Happy Jack

Or maybe phishy?

I looked at the email address and immediately thought, that looks well fishy.

Frankly ... I agree.

That's my utterly gorgeous and uber-lightweight Mike Lull 54P. I bought it from a guy in Denmark because ... erm ... well, I liked the colour actually. To my complete amazement, it became my instant go-to bass for anything needing a chunky 4-string sound. It has fought off some very serious opposition to achieve that.

It was quite a strong gust, Roger. In truth, I had no idea a bass could blow off a bass bar like that. From now on I'll just lay it down on its back in its gigbag, on the ground next to me. Incidentally, the entire fingerboard popped clean off, two seams opened, and the soundpost moved. I took it to the nearest DB specialist today ... £180 to put it back together.

With double bass, timing is everything.

Yes, who was that masked camerawoman, I wanted to thank her!

Hit me up (or some other pathetic Americanism such as 'bad boy') with what you've got. Better still, just list everything you've bought in the last six months. Cash waiting. No time wasters.

Have you ever considered trusting your own common sense? Bwahahahahahahaha!

If you think that you were being quoted £235 for such an upgrade, then I can only assume that there has been a massive communication breakdown somewhere along the line. I have been shipping stuff from the States (on an occasional basis) for many years ... basses, audio equipment, accessories, you name it ... and I have never been quoted anything remotely like that figure. Are you sure that you are not confusing the situation by adding in quotes for insurance? Incidentally, and as a side issue, I have never ever paid for extra insurance on any purchase. One day I may have cause to regret that but, in literally hundreds of transactions, I have yet to have done so. YMMV 🙂💋

You should only use or accept the use of USPS if given absolutely no choice in the matter. Most big US institutions work on the basis that 99.9% of their business will be domestic, so don't waste time on a tiny number of customers who are stupid enough to live outside God's own country. No, really, that is exactly how they think. Try doing business with a US bank or cellphone company or whatever and you'll soon find that out. Don't ask me how I know. If you deal with a proper courier company (i.e. not USPS) then you should have no trouble and no long delays. UPS and Fedex aren't perfect, but then neither are DPD and DHL (though DPD come pretty close). I bought a microphone from LA a few months ago, it arrived within three days. A pedal from New Jersey took about the same time.

There'll be no shortage of people recommending basses for you. Without knowing your target weight and of course your budget, I can't make any helpful suggestions so I'll ask instead, why "unfixable"? Are you talking slipped disks and crushed vertebrae here?

Yup, but I had my reasons ...

I was very happy with the ToneDexter and quite content with my sound, but we were performing under ... ahem ... acoustically adversarial conditions and @Silvia Bluejay isn't happy with using these results as the yardstick of success. First gig in six months, performing at fairly low volume with a noisy crowd between us and the cameras, the overheads didn't work quite as planned, we had a f***ing bouncy castle right next to us (with a compressor that masked/interfered with a range of bass frequencies), and the Kolstein turns out to have a bit of a wolf note at C# which Silvie had to EQ mercilessly to tame. Don't get me wrong, it was a great gig and we had a whale of time playing to a garden full of very happy punters who were quite clearly there for our music ... there were Rockabilly fans, Elvis fans, Eddie Cochrane fans, Jerry Lee Lewis fans, these weren't random people and they really liked what we were doing. But if we're being picky, this wasn't a gig where we'd have boasted about either our performance or our sound. So we're playing again on Saturday (at The Wonder in Enfield), the setup will be very similar but with no bouncy castle and we'll have learned from Sunday's gig. I'll be playing the Zeller to see how that fares with the ToneDexter, and hopefully we'll get some better-quality recordings.

+1 I've only ever used Hot Wires on my Status Streamline and I've never yet regretted it.

My signal chain is unaffected. Previously I ran the signal from the DB pickup into an AI Clarus, using the amp both to drive my cab (stage) and as a DI to the PA (for FoH). That's exactly what I will do tomorrow, except that the signal from the DB will pass through the ToneDexter to get a mic'd up sound.

Yeh, but can you play Brown Sugar on it?

I bought it from Mark at https://gollihurmusic.com/

That was the whole point of using it with the AliKat. I was using the WaveMaps from the Zeller and the Kolstein to modify the sound of the AliKat.

Can you powder-coat chrome?

That would be it then, for that recording I had nothing plugged in. More importantly, that means I can only hear it when playing acoustically. As soon as I amplify the bass, it disappears. I'll be gigging this bass on Sunday afternoon (at The Nag's Head in Sunningdale) and I'll post a video from that gig as soon as I can. I doubt any rattle will be audible. 😎

By the way, Mark Gollihur has read this review and emailed me to say Did you not get our "quickstart" sheet that I wrote up? We include it with every TD we ship out, and it "bullet points" the process of creating and testing a Wavemap, using layman's language.