Happy Jack

God, where do I start? How much detail to go into? Is this a review or a graphic novel? Let's keep it as short and simple as possible. One year ago, between Lockdowns, I saw a bass that I really liked - a Grosmann by Cristian Grosu in Romania. Essentially a Jazz shape but hollow-bodied with f-holes, piezo pickups under the saddles (no mag at all), a quirky home-made bridge, and a lovely colour and figure to the body wood. I play a lot of doubling gigs these days, swopping between double bass and a Precision during each set, and I really liked the idea of having a bass guitar which would start by sounding more like a DB and deliver the same sort of signal to my rig. £900 was a bit of a punt on a bass from a manufacturer I'd never heard of, and from Romania of all places, but his website looked convincing and he seemed to have loads of very happy Romanian customers. They're mainly Metal players, but I won't hold that against them - I blame the parents. So the bass arrived, looking every bit as good as I'd hoped, plugged it in ... nothing, nada, not a sausage, bugger all. I did all the obvious things and got nowhere. I opened up the back plate to find an absolute rat's nest of wiring which I didn't understand and didn't dare touch, so I closed it up again and PM'd Cristian. Please imagine that this paragraph runs to well over a thousand words as Cristian and I bat the problem back and forth. He keeps assuring me that the bass was working fine when he sent it, why would he send me a bass he knew wasn't working etc. and (infuriatingly) keeps asking me if I like the bass! He seems to really struggle with the notion that I would not warm to an instrument that cost me a lot of money and doesn't work. Worse, with all my wiggling and jiggling and fiddling, every now and then I can get the bass to work for about five minutes, and it sounds great!

Given the way this story unfolds, why not start with a happy ending? Here's the end-point of the story:

£1500!!! In all the years this thread has been running, that has to be the most ambitious / optimistic / ludicrous price I've yet seen.

They used a companion product to Photo Shop. It's called Photo Cafe.

I was at Bad Company's first ever London gig, the Rainbow. Can't Get Enough was in the charts at the time. All the material they had was their debut album, Eponymous. Is that right? No, it must have been their eponymous debut album, Bad Company. So there they were trying to play a gig with just 40 minutes of material available. Hmmmmmm. They opened with Can't Get Enough, played the entire album (including Can't Get Enough), and then finished with ... erm ... Can't Get Enough. Then they went off having been on stage for well under an hour. The crowd got rather rowdy and eventually they came back for an encore. Literally. They played Can't Get Enough. I'm not making this up, y'know.

Not sure what all this "leaving the stage" and "taking a bow" stuff is all about. Try that at the Dog & Duck and you'd get laughed straight back into the Gents' toilet, and deservedly so. Really not fond of bands who introduce themselves, either - why would I care that "tonight ... on drums ... we have ... DAVE!!!"? But Encore! now, well that's another matter. The word simply means 'more' as in encore un fois = one more time in French. Every gig I play I prepare the setlist on the basis that the crowd might go wild and the band might be asked (or yelled at) to "play some more" or at least "one more song". That happens more often than not, and we'd be fools not to have two or three really good songs to fall back on when the shouts come. No shouts, of course, and we just stop playing. It's not a false encore just because it appears on our setlist.

https://www.homebase.co.uk/really-useful-christmas-gift-wrap-box/12811507.html I imagine there must be at least some people out there who actually buy a special box to store their unused Xmas wrapping paper, but I find this box much more useful for other purposes ...

Super-quick delivery of NOS flatwounds means that I can gig them tomorrow ... top work!

Ah yes, the famous "Squier by Wal" range ...

This is the point, really. The number of strings on its own isn't the whole issue ... neck width and profile are also very important. String spacing comes into it too, it's a complete ergonomic package. If you are short, and have short arms, then obviously short-scale might help a lot, but that's not a given. If you have small hands then you may be happier with 'tight' string spacing like 17mm or even narrower. I have big, clumsy hands with big, clumsy fingers. Combine that with an agricultural playing style and you'll soon see why I always prefer 19mm spacing (used on most Fenders). Before buying another bass, the best thing you can do is to set a time period and use that to try out as many different basses as you can. Given your size, I'd suggest that you start with a Hofner Violin bass, not because you're sure to like it but because it sets a benchmark for how small, light and narrow-necked a bass can be. If you can't stomach violin basses for some reason, then try a Danelectro Longhorn.

Is that because the bass is a 5-string, or because you have small hands, or because you're a small person?

Often the problem with cheap basses, no matter how well they play. I remember 10-15 years ago that there was a range of Far Eastern basses under the Jackson brand that were really good value and excellent to play so long as you held them up with a forklift ...

What she said ...

They're playing The Horns (Watford) this month.

I just love the idea that there was a Great Fire Of Potton (in 1783). Sadly, you're too far North of us for much useful info to emerge from Chateau Happy, but you will be pleasantly surprised by the size and enthusiasm of the music scene in Leighton Buzzard. On the other hand, you will be thoroughly depressed by the musical wasteland known as Luton. There's a fair bit of activity in Stevenage too. Are you looking for good-quality jams as a source of (competent) musician contacts? If so, then there's at least one contact I can share who should be useful.

Agreed, especially since the vendor apparently doesn't even know the name of "the bass player in S & the B" ... Coming soon, the actual microphone used on TOTP by that guy from the Sex Pistols, you know, the one who sang, what was his name again? Anyway, a snip at £5000 and still covered with gob too.

Yup - seen a bit of that myself recently! In other news, a rash of phone calls over the last week has taken both my bands into double figures. Quite frankly, I never really expected to reach that point this year. Even more bizarre is that I'm now running out of available gig slots. Each of my bands prefers to play no more than three gigs a month (so that would be six for me), each prefers to avoid double-headers (defined as playing gigs on consecutive nights), and obviously each band can only play on a night when the other band doesn't have a gig (no deps, unless they're drummers!). With 17 gigs in the diary for the second half of the year (four already played), it turns out that I can only accept another eight gigs for The Junkyard Dogs and eleven for Damo & The Dynamites, and there's a rapidly-shrinking list of dates on which those gigs can be played. Get your orders in soon, guys ... 😂

The news today is awash with carefully-planned leakage preparing us for the disappearance of the 21 June release date. My guess is that they'll put it back by a full month.

Aaaaaaaaaargh!!!

Nah ... you should finger the instrument!