BigRedX

I think my attitude is slightly different. Being self employed allows me to work when I want as long as I deliver on time. Even when I am having time off from work, I always have time for a quick email to acknowledge the receipt of anything that has been sent. Edit: Also I work in a "creative" industry (as I would count someone who does guitar finishing) designing packaging for other small businesses, and often my customers/clients are busy creating/producing what they do during the day and only have time to look at what I have done for them afterwards (evening and days off), when they will reply with comments. IMO it is good business practice to send them a quick acknowledgement that I have seen what they have sent me and will be attending to it during my next work period.

IME the popularity of a band has very little to do with whether they play covers or originals and a lot to do with how entertaining they are. In this respect covers bands should have a head start as they have a vast selection of crowd-pleasing songs available to them, but in actual fact lots of covers bands make poor set choices and then stand in the stage area in jeans and t-shirts taking up valuable drinking space in the pub while delivering little in terms of entertainment that couldn't be bettered by a well chosen iTunes playlist being broadcast over the venue speaker system. As a punter, I find nothing important about live music per se so, if I'm going to pub with live music on, then I want some visual entertainment to go with the sounds.

I'm self employed, and while I don't respond to work emails 24 hours a day, I would take the time to reply (especially to a new customer enquiry) ASAP even if it was only to say that I had seen the email and will give a more comprehensive answer on my next working day, and let them know when that will be. I suppose it might be down to how many of these "refinishers" do it as a hobby rather than making a full time living out of it, but if you are offering a paid-for service then it is poor business practice IMO not to reply reasonably promptly. Maybe they are best avoided - after all if they can't find the time to answer a simple email, who knows how long they will take to refinish your instrument, and how easy it is going to be finding out how things are progressing while they do?

More importantly with only a single saddle per course how do you play it in tune above the fifth fret?

I doubt you could get a 76 or earlier Gibson Thunderbird (which is what this copy is based on) at that price.

This. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen these basses with a 3-point bridge and through-body stringing as well.

Depends on the finish. Generally rosewood boards are natural and maple boards are lacquered, however I have owned basses with unfinished maple boards and layered rosewood ones (although I wouldn’t recommend anything with an unfinished maple board based on my experience). In the short term lacquered boards are the easiest to look after. Clean them well with a DAMP cloth each time you restring. Unfinished rosewood boards require lemon oil and a little more elbow grease to remove the finger crud unless you are replacing your strings more often than once a month. In the long term the finish will begin to wear off the lacquered boards, and the only way to return them to their ordinal state will be to get them refinished, which may mean refinishing the whole neck and will definitely involve laborious and time consuming removing the finish from the frets. HTH

Very much this. Even if you're not tech savvy enough to work out how to create an auto reply, it takes less than a minute to copy and paste a standard we’re closed or too busy to take on new work at the moment into an email and hit send. I very much doubt that any of these businesses are getting so many emails every day that they cannot keep up.

You could condense this thread down to just saying go an buy the greatest hits/best of album or the first live album any band puts out.

A slightly better time for originals bands then. Time for everyone to hone their songwriting skills.

IMO this is an appealing state of affairs. If your a business and don’t want to deal with your customers by email, then don’t give out an email address. However in this day and age if you can’t deal with email enquiries you probably shouldn’t be in business.

Surely for the Ramones it would be the first “It’s Alive” album which is all the best songs from the first three studio albums. The only thing missing for me is Rock n Roll Radio.

1 or 3 IMO.

TBH the only times I've had to adjust the truss rod on any of my guitars or basses is either when I have fitted strings with a completely different tension, or when I bought an instrument from a country with a very different climate to the UK. The rest of the time I leave it alone. I can live with the very tiny fluctuations in relief caused by the UK climate.

IMO there is no such thing as "a set up". Set up is very much a personal preference and what suites one musician may be seen as unplayable for another.

For monitoring you want brutal rather than forgiving. IIRC the point of those nasty Yamaha NS10s that every studio had in the 80s was that if you could make your mix sound good on them then it would sound good on everything else.

All of my custom-made guitars and basses have solid colour necks that match the body, it's only the cheaper, factory-made ones with bolt-on necks that have a natural finish. Also I never understand why people think that necks with solid colour feel sticky compared with those with a natural finish. Coloured necks should have the same clear top coat as the natural finish ones, so it must be psychological.

Also do you have a multimeter or continuity tester? IME trying to track down even simple wiring problems is extremely difficult without one.

Good luck with joining the forum. I registered back in March and I only got my approval email (which allows me to actually post on there) last week!

I always find it weird that the neck is left natural when the body is a solid colour. I suspect it stems from another of Fender's cost-cutting exercises, so that any neck could be fitted to any body. Personally I find the juxtaposition of natural wood with blue and green rather jarring, but I suspect that must just be me because plenty of manufacturers and luthiers produce guitars and basses with these colour combinations and people seem to buy them!

Yes put they all have their amps mic'd up so every component in their signal chain is used to produce both the on-stage and FoH sound. When was the last time you saw a bass cab mic'd up and knew for sure that the mic was solely responsible for the FoH bass sound. For most bassists at best they are going to get a post-EQ DI feed to the PA which means that from a tone PoV the power amp and the cabs contribute nothing to what the audience hears. That's why I have dispensed with my big, heavy and expensive bass rig and replaced it with a Helix (and an FRFR as a personal monitor). That way I know that all the components of my carefully crafted bass sounds are being supplied to FoH.

I like the colour. Out of interest why did you only spray the front of the headstock and not the whole neck (not including the fretboard)?

There's also talk now of a lot of countries (including the UK) introducing a 14 quarantine for all new arrivals as they ease off lockdown. For the EU this means the Schengen Area which gives touring bands access to a lot of countries after their 14 days in quarantine which is probably worth it. For the UK it means just the UK which for a handful of gigs at the most probably won't be worth the effort and hassle.

I think it depends what/where you play. My 40+ years of gigging has been nearly all originals and not always at a particularly high level. I've played all over the UK in many different bands doing different kinds of music, but at all, apart from the smallest of venues, the bass has gone through the in-house PA system. Often I'd be asked to turn down my rig to the point where I could hear the bass louder from the monitor on the other side of the stage than I could from my own rig unless I was stood right in front of it. OTOH almost all of my (very few comparatively) covers band gigs have relied on me having a decently loud bass rig and PA was vocals only. However IIRC the OP is strictly and originals band player hence my comments.

Surely the only bassists who need amps are those who play with no PA support? In over 40 years, less than 1% of of the gigs I have played have required my bass rig to be the sole or main source from which the audience hears my bass guitar. These days I just use my Line6 Helix straight into the PA with an FRFR cab for those gigs where the foldback isn't chunky enough to deliver a decent bass sound.