Cato

Just out of idle curiosity sparked by this thread in General Discussion that features an £8k Fender Custom Shop Precision. Would I theoretically be able to get more than one of Andy's latest masterpiece for the same money?

For me, I think this may be @Andyjr1515's best work yet. If that was in Bass Direct parked next to all the top end basses, it would still be the one I'd be most drawn to.

I've got a first generation Sire V7. The bridge on that is as solid as most basic BBOTs. If you pull the bottom E sideways you can move the saddle, but you do have to pull it with a force far greater than most people would ever use when playing. Other than that it's solid.

Assuming we're talking about an active bass with a preamp that has an EQ section then generally I would say you have much more control over how scooped or not the sound is than on a passive bass.

There was an entire plastic pipe 'orchestra' that used to do the festival circuit in the 90s. They weren't officially on the bills but they'd find a bit of space in one of the fields, set up and start playing, often to a fairly large, if somewhat transient audience.

I went to see Placebo at the O2 Academy in Birmingham 5 or 6 years ago. It was painfully loud. I saw a lot of the big heavy metal bands of the 80s and 90s back in the day and it was pretty normal for my ears to ring for a couple of days after those shows, but this was louder than anything I've previously experienced. I stayed to the end because the friend I went with is a massive fan, if I'd been with anyone else I would have left. That was the gig that made me decide I was going to start taking ear plugs to live shows.

I'll state the obvious and say headphones. Preferably through one of the many multi fx/amp modeller units currently available at many price points. And get Mrs Skinny a keyboard.

But are you playing on all those beats, or, say, just the 1 and the 3?

One of the questions I have about Fender Custom Shop in particular is to what extent the bodies and necks are 'hand made'? Are the necks and bodies really crafted by hand from the original blocks of wood or are they made on the same CNC machines as all the other US Fenders albeit from a special 'custom shop' wood pile? To some extent using CNC would be much closer to Leo Fender's original vision for his instruments, but it then becomes more difficult to justify the prices. I'm not suggesting that they're not constructed using 'highly skilled' labour, just that most of the man hours are going on finishing rather than actual construction and assembly, which isn't radically different from their mass production lines.

If someone gave me the custom shop bass in the link the first thing I'd do is get it refinished and have all the rusty/tarnished hardware replaced, presumably drastically reducing it's resale value in the process.

I'll admit to frequently finding myself bemused at the the prices Fender Custom Shop can charge for a 'faithful hand built recreation' of a guitar or bass that was originally specifically designed to be mass produced on a factory production line for sale as a quality but relatively affordable instrument. But someone must be paying those prices.

I liked the faster versions. I don't think it ever got too silly.

Good call. Possibly sacrilegiously I prefer Loco Live. It's a better recording, it covers more of their back catalogue and the Ramones sound like they did the one time I was fortunate enough to see them live in around 1993.

Can't see why this is a game changer. Fender had a 3 pickup short scale bass 'The Rascal' out a few years ago. The tremolo is unusual on a production 4 string bass but not unique. Everything I've ever read about trems on standard basses including Neil Murray talking about his own Strat Bass suggests that they can't really replicate what a guitar trem does in terms of pitch bending, it tends to be more a vibrato effect with the strings going quieter when the trem is depressed. Maybe this one is different.

I suspect in terms of overall tone on solid body guitars the effect of body shape is even less than that of the wood used to build it. If you put three single coils and a trem on a Les Paul body shape it's going to sound far more like a Strat than a Les Paul and that's taking into account the different types of neck joint as well.

I got hit in the shoulder by Sean Kinney's drumstick at an Alice in Chains gig. I didn't manage to catch it though. It bounced off me and landed several rows back.

Sire V3 is in a similar price range to those already mentioned.

I went so see an NME tour with Cribs, Mystery Jets and Arctic Monkeys on the bill below a headlining Kaiser Chiefs. At that point Arctic Monkeys had just suddenly become huge, just about everyone was there to see them, to the point that when Kaiser Chiefs came on the room was noticably emptier because people had left after Arctic Monkeys.

I've got some Aguilar 70s pickups in a Squier Jazz. Absolutely love them. They're not hum cancelling, but they're certainly no noisier than you'd expect a single coil J pickup to be.

I think it's the same preamp as on my Deluxe PJ, in which case the controls are (from the top) volume, pickup pan, treble/bass (stacked) and mids on the end.

Not sure what you're after. There's a technique called 'tremolo picking' famously used here The technique itself isn't that difficult although the level of control against the metronome in the example above is exceptional. Thing is, although the number of note strikes per minute is huge, the actual bpm of the song is 'only' 175.

Exhibit 1 Guitar body apparently made from Cotswold stone. Sounds like any other distorted guitar.

I'm very much a believer that in terms of tone, pickup position is the number 1 factor, followed by pickup type and electronics. Everything else, including body and neck materials has far less impact on overall tone than those three. I strongly suspect that you could mold a P bass out of concrete and as long as it had the split P pickup in the correct place and the usual passive tone and volume it would still sound very much like a P Bass. Might weigh less than plywood too.

Heavy 'Born in the USA' era Springsteen influence as well I'd say, which plays into the 80s revival that's become more and more prevalent in the charts over the last few years.

First time I heard this I thought it might be Kings of Leon.