NickA

Yup, needs a clean from time to time. I Clean the ebony fingerboard on my double bass with vodka on a kitchen towel. Looks like the ub804 has a rosewood board in which case vodka may be a bit harsh. Real turpentine is good, or follow up the vodka with some walnut oil, wipe off excess then allow to dry. Some people use linseed oil, I find it's too sticky. Some people swear by lemon oil. There are special finger board oils too .. but mostly expensive repackagings of the above.

note bends ... hmm. Don't do it myself; but it might need that extra leverage.

In fact it DIDN'T go for $9000; that was the highest bid and he pulled it. Now back on reverb at $9700 which is where he bought it for $6500 a few weeks back.

Down a 3rd = up a 6th. Down a fourth = up a fifth. Down a fifth = up a fourth etc. You can still refer to a note as a 3rd below another but the chord interval will be the invertion of that interval.

Can't argue with that! Depends so much on the amp architecture that it's impossible to make one rule for all. Turning up the gain gives a nice strong signal into the power amp, but not if you then turn the volume down. If you want a clean sound turn up both gain and volume avoiding clipping in both, if you like the sound of the pre clipping, turn up the gain and if you want to clip the power section, turn up the volume too ( but it will be unavoidably loud! )

Hey! He touched it ok! Worth gadzillions 😄must be 🤣 🙂

It went for around $9000. ! The mark up is due to the price of and long wait for a new one. prices "start at" £6050, £6350 for a mk 3, but there's a 3 year order backlog .. When demand surges (Tool have an album out, someone from Rush kicks the bucket) people want one and want one now. Then people see how quickly they're gaining value and the collectors and chancers step up. Nice basses, not £15,000 nice ... but up there with Alembics and Foderas I suppose. Weird thing is, equally special basses ( Smith's, ACGs, maybe Overwaters and a few others) can't command a fraction of the price and lose value as soon as they're played. Bill Wyman's Wal is up for auction right now, expected cost £40,000+ and there's a £10k offer in. ..https://www.julienslive.com/m/search?page=1&view=list&sale=undefined&catm=any&order=timeleft&live=no&hybrid=no&timed=no&regular=no&buynow=no&makeoffer=no&xclosed=no&featured=no&lotnum=894

I know .. gutted. Was going to paint it black and flip it back at £25k..

https://www.ebay.com/itm/193628307622 Nuts, quite nuts. Flipped by someone who already paid over the odds on reverb.

I had the GP12smx version of that for years. Agree with everything Belka says. It was a very clean and clear amp for it's day lots of punch .. too much for home practice in fact! About scooping the mids ... I always did that with the trace EQ ( BIG Smile across the 12 bands,) Much too "thin and middy" otherwise. Never scoop the mids on the PJB kit I have now ... it stays dead flat except for a little adjustment for room acoustics. Paid £800 for my trace in 1998, sold it for £150 in 2018. Miss it somewhat, especially with my Warwick. Don't miss the weight though. Had space allowed, I'd still have it.

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Yes they do sell for £5000+ at dealers. This one is at a dealer (elite Vintage guitars) not a genuine private sale. They don't sell for £5750, certainly not this one. Probably worth £4250. Replicas of Geddy Lee's Black one or Justin Chancellor's maple one go for silly money to USA based fan boys who then play along with rush and tool recordings. Beats me. Especially as the rush fans are now arguing about whether geddy's had a face-wood under the plack paint or not .... and now it transpires that he recorded an album called power windows on a brown one!!! Arghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!! Madness. I have two, one cost £800, the other £4150. Doing much better than my pension fund despite a £500 service last year. The four string fretless is the bass I'll never part with, sounds great and nice to play.

Serious, but in a tongue in cheek kind of way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_Benét "anachronistic post disco" apparently; he envisions his album as the background music to a 1980s dinner party! not a bad bass player though

FWIW ... Most Trace amps have a separate fuse in the back of the amp (ie additional to the fuse in the plug) it can be changed without dismantling anything - that's the one that goes occasionally. Just there, between the ON switch and the power socket. Nice to hear the new Amp is problem free though!! Happy playing.

Up to 18 months ago, my bitsa copy jazz bass was the most expensive bass I owned. Original bass was a Grant jazz copy bought in 1981, got esp pickups a Schaller bridge and an ebony fretless board in 1983, Kent Armstrong pickup rewind in 1986, then endless iterations of home made electronics. New hardwood body in 1991, new neck in 1992. Put away for many years then resurrected in 2016 with passive controls and Delano pickups. A couple of years back it got east acg-eq-01 electronics, then gotoh tuners and finally a set of decent eb cobalt strings. Total cost over the years ... About £1000; value ...ermm, not a lot. Nice bass now. Has some of the qualities of Jazz bass but brighter, Warwick growl and Wal tone flexibility I was after and does a killer Jaco Turbo sound. But in the interim I acquired a fretless Wal and a Warwick which tbh do it better, so it doesn't get played much. Bitsa basses are great fun and you learn a lot, but a professionally built one will be better value in the end. 😞

