JoeEvans

My Roth and Junius bag, bought for £90 or so a few years back (not sure of model or reference number) is now falling to bits at a fair rate, starting with the handles coming off at inconvenient times. So won't be buying one of theirs again...

I'd honestly just go trial and error, or 'successive iterative approximation', as my dad used to say.

This was obviously a joke, but thinking about it, I seem to remember that metal fatigue develops more rapidly at low temperatures, so potentially if you froze your strings then put them back on quickly and played them, then repeated the process over and over again, they might acquire the played-in sound more rapidly...

If you like that played-in sound from old strings, can you get new ones and put them in the freezer?

DJs who just put on playlists are still doing a useful service. For weddings and parties they will have done a load of work in advance to sort out what music the client wants to hear; then they bring and set up the PA, deal with requests, read the room and keep the punters dancing - it's a lot of work but it has to be done by someone to make the party happen.

The important relationship is the one between the performers and the audience. If the audience are having a good time, the band are doing a good job and that's all there is to it.

I think it's plywood, looking at the grain pattern on the back, and the neck is painted black over some paler wood so not ebony. I think £350 is a fair price considering that someone appears to have worked it over with a rubber mallet then left it in the garden for a few weeks.

It's a bit complicated ... I play accordion at pub sessions, but I also do ceilidh gigs for weddings etc on both bass and accordion. But the ceilidh gigs are with various different 'bands' which are really more like agencies, getting the gigs then seeing who's available from a big pool of musicians. You could be playing with people you've never met, and the client could end up with the same musicians if they booked three different bands! To add to the stress, nobody on the scene seems to bother discussing which tunes they're going to play, so you just work it out while the caller is teaching the dance. And there are no fixed chords to go with each tune, so it's exciting playing bass because you have to psychically agree a chord structure on the fly with the guitarist... But, the weddings are pretty well paid and it's great fun when it goes well.

I always wear earplugs now for more or less any musical activity. 10db for acoustic sessions (I play Irish trad and fiddles are loud!); 20db if there's a drummer using sticks not brushes. If I was in a loud band I'd want 25db+. The great thing for bass players is that with earplugs in, the higher the level of protection, the better you can hear the important bits: yourself and the kick drum.

I suspect that the bank either simply don't believe the bit about the transfer going to a different account to the one entered, it know full well what caused it and have no intention of admitting to a system fault.

I don't see any way for the seller to have orchestrated what happened with your banking. My best guess is that they're innocent and that your bank has a problem that they are highly unlikely to admit to. But without screenshots of the process you can't prove it either, so you might just have to accept the refund and move on.

In my limited experience a really significant part of left hand technique, in terms of not straining the hand, is just playing on the tips of your fingers, so that the last joint of the finger is up off the board rather than being flat across the string.

She's 16 and fairly tall so no need for short scale. Some good suggestions there, thanks! Interesting to see the universal love for Harley Benton.

Any thoughts on the best bass to buy, new or secondhand, for a very low price? My daughter wants to start playing bass, which of course I strongly approve of and want to encourage, so I want to pick up something cheap and cheerful right now to get her going. I'm thinking £100 ish for secondhand, correspondingly more for new if I become convinced that it's worth going that way. Obviously if you have one to sell, feel free to pitch it!

See also: vintage Trace Elliot.

The ideal might be to fit an XLR socket to the bass and drive the preamp on phantom power from something like an ART Tube preamp, which can output via jack to go through your pedals. But if you had to use an external preamp to power your internal preamp, you could just use a passive bass instead...

No case sadly, will buy a gig bag at some stage.

It's what a normal bass would look like if you took a jigsaw and sawed off all the bits that weren't doing anything... I thought it was ugly as hell when I first saw it but it's growing on me now...

A rarity for you lovers of vintage Ibanez items... Axstar AXB50, just arrived. Closest in design to the Yamaha BX 1, strongly 80s look - it looks like a prop from Total Recall - but sounds great and the body is actually very ergonomic and of course very light. The main thing for my purposes is that it can go on a plane if you pay for an extra cabin bag, but I think I could become very fond of it anyway.

Why are rechargables not an option? I just did a quick Google and there are loads on offer from good manufacturers. Am I missing something?

More orange basses.

https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/474391-experimental-tailpiece/ If you do go down that route, you need to use a water knot to tie the loops of cord, as other knots will slip under the tension.

I removed the tailpiece on my db and replaced it with four loops of spectra cord - I posted about it on here, will try and get a link. Might save a bit of mucking about if the bass needs a non standard size of tailpiece.

Thanks for this interesting overview everyone, looks like the only consistent themes are diversity and personal taste!

@BigRedX yes, my proposal wouldn't give an exhaustive list of the qualities of each timber. But if, say, 65% of listeners chose the adjective 'bright' from a list of options to describe the maple body and only 35% chose it for the pine body, regardless of how the other components were swapped around, that would pretty definitively end the 'it makes no difference which wood you use' line. I guess I'm looking for easy-ish steps away from pure opinion and towards actual evidence.