NancyJohnson

Not a she BTW.

I've got an Epiphone FT140 acoustic, new in the late 1970s. My mum was left some money from her mother, they really didn't get on so she passed it along to me and my brother. No idea of how much it cost...certainly not as much as £100. I rarely play it, but couldn't sell it. It plays OK, but tonally it's not that good... I'd say it's not really contributed to my playing in the slightest and if anything has had more of a detrimental effect. I would like to get a decent acoustic at some point...a Taylor or Takamine, just to see what I've been missing out on.

Big hands, big, umm, cough, err... allegedly.

I have this. Aria Primary Bass, 1978. The bass was in pretty poor condition when I bought it, but it had Schallers fitted, although beyond that is was just a body and neck. Everything that's screwed into the body is new. I just decided that every time I took it out of the house I needed to put a ding in it. It's way worse than this now.

Let me tell you a story. There's a Star Trek analogy, but don't let that deter you from reading. The scene below is from the first Generations film. Data has had the emotion chip installed and is laughing at a joke that someone said seven years previously: Why, pray are you asking, are you showing me this clip? A few years ago, I was playing with an incredible guitarist called Pete. His wife told me he was wired slightly different to anyone else I would meet, so shouldn't feel bad if I were to say anything to upset him if he ever weirded me out. He had a memory like nobody else I'd ever met, but it was just the way he applied those memories that made me recall the above clip when it happened the first time. We'd been playing two or three years by this stage and he started recalling little guitar parts from rehearsals years previously and expected me to know what he was going on about. Our singer pulled up recordings and boom, there they were. And again. And again. He had an incredible memory; he works in some sort of paint place, I called in on him one lunchtime and he was literally having a conversation with some bloke that had been in to buy paint months beforehand and it kind of went: 'So you're asking me for ts five litres of blah blah blah in satin, but you actuallu ordered the vinyl silk and the reference code was 12Y55-GGa.' I saw him do this sort of thing regularly. It was jaw-droppingly astonishing. He could navigate anywhere from memory...just glance at a map, photographic recall, venues we'd never been to that me and the drummer couldn't find even when we were going off a sat-nav. I suppose my point here is that yes, he did remember everything.

This is like saying if I attach a lump of bacon to a fillet of beef, it all becomes some delicious baconybeefy thing.

I bought a £4.00 four-string set branded as 'Soldier' primarily for the purpose of putting them on a mate's bass during a full set up; they were going to be on and off a few times, so just needed something cheap. They were in the same packaging as the OPs and were really pretty good. My mate doesn't play much bass, but I know they're still on his Jazz a couple of years later.

I used to forget songs while we were actually playing them live. Little panic. It's an age thing. Amazingly I can remember every note of the old songs I played 30+ years ago.

I prefer the visual aesthetic of a BadAss or whatever the Hipshot is called (KickAss). These feel nicer under your palm - I've never been cut on the wrist by a BadAss/KickAss. Better (and possibly more stable) adjustability. Beyond that, I honestly doubt they provide anything more, tonally or otherwise.

Reckon the only bass that bucked that trend was a Rickenbacker 4003, it just sounded different, but in a good way. I'd really love to track down some of the old stuff that I had during my formulative years...old Jedson, Arbiter, Columbus...just to see whether the same rule applies.

Just going back to the OP, to this day I'm still fascinated with the music community drive to try different pickups. I've got six basses at the moment...these range from a 1978 Aria P-Bass copy (which has a Delano pickup in it), through to a £5K custom build Mike Lull; I've maintained that I've never really had any issue dialling in my desired tone with any of my basses. OK, granted there's this hybrid Geddy Lee/Jean-Jacques Burnel tone thing going on, but equally if I needed to go 60s ponk or 80s SWR I could easily dial up an approximation of of that from my amp, considering any nuances would be lost in the mix. I still don't get it!

Does anyone make an off the shelf Precision scratchplate with the D&G element closer to the neck?

I've been using Warman pickups for ages. Don't let the low prices sway you, they're wonderful pickups: https://www.warmanguitars.co.uk/product-category/pickups/bass-pickups/

I just put a John East pre into my 8 string; there's a lot of discussion about the EMG/SSD pickups being awful, but the thing has come alive.

