NancyJohnson

A few years back I rocked up to Andertons to have a quick look at the basses, out of everything hanging in there the Schecter J-4 was just a country mile better; sounded nice, excellent set up, very playable. While I wouldn't necessarily buy/play one, it did seem pretty good VFM. Just taking a peek, the Nikki Sixx J-4 is discounted to £899 at the moment. Only in distressed ivory at the moment (I seem to recall there were greeny ones originally).

I didn't have anything to do with the final edit; it's unwatermarked stock footage...really don't know the source.

Here's a full sized comp. We're a punkyish/alternativeish four piece. Singer Eddie fronted Department S (and before anyone one asks, yes we do), guitarist is ex-Members (amongst others), session drummer (loads) and moi.

I'd been wanting to run a twin 1x12 set up for a while. Cabs are great tonally and more than capable. Lightweight, generally leave the tweeter/horn on the midway setting. The AO900 head took a long while to bond with; I'm happy enough now. Post-DI to the desk, only run it to about 25% live, which is more than enough. My only criticism of last night is more my fault; the output on this bass is super-hot, it's got a John East on it, so need to do some set up tweaks (pickups down or adjust the output down on the East, which I'm sure is an option).

We played the Alice's Wicked Tea Party festival last night. There's scant information about this online, but it's an independent event held in a big field located equidistant between Corfe Castle and Wareham in Dorset. The site has two barns about 20m apart, each with a full stage set up; while one stage is busy, the other is setting up. The barns are both draped in camo and parachute silks. Line checks only and finger's crossed. We had an incredible sound guy, who said he were the best band of the weekend (so far...). Fantastic PA system in both barns. 45 minute set, I'd say 175-200 people in for us. Very appreciative and responsive. Took my Lull and Darkglass kit. Post-DI. Tone was nice and gnarly. My wife was out front and she said we were a firm 8/10. (I've dragged her along to enough gigs and if we were sh*t, she wouldn't hesitate in saying so.) Two hour drive home. Nothing better than sleeping in your own bed.

Wouldn't make a claim to a decade, but if you want a ten year period I'd go '73-82. Kicking off as a pre-teen, that ten year period had a profound effect on me musically; The Sweet, Sparks, Mott the Hoople, Kiss, Queen, Rush, Aerosmith, Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Heartbreakers, Japan, Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Motley Crue. Message ends.

The colloquial 'we' love a band with a gimmick in this country and count Royal Blood, Mr Blobby, St Winifred's School Choir, The White Stripes and Benny Hill in there. I'm an ageing indie/punk/post-hardcore bloke; honestly couldn't tell you the title of a single Royal Blood song despite listening to them a few times.

We were in a place in east London, called the Engine Room. It's a live venue/rehearsal space that operates out of a very unglamorous railway arch on the edge of a tired business estate.

I did a video shoot a couple of months ago. It all seemed preposterous at the time, but the end result is decent enough.

Guitarist in my band has more guitars (50+), amps and outboard gear than you can shake a stick at; he mixes things up a lot, so every rehearsal/gig is a revelation. Right now he's favouring a class-d amp and assorted effects on a floorboard (about 18x12"), which he just jacks into whatever cabs are available. I suppose this will change again at some point. He always sounds fine, but part of me just prefers the straight approach, guitar into amp.

In general, if I lose love of a bass then that's it, no remorse. I forget why I felt the need to move on the Bongo...as I've mentioned elsewhere, tonally I never quite nailed it; there was a tiny sweet spot between clarity and mush. I wish I'd persisted.

Sellers remorse. The Travis Bean. The Bongo 5HH. The white Gibson Thunderbird.

My Thunderbirds used to be called Scott, Virgil, Alan etc. in the order of acquisition, now everything is just, 'the Cruisebass', or 'the Lull', or the Spector'. Beyond this, nah.

On your amp, you have the option of pre/post DI - this is selected by an in/out button on the fascia; ideally you want to send a post DI signal to the desk, this should be a flat line level signal and will tonally reflect what's going through your amp. This output signal should be unaffected by how loud you ramp things up when playing, so no necessity to turn your amp down. Just as far the Bongo goes, I owned a 5-string HH model a few years ago and while it played like a dream, tonally it was a fine line between tonal bliss and mush; there was always this thing where you just kept tweaking things up and up.

