Misdee

I keep seeing the title of this thread and thinking to myself that Chancers And Beggars would be a good name for a band. Or a disco. ( Do they have discos anymore? Probably not. I don't get out much nowadays). I have always found prospective buyers on Basschat to be very fair and quite knowledgeable. However,back in the days before the internet when I used to advertise items in Bassist magazine I remember some right "characters" getting in touch by phone, quite often at very odd hours. "I really want to buy the bass but I can't afford that price because my wife has just had a baby." If your wife has just had a baby and you have more urgent financial priorities why are you phoning a complete stranger at half past ten at night to talk about a bass you can't justify buying? Just to let me know how you are fixed at the moment in case I was wondering perhaps? It can be hard to be polite sometimes.

The rear pickup is a fair bit closer to the bridge, in what I would describe as conventional bridge pickup position. The rear pickup on these HH basses isn't really a substitute for a traditional Stingray position H. There's an element of Stingray tone in the Bongo, but these basses have a distinct sound of their own. The midrange frequencies are inherently different to a Stingray, to my ears anyway. The Bongo has a unique sound, and I really like it.

These really are superb basses. I really regret not buying a single H to go with my HH, and now they don't make them anymore ☹️. Anyhow, I hope you have a lot of fun playing this Bongo. I really cannot fathom why some people think these basses are ugly. I have always thought they look very chic. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks who are of that opinion have never seen a Bongo in the flesh.

I really hope that is the case, because Status Graphite are an excellent company run by thoroughly decent people. It would be a big loss if they packed it in.

The bass in question is a Yamaha BB2024( ie the one without a scratch plate ect). It weighs 8.8 pounds, sounds great, feels great and plays perfectly in every respect. It looks nice, too. I really can find nothing to criticize about that bass. I have got other basses that are also perfect from a manufacturing point of view, I just don't like them as much as that one. I don't play those other basses either, truth be told. The reality is that for the last eighteen months I've mostly been playing a Harley Benton, I'm a little bit embarrassed to say. Why you may ask? Well, partially because nowadays I want to focus on putting my time and energy into doing some intense study and practice on the bass. Having nice basses around inevitably leads to me adjusting them, comparing them, or obsessing about some other superfluous "problem". Playing a cheap but functional bass makes me much more productive in terms of improving my playing. I suppose I have reached a point in my life where I have realized that material things are not as important to me than less tangible things, like knowledge. Anyone can buy a bass, not everyone can play it well.

They were indeed Benedetti pickups. Nowadays noisy pickups wouldn't be the deciding factor me, nor would the strings being a bit dicey in relation to the edge of the fingerboard. I would buy the bass anyway and accept the idiosyncrasies. The good things about Vigier basses from the 1980s far outweigh the drawbacks, ie they are relatively light, easy to play and sound as punchy as a kangaroo in boxing gloves. Back in those days however, I could only afford one bass in that price range, so I felt under pressure for it to be perfect. (In case you're interested, in over 40 years of buying and often subsequently selling lots of basses I have only really found one bass that was perfect to my sensibilities. I still have it but never really feel like playing it. It's been in its case for years. I can only conclude that perfection is overrated. What is that old adage about it being better to travel hopefully than to arrive?🤔)

Enjoy your Bongo, they are superb basses. And don't let the emo kid play it. That way he will have something substantive to be miserable about. Inspire him to even greater heights of emo-ness😄

If I remember correctly, truss rods were introduced to graphite necks by various manufacturers around the turn of the millennium to give players the option of setting the relief to suit their taste. Truss rods were to provide adjustment rather than additional strength. Back in the day, if you wanted a modern hifi hi tech bass then Vigier were one of the very best. Vigier basses played effortlessly,sounded magnificent and they looked beautiful. The complete package. I remember when I went to the Bass Center at Wapping with a view to buying a Passion or Arpege, but when I played them I found the pickups a bit too microphonic ( ie you could hear your fingers thumping on the pickup cases through the amp) and the strings were a bit too close to the edge of the fingerboard for my taste. Nowadays it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me, but back in those days I was still on a quest for perfection.😐

One of many bass gear regrets is that I sold my '73 Precision ( Olympic white , maple board, A-width nut) for £200 in 1989. That was the going rate at the time, but still...😟 I remember going to America in the mid-1980s and the guitar shops were full of 70s Fenders at very reasonable prices( except in NYC where everything was overpriced) because there wasn't a huge demand for them. Nowadays they are just as sought after everywhere in the world.

Both sound great, but in a sense their is no comparison because they are so radically different sonically. Some very tasty and tidy playing there too, if I might say.

Steely Dan- their outtakes and demos are better than most other bands albums.

I'm really looking forward to watching this series! We live in a society that has a built-in prejudice that encourages us to think of older people as increasingly useless and problematic. This program seeks to challenge those assumptions through the prism of rock music. It has all the right ingredients to be compelling car crash television.