Just as an aside here, during my first dalliance with Larry (there's been two or three)...this must have been 2009 or 2012...I was in New York for the US Open Tennis, so it was one of those years, he told me about the Kilo and told me he'd got Billy Sheehan and Jack Bruce as endorsees, but that I should keep schtum. I was looking forward to giving the Kilo a punt, but it just kept being put back, so I went with the LH1000, which really wasn't that great. I really needed something that a head that was going to give me a bit of dirt, so I ended going the outboard route (Sansamp) and now I'm on Darkglass AO900. About a year and a half ago, I was looking for a smaller alternative to the Big One and was looking around at going with a pair of 1x12s - I did have a pair of Aguilars, lovely cabs but too hi-fi for my tastes, I did look at the HD112s, but I felt I just couldn't go back to Korg and try to get a deal on them. I guess if I did get something different, I'd consider selling on the prototype Barefaced and going with a pair of Big Baby IIs.

I met Larry at the old Manny's, amazingly he listened to my band there and then, asked what I was using (at the time Ashdown), was I interested in going with his stuff. To his credit, he must be offering artist endorsements to hundreds of people a year, but I took the bait, he handled Korg in the UK, and over the next few years used a combination of HyDrive enclosures...the 115/410/210. The LH heads were nasty and I never got on with them...noisy and buzzy...but the cabinets were amazing really; I did well over 100 gigs and several hundred rehearsals with them. Oddly, the only reason I moved them on was because I won the Barefaced Big One at the SE Bash three or four years ago. I have very fond memories of my time with Hartke, but now they just seem to be one of a dozen companies all scrapping in a limited marketplace with some rather bland low end product, whereas (when all this was fields), it was an aspirational brand

As mentioned earlier, I had a playlist on Spotify of about 1,400 tracks, just a collection of cherrypicked tracks from albums, stuff I've Shazammed over the years etc. I just like sticking it on shuffle; the familiarity of the material is comforting. In the last few minutes it's played a couple of old Christmas songs back to back (Macca's 'Wondeerful Christmastime' and Louis Armstrong's 'Zat You Santa Claus?'). Today I'm going to be channeling Christmas music. It is, after all, only 204 sleeps away.

Anderton's have grown their business from a small local store to a Worldwide brand all from an extremely small shop (and warehouse facility) in Guildford; you can see they have a passion for the product. Here in lies the difference. Dawson's don't really share that passion or the nuance to grow the business.

Good news/bad news is debatable. I've had reason to visit Dawsons twice in my lifetime, it has to have been two of the most soulless instrument shopping experiences I've ever experienced. There's a parallel with Halfords that's unavoidable; clueless/lacklustre staff selling clueless fathers a first guitar/bicycle for their equally clueless sons. Kid wants something pointy, shiny and sparkly, father wants something the kid can keep and not grow out of, staff motivated by selling whatever carries the highest margin. I honestly felt for the poor unplayable instruments serving as demo models; just pulled out of shipping boxes, hung up and battered by all and sundry.

I woke up early one Sunday and started trawling through eBay for basses, saw a Hamer FBIV on sale for £350 as a Buy-It-Now thing. Did a little panic; aside from Nikki Sixx, I'd never seen one in the flesh and as they're so rare, there was nothing online to compare it to. Eventually found a photo of Mr Sixx somewhere; configuration was a little different, more knobs on the eBay one, headstock a bit different, stadium logo. Went back to the computer and bought it. Unbeknownst to me, the Hamer Fan Club forum had a thread going on it already. It arrived a few days later; no case, heavily wrapped in about six inches of bubblewrap. I was offered around £3,500 for it from someone on the Hamer Fan Club group. Porno shot:

Back in the day the inferiority of the sophomore album was generally known as the difficult second album syndrome. I'm very much from a rock/punk background and could, given the time for recall, cite dozens of second albums that fell well short of the debut releases by the same band. Off the top of my head, second albums by Van Halen and Living Colour were awful.

One of the best? No. It is the best.