I'm playing AWTP this coming Saturday with The Adjacent Kings. The festival is in Wareham, Dorset...a two-dayer (2nd & 3rd), we should on sometime between 8.00 and 8.30pm. Unsure how big this is... possibly a few hundred people tops. Weather looks good too.l If anyone is going, come and say hello! Alices Wicked Tea Party Soldiers Rd, Wareham BH20 5DU https://maps.app.goo.gl/2g5xCo3YQThZPEZP6

I still don't 'get' the desire for a Signature bass, despite owning one right now and owning a Geddy Lee Jazz about ten years ago. Ownership is never going to magically turn you into Geddy/Flea/Marcus Miller (etc) although it has to be said, it's quite amusing to show up to a gig and see duplicates of the same bass being used in other bands, right down to similar areas of distressing. It's only a Geddy Lee model because he was fortunate enough to find it in a pawn shop. (I often wonder who owned it previously.) Fender wouldn't be remotely interested in putting the owner of the next serial numbered Jazz onto a Signature model.

The whole ridiculousness of chasing tone and the amount of money I've thrown at it. Sigh. Worst case was this frankly ridiculous tri-amp set up I ran about 30 years ago. TE preamp, TE stereo Poweramp, TE mono Poweramp, two SWR Goliath cabs (1x15/4x10) and a TE bright box. It sounded ok, but didn't deliver anything like the sound I was looking for. It wasn't until I got a BassPOD that things started getting interesting. Then a BDDI. The beauty now is that I get what I need from a set up barely bigger than a cabin bag.

At 6'4" and predominantly using Thunderbirds, I favour a Levy's extra long strap; there's certainly times where the strap has been too long and photographic evidence show me in a square-shouldered Herman Munster poise, just to raise the bass to a more comfortable playing position.

David Sylvian this morning. Early solo nonsense.

180° turnaround from a few years ago. Little Gator padded bag. Darkglass head, power cable, Speakons, spare 9v battery, little pouch of picks/pens, a few sheets of A4, strap, lead, headstock tuner.

I tend to buy all my strings from Amazon; pricewise there's got to be a degree of price-fixing given the similarity of prices elsewhere (and I mean, how much markup are there on strings, it's bonkers), but I'm a Prime member, so free shipping. Background behind a 5-string string change, my Lull is a 35" scale, checking my Amazon orders at the end of April 2021, I ordered a set of 14087s (45-105 XL nickel plated steels) and a 15433 (.130 XL taper wound). Like @glassmoon, I too was a bit surprised that Elixir didn't make XL five-string sets, so had to resort to two purchases. To compound issues, there was a really long lead time on the low-B, from memory it took 6-8 weeks to arrive (I suppose we were still in lockdowns of some sort at that time, so the world priorities were elsewhere at that point). Given we're nearly two years on, the bass hasn't seen a lot of use since I put them on, but I did have a noodle on it yesterday. They still sound fresh as.

Of the dozen or so Gibson models I owned, I'd say two were head and shoulders above the rest - a white one I imported from Japan (sold to @police squad) and a limited run Gothic (which now resides in Spain). This was nothing to do with tone or anything; the neck on the white one was skinny as hell, the black a bit more chunky. Both these had additional bridge replacements (Babicz FCH). To be brutally honest, I don't buy the 'ironically the sound...' argument...we've done the blind tone test at a pre-pandemic Bass Bash and scores were exceedingly low; all of them sounded more or less the same. Tone comes from a combination of many things, from your hands through to the backline the bass is going through. Nobody could tell the difference between Precisions, Jazzes, Musicmans etc.

I played Gibson Thunderbirds exclusively for about a decade and while I'n still using basses of a similar shape (Lull/Spector/Hamer), they're all different to the Gibsons I owned. In answer to the OP, I'd consider three things, price, how long you're going to keep it for and resale value once you decide to chase down a Gibson (because you will). A while back there was a configuration tool on the Phoenix page and obviously I had a play; it spat out a purchase price and it wasn't cheap by any stretch. I mean, it looks similar to the model it's apeing, headstock is a little odd, maybe the body geometry is a bit off too. You're going to be buying blind unless you can work out a way to play before you buy it and most of us have read the manufacturers feelings about QC and aftercare. So, not for me, no.