Happy Jack

Thursday 29th May 2008 in Kilburn with a scratch band put together by the Weekend Warriors program. I was 51, having picked up a bass for the first time on my 49th birthday. In the 15 years since then, I've played just short of 500 gigs. Why do you think I'm Happy Jack?

Nope ... just that it's wood rather than a laminate.

So how close is it to the real thing? As luck would have it, I bought @Silvia Bluejay an SB310 a few years ago. Since she's (famously) a lefty, her bass and mine make a book-matched pair. You judge ...

The bass felt absolutely fine and played perfectly well (apart from the high action). I'd expected it to be way heavier than a genuine Bass Collection but it weighs 8.25lbs which is very much ballpark for these basses. So I bought it and brought it home. Obviously it was in dire need of a setup ... a shim to the pocket-end of the neck, tighten up the sloppy tuners and the loose control knobs, replace the battery in the preamp, re-string properly, and Hey Presto! a very passable bass for £110 plus a little petrol money. One oddity was those neck screws. When I took the neck off I discovered that the factory had used four identical screws (as you would expect) but the slim-ness of the neck, especially above the 24th fret, meant that the two screws closest to the pickups would have protruded through the fingerboard. You or I might have chosen to substitute two slightly shorter screws to avoid this ... the factory had roughly 'snipped' the last 5mm of each screw to leave a blunt 'point' and gone ahead regardless. 😂

The guy was in Christchurch and I happen to be visiting Salisbury a lot just now, so it wasn't much of a detour to take a look at it. He wanted £110 for it. Now I know you'll think me naive, but up until this point I'd never realised that such things as Chase Collections even existed. I've never before seen a "cheap Chinese knock-off" of an SGC Nanyo so I was really quite curious, especially since there are frankly very few cr*p basses coming out of China these days. Apart from the usual screw-up with the string routing at the headstock, other features included a very high action (even for me) despite the saddles sitting flat on the bridge, an odd-looking neck pocket, and at least one of the neck screws sitting at a slight angle.

So me old mate @TheGreek spotted this on Gumtree ... at first glance an SB320 with an unusual finish, but the backplate ... oh that backplate.

It's really not that hard to find a Unicorn bass ...

My main gigging vehicle carries the plate BA55 BOP

He used to advertise Beatle basses for Hofner ... I've got a pic of his advert for the 500/1 somewhere.

Is that a euphemism? No, I rather thought not. Sorry to hear that Clarky, I'll try not to make you laugh.

Basses in the bathroom is a novel approach ...

Correcting causality cures casualness?

You're humming it now, aren't you? Go on ... admit it.

It must have taken bright eyes to spot that duvet.

And that's a Plus One on the Stagebugs. My Radial JDI and Radial J48 are wonderful bits of kit, but they sit in a box gathering dust while my SB2 and SB4 (piezo) are there at every gig, even when not intended for use that night. Any difference in sound quality between the high-end gear and the SB series is small enough to be non-existent except under utterly ideal conditions, whereas the difference in size and weight is completely obvious every time you pick up your ready-bag.

Quite possibly the most obscure artist ever to have a signature bass.

Nice score, especially as you have the skill (& facilities) to sort it out.

A liberal dose of 48Hz would cure you of all your negative vibes, man. 😂

We all spend our playing careers trying to replicate "the sound in our head". For anyone listening to pop music through the 60s, that sound is most likely to be a Fender Precision strung with flats, and quite possibly being played by James Jamerson (not that any of us had a clue who he was until many years later).

They used to import their blues from Belgium, but ever since Brexit ...