Doctor J

That's how Fender do neck pockets these days. The scratchplate covers a lot of lazy manufacturing practices. The stupid routing guide hole would annoy me more.

It used to be age, over 25 years. Then, as more basses reached that age, the people who owned the older basses took umbrage at basses not as old as theirs being called vintage as they felt it diluted the term. Now it means Fenders made up to about 1975 but, really, it's anything over 25 years.

Rattling off lists of pickups without being able to hear them is fairly pointless. When I was building a single coil P, I went through loads of videos and sound samples to try to find something which matched the sound I was chasing. An old P pickup is never going to sound just like the split P for a multitude of reasons, but there's still a lot of variety out there and a lot of different sounds to choose from, more than you'd think. I thought, in theory, I would prefer a double coil wired in series as I was after a healthy mid bite but, to my ears, a proper single coil was closest to the sound I was actually chasing. Leave the tone open and it's bright and aggressive, roll it off and it fattens up nicely. Anyway, here's what a Seymour Duncan SCPB-1 sounds like with D'Addario Chromes.

I've got a .149 for a B which I've used as low a G# every now and again. If I needed a low G all the time a .160 makes a lot of sense. I'd do it. Bigger is better the lower you go 🙂

If it's metal and they're playing that low C a lot, I'd tune to C too.

In this instance, Davide Romani is a little wide of the mark. The first Chic album was a P, but most of what came after in the late 70's and early 80's was the Stingray. The BC Rich was very much for looks, Marcus Miller had a story about that, and the Sadowsky was a lot later, into the 90's, I think. The Stingray definitely became his primary studio instrument for a good few years, though.

Wire the pickup directly to a bog standard jack, find whether the pickup itself is the issue.

Whatever it is, a Fender it is not.

The two string retainer shows Leo never got it truly right, no matter which time. Apologies to all offended cultists, of course. Get one of these and finally have some kind of consistent break angle for all strings over the nut. You will be able to put it in the same spot as the current one and cover the existing hole, so your headstock won't have an unsightly hole in it. https://www.public-peace.de/hipshot-string-retainer-3-strings.html?language=en

Swap the pickups around on the blend pot and find out if the noise follows the pickup or the pot.

Yep. I always use my L2K in passive mode. Everything works in passive mode, it just seems to boost the output. If there's one thing it doesn't need, it's higher output.

Possibly the finest recording of a Metallica gig, from early December 86. Newsted was bang on.

Very sorry to hear of your loss.

Well done, Leonard, great stuff 👍🏻

Related to Mick? Did you buy a pedal and he promised he most definitely will post it to you?

Racism isn't a trivial matter and accusations of racism shouldn't be so casually thrown around as it badly dilutes the importance of the message. You've gone from slandering all of them, including Filipino Kirk and Cliff, to just some of them. What did Kirk and Cliff do which lead you to accuse them of being racist, out of curiosity? Sure, Hetfield was a tool and I'd imagine him and Rose in a room together at that time was hardly a shrine to enlightenment, but do you really think a band who have been paying Mensch and Burnstein, their jewish management, 20% for almost 40 years really believe in National Socialism? Think about it for just a minute.

The Homeball is playing riffs and asking questions in the shadow of Slievenamon, dipping a genre-fluid toe in every musical orifice. This is I Ask The Questions, the debut album, an all-original collection of songs of selective appeal for your listening pleasure.

Most heavy metal musicians never would have had realistic expectations of the fame and wealth the chosen few of them eventually achieved. Metallica were a genuine niche band until the very end of the 80's. The kind of success they eventually found would have been completely unthinkable when they were making their first four albums. When I first saw them on the AJFA tour, they were playing a 1500 capacity venue. When I last saw them on the Black album tour, they were playing an 8000 capacity venue. They were the exception, in the genre from which they originated. Megadeth were probably the next most commercially successful but they were not even close to what Metallica, as they became 'tallica, achieved. The rest of their peers never achieved commercial success at all and mostly broke up by the mid 90's. The point being, unlike a lot of genres where being commercially successful is a genuine prospect and probable aspiration when the band starts off, in Metal, outside of the pouffy hair stuff, that was completely unthinkable until the start of the 90's. Success would have come rapidly as a stranger and they were ill equipped to cope with all it entailed.

Which record?

It's mega wild to me that people are so quick to judge and libel people they've never met with no foundation 😉

Oh, and anyone who wants to actually watch "the DVD" in question and see Newsted in context, it's from the 1989 Seattle concert during the intro of... wait for it... Am I Evil! Clumsy theatrics? Yes I am! Nazi rally? No it isn't. He also wrote this song for Flotsam And Jetsam but, sure, I suppose one frame from a 2.5 hour concert shows where his heart truly lies? https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/flotsamjetsam/derfuhrer.html

Metallica aren't racists, FFS. Hugh Tanner, the original guitarist, is black. He and Hetfield were in Leather Charm together before they joined Metallica. Kirk is Filipino. Trujillo is latino. They wouldn't be the first and won't be the last dopes to make that gesture in a poor effort at humour, especially in the past when enlightenment wasn't as easy to come by as it is now. Humans start as idiots, but we learn, some quicker thank others. Thankfully, most of us don't have every indiscretion photographed, ready to be dredged up out of context for some ill-guided outrage. Let's not forget this guy married a black lady, much to the delight of his family.

On a tangent, Mission to Lars is a nice companion piece to SKOM.

I read it as Tim is talking about the two players in his band before him and not that he played From Out of Nowhere with Metallica 😉

It's a brilliant movie, an account of people who made some of the most revolutionary, high-quality music of the 80's, now creatively adrift with seemingly no ability to connect with that which fuelled them and made them great in the first place. They were so, so good. It's amazing to see just how mediocre they could become once the fire went out... and it has stayed out. Neither Newsted nor anyone else would have made a difference.