BigRedX

He's definitely playing an Ampeg in the OGWT session.

What's so bizarre about the pickup arrangement?

Looks like a Magnum 1 from the controls.

Right now IME it very much depends on what kind of a band you are in, a what venues you play. Covers in pubs where the PA is your own and mostly for vocals, you will need a traditional bass rig. Pretty much anything else and you can do what you want. I sold all my conventional bass amplification and bought a Helix and an RCF745 FRFR powered speaker. I found that at the smaller venues I was being asked to turn down to the extent that I could hear more bass guitar from the guitarist's wedge monitor over on the other side of the stage then I could from my own rig directly behind me; and on the bigger stages even though I was using a Tech Soundsystems 1kW bass amp into 6x10 EBS speakers as soon as I stepped out of the direct "line of fire" of my rig I could only hear the bass in the foldback. For me the Helix and RCF cab is an ideal solution. If the foldback on the in-house PA isn't up to the job I have the RCF which I position so that it "fires" across the stage for the rest of the band to be able to hear me rather than out front where it could potentially mess up the PA balance. It also means that for gigs with multiple bands where stage space is at a premium I can place the speaker in a place where it wouldn't be possible to easily fit a traditional bass rig. For the bigger gigs I don't even bother with the cab and just use the supplied foldback. I've never noticed a problem with not being able to "feel" the sound. Most of the time I still couldn't even with a standard bass amp and speakers. The only time I've needed to use my FRFR cab to supply FoH bass sound the RCF was more than up to the task.

@Bassassin should be along in a bit with all the facts, but IIRC MIJ and CIJ come from different factories.

Surely that also means the DI level is affected by the output volume of the amp? That can't be a good thing.

TBH from a OCD PoV the state of the gold platting new vs old is likely to be more unsettling than the lack of a Yamaha logo.

Difficult to tell from the tiny photo of the cheaper bridge, but IMO the important difference between the two is the presence of grooves in the base plate of the Gotoh bridge designed to prevent lateral movement of the saddles. If you think that is worth paying extra for then go for it.

It's not really a "mud-bucker" though, more individual single coil pickups for each string fitted into a single cover, and IIRC has more in common with Wal pickups than anything Gibson ever made.

IMO it's only tradition that dictates the need to have both a guitarist and bassist in a band. After all it's perfectly acceptable to not have a keyboard player (or brass etc.) so what is so different about not having a guitarist or bassist? My first band didn't have bass on a lot of our early songs (including one that was on our first vinyl release and played on national radio) although that was partly because we didn't own a bass guitar and weren't always able to borrow one when we recorded, and partly because we thought that, for may of our songs, the rhythm guitar parts filled the arrangement out better. One of my current bands has no guitarist. The musical parts are handled by our synth player and myself playing bass VI both alternating between melodies and bass lines as the songs dictate.

Warwick?

Plenty of bass there, it's just not being played on a "traditional" bass guitar. No different really from any other band that doesn't have a player with a bass guitar.

Most Gus guitars and basses have wooden fretboards, although they also have a cedar core to the neck underneath the carbon fibre skin. Mine have either ebony or cocobolo.

At least the controls are on the front this time...

Less horrible looking than most Warwicks IMO.

Yes/No. I find that my searching out and consumption of music (both new and old) is inversely proportional to how busy I am with my own compositions. At the moment I'm very much focused on the later so I don't have much time for the former. I'd like to think that I was open to new music, but in reality nearly all the "new" artists I have discovered in the last 10 years are either heavily influenced by music from my past - mainly the 70s and 80s - or feature members from bands I have previously enjoyed.

Accurate at which frequencies? And which frequency weightings are available?

Calling @evilLordJuju

In the bass world “lipstick” pickup says nothing about the design of the actual pickup other than it will fit in a tube. The Gus bass pickup is one of the hottest single coils you will ever come across.

1” tape is going to have a lot more variables than 1/4”. It could hold any number of tracks from 8 to 24, be recorded at a number different speeds with various possible noise reduction systems (or none at all). Hopefully all the relevant details including the types of test tone used are on the box.

That's not going to help as the thread in question has been going for over 2 years and I have no idea what I posted in it it an when, hence my wanting to find my post(s).

As the title says. It is possible to search within a thread but that doesn't seem to include member's names - when I use my name as a search term it produces no results even though I have posted within the thread. Using the advanced search it is possible to find member's posts but it doesn't appear to be able to limit the search to a thread with no other search terms. Normally it wouldn't matter, I'd just scroll through until I found my post(s) but the thread in question is over 30 pages long.

Sad to say after getting a promotional email from Eastwood Guitars saying that: and subsequently enquiring why I haven't had mine yet, I have had a reply from the UK part of Eastwood Guitars saying that they are not expecting the UK shipment to arrive until 23rd August, so I'm probably still 2 weeks away from receiving mine :-(((

IME most low B-strings could do with being a bit less flexible if anything.

They all have the wrong headstock IMO. I did consider having mine modified to something more in keeping with the rest of the bass.