Cato

Once you learn your way around the fretboard on any guitar type instrument ,in standard guitar tuning, everything else is just a matter of adjusting your technique to suit the wider/narrower/longer neck and string spacing.

At least it wasn't Gibson The music tech world is littered with the corpses of companies that were acquired by Gibson. Fender's track record in that department isn't exactly sterling either.

That Bona bass looks like it should be headless. Other than that neither of them illicits strong emotions of either like or dislike from me.

That's exactly what I thought I remembered seeing when I took the lid off mine. Glad to know I didn't imagine it.

Every bass design I've ever hated for aesthetic reasons I've ended up wanting to own a few years later. At this point I've given up having strong opinions about these things because I know I'll probably change my mind at some point.

I did it when I installed new pickups and a new wiring harness. I was sure it had the control cavity/neck pick up rout, but some of the other answers have got me doubting my memory. I reckon you're just going to have to bite the bullet and spend the 10 minutes or so it will take to take off the plate, have a peek, then decide if you want to take it further. Fnarr fnarr.

If it's like my 2016 VM70s then there's a bloody great channel carved out between the neck pickup and the control plate. (Edited for clarity).

Worth remembering that Fender is an absolute behemoth in the guitar world. Apart from Fender branded instruments they also own Gretsch, Jackson and Charvel and countless others. FMIC accounts for a huge chunk of all of the guitar/bass advertising market. The bottom line is that magazines like BGM simply cannot afford to p!ss them off.

It's all subjective but.... 1970s soul,funk and disco was a golden age for bass. Some might find some of it a bit cheesy but the general standard of musicianship (not just bass) on a lot of those tracks was just sky high.

This is mine. Apologies for the dodgy pictures (I was standing on the bed trying to get as much of the bass into the frame as possible - not the most stable platform) I actually think, visually at least, that swapping the stock metal knobs for classic black plastic ones may be the favourite mod that I made.

I've got same bass, but in a natural finish. I've modded mine a bit with new pickups , wiring loom and bridge, but even as stock it was a damn fine playing and sounding Jazz Bass.

I seem to recall that you found a soiled state Hi Watt in your vegetable patch or did I dream that one?

I'm pretty sure that the guy from Royal Blood played a Junior Jet on their early tours. He may even have recorded their first album with it.

6th form common room, lunchtime, about 25 years ago.

Bass Direct? http://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Home.html

I just realised I don't think I've looked at the top shelf in a newsagents for 20 years. Do the likes of Fiesta and Razzle still exist?

It's not a full justification but I think that each Fodera starts life as a collection of blocks of wood and is hand crafted from the ground up from there. I'm guessing that the process takes hundreds of man hours. Maruszczyk, whilst undoubtedly a quality maker, employs some mass production techniques so the production time for each instrument is much shorter. Having said that there are guys in the Build Diaries section on Bass Chat who also start with a collection of planks and they're not charging anything like 8k+ for their handcrafted instruments.

It's an understandable policy but I'm not going to even try a bass or guitar if I don't know what price bracket it's in and I don't want to be asking 'how much is this one' every couple of minutes. I supposed it's easy enough to find out online, but I reckon it would feel a bit weird, not to mention rude to wander in to a guitar shop to just to sit there googling other music websites.

Burn the heretical bastards, before their foul perversity spreads to the simple minded and unenlightened.

This is how religious schisms begin. One innocent question about an inconsequential point of protocol. A thousand years from now our descendants will still be participating in mass persecutions and guerilla warfare between E starters and G starters.

I can see a sort of of logic in starting at the G in that your'e then not reaching over tuners you've already tuned in order to get to the next string, so you're less likely to knock a tuner you've already tuned. Although that only really works on a 4 in a row or 3 + 1 headstock. It might be different on a 2 +2 arrangement. If that makes any sense at all. I'm not planing to change from starting on E though.

I always start with the E then A,D,G. No logic behind it, I've just always done it that way.

Many years ago I bought a dirt cheap melodica on whim with some vague idea of using it to learn how to play keyboard instruments. My abiding memory of it is just how much phlegm got into the instrument in a relatively short space of time. I still can't play keyboards to this day.

A friend of mine has small collection of no name shortscale basses of various retro designs including an unlined shortscale fretless. It did throw me a bit the first time I played it, not helped by the fact that it was my first time on a short scale bass. As on a 34" scale bass, the closer the 'frets' are together the more noticeable fretting hand intonation errors become. So I did find the shortscale a bit more unforgiving than my own 34" lined Sire fretless but I reckon it's nothing that couldn't be overcome with a bit more time spent playing that instrument.

Led Zeppelin 3 is by far my favourite Led Zep album. They paused for a moment to do the (mostly) acoustic 'folk music' thing before heading down the hard rock road.