Happy Jack

In all fairness, having wonky pickups sometimes costs £7222 (at today's exchange rate).

I've never tried uploading a spreadsheet before ... StewBlack's SS.xlsx

Have they arrived yet?

I s'pose I could contact him through eBay ...

Always leave them wanting less.

And luckily enough I missed it. Lucky, because I'd probably have bought it, and quite frankly I cannot imagine what purpose I would put that bass to except to drool over it!

Bizarrely enough, I was actually being serious. A piezo (as I understand it, within the limits of my very limited knowledge, alternative facts are available) generates so little power compared to a magnetic pickup that it requires power to operate at all. Some piezo rigs get their power from the instrument cable, but your bass has a battery which implies otherwise. If you have a piezo pickup and an on-board battery, it would be odd to not have a preamp on-board too, also requiring power. So your signal path is presumably battery --> piezo --> preamp --> amplifier and suddenly you have pretty coloured wires everywhere and blobs of solder where perhaps they shouldn't be.

It shouldn't draw current when no jack is plugged in but hey, it's a piezo, and there's probably also an on-board pre-amp. Lots of room for wiring to be done badly. What you need now is for someone who knows what they're talking about to come along.

Are there any LEDs or similar? If an electro-acoustic, what about the preamp and tuner? In fact, is there a piezo pickup at all?

Get back to Valladolid then.

God, that takes me back. "Read the bloody Wiki ..." Wasn't it Old Git that used to say that?

It's just not possible to see this too many times. After the show, honey ...

Filing cabinet: User Manual for Future Impact v3, thirty Midi cables, library of patches, four folders full of suggested settings that a teenager in Valladolid uses with his death metal swing band.

OK, I've just spoken to Laurence Blackadder ( @bassadder ) who handles all UK servicing for Acoustic Image. The company closed down the .eu website as part of their preparations for Brexit and replaced it with [email protected] The landline was closed down at the same time. Laurence's address and mobile number remain as per @Hellzero's post (above). Laurence asked me to mention here that any amp older than a Series 3, and probably some that are older than a Series 4, have circuit boards for which spares are very hard to find, so the boards have to go back to the States to be refurbished. Luckily, my SL-2 is a Series 4 so he has replacement boards for it.

Address not found Your message wasn't delivered to [email protected] because the domain acousticimg.eu couldn't be found. Check for typos or unnecessary spaces and try again. The response was: DNS Error: 24481001 DNS type 'mx' lookup of acousticimg.eu responded with code NXDOMAIN Domain name not found: acousticimg.eu

Good to hear from you again Tony, and that is absolutely gold-dust info ... many thanks. I'll contact them in the morning.

"Taken a tumble"? That looks like 20 years of hard living to me! Thanks for the offer, but my control set is a fair bit different to that.

I'm still stalled on this, struggling to believe that AI don't have a British / European / EMEA service partner. Having to send everything to Raleigh seems a mite parochial, even for the Yanks. Nothing on my Clarus II is actually broken and the amp still works, it's just that the control panel seems to do remarkably little and I don't know whether it's my dodgy hearing or a dodgy control panel. Sending the amp to Cowdenbeath or Garmisch-Partenkirchen to have it checked out is one thing, but paying their standard fee PLUS US$150 for postage to wait three months to be told "they all do that, Sir, it's a feature" is not really an option.

I had the GP Vintage Artist some years ago ... one of the few basses I genuinely regret selling. Those things are bloody lovely.

I wouldn't want to own a bass that could crush a garden bench like that.

Bizarrely enough, I've actually played that Marleaux and it's genuinely delightful to play. It was also bloody expensive, but I'd be happy enough to have it in my collection.