Happy Jack

Has anyone told Brother Malvis or Aud?

And before anyone asks, yes I paid full Duty & VAT as we passed through LHR. First time I've ever walked through the Red Channel.

Ah yes, that's the J.R. Hartley signature model, isn't it?

I have both. The M80 is a good, traditional gigbag which works well at gigs and studios where you have room to lay the bag down flat and open it. The Vertigo is designed for confined spaces where you want to be able to move your bass in and out of a case leaning (upright) against a wall or tucked into a corner. The level of protection is pretty much identical, the Vertigo has a 'boot' of reinforced plastic/rubber which means that your bass can be standing in a puddle of beer with no ill effects, the M80 has better pockets for carrying stuff if that's your thing. I play loads of gigs in small pubs and greatly prefer the Vertigo. Unfortunately, my go-to bass is a Mike Lull T5 and it's too damned big to fit into either the Vertigo or the M80! So I use a Gator gigbag instead ...

The end-pin housing should have been better reinforced than is the case. That aluminium plate at the bottom of the bass is all there is - there's no wooden support block inside the bass to keep it rigid. When the end-pin is fully retracted, as it so often is in rockabilly music, there is no issue. But the more the end-pin is extended, the greater the leverage effect, and it would be possible to buckle the aluminium plate. My solution, as usual, is to compromise. I don't want to play with the bass resting on the floor, and I can't have it at the height I'd normally use, so I now have the pin about 50% out.

I got the bass back from Laurence Dixon (The Bass Place, Herne Hill) today. He installed a Realist pickup (at my request, and in addition to the existing one), replaced the bridge with an adjustable (again at my request), shaved & profiled the fingerboard to match the new bridge, sorted out the twin soundposts so that they are correctly positioned and work properly, and did some corrective work on the end-pin structure. His work was every bit as good as Clarky told me it would be, and the bass is instantly far more playable and more comfortable to play. It also sounds noticeably better. I wanted the Realist since the existing pickup arrangement did a great job of picking up the sounds of the strings and of the slapping, but disguised (almost completely) the sound of the oil-drum. The Realist picks up far more of its sound from the resonating body and that means that you can actually hear the aluminium. All I need now is to run the two outputs through a blender and I will be able to control how much oil-drum the audience hears. The adjustable bridge allows me to switch between a rockabilly setup and a blues/jazz setup at will. The rest of the work was, frankly, remedial. As I mentioned before, Dave Gartland is not a professional DB luthier and he doesn't claim to be one. The bass as delivered had a few flaws which were easily fixed (well, "easily" by someone like Laurence), plus one which it is stuck with. As far as I'm concerned, it is now fully giggable and I'm looking forward to doing exactly that. I'm also expecting a fair bit of trepidation from any sound engineers who have to deal with it ...

Pics on arrival, please.

Now links to a sold no-name unpainted Precision. That was quick! Incidentally, I played one of the Orange-branded basses at NAMM in January. It was really very good indeed. I asked the price, expecting to be told something in four figures, and it was something like $350. I bloody near bought one on the spot!

Nah ... that thing is rubbish. I never did get on with Jazz basses.

Douglas, Fir all I know it was washed up on a beech. It should be turned to ash.

One ... two ... One two three four

Eeeugh! Tone Tolex ... yuk!

Ah but that's tone paint, that is ...

Yes, but they're not valve watts, are they?

Is her horse Trojan?

Agreed, but the thing is that we bass players are the sensible ones in the band. That means that we don't ignore weight, don't ignore practicality, and never own kit that will be used solely in studios and absolutely never gigged!

Not sure why this hasn't been mentioned already, but for bass players the hybrid valve preamp + Class D power stage are usually a better (and much lighter) solution than any all-valve head. I have an all-valve Matamp GT100 and a GB Shuttle 9.2. The Matamp is way "classier" as a thing to stick on a cabinet, more visible, cooler to look at, look-at-me-I'm-old-skool sort of thing. It also sounds better than the Shuttle (IMHO). What do I actually take to gigs? The Shuttle of course. It weighs less than one-fifteenth of the Matamp, it doesn't generate more heat than an oil-filled radiator, and it's way more flexible in terms of EQ should the room need it. Now if I was routinely playing through a 410 stacked on top of a 115 then perhaps I'd need to take the Matamp simply to complete "the look", but these days I routinely have a Crazy 88 for my backline and the real volume comes from FoH. Yes, even in a pub.

In fact, it was so heavy that I glued stones all over it. I like meeting people when they let me out of The Room, and my psychiatrist says I'm much better now. No, really I am.

I am sure that there is no aspect of this video that any of us will recognise.

Go looking for a 1970s WEM Dominator Bass 25. The model number is hopelessly misleading. It's a 17W (usually misdescribed as 15W) all-valve open-backed amp fitted with a 15" Celestion rather than the more common 12" Celestion. There is no "25" anywhere. In good nick, these sound every bit as good as a B15 and normally go (on eBay) for less than £400. Don't buy a Dommie with the 12" Celestion, it just won't work for bass. Especially don't buy any of the smaller WEM combos, Westminster etc. If you really want just the head, then go looking for a Selmer 50W PA head. These turn up all the time on eBay, all-valve 4-channel PA heads from the 70s. You can just use whichever channel sounds best, or you can bi-amp with them.

Where in the country are you, Liam?

That was donated to a prison charity? Barking mad! That is indeed a 1960-ish Hofner 500/5, the model which (in modified form) eventually became the best-selling Hofner President in the UK. The close-spaced 'toaster' pickups narrow the date range down quite nicely. Your bass looks pretty much all original, although I'm not entirely convinced by the tort pickguard. It also appears to be in really lovely condition and should be worth somewhere into three figures. The neck repair is absolutely typical of the 90s / noughties. Those basses were built using traditional techniques. The set neck was glued in using animal glues rather than modern epoxy and similar. Over the years/decades those animal glues will gradually dry out and turn to dust, at which point the neck will gracefully fold against the body like a well-oiled pen-knife. Any number of well-intentioned but ignorant owners/luthiers tried to fix this by putting a bloody great woodscrew through the neck joint. Cheap as chips and very long-lasting, as long as you got the neck angle at the heel exactly right. The correct solution is, of course, to re-glue the neck using animal glues. After this amount of time (58 years) the original pickups may need re-winding and the original electrics may need re-soldering, though neither of those are inevitable. Given the short scale of that bass (30.5") I have no idea what has been done to have the strings look so weird, unless there's an issue with the tailpiece (not that I can see anything). In terms of what's best for your charity, my recommendation would be to eBay the Hofner and use the funds raised either to buy five decent Squiers or to fund one complete rockband's worth of kit.

Download the Best Practice app for Windows. https://sourceforge.net/projects/bestpractice/ You can slow down a song to make it easier to follow what's being played, or change the pitch in tiny increments to allow for the varispeeding you've just bumped up against, or do both at the same time. Highly recommended.

Drums beatin' cold, English blood runs hot ...

The bit with the samba rhythm and the timbales had completely passed me by, and that's after 45 years of listening to that track ...