chriswareham

Same height as me apparently (6'4" / 193cm). I briefly played a Hofner violin bass, which really did look like a ukulele on me 😄

Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. Not the most proficient bassist but he's pretty decent on drums, which reinforces my view that every musician harbours a secret desire to really be a drummer.

Yup, that's the one! Sounds like the staff member that claimed it was Wyman's was full of it then, as I can't see them not mentioning that to you if really had been his.

It was the last time I went in their, which is about a year or so ago. There's a set of stairs leading down from the ground floor to basement, and it's hanging on the wall about halfway down. It's actually in unplayable condition, with considerable damage to the body. Surprised they've not had it restored if it really is ex-Rolling Stones.

The story I heard is that Rose Morris got annoyed with Rickenbacker not shipping enough instruments to meet demand, so they imported good quality fakers from Japan and sold them under their Shaftesbury brand. As well as the 4001/4003 style basses they also made a semi acoustic - a battered example, claimed to have previously been owned by Bill Wyman of the Stones - is on the wall of the Rose Morris shop in London. I owned one of the semi acoustics, and it was a nice bass with a very narrow neck.

Having your only web presence on Facebook means you're reducing your potential audience by a massive amount. An increasing number of people have never signed up for a Facebook account, have closed their account or haven't used it in years. Facebook are also keen to make their site a "walled garden", so pages are becoming less likely to be indexed by search engines such as Google or Bing. Your best bet is to cover as many bases as possible - website, Facebook (depending on the demographic you're targetting), Bandcamp, etc. As others have said, shop around for a cheap domain name registrar (a company that will let you buy a domain name such as mybandname.com) and web hosting. There are free websites that allow you to build an acceptable looking set of webpages, such as Wix. If you have the skills or a reasonably web savvy friend, then copy the web pages from the website builder's website, remove any unwanted branding ("this site built with wix.com", etc) and upload the pages to your web hosting.

Best bass amp I've ever played was an Acoustic Control Corporation 140 into an Ampeg fridge - phenomenally loud, definitely more than the 100W or so it was supposedly meant to be. It was very clean sounding and had only the most basic controls of volume, treble, bass (plus a completely useless bright switch that cut all the bass out). If I needed grit then I just put a distortion pedal in front of it. It was eventually paired with an Acoustic 370 with a splitter box so effects (chorus or distortion) went to the 140 and a clean, bass heavy signal went to the 370. Foolishly sold the two amps to buy an Ampeg SVT CL, but I now own the combo version of the 140 thanks to a seller on this here forum.

I've actually used a Hofner Violin bass (one of the cheap Ignition ones) for metal. It was OK, but the novelty quickly wore off and I went back to a Stingray. Talking of unlikely genres for particular makes or models of bass guitar, Peter Steele used an Alembic Spoiler as his main bass in his thrash band Carnivore. He only retired it from live use with his later band Type O Negative because it had got a bit fragile from all the abuse it had suffered. He still used it for Type O studio recordings though.

First gig was aged nineteen in 1991 at a venue in the hellhole that is Aldershot, home of the British Army. I'd only been playing bass for a few months and I recall having an A3 pad of paper on the floor with the song structures written on them in marker pen. I really wanted to be a keyboard player, but very few bands in the area wanted one since they were mostly trying to emulate local heroes Mega City 4. I really liked Peter Hook's bass playing though, so I traded my Roland MC-202 synth/sequencer for a terrible Aria bass (one of the later Korean made ones rather than a decent Matsumoku one). It was actually a good thing when the headstock snapped off the Aria a year or so later, as my next bass was a Westone Thunder which was a totally wonderful instrument.

I bought Chris's Acoustic 136 amplifier. Fantastic bit of kit, and Chris carefully packaged it for collection by a courier.

Google are removing the ability for Ublock Origin and similar extensions to function in a future version of Chrome. They've postponed the change a couple of times but the change is inevitable - after all, Google make the overwhelming majority of their revenue from adverts, so it's in their best interests to prevent people blocking them.

Running a bit of software at home called "Pi Hole" (it was originally intended to run on a cheap Raspberry Pi computer, but happily runs on any Linux based computer). It acts as a DNS service that blocks known advert sources. I also run the Ublock Origin extension in the Firefox web browser, and see virtually no adverts. If you use Google's Chrome browser, any of Microsoft's browsers (Internet Explorer, Edge, etc) or Safari then just stop and install Firefox with Ublock Origin. I'm always amused by how terrible other people's web browsing experiences are when I get to see what it's like without at least an ad blocker extension.

I used to tune as low as drop A. The thing I found that made a difference was using strings from a company called Circle K in the US. They're now using the brand name of Kalium, and sell custom sets that maintain a consistent tension for various tunings. Before that I would use the heaviest four strings from a five string set of Ernie Ball "Power Slinkys" (135, 105, 85, 70). They were great when I was doing drop C, but the lowest string became horribly slack and flabby sounding when used for drop A. Edited to add that these strings and tunings were on a Musicman Stringray, so similar neck to a Precision. I also had a similar set on an old Hondo Precision copy from the 1970s, and even with a traditional passive P bass pickup they sounded great.

