NancyJohnson

Thank you. There's a ton of these from this project, maybe 20 complete and another 10 part-demoed. Inevitably, [it] experienced a falling out...a keyboard player arrived out of the blue; the guy was just awful, terrible player and a genuinely horrible personality. There were a few heated emails and the guy I'd been working with for a year and a half just replied with one that read, 'OK, I quit,' and that was it. We never spoke again!

Well, this has been a fairly interesting journey. Hours of frankly terrible church hall recordings going back to when I was about 13, through to some fairly decent studio reels. Runs from punky originals, through metally stuff, the white soul boy years and then stops with a few tapes of stuff I recorded in a local studio as audition tapes for band/label prospecting. I also unearthed a pair of three-track demos I did with a band when I was 18 or 19, the first was self-financed (£65! I remember this distinctly) and the second funded by Polydor (this is another story). Dates cut off late 90s. Interesting. Despite my punky/alternative roots, re-listening to the WSB stuff was the most interesting. I was writing with a bloke up in Ealing; I'd decamp there for an entire Saturday, every Saturday for about 18 months, and we'd just immerse ourselves and write. His wife would do a nice lunch, we'd work through the afternoon and I'd get home around 6.00pm. Programmed drums. From memory, I was using a Warwick Streamer 5LX...my first foray into a 5-string. Sadly it was never going to be a live thing, purely writing and recording (I had a 50% share in a 24 track studio, so it was a good vehicle for that). I'm very pleased to hear these again. For now, the tapes go back in the box. I'll probably never listen to them again! If you're interested: https://on.soundcloud.com/u5PWooGdoLMkJ1426

Everything is better with lube*. *Apparently.

I don't have a bass handy, but I considered adding a second nut/washer to the tuner to stabilise the shift.

I'm latching onto the zinc alloy element of your post. You know that there's probably a few people here that will now be investigating zinc alloy for its tonal/sustain properties over steel/aluminium/lard. What have you started? I hope you're happy. 😂

The Schaller (by virtue of it's 3D moniker), allows a sideways adjustment via a threaded roller saddle, which is very clever 40+ year old tech. These units (albeit Hamer stamped) on both my Hamer basses.

Try a Schaller 3D-4 as a viable alternative.

I put a Hipshot Kickass on an old Aria P-Bass I have. I installed because the original bridge was incomplete when I bought it and Bass Direct were having a sale. If the old bridge had been complete I wouldn't have bothered. It's fit for purpose, intonates and gives me the option to adjust string height. That's all I need, really.

I'm actually scared to post anything detrimental about addition/replacement of original parts with 3rd party pickups and bridges.

I've got D-tuners on three or four basses. They do what they do; give you an Eb and a D option. Like anything, the mechanism needs the odd tweak...I find the little adjustment screw/bolt moves with use which throws out the tuning. They're not rubbish per se, they can be a pain.

Oh, god, here we go. Honestly, just put anything in there. You don't need to spend nearly £400 on pickups, even if they were hand wound by virgins in the mountains of Tibet and potted in wax from bees that produce manuka honey. Buy some Warmans. £20. Tonally you won't hear any difference. You'll want to hear difference, you'll believe you hear a difference, but there won't be any difference.

I blame Brexit. 😏

I've just unearthed a veritable treasure trove of old recordings from 1978 through to the mid-90s. I thought these were all long gone to landfill, but my mother-in-law says, 'I've found a box of cassettes in the garage,' so I did a trip out to pick them up. Man alive. I'm just transferring the first one to the PC. In the early 90s we were rehearsing in our (rather well-heeled) guitarist's basement, a double garage conversion that was under the main lounge of his house. We had a ton of gear...I had two Hamer basses and a huge Laney stack, guitarist came back from a US holiday with three Jacksons (a purple Kelly, two Strat things in custom paint) and he was running a superb Fender Twin Reverb. Thinking back, I can recall he'd bought a Fostex F-77, a little mixer (for the drums) and a bunch of decent microphones, so we tended to capture fairly clean recordings whenever we rehearsed. Listening back, it's a home counties cross between Motley Crue, Anthrax and U2. I'm about halfway through the first cassette (dated May 1991), by which time we seem to have employed the services of a singer who is pretty much channeling Mike Patton (I wonder where he is now). It sounds bonkers. So f*cking fast. There goes my weekend.

I remember being in one of the bigger guitar shops in New York and the new Gibson Thunderbird had come out (this was the one below with the different pickups and the switches). I was using a variety of other 'birds at the time (see elsewhere). Plugging in, you couldn't really hear anything different going on. I mean, if anything was actually happening tonally, it was on such an infinitesimally small tonal swing that you couldn't really identify any difference.

I think these are lovely. People rave about that vintage tone from these old Musicmaster basses. Have a guess what's under the pickup cover on most of these. Ta daa!

You know it. Bwahaha!

For some time, I've advocated that we shouldn't be so obsessed with the swapping out of pickups/hardware; sure if something is broken, too difficult to repair or non-functioning, then fine, pull it out and replace. I could stick any pickups in any bass and so long as they fit the rout and I told you they were wax potted Vintage '62s (or some other nonsense) you be happy as a pig in sh*t and off you'd toddle, none the wiser. I just wish more people would realise this. There's also zero correlation between price and performance. A Timex watch will tell the time as well as a Patek Philippe. Seriously.

I had a bluefaced UK built ABM head, I think it was the 300 (I was in a bit of a bind and Ashdown sorted me out). The head was quite bass heavy/boomy; I was running it through Hartke Hydrive cabs which had fairly bright tonal characteristics. While the power was there it was very hard to get any overdrive out of it, I mean yes, there was some kind of drive circuitry on it, but it was more of a crackle/interference than dirt.

Yup, this, 100%. I used to use a mini-jack adapter.

Send the bass over to me and I'll put in an old bit of junk from my spares box and fudge up some pickup covers from somewhere. I'll tell you I've installed exactly what you want and you'll be none the wiser. That's how it works 😅

While a lot of people may define defeatism as something that John Myung might record, insofar as a body of work goes, there's a post-hardcore/alternative band called Shudder To Think where, despite every song being less than four minutes, there's a ton of stuff going on; bizzaro key changes, timing changes, guitars all over the place with a falsetto vocal capping it off. Because things don't come across as being particularly cohesive, it's difficult to simply noodle along to if you have a bass to hand.

Yeah, yeah. Guitar stuff. I'm just looking for advice on anyone that has a standalone guitar cab, 1x12 (or smaller). It's only going to be used at home and for home recording...I have a Fender Pugilist distortion (which works great on bass as well when going direct into an interface) and a Harley Benton GPA-100. Don't want to spend a fortune, so used is probably the way to go. I'm not entirely certain whether an existing (bass) cabinet would be fit for purpose (I have a pair of Darkglass 1x12s). It seems the better deals are for loaded cabs (and to be honest, without a bit of investigation, I wouldn't really know what to load it with). Advice, please!

In the good old days it was more, 'Can you email me a track?' or 'Have you got any audio up anywhere?' The 2025 spin on this is obvs a blanket invite to send audio out without doing the footwork.

A new one for me. Email dropped earlier (via Bandmix) letting me know that I had been selected for a digital audition with a guy 30+ years younger than me. Clearly digital auditions are the 2025 alternative of standing in a room for two hours with three strangers. Anyhoo, intrigued, I viewed the guys Bandmix profile, and once again another bloke bigging himself up; age difference aside, I simply couldn't work with anyone that uses the expression, 'midweek meat up'. Sigh.

I prefer sand in the Vaseline. 🙄