Lo-E

Well, I was kidding a bit; tame luthier…. feral luthier…. It was funny in my head, anyway. Nevertheless, I’m happy to weigh in on your situation. Truss rods don’t have a whole lot of effect on neck relief past the 12th fret. They affect it a little bit, but it’s negligible. That’s why I measure neck relief between the 1st and 12th frets rather than the first and last; those first 12 frets are where truss rod adjustments really count. Furthermore, if you do have a “ski jump” and you measure relief between the 1st and last, the ski jump can fool you into believing that your neck relief is greater than it really is. With this in mind, let’s think about your symptoms: Your buzzing doesn’t occur until after the 12th fret so it’s safe to assume (for now) that your nut height is fine and your neck relief is, at least, okay. That leaves two possibilities: a ski jump or a high fret. A high fret is best found using fret rockers - short pieces of straightedge that will span three frets and will ‘rock’ on the middle fret if it’s high. If you don’t have anything to use as fret rockers, the less precise method is just to play the instrument and see if the buzzing stops past a certain fret. If it does, that’s the high fret. If you have a high fret and you’re able to identify it, you then need to determine if it was simply never dressed correctly or if it is raising up out of the fret slot. Once that’s determined, you can either reseat the fret or file and redress it. A ski jump is fairly easy to spot with a straightedge. Because the truss rod has little effect upon the neck past the 12th fret you can just lay a straightedge between the 12th and last fret and see where you stand. A healthy board should be pretty flat regardless of how the truss rod is adjusted. If there’s a ski jump you’ll see it immediately. Addressing a ski jump depends upon several different factors. If a bass has a lot of meat on the frets and the ski jump is very slight, I will first try just leveling some of the height off of the last 5 frets. It’s the least invasive fix and it risks nothing to try since any other fix will sacrifice the last 5 frets anyway. Sometimes there’s enough material on those frets to enable this simple fix to be sufficient for years, if not forever. If the ski jump is too big to “dress out” of the frets, the last several frets will need to be removed, the fingerboard re-leveled, the fret slots deepened and the high frets replaced and dressed. In particularly bad cases, the entire fingerboard might need to be defretted, leveled and refretted but that would be a pretty extreme case and would indicate other, more serious neck issues at play. Once the issue, either a high fret or ski jump, is addressed you’ll need to go back and re-check your setup top-to-bottom and make sure everything is still where you want it. In most cases, you’ll be able to improve it. Hopefully this will help you diagnose your issue and give you an idea of what you’re up against.

I’m a feral luthier myself.

My string height at the 12th is typically 2.3mm for the E string and lowering very slightly with each smaller string. I measure my neck relief at the 6th fret with the string gently touching the 1st and 12th frets. I aim for .2mm (actually .008”). These measurements always end up getting adjusted slightly higher or lower, depending upon the bass, the strings and whatever feels most comfortable to me at the time I’m setting the bass up. It’s not very often I can get very much lower than these bogey values without buzzing but sometimes an instrument will be very cooperative and give me a pleasant surprise.

You did very, very well! When these instruments were new they were inexpensive and, as a result, they were dismissed by many as being “entry level”; A big mistake as these were very well made basses that played and sounded great. I started my bass journey 35 years ago with a good deal on a used Ibanez bass. I hope you have as much fun as I did!

I did something similar with a long strip of sheet steel. It’s not as accurate as a precision ground rule, to be sure, but it’s been accurate enough for my purposes for years.

A P-bass was probably heard on most punk recordings of that era but, really, I think any bass would do fine if you just dial in a fairly aggressive tone at the amp. As Mike Watt always points out; “Punk was whatever we made it to be.”

Congratulations! I avoided P-basses like the plague for the first several years I played. I had a couple of late '70s Ibanez basses and I was not going to be bullied into playing what everybody else played! Then I took down a used Japanese P out of curiosity when I was hanging out at a music store.... CLICK. The light went on. While I still play lots of other basses, I don't think I'll ever be without a P-bass in the stable. They just work. I also agree with you that Fender's product line has gotten ridiculously confusing. Do we really need 72 "different" models of P-bass? In the end, a really good setup would render most of them essentially the same. I guess it's better to have too many choices than not enough, though.... it's not a bad problem to have. Enjoy your new bass!! (Now you need an Ampeg B-15. I'm just saying....)

I agree with Lozz that there may be something awry with your line out and it’s definitely worth inquiring about. That said, I’ve found the line and/or DI outs of most amps to be pretty inconsistent from model to model and brand to brand. It often seems like the DI is added as an afterthought and doesn’t get the design attention that the rest of the circuit gets. If you’re happy with the sound of your line out, I’d suggest running it through a Countryman Type 85 direct box. This box was (still is, really) the industry standard DI for decades and the design remains virtually unchanged since the 1970s. It will work with line or instrument level inputs and it doesn’t color the sound in any way. Add to that the facts that the company is small and very, very helpful if you ever need support and the need for support is very unlikely as a Countryman DI could survive practically anything and you have a recipe for success.

