rushbo

A poor idea, badly executed.

https://www.gumtree.com/p/guitar-instrument/fender-precision-bass-mex/1166809460 I'm not convinced about this...firstly, the "strip down and varnish" job makes it look like a Bass shaped toffee apple, but the small diameter tuners and single ply scratchplate say "Chinese Squier" to me. Other than that, with a Seymour Duncan pup, £180 ain't bad if it's what it says it is. Any thoughts from my more learned colleagues?

That's Grandma's Chrismas pressie sorted.

I had a set of Schallers on my first "proper" bass. i was forever tightening the pesky thing up, until one day, at rehearsal, the bass crashed to the floor with the strap lock in pieces. I may just have had a rogue one, but it put me off those mechanical locks for life. i tried the Dunlop ones and found that they needed quite a bit of heft (!) to get them secure. Then, I went down the washer route...I tried some eBay specials...thick black washers branded as instrument specific strap locks. They were incredibly stiff and needed a real effort to get them over the pin. After a while they became hard, then brittle, then they cracked and were unusable. By far the most user friendly, cost effective and successful have been the Grolsch grommets. The pack I bought years ago are all nice and supple and they're easy to take off and put on whilst still offering plenty of security. All my basses have them on now. I'm a fan.

I swapped a handful of Grolsch washers ("Happy Shopper Straplocks") for a keyring 'n' plectrum combo with Mick. All was going swimmingly until he suggested that I had acquired the washers by drinking massive quantities of imported lager. The nerve! I wish I hadn't bothered now...I only agreed to the deal because I was smashed out of my mind on imported lager... ...but other than that, he's a lovely man. Buy, sell (and swap) with confidence.

With my hippy head on, I'd say, "yeah, help him out...he's a fellow traveller and he'll make you sound great!" With my slightly less hippy head on, I'd be inclined to say this: like you, he is being paid to provide a service. To perform that service he needs to get his equipment in and out of vans and venues. That is his job. To pull a face when you don't immediately spring to his aid seems rather petulant. If you play a bar and that bar gets really busy, does the landlord ever ask you to pop behind the bar and pull pints? No. It's not your job. If the sound guy doesn't think he can move his kit without assistance, he should bring along a helper, otherwise he will have to rely on the good will of people who are not getting paid to shift his stuff around. By all means, as an empathetic human being, help him out, but if someone who you are paying to work for you, demands that you provide unpaid assistance, then you are perfectly within your rights to refuse. I'm a friendly, helpful chap, and I wouldn't hesitate to help if I was asked politely, or was in a position to help. But when assumptions and demands are made then I'm afraid I wouldn't be quite so lovely.

Using the "Active " setting on the B3 helps massively, too.

I'm using the Zoom and Smooth Hound PSUs. The noise reduction tamed it considerably, but it caught me a bit by surprise. I'll play about with the power supplies... The adaptor was to swap polarity... The receiver takes a [i]centre-positive[/i] 9V supply so requires a polarity swap cable to use a centre-negative PSU. Chris kindly popped one in the post to me. I didn't use it in the end and went with the two separate PSUs.

I've had no luck at all with strap locks. I find them really fiddly. I bought a bag of 100 rubber Grolsch bottle washers about five years ago off eBay for a few quid and installed them on all my basses and guitars. Solid as a rock but easy to remove. And they're a lovely pink colour...

I've done two rehearsals and two gigs with mine over the last 10 days and I'm impressed. I'm using the batteries that Chris supplied at the moment, while I'm waiting for my rechargeables to arrive and it looks like there's loads of life left in them. Operation is faultless, with none of the dropouts that plagued my Line 6 G30. There's barely a difference in tone between the wireless and corded signals. It's ace. The only issue I had was using it in conjunction with my Zoom B3. Although Chris kindly sent out an adaptor so I could daisy chain it from my existing PSU, I decided to use the separate power supply for it. Both my Zoom and the Smooth Hound are on my minimal pedal board. When using the compression and fuzz/distortion settings, the signal was really noisy and I had to dial in quite a bit of noise reduction. Not a deal breaker and probably just the result of having two bits of digital kit side by side.

Very talented guy, but the groove has been processed right out of the tune. Quite a lot of that sounded a bit like a fight in a music shop.

Anth bought some tuners from me - great communication and speedy payment. All lovely. Buy and sell with confidence.

Mike bought a fretless neck from me - all good. Fast payment and great communication. Whattaguy! Buy and sell with confidence

Tardy to the party, but I've always used these guys - initially because they're a local business, but subsequently because their cables are brilliant quality and keenly priced. Ultimate Pro Audio Ltd http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Ultimate-Pro-Audio-Ltd?_trksid=p2047675.l2563

Year 6 art project gone wrong.