Misdee

Totally this. Blues can be many things, and a lot of them ain't easy. Listen to Robben Ford play blues and imagine having to back him up. Firstly, how does move through the changes? Not all blues is 1-4-5, and even if it is you need to make it sound good. What and where are the turnarounds? What cliches are the right ones? I know we're only talking about a jam night but if it's with an audience and not in your mate's front room you don't want to show yourself up.

People would probably love it - extra vintage. I'm a sucker for a black/tort P Bass ever since I saw footage of Deep Purple and the LSO at the Royal Albert Hall and Roger Glover is sporting a beautiful example. Also George Murray with David Bowie. Both big influences on the young Misdee plunking away on the bass in his bedroom.

People put tort plates on just about any Fender colour now because it's become synonymous with the nebulous concept which is "vintage". Historically, Fender did indeed ship most of its custom colour basses with mint/parchment pick guards. Bear in mind that most colours except sunburst were actually custom colours, including black. Some black Fenders were sent out with tort plates, but usually only as customer's special orders through Fender dealers. That's why finding an all original vintage P Bass or Jazz Bass in black/tort is so hard. They do exist, but they are very, very rare. But if you look at Fender's vintage reissues you would think they were commonplace.

I approve of those choices, except for the sunburst/black combo. Mid-to-late '70's Fender is a rational prejudice as far as I am concerned. I hope you didn't pay a lot of money for it!😄 If you like I could be really annoying and regail you with what I could have bought that bass for back in the eighties (£200 tops). Myself, I can't abide red basses with tort guards. It's too much redness, like it wants to give me heartburn.

I thought the original MM Stingray EQ was cut and boost but without a centre detent. There isn't the same amount of cut available on bass and treble though. The bass only has a slight cut available, if I remember correctly. I'm pretty sure that has been confirmed by both by MusicMan and other boffins who would know.

4kg would be just about okay for a four string.

These look like a lot of bass for the money. It would be interesting to try them side by side with some much more expensive boutique brand Super-Jazz style basses and see how they measure up. That midrange circuit reminds me a bit of the Sadowsky Will Lee preamp, and it would certainly serve the same purpose. I bet these will be very useful basses, and the price-point is pretty accessible. Providing they don't weigh a ton, I think these basses are going to be very popular.

Yes, Mike's channel is chock full of interesting stuff, and the live chats are particularly good IMO. Suffice to say that, by contrast, there is some content from UK bass YouTubers that confirms the urgent mental health care crisis in this country. I don't mean Scott's Bass Lessons, though. That's more of a mental hair care crisis.

Thanks for posting this, I'm a big fan of Chris's playing going back to the days when I didn't know who he was, or indeed that it was Chris playing the bass parts I was so enamoured of. We take it for granted in the internet age that you can find out who played what for whom, but it wasn't always that way. I remember seeing Chris on TV playing his Status five string live with Go West back when five strings were still a novelty, and I always loved the bass on this track : I had assumed it was Pino, especially as the band were from Cardiff, but it was in fact Chris Childs. Only took me about thirty years to find out by accident!

I've got an identical Am St P that I bought new in 2009 and I would never part with it. One of my favourites basses ever. Mine doesn't have the Custom Shop pickup that came fitted from 2012 onwards, but the standard pickup it came with sounds good to me so I've never bothered changing it. I think the post- 2012 basses had a bit chunkier neck profile too, but I could be wrong about that. I know that my 2009 model has a perfectly-proportioned neck for my tastes. It's just like a classic and very playable late '60's/early 70's classic Fender "B" neck with the nut width halfway between a vintage P and a Jazz, and a fairly slim front-to-back profile. Anyway, I've got Thomastiks flats on mine and it does the classic P thing to perfection. Enjoy your lovely new bass. I hope it's a keeper and that you get as much enjoyment out of it as I've had from mine over the years.

My BB P34 was 4.33 kg.

Those old Pye and Decca compressors look (and probably sound) very interesting.

I know a doctor in Turkey who could probably arrange that swap for you.

The biggest difference as the decades have passed is that drugs that were once prevalent in the music business to some extent or another are now widely available in society at large, and are commonly used by people in just about every walk of life, but particularly by people from lower social classes. The experience has been democratised. There are far more street drugs available on Britain's sink estates in 2026 than there ever was in the music business in any era. Drugs like cocaine that were quite elitist as recently as the 1980's/early1990's are widely available in Britain nowadays. Opiates the same. How musicians use drugs has become far less of a totemic issue because the rest of society has superceded them and established its own drug culture. No one is looking to musicians for an example of whether to use drugs or which drugs to take. Rather, musicians who use drugs are merely an analog of wider society nowadays.