's been a lot of mention in this thread about how a bass players primary role is to 'play (or support) the song' , which is an assertion I pretty much agree with. But equally, as a listening, creative musician, you also have to 'play the band' as well... Only my opinion of course, but I think Entwistle's style and approach to bass playing and creating bass lines, played the band context he was in perfectly. His playing next to Keith Moon's, created something different, something that set The Who apart from other bands.. Not dissimilar to JPJ and John Bonham in Led Zep, for example. In both cases, those two rhythm sections had a unique approach that elevated the band's music beyond the norm, and beyond others - hence why we still talk about them today. Doesn’t mean we all have to like it, but I personally respect that level of creativity and ambition. On a similar note, I'm a huge fan of James Jamerson's playing. And his approach was something different as well - for example, the bass line on 'What's Going On' is a masterclass to me... But I think it's fair to say that what he played on that song isn't what 99% of other bass players would have played on that it.. Yet, it's (quite rightly) celebrated as a work of bass playing genius... Just my 2p worth of course. And there are loads of renowned bass players who 'I don't get', or like, or care for. But what I would say is that there's always something you can learn from those people that helps improve your own playing, or musical creativity, even just a little ...

Honestly I would be ok doing more miles if we had more gigs - its been really quiet this year, but mostly because the singer and guitarist have had holidays on alternate weekends. I think i might put a post on our local music group to see if anyone wants a dep.

It wouldn’t be the same price if it did though. You never know the new pickups might make it a much better bass. I’d love one in this kind of condition.

Smooth.

Here is a link to the VT Bass Deluxe manual. Keep in mind that all sample settings are done with a vintage P or Jazz Bass into a mixer and studio monitors. Using the pedal into the front of an amp or power amp and speaker will yield different results. Once you edit a preset make sure to double click and save the preset. Do not keep playing while the pedal is in edit mode to avoid noise.

I love this post. On the subject of Oasis, have you noticed how the British media have cultivated Noel Gallagher's grandiose delusions by appointing him as a spokesman for a whole host of social and cultural topics. Music, football, politics, marriage, crime, you name it. Noel is invited to share his very definite and forthright opinions expressed in his own inimitable way. His diatribes usually begin with " No one can tell me, right that...". I expect no one can tell Noel much, especially people better informed, better educated and more intelligent than him. That's why the British public identify with his persona. To Noel the world is a very definite place and that certainty is hugely reassuring to some people. Now I've got that off my chest, could I just point out that Waterfront by Simple Minds is more than just that one note shuffle in so much as there's overdubbed fretless bass interspersed throughout the track. Great song, superb bass player.

And there's bad-tempered tuning, when the guitarist sulks because he's been told he's got to use the digital tuner too.

This is often a BC way of saying "keep it simple cos that's the only way to do it that isn't blatant showing off!" 😁 I mean, there's all sorts of songs - Waterfront with its 1 note (though Simple Minds did far more complex stuff too), Rhythm Stick, School Days... But there seems to be lots of folks who are instantly turned off if music is at all complicated (Rhythm Stick excepted!) - this is why Mr Sheeran and Take That are multi-millionaires and Mörglbl are at best niche despite being completely awesome musicians. In the UK there's a weird sort of anti-intellectual thang going on; when I was a kid you should have heard the jeering from my 13 year old classmates when they discovered I'd read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. If a red-top newspaper ever reports anything scientific it's always prefaced by "Boffins have discovered", as if Boffins are a different species from yer average Joe and somehow to be pitied. I mean why would you tinker about with all this cleverness and not be watching the footie or enjoying the X Factor? The only sorts of knowledge that are acceptable under this scenario are an ability to recite every FA cup winner since 1921 or the exact exhaust valve clearance of a 1968 Ford Anglia. That's proper bloke stuff innit, not wishy-washy wet swot stuff! I blame The Beano...