A sad day for sure. I remember when Vigier basses first arrived on these shores via the Bass Center in Wapping. They were stunningly beautiful basses in those days. Nick Beggs had a white fretless one he played on TOTP with Kajagoogoo. It looked amazing, the zenith of bass exotica at that time ( about 1984). Vigier retiring another indication of how that era is getting to be rather a long time ago. Every day I am confronted with reminders of that fact closer to home ie my knackered prostate, grey hair, creaky knees ect, but the realisation that I will now never be able to buy a new Vigier or Pedulla is what really brings it home to me that I am getting old.

I've only ever had a very quick dabble on a very old Hofner, but the action was so high it was just about unplayable for me unfortunately. I have seen some old pictures of Robbie Shakespeare playing a Hofner, probably back in the early to mid 1970s. I can see how these basses would be great for reggae. I'd love to have a proper go on a decent example of a violin bass and channel my latent dub tendancies via a nice rubbery set of flatwounds.

I must confess, nowadays I think that a straight P Bass looks more elegant in its simplicity than a PJ. And I do use the P pickup far more than the J. Thirty( and indeed fourty) years ago, who could have predicted the seemingly unassailable revival of the P Bass? Nowadays it's P Bass Uber Alles or risk being denounced as a heretic. But I remember when adding a J pickup to any P Bass was considered an act of kindness, enabling it to sound more articulate and making it more suitable for contemporary styles of music. I know younger bass players might not believe me but it's true! And as for flatwound strings....

Tom bought some GHS strings from me. Perfect transaction, prompt payment, an absolute pleasure to deal with.👍

That is very true, but their are also other reasons why traditional Fender pickups are imbalanced between the P and J, most notably string excursion. The closer to the bridge the pickup is the quieter it will be.

Well, there's PJs and PJs. My most favoured bass is a conventional Fender- style PJ (USA Lakland 44-64 with a Jazz neck), albeit with some pretty hot pickups that seem a bit better balanced in terms of output than a typical Fender PJ setup. By comparison, my Yamaha BB2024x PJ sounds radically different, despite being a bolt-on neck PJ, same alder body and rosewood fingerboard construction as the Lakland. It's a completely different animal.They are both great, just very different to each other. Yamaha have somehow nailed all the problems of imbalance between the P and J pickups. A traditional Fender-style PJ is idiosyncratic in so much as you have to allow for the P pickup sounding a bit more dominant than the J to some extent or another, depending on the pickups and how they are adjusted. It's not necessarily a big deal, just something you have to be aware of and work around. I think a J pickup can make a P Bass much more versatile and ( to me) more useful. Obviously, if you don't use a bridge pickup anyway then it won't be useful to you at all. Some folks think that they can hear a difference in the P pickup just because a J is wired into the circuit, even when it's not on use. This is very much what I would call a theoretical problem rather than one that you would actually be troubled by in real life. Part of the reason I love my Lakland PJ is the Lakland PJ pickups on it sound so raunchy and are much better balanced in terms of output between the P and J than most other PJ sets I have tried. Fender-style PJs always take me back to my youth and the basses I learnt to play on. I know where I am with a decent PJ and I know how to make it work for me.

What sets bass players like Jeff Andrews and Marcus Miller (and Jaco, for that matter) apart is that they have a deep knowledge of jazz theory. And they also have the chops put that knowledge into practice. That Yamaha BB 1500a looks and sounds a good fit for Jeff considering his mainstay was a P Bass with Jazz pickups.

+1. Jeff Andrews was surely one of the most accomplished bass players on planet earth. I think he never became as acclaimed as he should have because he stuck to fairly purist contemporary jazz fusion and the NYC scene. He could very easily have done sessions, played more mainstream music and made a big name for himself like Marcus Miller has done. Maybe Mike Stern hooked Jeff up with Yamaha. I wouldn't be surprised.

I suppose you have to look at the new prices in context. If a MusicMan Stingray is now retailing for over three grand then what is a fair market price for a handmade British bass like Status? Everything is going up for everybody, it seems like. Ultimately, any business has two options; cut profit margins or pass the extra costs on to the consumer. I would much rather Status Graphite stayed in business albeit with higher prices than be forced to pack it in. I have always found Status to be a first-rate company run by very decent people. I would still consider buying another bass from them at these prices.

43,mm must be what it was then. 20 years ago is a long time! Whatever it was, it was noticeably wider at the nut than a traditional Jazz Bass (38mm) and that's what threw me a bit at the time.

I had that catalogue! Chris Minh Doky used to play one, as did the late great Jeff Andrews.

Smashing basses, I remember them well. I would have bought one but the only thing that put me off was I couldn't get used to Jazz Bass with a 40mm nut, silly as that may be. Cracking basses nevertheless. I remember it getting a rave review in Bass Player magazine back in the day.