NancyJohnson

One bit of sage advice if anyone is considering a reverse-P pickup configuration, these Tonerider pickups have raised poles for the A & D strings, so they need to be aligned accordingly. This causes a bit of an issue with the length of the wires connecting the individual pickups.

Come on, Johnny. You said you wanted a little bass!

A less than usual glamour shot. Been a bit busy ripping out a downstairs loo and workshop full of said rooms new fittings, so I'm limited to doing small stuff on the ironing board at the moment. Pickguard should be here tomorrow. Machines are installed. Neck is (like the other), great quality. Profile is chunky. It will need oiling and ill probably sand off the finish on the back of the neck. Once the plate is here, I'll do final measurements afore routing out the pickup cavity. The guard isn't white.

Pretty much all the damage on the bass has been done on purpose every time it leaves the house; there's little effort involved in wrecking the visual aesthetic of the body.

Have you been on the sauce?

Umm, no.

Little thread resurrection. [Full edit]. Just bought a second neck (different seller, different project. The neck arrived about a week ago, just had a second delivery of an Allen Key. Did a You Tube search and turned up this video. Scenario identical to the video below, although neck arrived first. This rings a bell;

Voice of reason: Sell it as is, explain the middle pickup is faulty and that the buyer will need to sort it. They're just Stratocaster pickups anyway. You're going to haemorrhage £££ getting it rewound, just stick a £15 Warman in there and swap the cover. Nobody will know, or be able to, hear any difference. It's simply not worth the expense or hassle.

Cough. "It's a great bass, but I'm thinking about..." Lost count if the amount of posts that pertain to this. If it's great, leave it as is. Invest the money elsewhere. Go out for dinner. Buy a book. Cough.

We're having a cheeky bottle of red and there's hoisin duck coming. Reliving my 20s...Big Country, The Crossing. 5/5

Painting is done. Slight scar from the outline of bridge pickup, but it's fine.

I listened to the deluxe version of Frank Sinatra's Ring A Ding Ding! album twice this afternoon. The second CD is 69 minutes of absolute delight. Studio chatter, out takes, botched takes, Sinatra talking with the orchestra, Sinatra singing on his own and telling the orchestra they need to play at different tempos and where he went wrong. It's amazing that he tracked all the vocals for 13 songs over three days just prior to Christmas 1960 AND there were clearly versions of various tracks that were clearly in flux at the time of recording. Honestly, great stuff.

Aah, so to the plan. I'm doing a Mark Hoppus-esque Jazz/Precision build in black: Jazz bass body (Fender MIM), Precision profile neck (cough, Chinese, cough). Hipshot Kickass bridge (used elsewhere). Reverse Tonerider P-pickup (I put one in a mate's build, it was pretty hot, so am going that in this). Wilkinson Machines. Dunlop Straploks. I've got prior experience with all the parts, so they should go together without issue. Once Tim at Gig Ink gets the guard to me I can enlarge the neck pickup rout to accommodate the pickup.

All the bits are here aside from the scratch plate; it's been a while since I used a car filler product and had forgotten how heady you feel using it in an unvented room 😄

Sandberg made some two string basses and so did Waterstone. I'm surprised nobody put a 2-string Chris Ballew Gitbassinto production.

This seriously needs a deluxe reissue. There's a lot of stuff that could be bundled with this to fill up another two CDs. 'By The Time We Got to Woodstock', demos, the live B-sides.

Basses that look like highly figured table tops. Sandberg headstocks. Flats. Straight jackplugs out of the body. Strat jackplates. Referring to a bass as she or her. Gig bags that aren't fit for purpose. While I ran a Darkglass AO900 head for a while, I didn't bond with it, so Darkglass AO900 heads. Reissues that are simply all wrong. Reissues.

OP: "I love everything about this bass, it's awesome!" Ten seconds later: "What can I do by throwing ridiculous amounts of money at it to make it betterer?" Eyes down for a full house.

'I can see a team wearing claret and blue lifting the Premier League trophy...'

I was just looking at some old stuff I'd posted and had a bit of a dark chuckle and the 'So as 2019 draws to a close, I can only say, hell, 2020 has got to be better, eh?' About a week after I posted that, I went to Iceland for a few days over my birthday and unbeknownst to us things were really kicking off in China. 2020 wasn't better, was it? It was the year from hell globally.

[Mahoosive Edit] This journey, into bass playing? What made you pick up that first bass at the start of this long and winding road? I had mates (very good 14/15 year old drummer and a fast learning guitarist) who wanted to start a band, and I had access to a bass. Do you still have the same fire and enthusiasm? Do you still love it? I have love for the instrument and the collection as it stands, but do I have the fire? In all honesty, that ship sailed a while ago. I just tend to pick up a bass and noodle for ten minutes. I have little desire to do band stuff right now, it's just too exhausting, frustrating and stressful. Musicians, by and large, are lazy and need pushing to do stuff and most suffer from allusions of 'what's in it' for them. I can't deal with this, or pander to their whims, any more. What has changed along the way? Your taste in music, taste in basses? I'd been playing for about ten years when Polydor came knocking. That was a major knock to my confidence. The anticipation and then the news they were only interested in our vocalist. That rejection hardened me a bit. Musical taste hasn't really moved much, I still get turned on by the same genres/bands. Taste in basses changed largely due to cost/availability. I've got cheap kit and I've got expensive kit. They all sound more or less the same. What was the first bass? And what’s the latest? I had an Arbiter, or CBS/Arbiter SG thing. White. £35.00. My last one was the Spector Euro-X. Black. £2,500.00

Despite my love of the Thunderbird, I've always adored a Fenderesque neck with binding and blocks. I suppose that harks back to my first Columbus Jazz.

As I've posted previously, strapping on a Thunderbird is like magic; it can transform you from a slightly overweight curmudgeonly man in his 50s into Nikki Sixx in his mid-1980s prime. I don't know how it works.

Customish pickguard pretty much sorted, although unordered. Nice deep tortoiseshell. I'll give you this: