wingnutkj

Or maybe something I can't quite get a clear picture of - I'm imagining something black and compact, maybe made by one of the 80's shred-guitar companies? Unless you mean a Steinberg headless, but that's not particularly Thunderbird-y.

Gibson RD?

Muddy, thuddy, neckdiving beasts with a god-awful bridge design where the saddles fall out when you take the strings out, and rattle when the strings are in. Very limited tone-wise - the '70s pickup positioning helps a bit, and the bridge pickup adds a bit of a change, but really they're all about that thud. That may or may not be what you're looking for. If it sounds like I've got it in for them, I should point out I'm a fan - I've had two or three different ones over the years, and there's times and places where nothing else will do. If you're looking for something a bit more useable, the new Les Paul Junior Tribute DC Bass is worth a look at, and the Reverend Mike Watt signature gives you a much more sensible pickup but much sillier colours.

I sold a pedal to Jim - speedy payment, good comms - a pleasure to deal with. Good stuff!

I bought a compressor from Paul - quick and easy transaction! Highly recommended.

I just bought a mixer from Gav - a pleasure to do business with!

Bought Dan's Muff (as it were). Great guy to deal with - speedy comms and a smooth transaction. Thanks Dan!

I buy and listen to lot of stuff via Bandcamp, but if there's a physical component, I'll try to buy that too. If I'm seeing a band live and enjoy it, I'll generally try to buy something off them, and will favour the physical component. However, I rarely play records these days, because it's easier to just play the download. Maybe bands are going about it the wrong way - get a load of download codes, record sleeves and label stickers printed out, then raid junk shops for the cheapest records they can find and bung them in the sleeves. Anyone complains, well it must have been a pressing error, right? And you've got the download code anyway.

Can't go far wrong with either of them - I've got an SD which is *still* my go-to bass (admittedly, I swapped the body out for a P-shaped one years ago), and my mate swears by the Yammys, owns two and is always on the lookout for more. Have you tried them both out? I've not seen an SD in a shop in years!

[quote name='KiOgon' timestamp='1438885058' post='2838442'] Yep - me too! Where to begin [/quote] [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/267346-the-spooky-thread/"]Here[/url]! [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/267346-the-spooky-thread/"]http://basschat.co.uk/topic/267346-the-spooky-thread/[/url]

My spooky music-related story: A good few years ago now, the band I was in used to jam at a place belonging* to a friend of the guitarist. It was an old stable-house, with three sides round a courtyard. One side was the house the guy lived in, the back was half workshop,half dumping ground for dead workshop equipment. The other side was a massive room with bare stone walls and an enormous fireplace, a couple of tatty sofas, ragged carpet on the floor, a pool table, and some tatty instruments on the wall. The guy basically used it as a party room/man-cave, and he was happy to let us practice in it. It was a bit chilly and damp, even with the fire on, but hey, free rehearsal space! Usually, we'd go over on a Saturday afternoon, set up our gear, jam for a while, go get some dinner, then in the evening go back to pack up the gear and hang around for a bit more acoustic jamming, which inevitably devolved into a drinking session with the guy and whoever turned up. One particularly dreich night in the autumn, we were sitting round the fire drinking whisky and sharing ghost stories. Footsteps in old buildings, visitations from relatives at the time they passed, shadowy figures at the ends of beds, the usual stuff. There was a healthy mix of belief and respectful scepticism, and eventually, the guy who owned the place, who hadn't said much until now, spoke up to say "well, I've lived and worked in a number of supposedly spooky places, and I've never so much as seen any~" At that point, there was a pop, and all the lights went off. There were a variety of reactions - couple of screams from the girlfriends (and drummer), I froze in place with the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, and the guy saying "that's just sodding typical - don't worry, it's just the circuit breaker. Does it all the time." (It had never done it while we were doing band practice running two amps and a PA off it...). He clicked the breaker back on, and the drinking resumed, at a slightly subdued pace. Later, when I was walking home with the guitarist, he told me he'd noticed that for the early part of the night, before the lights went off, I'd kept at the back corner of the room. "Probably just a natural reaction to the spooky stories, looking over my shoulder to check for anything creeping up behind me" I said. "Maybe, but so was I. And so was the drummer. Couldn't quite see whatever I thought I saw out the corner of my eye. And it was always that corner. Where the circuit breaker was..." Never quite worked out what was going on there - I certainly didn't see anything, but if it wasn't supernatural, it was certainly Sod's Law that the lights would go out at that particular moment. *Turned out when he said "owned", it was actually rented and his grand plans to turn it into a recording studio were total fantasy, but that's another story.

I've added the Staytrem bridge to mine, and have ordered a couple of sets of Kalium (formerly Circle K) strings, which I'll hopefully get in a few weeks time (I've had them sent to a friend in the states who is coming over for a visit soon).

Good find! I've found that "random" or "shuffle" buttons on mp3 players/software tend to be pretty useless, but I like the idea of being able to push a button and getting a whole album chosen for me. It needs a "and now for something completely different" button as well, which picks an album from a totally different genre than the currently playing album.

[quote]bass identification.... what is it?[/quote] It's the act of determining the manufacturer and/or model of a bass guitar based on available evidence, but that's not important right now.

If you're a regular record store visitor, Record Store Day is the worst day of the year to visit your local friendly record store. Normally on a nice sunny day like today, I'd quite happily wander round town, popping into my usual haunts for a browse, but today if I want to in, it'll involve a queue and having a list of what I want, to speed things along. This year, I had a look at what was coming out, and pretty much none of it appealed to me, and it's painfully obvious that so much of it is aimed at the "collectors" market, rather than the "I'd actually quite like to listen to the record, and I'm not particularly bothered that doing so will involve opening the cellophane and halving the eBay sale value" market.

If all you're after is the tone, and you don't like the body shape or neck width, there are a number of other basses out there with P pickups in the necessary location. Or, as a stop-gap, you could wire a Jazz up with a series-parallel switch - gives an approximation of the P pickup sound and is easily done if you're able to solder.

Those must have been pretty serious sins...

After years of putting up with a ropey action, muddy humbucker, warped bridge pickup top and unstable tuning due to a badly cut nut, I finally got round to giving my bitsa telecaster a facelift. Shimmed the neck, sorted out the nut, and put new pickups in. The pups are a Tonerider Hot Classic at the bridge, and an Artec P1 Filtertron-style humbucker at the neck. Sounds much better now! The Filtertron is much clearer than the old pickup, and balances much better with the bridge pickup when they're both on. The guitar is a Warmoth body - wild maple top on poplar, with Fender Mexico Telecaster neck with 2 roller string retainers. I put it together about 12 years ago. For such cheap pickups, I'm well impressed by the quality.