Cato

You see that shape in funk music quite a lot. Try barring just the G B and E strings at the 7th fret then move to 6 on the G and bar the 5th on the B and E. Repeat. That's a fairly common sequence.

I'm not sure about the others but The Cure are pretty big in the US. US sales make up just under a third of The Cure's 30 million or so career album sales and in 2023 they played to over half a million people on the sold out North American leg of their 2023 tour.

Not music related but... I think the only company I'll never use again is a local Ford garage. It's about 3 minutes walk from my house so it made sense when I first moved here to take the car there for MOTs , services etc But they always found stuff that 'needed' doing. The tracking would be off or the tyres were worn or the air conditioning fluid needed changing. The final time I went there I got a phone call saying I 'needed' over 1k worth of stuff doing or the car would be undrivable. I declined, took the car back and took it to another local garage where they told me they were unable to find any of the issues the first garage had warned me about. So now I take my car to that garage, and if anyone ever asks me if I know a good mechanic I 'll warn them about the local Ford garage that tried to rip me off.

Same and I've listened to few bits and pieces down the years since they impressed me at Glastonbury in 1994. I think that would have been the year before Justin joined.

Just when you think films can't possibly get any longer someone comes along and decides to make 4 full length films on the same subject.

I definitely woudn't say that. Any design that has no only remained in production for as long as Leo Fender's guitars and basses but actually still retains it's place as a market leader must be something a bit special

As I mentioned in another thread the Fender Custom Shop is a bit of a paradox. Expensive versions of instruments that were specifically designed to be mass produced on a production line by people with no luthiery skills to be sold at an affordable price point.

Not much wrong with your English, it's infinitely better than my Danish. Sometimes on the internet (although it's rare on Basschat) you find people who are determined to have a fight. Best thing to do is ignore them and move on.

Chances are even if the tech did it they didn't notice. As everyone says, these things are inevitable.

I've never heard anything but high praise for Enfield basses. You sometimes see them at absolute bargain prices too, presumably because Enfield are a fairly low profile boutique maker. As for the Quad system? I'm sure that the pickups are excellent in all configurations but a fairly large chunk of tone comes from pickup position rather than pickup type. So switching from a split P configuration to a full fat Music Man type humbucker while the pickup remains in the same position probably isn't going to produce the massive difference in tone which you might expect. Having said that I don't doubt that with the Quad pickups placed in the correct position they will do a spot on P/J/Ray impression on a single instrument.

That's the the kind of bass I'd happily hang on a wall as a piece of art even if it was unplayable. I suspect after a clean and a polish it's going to be very pretty indeed

One of the great things about now vs when I started out is the whole YouTube tutorial phenomenon. It basically means you can design your own 'course' , concentrating on the stuff you want to learn be that theory, technique or just learning the tunes you want to play. An you can do it in your own time, on your own terms. Having said that I don't regret the hours I spent playing rewinding cassetes to listen to the same 10 second passage over and over again until I could play it perfectly. I still use the 'listening' skills I developed back then today.

I think there's a particular paradox in play when it comes to custom shop Fenders that tends to get people's backs up. The original models, the really highly valued pre CBS models, were all made on a factory production line by a labour force with no luthiery training and designed to be affordable to working musicians. So Fender custom shop is left trying to justify sky high prices for a recreation of something that was designed to be made cheaply. In recent years they've done it by offering various relic'd finishes that are allegedly unique to each custom shop intsrument , now that the relic craze seems to have calmed down a bit maybe they've decided figured tops are the way forwards.

I think a lot of self taught players from my generation are a bit wary of formal musical education because it used to seem almost like an impediment to playing what you wanted to. When I first started playing in the late 80s a lot of my friends were also picking up guitars and many of them tried formal lessons. Back then it seemed that no one was really teaching 'pop' or 'rock' guitar the only lessons, certainly in my locality, were all classically based and the general advice from tutors seemed to be not to move to electric guitar before you'd achieved a basic level of proficiency on a nylon strung classical model. Sod that.

This makes me think there's more than a dead battery going on here. Unless you'd accidentally knocked the volume on your passive bass down to zero (we've all been there) then with neither bass making a noise then the issue is almost certainly further down the signal chain.

The closest thing I've seen to those pickups are on the Fender Hockey Stick 12 string Although those are rounded and the ones in the TOTP pics look more square. My best guess is that the TOTP bass is a one off, put together with whatever electronics and pickups the builder could get their hands on.

I learnt by working out and playing along to my favourite songs. It helped that my favourite band was the Ramones so the learning curve wasn't too steep.

Kind of depends what I'm doing. One of the things I discovered when I started home recording is that sometimes a bass that sounds overdriven when on it's own will come through as clean in the mix, especially with distorted guitars, but somehow the additional drive makes the bass more prominent Since then I've noticed with isolated bass tracks from a lot of very well known songs where I would peviously have said the bass was 'clean' there's actually a fair bit of drive on there. So sometimes I add drive to boost my 'clean' tone in the mix, if that makes any sense?

Never played one but I love the aesthetics on those old 60s British Fenderish inspired solid body guitars.

I've forgotten that strings with silks still existed. I think the last time I used them was pre internet in the early 90s and the local music shop only sold Rotosound Swing Bass.

I've had a gen1 V7 fretless for a few years now. It's a great instrument, even though I bought as a cheapish first fretless (and back then I think they were under £400 brand new) I feel no need to 'upgrade' to something more expensive. The mid sweep on the preamp is a control too far for me so I generally use it in passive but that's my only niggle and that's definitely a 'me' problem rather than an issue with the guitar.

I'm thinking of the bending the paperclip back and forth until it snaps thing. No idea if the two things are actually comparable though.

To be honest I'm just a massive Thinline Telecaster geek.. I go through a cycle o geting the urge to put the recent CuNiFe reissues into one of my late 90s reissues to make it more 'authentic' but the truth is I really like them with the PAF style humbuckers they were born with. Like a lot of things in the guitar world there's a lot of myths and snakeoil about the original Wide Range humbuckers. As far as I know no other mass production guitar maker even went down the CuNiFe path and Fender only made them for 8 or 9 years between 1971 and 1979. Truth is that neither they or the Deluxe and Thinline Tele models that used them were that popular at the time, partly because the Wide Ranges were significantly lower output than the double humbucker Gibsons of the same period. But because of unique magnet and their relative difficulty to obtain, over the last 40 years or so these original , unpopular, CiNiFe Wide Ranges managed to obtain such a mystique that in 2020ish Fender brought them back for the first time in 40 years for their US Deluxes and Thinlines.

That's the skinny string version, they've being doing those for 3 or 4 years, but the equivalent 4 bass version they've been using on the recent Vintera IIs and Squier Rascals is just standard alnico.

There's one on Reverb that hasn't been butchered for £500 less. https://reverb.com/uk/item/54783511-1985-fender-performer-bass-burgundy-mist-w-original-box-gig-bag As a quirky shortlived bit of Fender history I can see a good example being worth £2000 to a collector of such things. But the refinished PJ monstrosity above is far from a good example. Some would argue, and I'm in that camp, that without the original pickups which are a big part of the original design's aesthetic character, it's barely a Performer at all.