Happy Jack

In a word, "clumsy".

I would love to ... if only I had half a dozen gigs under my belt! I didn't think it would be fair to spring such a different bass on the band two days later in Richmond, so I stuck to the usual Mike Lull T-bird. My first gig with the Ric was a not-very-good one in Hampshire three weeks later, followed by three much better ones at weekly intervals and everything beginning to click rather nicely ... and then the whole world went to 5h1t. I could have written something as the world went into Lockdown, but sat to relate I went down with a nasty case of man-flu (or Covid-19 as we calls it round 'ere) for two weeks and instead I did the square root of f***-all. I could write something now except it's been over a month since I played it in anger. Ah well, Game Over Insert New Coin. Reset to zero when the lockdown is lifted.

To Hell with that! Did you succeed? Did it work? What does it weigh? How does it sound? What do those knobs do? Why is it that colour? Is it any good for metal?

Erm ... what?

You're in touch with your Inner Yoda?

Yes, I was a bit puzzled by that. What is a "saw rasp", why is it "such a great tool", and why don't Homebase stock them?

You're not really on-board with the whole GAS thing, are you Pete?

The bass is buried underneath ...

The FDeck unit is an amazingly simple but effective piece of kit when using DB (it's called that because the original circuit was designed by a guy called Francis Deck = FDeck). It's as near plug-in-and-forget as anything you're likely to find, and the louder you play the more you'll appreciate it. Are you based near London at all?

Obvious question - what pickup system(s) are you using? IME any amp/head that's going to work well with DB and a piezo pickup will offer input impedance of greater than 1M Ω and the specs won't be slow to let you know this. Those Ampegs don't mention input impedance in their specs.

Judging by their website, you may have revealed their best-kept secret Roger. It's clear that they really, really don't want people to know that they sell DB cases ...

https://tomandwill.com/collections/strings-accessories-cases-double-bass Pretty sure you didn't mention "cheap".

Just a brain-dead vendor trying to get around eBay fees for Reserve Price & Buy It Now.

What do you mean by "small places"? The GK MB110 is a 100W combo, but the TH350 is a 350W amp, so you're looking at two very different solutions. The TH350 will do anything from a quiet wine bar to a large, busy pub and the MB110 is far more limited. If money doesn't matter, buy the TH350. It has a volume control. You can use it quietly as well as loudly.

Nah ... they're impaled on a line of stakes running down the garden. Think 'end of Spartacus' ...

A quick Google reveals loads of photos of Ross playing a Jackson and a Musicman in later years, but the only photos I could find of him with Journey show him playing an Ovation Magnum II. A totally brain-dead thread from 2005 on the Ovation FanClub site focuses on the alleged sale on eBay of his alleged Viper 3 bass (seriously ) which he allegedly played on the Escape album. The accompanying photo of course shows a Magnum III (with knobs, not sliders) on which someone has scrawled some sort of a signature in black sharpy. It is all way less than convincing. If I were a gambling man, I'd bet the farm on the Ovation Magnum II and nothing else. Why do you need to know?

My basses are all now practising social isolation, and are kept on wall hangers at least two metres apart. But the real plague carriers are the valve amps ... dodgy characters with a dubious past, and they smell funny too.