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Do you have a Sarzo model with the Sims Super Quads? If so, I don't know if your settings will be transferable to any other Euros, nor will our settings be useful to you. That said, my Euro LX has the EMG PJ set and Tonepump, I use the bridge J bar on 100% and the P pickup on maybe 50%, which gives a middy aspect to the tone. I've got my bass and treble knobs pretty much flat, no cut or boost - despite Spector's inaccurate marketing, the Tonepump can both do both cut and boost the treble and bass. I think the EMG PJ is quite sensitive to picking position, it can get beefy slaps, grunty fingerstyle over the P and growl fingerstyle over the J. Of course, all basses can do this to a degree but I find these pickups to be very good at everything, all at once without needing to fiddle with the knobs. My main rig is a Markbass Little Mark Ninja 1000W, Ninja 2x12 and a Markbass Traveler 2x10. I keep the filters on the amp switched off, the tweeters at neutral (no decibel cut or boost). I boost the low and high mids on the amp and little and keep everything else flat. I find extremes of EQ just don't sound good.

I was just about to post the exact same thing. There seems to be a level of misunderstanding about taperwound strings on this forum. The thin core part of a taperwound string sits over the saddle. This won't cause any issues for stability, sustain, tone etc. I'm interested to know if OP will be able to get a decent sound from his B string. Some basses just sound a bit dead on the B, through no fault of the strings used or how they were applied to the instrument. Could it be perhaps that the open B is a dead spot? Does the B in any of the other positions sound weak?

I have locking strap setups on all of my basses. I have two Dingwall racing straps, one with Schaller and one with Dunlop locks. I think the Schaller "cup over peg" is the most secure design, if you set the cup part on the strap so the peg sits in it under gravity, you could unscrew the locking part and if you've set it up right, the bass should still stay on the strap, sitting with the strap pegs in the cups. On the downside, the locking wheel on the Schallers is more prone to loosening, though I've never had to turn it more than a few degrees to tighten it, I can see that if you didn't check it could feasibly work loose, but you'd have to really avoid tightening it for that to happen. It's quite literally a 5 second job, so hardly worth skimping on. My Warwick and Ken Smith basses have recessed strap locks, so they only work with Dunlop. I think Schaller is the slightly better design, as you can actively mitigate the risk of it failing by tightening it, and you can set the cups up so the bass won't hit the deck even if the locks do fail. While extremely unlikely, if the ball bearings on the Dunlop design failed, the bass could head south very quickly, however I think it's still very unlikely. I must admit I get a bit nervous when I see people playing guitar or bass on a strap without any form of locking mechanism (or washer, if you're thrifty). I made the mistake of doing this with an Epiphone Les Paul (which was a crap guitar) as a teenager and nearly broke my foot. The guitar didn't have a mark on it, but if you dropped you £10,000 Alembic or even just your £500 Fender and marked it you'd be throwing expletives.

Fantastic basses, I had a poplar burl 5 and I recently bought a maple 4LX. As mentioned, try winding the preamp gain back a bit using the adjustment screw unless you've done it already, or you just love the sound of your amp clipping.

Some of his live performances with Chaka Khan are great, he definitely does the gig justice. His Ken Smith sounds great too. I'm not so convinced by his Korean store brand signature model thing.

Who on earth is Skyler Accord? I must admit, I've never heard of him and I'm generally fairly up to speed with rock and metal. The band he is in don't seem to have a huge following. I recall a few years back when Ibanez massively expanded their signature line with a load of metalcore artist sigs made in their Asian factories. There was a strong demarcation between those and the Japanese-built stuff for the real AAA roster. I think we've seen even further dilution of the signature instrument this year with EBMM offering a Jared Dines guitar. I'm not even sure he is in a band or plays music outside of joke tracks for his crap YouTube channel. Is this what people want now, a guitar specced out by an "influencer" rather than a signature instrument with features that are useful to the artist and their music? I digress. This Sky Accord guy can play and he gets a great tone from his Spector (which is to be expected, I suppose) but the band he is in are bad, cringingly bad. If you don't like metalcore with autotuned vocals then just try to tune them out and listen to this bass tone: It will be interesting to see how Spector changes in the future now that Stuart has retired. I wonder if he still has any stake in the business and ability to influence as a shareholder or if he is fully retired and out. I see the new Euros with Fishman pickups and I think that could be interesting. That said, I've heard the Spectors with Bartolini and Aguilars and I didn't think any of those were as good as Spectors with EMGs, although I'm not a fan of Aguilar pickups, I must admit. As mentioned in another thread about Spectors here recently, I do wish Spector would broaden their artist roster and try and pick up some jazz fusion artists. I want to hear some awesome music with that great Spector tone instead of chunga chunga metal.

