Doctor J

The obligation is on the buyer to comply with tax laws. If you intentionally try to circumvent these laws by having something marked as a gift or declare the value as lower than it actually is, that is fraud, as Steve says.

Before Brexit you paid your local VAT rate from Thomann, not the German VAT rate. Depending on the business' sales per annum to that country, if they exceeded 80 grand you pay your local rate, the tax rate of the recipient not the VAT rate of the seller. Thomann comfortably exceeded 80k PA sales to the UK so all UK residents paid the UK VAT rate in accordance with EU law.

You might be better off creating a new thread in the Bass Guitars section than resurrecting a 10 year old thread here.

Serial number: 8FX2062 Production year: October 1998 (serial: 2062) Made in Japan. (F is an internal factory code) Courtesy of https://guitarinsite.nl/serienummers-yamaha_eng.php

Nino used Sadowsky knobs on most of his basses, IIRC, but that it has push/pull to engage the passive circuit is what leads me to think there's a Sadowsky pre in there.

I would guess it's a Sadowsly pre, but you'll only know by popping the lid.

If the ethics bother you then you should embrace bandcamp. Over 60% of the money goes to the artist. There is no other platform which even comes close. Plus, you can download purchases in lossless and wav formats so sound quality should not keep you awake at night either. If the music is good enough, you'll find a way to come back to it

Define "better". If you want something which sounds as close to what the band and producer were aiming for in the studio as commercially possible without going into super high-resolution digital audio, CD without doubt. If you want something with fuzzy warm low end and a lack of detail which some find pleasing to the ear and others claim is pleasing to the ear, then records. Do you have an impressive beard?

I like them a lot, nice variety in there, not just the usual mundane P's and J's 👍

This is what the people wanted. Consider control taken back.

As far as I'm aware, with the Global Shipping Program, you ship the item to a local ebay hub who ship it on to the recipient. At least, the last thing I received through it had been shipped to an ebay address first, as I found when peeling off the shipping labels. As ebay are then the ones shipping into the destination country, they pay the duty at that point. It's not perfect, I suppose but, as a buyer, it is nice to know the final cost when you're buying rather than an educated guess until the postie arrives with an invoice.

If Reverb don't have something like the Global Shipping Program set up then you will pay the courier when it arrives in your country.

Ebay have had the Global Shipping Program for years. Essentially, you pay the import duty to them and they pay The Man, rather than you paying the courier or the Post Office. Either way, you pay. It is used, in this case, to simply illustrate that import duty is being charged for second-hand goods moving between the EU and UK.

And it looks like it applies to items under £390 too

Just browsing through ebay and they are applying import duty to items leaving the UK going to here in the sunny EU so, obviously, the same will apply for second-hand goods going the other way. Ah well, the FS section was beautiful while it lasted.

Hate crime?

Saw him twice with Wong in late February just before everything went wrong. Great player. He really makes it look effortless. One of the gigs I had tickets to was Wong with the Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam in May. I have no doubt it would have been amazing to witness in person.

Your 88 Thumb has the brass adjust-a-nut 1 with the rotating brass screws? It should be fine. With a Warwick you're more likely to find an issue with the B string fitting the bridge as the ball-end wraps on non-tapered strings can be too wide for the narrow slot in the bridge anchor, so try a B from a Warwick set initially.

He's 78. I don't expect to live that long, never mind be able to perform. His dues have been overpaid and then some.

It stopped after 4 seconds!

I kept one years ago when I was playing in a free-form jazz-metal band. Strange things happened frequently and I'm glad I documented much of it. Those gigs, where we did not have any actual songs to play when we went onstage, were far more interesting than later years when I was in bands who wrote songs and rehearsed and such. For example:

Note the channel name https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3FpD5FxyDXL1rTrGsYKXAw Edit - screengrab added in case he deletes or renames that too

Just the thing if you want to rock and roll all night, no?

An entertaining video, thanks for posting. He didn't need a ground wire for the EMGs though. As they say...

Oh dear.