Suicide - Ghost Rider. Three notes cycling in an utterly hypnotic and disturbing way. Fehlfarben - Militürk. Another late 1970's example of "less is more". (The version by DAF is even more spartan).

One of the few bands in my Dad's music collection that I actually liked. He had the Manifesto and Avalon albums, and I was delighted to discover their earlier stuff thanks to local second hand stores. Then in the YouTube age it was great to see videos of them on shows like Old Grey Whistle Test. Andy Mackay's impossibly tight strides and "crotch bulge" are a little unsettling though...

This reminds me of how disappointed I was to discover that the "brown note" wasn't really true.

Strings now on their way to a new home!

Another set of strings I've found in a clear out. These were part of a special order I made from Kalium in the US, and I think the lowest string is 0.142 gauge. They're 34" scale (I used these kind of strings on a Musicman Stringray with some filing to the nut). Free to a new home for the cost of shipping.

Having a clear out, and found a set of spare strings for a Hagstrom HB-8 bass I no longer own. These are 30.75" scale strings, and fit the current H8-II bass as well as the now discontinued HB-8 model. Free to a new home for the cost of shipping.

Wow, that's a crazy elevation on the bridge saddles! I like the "checkerboard" binding on the body - my Greco RB700 faker had that.

Oh, and a word on the finish to the body, rear of neck and headstock. The Chickenbacker has a far glossier and thicker finish. The finish on the Rickenbacker is incredibly thin and brittle, which surprised me as I was under the impression they were known for thick finishes that took a lot of coats and buffing to produce.

Rickenbacker : 4.2Kg Chickenbacker : 4.3Kg Both basses are well balanced with no neck dive. There is certainly a lot more material to the Chickenbacker's body, so it must be a far less dense wood than on the Rickenbacker.

So I have these two bad boys to compare: On the left is what was a typical AliExpress "Chickenbacker", and on the right is a Rickenbacker 4003 from 2018. The Chickenbacker has been upgraded with Retrovibe pickups, treble mount and knobs. The cheeky Rickenbacker logo printed onto the truss rod cover has also been sanded off. I thought it interesting to compare the two basses, so here's some stats: Rickenbacker Chickenbacker Scale Length 33 1/4" 34" Nut Width 42mm 40mm String Width (nut) 34mm 33mm String Width (bridge) 52mm 55mm Frets 20 22 Body Depth 32mm 43mm Truss Rod Dual Single Ric O Sound Yes No The neck on the Chickenbacker feels chunkier, but not in an unpleasant way. It's just more like a Fender Precision or Musicman Stringray than the Rickenbacker. The bridges on both basses are terrible designs, and I notice that Rickenbacker have recently introduced a more practical design as well as a single truss rod on current production 4003 basses. The worst aspect of the Chickenbacker bridge is that there's no height adjustment for individual strings, and the bar that the saddles sit on is flat so it doesn't allow for the radius of the fretboard. I solved this by having the little metal pieces that sit under the E and G strings ground down. In terms of build quality, the Chickenbacker's only production flaw is a sightly uneven binding at one point on the neck. Meanwhile, the Rickenbacker suffers a common issue - the treble pickup is not straight. This is a common problem, which I assume is left unaddressed because as the bass leaves the factory it has the plastic cover over it, but it becomes an issue if you want to fit a plastic "treble bezel". Sound wise, they are very similar despite the difference in scale length and the treble pickup being closer to the bridge on the Chickenbacker. As for price - the Rickenbacker is around £3,200 to £3,800 if you can find one and this particular Chickenbacker was £320 shipped from China (plus £150 for the Retrovibe upgrades).

A very belated update on this thread. I raised a complaint with the vendor and they offered to send new packaging for a return at a cost to me of £15. No complaints there, since I recycled the original packaging before checking the instrument out. Meanwhile, I checked it out a little more thoroughly. As I suspected, the first two frets were high on the bass side, hence the buzzing. A few days after the return packaging was delivered, a replacement instrument arrived with the same courier that then took the original one away. The setup on the replacement was fine, no buzzing and for a ham fisted player like me it needed no additional adjustment. So, I'll name the vendor - Andertons. I'd still prefer that they perform a decent pre-shipping check on all instruments they sell, but fair play to them as they replaced the bass at what would have been no additional cost to me if I hadn't chucked the original packaging away.

I can tweak a set up that's already in the ball park, but removing the nut on this bass looks a bit of an effort as they clearly applied a final finish once the nut was installed. Removing it would likely need considerable care, and I've never had to prepare a new nut before - I assume they either come unslotted or need a fair bit of work.