Doctor J

That kind of thing reminds me of the Metal Sludge interview with Jason Ward, bassist from Flotsam & Jetsam who were on MCA for a few albums, as well as a few independent label releases. They sold a decent amount of albums in their day and toured regularly. This bit was an eye opener to me, twenty years ago.

What do you do to pay the bills?
"We all do many things, I am a computer tech by trade and have done tech support for the last few years. The rest of the guys work day jobs as well as other musical ventures. I used to worry about people knowing, now its more like “who the flip are you kidding.”

http://metalsludge.tv/classic/?p=28283

Jim Sheppard and Warrell Dane worked as chefs even when Nevermore were doing well. The myth of the full-time professional in original music was, and still is, greatly exaggerated.

39 minutes ago, deepbass5 said:

how about Yamaha exposing their basses to hours of musical vibration in their factory to simulate years of playing, the aim to line up all the woods molecular structure to be in line and vibrate in harmony to those notes to be played on it. Just as an old violin or 60's P bass. Good wood selection helps with this, hence the term tone wood. electronics and string choice can ruin this but not enhance it. High mass bridge can help bring out what is there, along with expert set up.

Those 60's P basses were built with plentiful and/or cheap wood, not carefully selected wood. Fender were and are in the mass-production game. Besides, all the old Fenders seem to be good ones these days, even the ones which barely had a note played on them. How has their molecular structure changed?

Rosewood fretboard, though. It should have a nice, warm tone.

I was forever having to repair stupidity

😂

Congratulations! 👏🏻

Sorry to annoy you, I was just trying to understand why you have that opinion in a spirit of open discussion. I'll go back in my box and just post pictures.

So the name matters more than the bass? Sorry, I just don't understand where the negativity is coming from. Surely the quality of the instrument is all that matters?

1 minute ago, Cuzzie said:

HPW is a bit of a tool with a record of ruining stuff

Really? I have never heard of this. What stuff?

Vote or perish!

48 minutes ago, FDC484950 said:

It’s about dilution of the brand. It doesn’t really matter what the quality may or may not be when the name on the headstock is meaningless. At least other manufacturers that have cheaper ranges elsewhere generally handle the sourcing, quality control, distribution and warranty. A Sadowsky bass used to mean something. A Sadowsky sold by Warwick is, to me, meaningless.

The first Metros weren't a dilution of the brand?

Have basses no-one here appears to have actually played yet ever been so unpopular?

I don't understand the ire towards this project. Sadowsky knows his stuff. Warwick know their stuff. Despite the shaky embryonic stage we appear to have passed, I can't understand why anyone would think these are going to be anything less than superb.

14 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

And I bet at the end they still don’t know who the fifth Beatle is.

Your mother should know

I go with what looks nice 🙂

If the truss rod snapped you'd expect all the strings would go flat and the action to increase by about 1cm. Are you sure it's really a truss rod issue?

Martin Ain's "mad monk on meths" was more to my tastes 

More than once. The one which sticks out as the earliest was Watchtower - Control and Resistance. I love that artwork and it was on Noise records, where a lot of bands I liked at the time were based, so I reckoned it was worth a punt - at a time and age where disposable income was still a fantasy. 
 

It's still one of my favourite albums of all time.

How do they compare to a Spector made in the US though?

3 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

I'm guessing it will be machined parts with just final quick assembly manually. I'm no expert in how long it would take, but let's say 3 hours per bass to assemble parts by an experienced worker How does that sound as a guesstimate?

Bear in mind that the cost of living is a lot less in developing nations, so the equivalent min wage might be 1/4 to 1/6 what it is in devoloped nations. But I have no idea what they are paid. Need Mr Stewblack to jump in on that one. 

Then you need to add transport costs and Thomann mark up, which will add a chunk. And UK VAT at 20%!

There's assembly, yes, but aren't necks and bodies painted and finished by hand too? Don't the same manufacturing processes and automation exist in the USA and Mexico too? I don't, for a second, think your average factory worker in the US or Mexico is living high on the hog, either. Anyway, you can see where I'm going as you expanded through the rest of your post. There's not a lot of the £99 going to the people who made it.

25 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

I've wondered about HB prices as they do seem such amazing value. But @stewblack mentioned the other day that they were made in Vietnam and the workers were being looked after.

I'd love to know how much they're paid per hour. How many hours of manual labour do you reckon go into your average P bass, let's say since it's as basic as it gets?

14 minutes ago, Paul S said:

This sentiment is all well and good but how about the clothes we all wear, the smartphones we all use, the pc/laptop/whatever we all look on the internet/run most aspects of our lives with?  Pretty much any consumer goods will tell the same story.  This is all hard baked into society now and there is pretty much nothing to be done about it - we, collectively as consumers, don't want to pay.  There is nothing that any of us individually can do about it so this guilt rant serves no real purpose.

Oh? How many smartphones are manufactured in the west? You have a choice, when it comes to instruments and the point of the entire thread is that the choice exists, hence the skewed comparisons.

You may consider Custom Shop prices outrageous but when you consider the instruments they're replicating - mass produced by largely unskilled labour using some of the cheapest, most plentiful woods at the time - sell for multiples of even Custom Shop prices, it might change your perspective, no?

What's worth considering is how cheap some instruments are, not just how expensive others are. There's a whole lot of exploitation built into your £99 Harley Benton. When you consider the cost of the raw materials alone, never mind the taxes and duties, the transportation, everyone taking their cut along the way, it does't leave much for the poor bastards who built it, does it? Comparing the cost of something made where worker's rights don't exist and living standards are barely above the level of vermin and using it as means to gripe about how expensive instruments made elsewhere is just a little misguided, in my opinion. 

Live At Leeds, The 'Oo, the various incarnations of which eventually wound up with pretty much the full gig.

Honourable mentions to:

Ronnie Scott's Quintet - Never Pat A Burning Dog

Rush - Rush in Rio

EST Symphony

Sleep in the Button Factory in Dublin, around 2012ish. Stupidly loud. I had good ear plugs and, if I hadn't, I would have left. There's rock 'n' roll level and then there's permanent hearing loss level and Sleep were wafting in the latter. I was amazed by how many people were there without hearing protection.

One's a P, one's a J, they're not the same size. The location of the bridge can be somewhate inconsistent too (think why they needed long G screws). The only accurate measurement is from a fixed point in relation to the scale of the instrument and they are the frets and the nut. The other witness point, the bridge saddle, is an adjustable, movable part.

I've never gone to a gig expecting to be disappointed. It's sneaky. It always takes me by surprise.