Tom Kennedy and Gary Willis ... two superb bass players I'd never really heard of (shock!). Got to say Gary Willis' technique is very neat indeed; hand position, position changes everything; thumb firmly behind the neck. Likewise John Patitucci (though he's usually playing way up the nec with six strings so has no option). Anthony Jackson too. So far I conclude that technical Jazz bassists play like classical guitarists with the thumb at the back of the neck occasionally swiveling it round to the side of the neck when playing near the nut. Rock players and funk players don't seem to care so much - but not sure what they gain from the bass ball bat grip. You have 280 basses and made a fortune out of space rock?? Wow!! NB: not wishing to diss Mr Lee I used to like Rush aged 17 or so (hemispheres / permanent waves etc), though an an ocassional play of Spirit of Radio is all I need these days. He wrote some good songs and he pumps out some good bass lines, in tune and in time .. I'd be happy to be able to do that. But he might be even better if he kept his left hand in order :¬) :¬)

Whilst (supposed to be) working at home ... keep watching vides of people playing basses. There is one chap who does Karaoki style play alongs to Rush tracks (not my thing but interesting to watch) and he plays with his thumb hooked around the fingerboard as if holding a tennis racket. Well, I though that didn't look right so had a look at Geddy Lee playing the same tunes ... blow me, he also holds the neck like a bat a lot of the time. So what about actually really good bass players: Tech Wizz and Tutor Scott Devine = never seems to move his thumb off the back of the neck and his lessons explain why Jaco Pastorious = very occasionally moved his thumb to the edge of the neck but didn't hook it over Victor Wooten = mostly plays with his thumb at the back but it does come around to the side now and then Stan Clarke = often grabs the neck bat style, especially when playing slap, puts it round the back when playing strings of notes - but his hands are so huge he's lost for somewhere to put them Marcus Miller = bassball bat, seriously, his thumb is hooked or up in the air and rarely goes round the back Lawrence Cottle = even Lawrence will put his thumb round the side, now and then (but mostly not) John Entwistle = hooked to the extent he's using his thumb to fret notes. Mark King = a hooker, definitely a hooker Having strived to keep my left hand mobile and hence my thumb behind the neck (as I was taught when learning the 'cello and double bass) is this a good thing ... or does it really not matter? Or is there some special occasion when it's a good thing? ... or am I spending too much time in front of a PC avoiding work ;¬)

Floating thumb ever since I bought a 5-string. It was never an issue on fretless 4-string.

Double bass and electric bass = quite different instruments for me. 124 on the double bass with the occasional "Rabat" extension. 1234 "OFPF" on the electrics. It would be quite nice to use double bass technique on the electric bass but it just feels "wrong" somehow; it's a waste of a finger, my 3rd finger is stronger than my 4th and the scale is a bit short to "lose" the 3rd finger anyway. I can see the advantage when playing near the nut, but then, at what position would you change to 1234? Bunches of bananas and bass-ball bat grip strictly forbidden ... pure snobbery probably.

That is likely the truth about the Delanos and the MECs in my Warwick ... doesn't leave much space between the (fat) pole pieces to fit in two lots of windings; but if you put in big enough magnets you don't need so many turns of wire! Kent A told me his were stacked ... but seriously, who knows without a destructive examination! Wal's pickups have a separate winding around each of the 8 (or 10, or 12!) pole pieces, then the four in each row are added in series. One row is reversed compared to the other so could be added in series or parallel - always series I think on custom/mk1/mk2/mk3 active basses - and still buck the hum. They "could" have reversed the phase half way along each row (on 4s and 6s anyway) and provided a single coil output that was still noise free.... may suggest that to Paul Herman ... but seriously, those basses have quite enough knobs and sounds already!

I'm not taking my Delanos apart to confirm that! But the "no magnets" coil must still pick up a bit of the magnetic field from the "got magnets" coil as they are stacked one on top of the other; so there will be a bit of signal cancellation as well as the near total noise cancellation .. but the output is still pretty high and they work fine in a passive bass. My Warwick has a single MEC active J-type pickup at the neck and a double version (humbucker) at the bridge. That bass is also silent in any of the six pickup combinations (neck, neck and 2x bridge, neck and 1x bridge, 2x bridge 1x bridge) - probably has similar winding inside each coil to the Delanos ... the output is much lower though and needs the active electronics to bring it up to a useful level.

They did that Rosco Beck one with HH pickups too. Same thing as the dimension in a different package? Fat Jazz bass as you say; they sound really good (in a Fender plus sort of way). Fender dumped that one too. To quote someone on talkbass: "No matter how good a new bass design is from Fender, they have a real uphill battle to get acceptance. People don't typically look at Fender when they want something different than the "normal". The bass that Mr Beck really wanted Fender to make was this one: Much too radical for Fender.