SwamiRob

I've only ever got 2 guitars/basses through the post and both times they came in a cardboard box at the least, that plus a gig bag should be enough. My U2 (guitar not bass) was only in cardboard and turned up perfect, ad that was without a vaguely protective gig bag layer in between.

Bought a Trace SMX comp off him, very helpful and got things sorted very quickly. Definitely recommend trading with him.

Bought a VBA400 off him about a year ago and forgot to give feedback at the time, made arrangements for me to pick it up from somewhere miles away from him cos he happened to be going for a curry which was very handy, but was gonna come meet halfway anyway which would have been a fair way too. Very highly recommended.

And I bought those pickups off him, posted as soon as he could, also had them very well packaged with all original packaging, instructions and little pole piece tool thing included, and kept me well updated as to what was happening with postage. Very well recommended.

I have to admit I haven't really posted on here other then to buy a couple of things, but this is truly shocking. I regard myself as a bit of an anarchist (a slightly more progressive one that believes in cooperative ownership, likes a bit of noam chomsky and stuff like that, not one of those idiots that goes round smashing things and wants everyones diets to comprise of nothing but bad quality lentil soups) but I see no sense in this at all. 3 things are true of most botuique builders: 1) They spend little or NO money on marketing, with most of these boutique makes bass, string, amp or whatever they rely on their repuation and word of mouth, I've been told on a few occasions when asking about some of these kind of products that I might NOT want to buy their product because it might not suit me, that's some crafty corporate brainwashing if I've heard heard of any... 2) They often either sell their products first hand, or the dealers are independent shops/online distributors that know what they're talking about. You don't exactly see any of this stuff turning up in places like the horrible american guitar centre, where it seems from what I've heard the staff are pretty clueless. 3) They are much more likely to source the parts they don't make for themselves from smaller suppliers, thus supporting small business, and in general seem to go more out of their way to use more ethical woods and all that kinda stuff. 4) The quality is just that much better and you get what you pay for, even though alot of manufactures don't charge as much, I'd say for certain that alot of the time a generous slice is marketing and profit. With these kinda manufacturers the cost is likely to go mostly on materials, labour and overheads, with next to nothing or nothing for marketing and probably nowhere near as much of a profit margin. Even if there was a decent profit in them I'd rather give my money to a manufacture that was actually spending the money I gave them on the product I'm gonna get, not just raving about how good it's supposed to be and then it not been... Like people have pointed out already, I bet none of these manufacturers own a private jet or anything, and to repeat myself these companies are by far more ethical (as a huge generalisation) then people like fender, even if your paying much more.

Can't see anything about them been balanced on the site, usually they make a pretty big deal of it, and even with balanced strings the bass side is much thicker and treble side much thinner it seems too.

Gonna be recording in a couple of months, and really wanna find some balanced strings beforehand, want them cos I imagine the overall sound will be much better not having the typically awful boomy E string and tight thin sounding D and G, but for recording it'd be really nice if I didn't have to have the masses of mulitband compression on my bass that a decent set of strings would sort out. Circle K seem like they'd be awesome, however paying just as much for postage as you are for a set of strings is a bit rubbish, I'd gamble on buying a few sets since they seem awesome and the actual strings are only 15 quid which is less then a set of ernies at alot of shops, but definitely can't afford that.