I love these threads where everyone shares their conservative musical views. Given how groundbreaking rock and roll was, you think that spirit of invention might have lived on, but it appears for many it got stuck somewhere in the mid 1970s. Anyway, I'll have my go, "Nuno Bettencourt plays with no soul / emotion etc". 😂

While that is present I feel like there is less of it these days, Talkbass is less middle class than it used to be. As I say, it used to be a doctors and lawyers hangout and the bass porn was off the scale. As a mere regulatory professional, I'm surprised they even approved my account!

A shame, because Talkbass used to be the home of exotic basses. It is super staid these days. I play Talkbass bingo. Browse until you've heard all the big hits... "P with flats" "Sits in the mix" "Leo got it right first time" "Mud and thud" "Bass should be felt and not heard" "7.6lbs? That's an ounce too heavy for me, I'm out"

You could always check but if the bass came with the EMG BTS then I doubt it's been changed to a Tonepump. I don't know if the EMG preamp has a trim pot, but it probably doesn't need adjusting. The Tonepump is an unusual case, you don't often need to make these sort of changes to preamp from other brands. The Tonepump is the most over the top hot preamp I can think of.

Hey Al, I know there's been a few replies but I'll quickly address a few points here: EMG HZs are passive, but if you can adjust the output on your preamp, you can still try it, it's very easy to do and you can test it on the fly, so if you don't like it you can put it back how it was. I haven't played a Spector with HZs and the Tonepump Jr, but if you play another active bass, then plug your Spector in and play without adjusting the volume and think your Spector makes your rig way louder than the other bass, then the Spector could likely do with a gain reduction. The problem with the super-high output of the Tonepump is that it hits the input stage of your amp really hard and causes clipping, particularly if you have the Tonepump on maximum output. If you have a clip light on your amp if might flash to indicate that your input signal is clipping. Basically this will not help your tone and will also risk damaging the tweeters in your amp if it has them. You can just lower the input gain on your amp to prevent clipping, but your amp will work best if the input gain is turned up but still set below the point where your playing causes it to clip. In effect, you're just hurting the quality of your tone if you run the input gain turned right down. I tend to pop and slap a few notes (as this generates pretty much the highest amplitude in your signal that you'll get in normal playing) and if my clip light flashes, roll back until it doesn't and then roll back a tiny bit more for some safety margin. Adjusting the gain on the Tonepump is really easy. Just take the backplate off your bass, and find the main preamp module, which is a little box, which may be attached to the inside of the bass by velcro (like on my Spector). Pull the preamp out and find the the adustment screw, it's a tiny phillips head screw. All the way to the right is 100% gain, which is how it comes from the factory) and all the way to the left is 0%. If you plug your bass in and play a note, then adjust the preamp all the way to the left, you'll hear the bass go silent. Then wind the screw to the right until you find a sound you're happy with. I find about 50% open is best for me. I always find the secret recipe for good tone is a nice smooth signal from the source instrument. With a smooth, clean signal, you can add effects, shape the EQ etc very effectively. I find that when a signal is too hot and spiky, you spend more time and effort taming the hot signal and it tends not to play so nicely with pedals and amplifiers and can sound harsh. It's counter-intuitive, but a smooth output signal allows for a richer tone at the end of the signal chain when you're actually hearing the tone. Pickup companies for example, prey on this ignorance by selling super-hot pickups to guitarists who think that a hot signal will give them the ultimate metal or shred tone (because hotter must be better, right?!) , when in fact all they get is a harsh mess that is wearing on the ears.

As of the start of the year, I'm a Spector owner again. I straightened the neck out because I like my necks pretty much bang on straight and dropped the saddle heights down. I wound the Tonepump down to 50%, which I think is a must for any bass with that preamp and it sweetens the tone up so much. On the 100% setting as they come from the factory the gain output is just ridiculous. Even putting the input gain on my Markbass Ninja 1000 way down, it would still clip even when not playing particularly hard. The eventual plan is to swap the pickups out for EMG X series and add an EMG premap with volume, pan and 3 band EQ just to give me more on board flexibility with the mid control. The EMGs in this might go in my Yamaha Attitude. The thing is, while I find the Tonepump to be a little fiddly to use compared to a 3 band, it just sounds so damn good once it's set right that I don't feel in a hurry to start changing parts.

Other than the string hitting the pickups, your amp might be clipping. Does it have a clip light to notify you of this happening? Try turning your input gain down and then boost the output to reach your desired volume and then try "giving it the beans".

