Junkyard Rocket

I did an acoustic gig where all the band were seated. Looking at the photos we looked like a dentists waiting room - I only play standing up now. No acoustic gigs on the horizon for the current band, but if any do come up I think I'll have to put my foot down with a firm hand.

My fretless precision has a kent armstrong Precision pickup, ebony fingerboard, TI JF344 flats, almost no relief in the neck and an ultra-low action. It has tons of lovely resonant mwahh even when played unplugged. I think the tone of my bass is more due to the setup & the ebony board than the pickup.

Looks like a double-cut version of the nighthawk shape.

Late 70s pickups sound nothing like 60s pickups. I heard that CBS used whatever wire they could source as cheaply as possible even if it wasn't the correct diameter for the spec. Probably a result of putting bean-counters in charge of buying - which must also be the reason for using the heavy northern ash normally used to make baseball bats instead of much lighter swamp ash. The original pickup in mine sounded terrible and the body weighs more than Eric Pickles.

This one: [url="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Planet-Waves-PW-GR-01-Guitar-Rest/dp/B004N0MKN8"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Planet-Waves-PW-GR-01-Guitar-Rest/dp/B004N0MKN8[/url] Wouldn't be much good for a Jazz, Jag or t-bird

This bit of text in the listing is rendered as a graphic. It is clearly looking for a deal to be done outside of eBay with a minimum price. That graphic is hosted on the website of an Australian housepainter: http://allcarepainting.com.au/xs2.jpg

I don't know if they still stock them, but Brandoni used to sell a cool rails strat pickup in a plain enclosed cover that looks exactly like a 70s musicmaster bass pickup and drops in with no pickguard or routing modifications and giving the tone the solid punchiness lacking in the original. There's also a hotrails version which doesn't sound so good to me as I found it a bit clanky.

My squier jag VM SS weighs not much more than my Danelectro longhorn & is a lot lighter than my CIJ mustang. I originally had an even lighter SS jag, but it went straight back to Thomann as it appeared to be a Friday afternoon one with more than one QC problem. On my bigger/heavier basses I find a neoprene strap like the comfort strap or the Fender one helps make it seem lighter.

[quote name='BassTractor' timestamp='1364851316' post='2031843'] I'm sure it's great to have you here, and if you answer one WordPress question from every active BC account per week, I'd say you'd answer less than 400 questions each day. Quite doable, eh? [/quote] Ha Ha! Might have to refer people to http://wordpress.org/support/ for that volume - I'm a mod over there.

Thanks for the welcome chaps. The Hat: the best way to get into making a web site is pretty much like playing an instrument, ie to rollup your sleeves and make a start - no matter how small or shaky. Courses and books can get terribly out of date very quickly and unless you are very lucky don't cover what you need at the time and go into detail about stuff that is irrelevant to your needs, so it is important to know aht you're following is up to date & relevant to your needs. There are a lot of free resources on the web and some paid courses such as those on Lynda.com are very good. I started by hand-coding html in the days before css so everything was in tables and the presentation was mashed up with the content. These days the flexibility of WordPress makes it very easy to set up a site no matter what your current level of experience is. Once it is set up, the task of managing the content can then be passed to a less-techie person. If you want to check out self-hosted WordPress route a good place to start is the WordPress codex: http://codex.wordpress.org Apart form that its worth learning HTML & CSS - I've not had cause to look at beginners' books etc recently, but I learned a lot from an early edition of the visual quickstart quide to HTML when I was starting out back when all web layout was table based (I still have a bucket of single pixel transparent gifs from those days). This seems to be an updated version of the book I had: http://www.amazon.co.uk/HTML5-CSS3-Visual-QuickStart-Guides/dp/0321719611 I don't know what the CSS coverage is like in that book but I originally learned CSS from Eric Meyer's books. I kept a copy of his CSS pocket reference on my desk and referred to it several times when I was first getting into CSS - This is a freebie Meyer CSS book for kindle: http://www.amazon.co.uk/CSS-and-Documents-ebook/dp/B008RBQHTW

Hello. I'm Michael I've been in bands on & off for over 30yrs since I was a teenager, but only got into regular gigging about 10yrs ago with my previous band , however that band now seems to have fizzled out even though we haven't officially broken up. My current band is Junkyard Rocket, a noisy four-piece pub blues band playing covers and originals. We formed last year and played our first gig together on Saturday, which was great fun. I particularly like short scale basses. The bass I use with Junkyard Rocket is a cheap & cheerful Squier VM Jaguar SS it needs 30" strings so I can't use my favourite Thomastik flats on it so it is wearing a set of GHS 3020L flats. Other basses in my collection include a Stentor double bass, an NS-design CR-5M, a few precisions, a jazz, a musicmaster, a mustang, an Epiphone t-bird pro-v, a Danelectro longhorn and an Ashbory with pahoehoe strings. My rig is a the MarkBass LMII & Schroeder 1212L (with crossover & tweeter removed) and I use a Zoom B3 pedal - I only use one setting on that which is a limiter and SVT sim. I'm a freelance web designer, specialising in WordPress so if anyone has any specific WordPress questions I may be able to point you in the right direction.