Doctor J

It'd be more accurate if it were aligned with a fret (look at the 12th fret on each bass there) but it's pretty much what I was thinking was the setup.

With that one, it looks like the E-A coil is in the traditional Fender spot and the D-G coil is much closer to the neck than the usual reversed P. Anyone got one and measuring tape?

It's better to burn out than fade away. What a legacy to leave behind. 

Well done all, another great selection. I just couldn't get time, motivation and inspiration to align this month. A hearty doff of the cap in the direction of all of you who did. It's not easy.

15 minutes ago, Barking Spiders said:

 Incidentally, Limp Bizkit and Baby Metal were the mutts nuts.

Ah, yes, I had forgotten about them. Limp Bizkit several years ago. Some Kerrang package tour. Utterly horrible. Nekrogoblikon, crap metal with some extra from The Office in a goblin mask. Then Crossfaith, I think it was. Japanese crap metal but ridiculously loud and with seizure-inducing strobes every three or four seconds. There was another band whose name escapes me but they were patrons of the trough of crap metal, too. Then Limp Bizkit, who I had high hopes for, but they were rubbish, just disjointed and disinterested. I left at the start of the second Nirvana cover. It still annoys me that I paid into that one.

Technotronic

Jungle Brothers

Pop Will Eat Itself

Hardcore Superstar

The Housemartins

There are enough 70's Les Pauls, Gibson ones, which were made like that, too. Play authentic, play a pancake Les Paul.

Doom

Paper and poly gives quite a bright tone but paper with nitro sounds like St. Leo singing in the shower on Christmas morning using primarily his left hand to get a lather going in his side hair.

There's now a Formula 1 driver born this century.

Fantastic work and a great thread to follow.

1 hour ago, Paul S said:

Govnt. Mule.  O2 Booklyn Bowl.  Same old licks song after song.  left after 40 mins.

Yeah, left their gig in the Ambassador in Dublin a few years ago. I had a two hour drive home and was in danger of falling asleep in the venue, never mind the car.

First gig I ever left was Opeth touring Watershed, I think. They made the mistake of having Cynic support and, to be honest, there was no following them. I like Opeth but they were boring as fooook live.

At Bloodstock 2016 I left Slayer after about 5 songs. They were simply terrible. I first saw them back in 88 touring SOH and a few times since and they got progressively more boring each time. There was just nothing left of them which was of any interest to me. I wished they'd be good but, no... just no.

Our music from the 90's/00's?

Bleedin' kids!

Very nice, congratulations. Great to see a bass doing its own thing, design-wise. What are the controls?

And any chance of a pic including the headstock?

2 hours ago, Hellzero said:

The original by Joe Jackson with the overlooked and underestimated Graham Maby on bass is better sounding and played at a higher BPM. That said, I really like Anthrax cover too. But it's about time to give back the credit of this excellent tune to Joe Jackson.

Excerpt of Wikipedia concerning this title and pure Joe Jackson :

In the June 1991 issue of Q magazine, Jackson remarked : "I think it sounds kind of clumsy compared to the way we did it on the Live album. I mean, our version is really smoking. Theirs is actually slower than ours, and kind of lumpen. The way I feel about it is, Thanks for the royalties, guys." In another interview, he explained, "I could never quite understand why they were called a “speed metal” band because we played the song about twice as fast as they did."

 

The original is excellent, of course, but faster it is not

I always check out the supports and have gone specifically for the support a number of times. The one that immediately comes to mind is Cynic supporting Opeth. At the time, Cynic was a bucket list band and, even though I like Opeth, I couldn't even keep interested to the end of their set and left early. Cynic was just too good an experience. I went to see Sepultura support In Flames, never liked In Flames. I travelled to the Bloodstock festival years ago just to see Atheist, who were playing early enough in the day. Only Metal Church, of the other bands on the bill, were of any interest at all.

Ok, then. Let's say that, unless the pickup has been specifically designed otherwise, running two coils in series generally emphasises the low mids and this is the recognisable trait of the average P bass 😉

On 17/01/2021 at 14:43, gareth said:

Look at the terrible matching of the body woods on this 1973 mustang - in earlier times Fender would have only used this body for solid colours

I remember seeing a white, late 50's P for sale, years ago. The finish was missing from much of the back of the body and you could see there were not just horizontal joins, but a diagonal one too. The body was assembled from random offcuts, by the looks of it. They still sold it for almost 10 grand, IIRC. I wish I had saved a picture of it.

30 minutes ago, PlungerModerno said:I think the single coil P bass was always about mass production, keeping it simple. The split P was a cheaper way to get a hum-cancelling pickup than two four string sized coils.

Yeah, he didn't have to pay Gibson for borrowing their patented humbucker design 😉

What's worth considering also is, if you play by anchoring your thumb on the pickup, like I do, where you strike the string can also change quite dramatically as a result of where the pickup is which will also affect the sound of what comes out of the speaker.

As a young Metaller I spent a lot of time getting three plucking fingers going as standard for the high tempos the music I loved required. Something like this is reasonably comfortable for me with three and I reckon it'd be a shortcut to RSI if you played this kind of speed consistently with two fingers.

1 hour ago, Ricky Rioli said:

This really, badly, desperately needs an ebony fretboard 😂

5 minutes ago, GreeneKing said:

The conventional P bass tone is, to my ears mid scooped.

It's actually the other way around. The two coils are wired in series, which gives the P its mid-honkiness. Series wiring emphasises the low mids. The reason P basses work so well is that they're not overly low-end heavy. They tend to cut through because the emphasis isn't on low end or high.

It's not standardised but it is possible to give an idea of what's going on which covers a substantial part of what different manufacturers are doing and remove much of the speculation. Personally, I find the reverse P more comfortable to play, for a start. There's also something very pleasing about that mixed PJ sound which isn't quite there with a traditionally positioned split P and J. But first, let's do some measuring.

I don't have a Fender P, the closest I have is an old Japanese Yamaha BB1100S. Other traditional P types are a Bass Collection SB311 and an Ibanez SB900. Measuring the distance from the 19th fret to the leading edge of the pickup, we find:

From what I could find digging around, it looks like the Fender P has the leading edge of the E-A coil positioned round 12.5cm from the 19th fret, which would put the D-G coil at around 15.5cm back. Someone be a dear and measure, if you have one. It would be interesting to see if Fender themselves are consistent across USA, Japanese and Mexican models.

Anyway, looking at the reverse P types to hand we see this:

The Charvel appears to be closest to the traditional Fender position but with the coils swapped around. The famous Warwick growl is coming from the pickups being much closer to the bridge than "standard" and the Warwick E string is read almost 5cm closer to the bridge than the Yamaha. It's a much greater difference than, for example, the 60's and 70's Jazz bridge pickup positions. If you think that makes a difference then surely there's more than snake oil?

As for disco and funk, you can do a comparison by listening to the first Chic album, recorded on a P, and the subsequent albums recorded on a Stringray. The leading edge of the Stringray pickup is, what, a little over 17cm from the 19th fret, so the E and A string is being read from even closer to the bridge than a Warwick SS1. Which tone stands out more?