Doctor J

If your eyes are over the bridge, turn the truss rod towards the bass side, away from the volume knob. Do one tweak and let it settle for a while. After 15-30 minutes, tune to pitch and check the relief again. Repeat. Definitely check a video or two on youtube just so you’re familiar with what you’re doing. It is intimidating at first, but the more familiar you are with it, the more confident and knowledgable you are, the more likely you are to get it right 🙂

In a nutshell, anything built with a Fender logo since about 1965? 😁

No, if the new strings are lower tension than the old ones then the neck is pulling back, resulting in a lower action than before. As the OP says, he usually brings it to a tech so we must assume the saddles are at the appropriate height as they will not have moved, just the neck (or specifically, the nut relative to the last fret and bridge saddles). Adjusting the saddles now will just make the right setup more of a moving target than it currently is. Once the neck relief is back where it was, everything else should be in the right place. @lowlandtrees it sounds like you just need to loosen the truss rod a small amount. If you fret the strings at the first and last frets at the same time, there should be a small gap between the top of the 8th and 9th frets and the bottom of the string above it. This is called the neck relief. Higher tension strings pull the neck forward and the truss rod is adjusted to counter that pull, leaving the neck with an appropriate amount of relief. The amount of relief is down to personal taste, personally I like very little relief, little more than the width of a piece of paper. If the relief is about the same as the thickness as a business card, then you’re in the right area. There are plenty of youtube videos which will bring you through it in detail. You will only need a very small adjustment to get you back to where you were so it’s nothing to be scared of. Take it slowly, don’t force anything, move in small adjustments and you’ll be fine.

Nothing wrong with bullet truss rods and three bolt neck joints at all. After all, Fender himself used them at MM and G&L and made wonderful instruments which were well made and, as a result, have absolutely stood the test of time. Design wasn’t the issue with Fender in the 70’s and early 80’s. The problem was execution. They were simply cheaply and sloppily made with no QC. That’s the problem which carried on through a lot of US Fender models until they shut the old plant. A lot of the hallowed early 80’s are nothing special. They’re just not crap like that which had previously been shipped out the door and carry a good reputation as a result.

Any symmetrical headstock looks terrible with an uneven number of tuners. Zon, Smith, Gibson, even the lovely Alembic crown headstock, they just look woegeously uneven as five string models.

How high or low do you wear your bass? Are your wrists in a neutral position (i.e. not bent) when you play?

Pick the one like like the look/feel of and get on with your life.

Perfectly proportioned and well thought out.

What’s so hard about quoting a fully insured delivery price, since you’ve gone to the trouble of packing and weighing anyway?

Yellow Submarine is fantastic, classic pop. I could live without the twee Macca stuff, Your Mother Should Know, etc, but I am no poorer for having them with me.

Pictures. I much prefer sharp pictures to shaky and fuzzy ones. I also prefer clear pictures to dark and murky ones. If I can see sharp and clear together in one picture, that’s just super. I want to see the front and the back of the instrument. I want every part of the instrument to be visible across the sum of pictures posted. I also like pictures which clearly show any damage, marks or features mentioned in the blurb. I don’t need to see an artistic b&w picture of you, from a distance, playing the bass on stage, thanks 🙂

Nice!

It has stopped me purchasing quite a few basses here over the years. Like you say, Clarky, it’s unnecessary grief to be a buyer sorting out these details, particularly from abroad, before you and the seller can commit to the purchase, packing and collection and before you can even pay the guy.

Then the battery stays connected and using charge, even if the bass is unplugged, if it’s in active mode. Unplugging the cable is the simplest, most reliable and obvious way of connecting and breaking the power circuit. It’s physical switching, so little can go wrong - user excluded.

The jack being plugged in connects the battery circuit to the preamp whether you’re in passive mode or not.

Now in our 27th year together

If you want some some melodic doom for these melodic doomy times... http://witheredfist.bandcamp.com

Great gesture from a company who already to more than most to get money into the hands of the artists.

My trusty old ESP 400 Series Jazz. It's coming to the grave with me, anyway, no sense in parting ways now.

There is a demented charm to these which I quite like. They’re like something out of one of Jim Moir’s (Vic Reeves) paintings 😂 300 quid, you say?

Would I need a bigger house in order to have somewhere to keep it?

The nicest looking bass here. Stunning.

Ehhhh... this is awkward 😂

Build up. Up towards the ceiling, all that empty space waiting to be filled with basses. You can do it 😉

I wish this kind of thing was around when I was doing acid.