Happy Jack

[Poirot] Exactement, my little cabbage. [/Poirot]

Do they still make them? Your old one (yours too @bassace) is still in one piece ... just. The neck needed major surgery shortly after I acquired it from Roger and Laurence Dixon obliged, but halfway through Set #1 last night a crack big enough to insert a thumbnail suddenly appeared right through the heel, and at roughly the point where the previous repair finished. I had to stop playing the bass and quickly detune to take off the string tension before the bass became the world's most expensive folding pen-knife. 😟 I imagine that it can be repaired ... most things on a DB can. But now we're into cost/benefit analysis and whether or not it would make more sense to buy another/different/new/whatever instrument rather than chucking serious money at the existing one. Don't forget the slow but steady collapse of the table on that bass. 😱 It's a miracle it's lasted this long. I'll be calling Thwaites in the morning to see if I can take it in for an assessment.

My existing bass is teetering on the brink of oblivion and the best replacement for it that I can imagine is another Kolstein Busetto. If you have one one - or know someone who has one - that is looking for a new, gigging home please get in touch.

I started on vintage basses with Hofner. If you think it's tricky trying to sort out exact details for vintage (pre-CBS) Fenders, just wait until you start collecting 500/1 (Violin), 500/3 (Senator) and 500/5 (President) basses ...

I'm more interested in the heavy emphasis placed on provenance here ... "Melvyn Whittaker was a close confidant and friend of Tony Zemaitis and many of the instruments offered are some of his most prestigious and unique of all Zemaitis Models ever created by Tony." OK, right, so this Melvyn Whittaker chap must have been a famous and successful bass player whose name attaches value to his old instruments? Erm ... no. Google has only three references to him, and 99% of those three references are the quote above, appearing in places where people are desperately trying to talk up the value of these instruments. The other two are a single mention in a 2000 issue of Guitar Auctions (quelle surprise), in an article which is no longer available, and a not-very-good YouTube demo (presumaby for an auction) of a different Zemaitis bass which Melvyn allegedly once lent to Jaco Pastorius for possibly a single gig, possibly a UK tour, it's all very vague. Quite frankly, on the strength of the above, attaching Melvyn's name to this bass wouldn't encourage me to spend a fortune on a grotesquely ugly instrument which (I suspect) weighs North of 12lbs. What with Basschat being the biggest & best source of bass knowledge in Europe, presumably someone here must have known Melvyn Whittaker in his hey-day and can tell us why he has left so little trace.

An excuse to post an all-time fave of mine ...

Well he asked me for a double entendre ...

Yes, Tippex on the knob has always been a thing around these parts.

I find this comes in handy:

Hi Atara and welcome. I don't tick any of your boxes, just here to say that London is a very big place - you'll more likely get useful replies if you mention whereabouts you're based, where you rehearse, and where you hope to get gigs. [I'd post a friendly smiley here if the ones on Basschat weren't so embarrassingly childish.]

価格を抑えて構築しました。

Don't forget to tell the sound guy to switch off the monitor that points at your DB!

My route is to take either a small bass cab with tophat fitting or the smallest PA cab in my collection,and put that on an old PA pole at ear level behind me, nothing pointing at the body of my DB. I normally run through a tiny head (Trace Elf, but other options exist) which feeds my mini rig on stage and provides a DI to the board. The minirig can be almost completely set up backstage while waiting for the previous band to clear the area, and then carried on as at most two lifts. I have YouTube I can share if you want it.

NO BREADHEADS, MA-A-A-AN!

Slightly more seriously, this sounds like a bass that can be customised in the process of 'fixing', wrapped around you and your playing style. If you were talking £thousands then it would be another matter, but if it's £hundreds and you could end up with a bass that's a perfect fit either for your general playing style, or perhaps for a specific purpose or genre, then my feeling would be keep it and tweak it. If you sell it and buy another, then Shirley you just go around the same loop again in due course?

And you answer: "Because I haven't bought a third one. Yet." 🤣

@Silvia Bluejay and I are Zoom afficianados. It started with my first-ever Handy recorder, the original H4 from nearly 20 years ago. I liked everything about it except that it was possible to think you'd set it running and then find (after the gig) that actually it was on stand-by. So I sold that and bought the original H2 from 15 years ago - I still have it and it still works perfectly. It remains completely idiot-proof, simplest device I've ever used. I was so impressed that I later upgraded to the H4n Pro which became my frontline recorder for years, Silvie bought herself an H1n, and when we started getting seriously into band videos we bought Q4n HD units. I liked the 32-bit Float thing so much that I took a long hard look at the new H4n Essentials but the reviews all agreed that it was a significant step down from the previous model apart from the Float technology. However, the arrival of the new model meant that dealers were selling off their old stock at silly cheap prices ... so I bought another H4n Pro. 🤣 Roll forward a few months and we were commissioned to do a bunch of pro-style video shoots of Tribute singers (a Michael Jackson, an Elvis, and a Whitney Houston) and it quickly became obvious that we really did need that 32-bit Float technology to cope with other people's PA's and their settings (at live shows) over which we had no influence at all. So I bought the F3. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zoom-F3-220GL-MultiTrack-Recorder/dp/B0BB8ST1HC It's a one-trick pony (arguably) but it's a great trick and it does it so well. Rather than replacing my H4n Pro units this complements them. It's built like a tank (more like Radial gear than typical Zoom), dead easy to use, can be controlled remotely by Bluetooth from an App (very convenient when playing festivals and such), and it's tiny. But it ain't cheap.

I have often wondered recently at my new obsessions, video editing and synthesizers. But now, the hidden purpose underlying everything has been made clear to me.

I had the 8-string equivalent some years back - very heavy and prone to neck dive. I dread to think what that thing weighs. 😟 But at least there's free tetanus in every string.

Bloody Hell, Raymond, £100 for a 4/4 DB? Reckon you've done well there. Love the wallpaper, too. 😁

Agreed.