Doctor J

€20 over here, you're definitely on a site which overcharges. Lots of them around, sadly.

Oh no, what dreadful news.

100% agree.

I bought some straplocks from Martyn, with items securely packaged and swiftly despatched. A gent to deal with.

I like them too. The control cavity is big enough to put any electronics package you wanted in there, should you desire it. It’s like a blank template of a bass which you could make as complex or as simple as you wish. Even a push/pull pot to switch between serial and parallel would be sweet but still stealthy.

Amazing playing from all involved. This one does it for me, though... those horns!

I haven't bought anything this year but this waiting business is a killer and driving me towards the classifieds more frequently than is healthy. Surely this doesn't count as a 2020 item?

I like the paintwork but, after that, like gets on the train and leaves this monstrosity behind.

Nice. White Thunderbirds are very cool indeed.

Anyone digging Vulfpeck should give Mr. Wong's solo material a listen. This is incredibly funky in an early-Prince kind of way. Petar Janjic and Kevin MacIntire are one hell of a rhythm section and Cory's a very funny fella as well as nailing that fourth-position funk guitar. He's touring in a few weeks and I have nabbed a ticket for the Cork show. Expectations are high after seeing this.

Once I learned to set up instruments for myself, going to shops became a frustrating and fruitless task as they are never, ever set up to my tastes and usually put me off whatever it was I was looking at. I haven’t tried a bass in a shop in over ten years, I would guess. The last one was the early 50’s P bass reissue with action you fly a pigeon through.

But... but... Leo... first time?

Deliciously funky but the first few seconds of that video are like a Crimewatch recreation effort. How times have changed.

Bob Babbitt on line two for you...

Can the speakers can handle the energy being sent to them? The greenbacks are, what, 25W 8 ohm? It takes a lot of energy to amplify low frequencies, a lot of speaker travel too. I would be very careful what kind of head I would connect to a speaker like that. Where guitar amps tend like running low wattage at high ohms, bass amps tend to be the opposite.

You just haven’t found your sweet spot with the Flea. Give it time. Live with it a while and get to know it. Having different sounding basses is a benefit, not a burden.

I find a happy place on a 4 string with a P (reversed) and J combo, 38mm nut, 24 frets, 2 band active preamp (ideally with optional passive circuit and passive tone), good forearm contour on a slightly downsized body and some form of de-tuner on the E string. Woods and colour are irrelevant. That being said, I love a spicy curry but that doesn’t mean I’d want to eat one every day. I love the variety too and being able to play variations of bass design is one of the great joys in life.

Add Adblock plus to your browser. Ads are usually set to blast out of the speakers at a much higher volume than standard content in order to grab your attention. It works, that’s why they do it 🙂

I didn’t say it would sound like a Precision, I’m just highlighting what many overlook about the effect of pairing up coils. Parallel will hide mids somewhat, giving you a sound full of lows and highs which can sound fine in certain areas of the fretboard but you vanish in others. Lots of people suck the mids out on their amp EQ too, which magnifies the effect. It’s a generalisation, of course, but understanding the effect will make it easier to figure out what is required to remedy the situation in terms of what is coming out of the speaker. A Stingray pickup run in series doesn’t sound like a Precision either, after all but it is a very different beast to one running parallel.

I know people who get jokes 😉

I was way off and way off even further

A P bass is two single coils run in serial, which cuts the lows and highs, leaving plenty of lovely mids your amp can project and your ears are great at hearing. The average guitar humbucker is wired this way too, it's a great way of being heard. Think of the EQ being like the lips in a sad face :( A J bass with both pickups on is two single coils run in parallel which works differently to serial, in that it cuts the mids, leaving lots of low lows and high highs. It's a great sound for some applications but, generally, you've got to get the mids back in there to be heard. If you want to cut through with a J bass, only run one pickup and don't run a disco smile EQ on your amp.

My last gig was the Bloodstock festival in 2016. I knew it would be my last gig for the foreseeable future, at the time, due to impending domestic and work changes which I didn't want to bring into a band situation but, since then, I've had little interest in getting back into it.There are times I feel the itch but then I remember lugging gear around, sometimes lugging drunk bandmates around, countless hours on the motorway and the itch gets scratched. I still go to a lot of gigs, but purely as a civilian.

My two old SRs didn't cost that much together... with truss rod covers 😄