My collection as it stands. I think the Pedulla will probably go on sale soon and make way for a Status, Zon or similar. It's fantastic but of my 3 PJ basses, it gets the least playtime.

Nice bass! Was the Spector Euro in the Glasgow store initially? It was in the Edinburgh store when I bought it online, it was shipped down to Newcastle the same day. I bought it early morning on Monday (3AMish) before going to bed and by the time I got up at 09:30 the page for the bass had been removed.

You've never played roundwounds before? Welcome to the world of tone!

It's a bass guitar. It's an asset you bought for cash and can easily turn back into cash for any purpose of your choosing. If you've got so much space and cash that you wouldn't feel guilty for letting it live in it's case forever then keep it. If you think you'd feel better swapping it for something else then flip it. Don't feel wedded to an instrument just because you wanted one for a long time. The pleasure of owning something you lusted after for so long will never truly overcome the fact it's not the right instrument for you. We've probably all been there. There's instruments I talk about in "wish I'd never sold it" threads, but after getting close to 20 years of buying and selling instruments, I've never regretted selling something that just wasn't working as I needed it to. The only things I regret selling were good instruments that I sold to free cash up for other ventures which ultimately brought me less joy than the instrument I sold to fund them.

Cool, everyone has different opinions on these things. If I couldn't tell the difference I'd have gone for the cheaper one too. 👍

Indeed, my brother actually sent me a link to the page on the Guitar Guitar website a few days back and I'd been mulling it over. You were right, it was a very fair price and the condition overall is great. I'd wanted a Euro 4 string ever since selling my Euro 5 a while back. I know you can get the Euros with Aguilar and Bartolini pickups now but for me, the classic Spector sound is EMGs. As I say, I'll be upgrading the Tonepump in the new year to an EMG preamp but it sounds great as it is. I love it!

Spector or Lakland is an interesting choice. They are very different in terms of feel. I think the Laklands are much more of an old-fashioned, traditional feel due their body shape and neck joints. Spectors, at least the high end ones with the curved bodies and thru-neck construction, are a much different and more modern feeling bass. I saw you had a budget of £1000, for that price I'd hunt out a used Spector Euro. The Korean Spectors are nice but they're not on the same level of quality feel as the European stuff. I think a Euro Spector will win out for quality over an import Lakland too, with a Euro being more on a level with the US Laklands. The most important factor will be feel and sound, however. The Spector growl isn't for everyone and of course, some will prefer the more traditional feel of a Lakland too.

Yes, the very same. It's got the volume, volume, bass, treble controls for the Tonepump circuit, often incorrectly identified as a "boost only" preamp, which isn't actually true. It's a decent enough preamp but I like to have a mids knob. You can still control your mids by cutting or boosting bass and treble but ultimately it doesn't have the flexibility of a 3 band or greater preamp. My plans for the new year are to get an EMG preamp for it and have it with a volume, blend, bass, mids and treble control. As I've only got four knobs I'll need a stacked one, but I'm sure EMG will have something to suit. Edit: Confused you with another poster.

Hmmm, what is this that has just arrived in the post?

I agree, Spector basses are better for far more than pumping eighths in minor keys. I suppose that kind of chugging rock and metal sells to the masses and it must be an easy marketing angle to align their instruments with that genre. Their basses do have a much greater depth of ability than their marketing suggests. That said, I can't see how to turn it around, getting some really good endorsers from other genres would probably be an uphill struggle at this point. I loved my Euro 5LX and will have a 4 string at some point. I loved how rich and clear the tone was.

Is a Vigier a better bass than a Warwick $$? Maybe, it depends on what you want from a bass. Is it more "high end"? Yes, but that is meaningless if the bass doesn't deliver what you need from it. I've played a lot if basses with graphite and carbon fibre construction thanks to my brother rotating them through his collection (lots of Status, Zon, Bogart, Zoot and possibly more) and I've had a very brief go on a Vigier. These basses are all different takes on one flavour and if that fundamental sound isn't what you're after then maybe the Vigier isn't for you. On the other hand, it might be perfect. However, if you have to lose thr Warwick in order to get the Vigier, maybe you should give the Vigier a test drive first. Of the two, I think I'd want the Vigier, if it was in good condition with no problems. The thing about Warwick necks being unstable just isn't true. You can dig up stories of necks shifting with any manufacturer - even the ones with carbon fiber necks that apparently don't need a truss rod because they'll never shift. I've had a German Thumb BO5 for a few years now, the only shift in the neck was the intentional one to drop the action right down as the previous owner preferred his action a fair bit higher than mine.