When I started playing about 35 years ago, a lot of the bassists I knew eschewed playing with a pick. Picks were for guitarists and “real” bass players played with their fingers. I ignorantly went along with that mindset and turned my nose up at pick players for years. One of my biggest regrets regarding bass playing is that I didn’t develop both techniques simultaneously. I would be a much more versatile player today. I eventually realized my mistake and began working with a pick about 5 years ago (30 years too late) but I might never reach the same level of proficiency I have with my fingers. If you have equal proficiency with both techniques, that’s not a hinderance, that’s an advantage! Why would you want to limit yourself?

This is all related to the materials and shipping issues caused by COVID. Music stores here in NYC are short on everything; strings, accessories, instruments…. There are long wait times for orders as well.

A lot of people associate a Jaco-like tone with fretless by default. He used rounds on a coated board that was very, very hard and that kind of articulation is much easier to achieve with rounds. It’s not the only road, of course; Rick Danko of The Band had a wonderful fretless tone using flats on an old Ampeg scroll bass but that’s not the sound most players gravitate to fretless for.

After years of string rolling on various fretless basses I’ve come to settle on DR Sunbeams and Ken Smith Compressors/GHS Compression Wound as my favorite strings for fretless. On basses with rosewood boards that are especially prone to marking I’ll often use the compression wound strings, which have a very nice feel and sound very similar to regular nickel rounds. On harder fingerboards I tend to use the Sunbeams for their big, warm tone and flexibility. There are plenty of exceptions, though: I like brighter strings on my G&L L2000 so I string that with D’Addario XLs and I’ve had a set of Ernie Ball flats on my ’78 fretless P-bass for at least a decade. My custom 5-string fretless, which has an ebony board, is currently wearing R. Cocco nickel rounds but I’ve used lots of different strings on that bass; always nickel roundwound. I’m not completely dogmatic about rosewood boards, either; sometimes they’ll get strung with roundwounds if I’m feeling especially reckless.

Spiros do break in and mellow a bit so it may be worth waiting a little while before you jump to new strings. That said, Innovation braided are trying to sound like gut which is not really a characteristic of steel strings, typically. You could give Corelli 380s a try as they're not all that strident sounding and not terribly expensive.

A fun topic! My first bass was actually a very good instrument: a 1979 Ibanez Studio which I bought for $100 from a college friend sometime around 1985 or 86 (and which I still have). My first rig was a borrowed Traynor 15" cab from the late 70s paired with a Yamaha powered mixer from the early 70s. That rig sounded better than it had any right to, mostly because those Traynor cabs are nice. The rig that followed was given to me by a retired RCA engineer friend of the family who played keyboards in a wedding band. He had cobbled together a very small 50W solid state amp and built a gigantic cabinet with a single 15" driver and a big horn. The little, plain aluminum box the head was built into looked ridiculous on top of this behemoth cabinet covered in ugly, brown vinyl. It sounded horrible for bass. But it was free and it was mine and I used it until I had the funds for a real rig. Strangely, I have absolutely no recollection of where that rig ended up. I have a pretty good account of all the gear I've owned over the years and where it's all gone, but that amp and cab remain a black hole in my memory. I sincerely hope it was incinerated....

Just about any bass with modern electronics will allow you to dial in that sort of tone. Factor in some bright sounding strings and some modern sounding amplification and you should have lots and lots of options. Play the bass you find the most comfortable and then adjust your tone to suit your playing style.

I only do it as a last resort. Most of my gigs are at bars and clubs where multiple bands play in the lineup and nobody gets a sound check. The odds of getting a really useful monitor mix in those situations are pretty slim. Actually, the odds of having separate mixes at all are pretty slim. In some venues I'm happy just to get monitors that work! Now, I'm not especially precious about "my sound". I often use house backline and I'm usually able to dial in a perfectly useful tone and my needs as far as monitors go are not elaborate, really, so I love the CONCEPT of ditching a bass amp and just using monitors. Reality, however, dictates a need to continue to use an amp - at least in my case. Perhaps if I move on to bigger and better venues I'll be able to revisit that decision.

That's a nice looking bass. Congrats.

[quote name='Number6' timestamp='1490453171' post='3265249'] On the fretboards i use similar alcohol wipes to those used in hospitals. They can be used on skin too. They clean away all the greasy deposits and then i normally use a bit of linseed oil on the board. [/quote] I used to use alcohol, but it tends to dry fingerboards out. I would guess that the wipes don't saturate it enough for it to be much of a problem, though. My method of choice is naphtha (lighter fluid) and a soft toothbrush followed by a couple of drops of pure lemon oil.

When I was younger (and had fewer basses) I would spend a lot of time cleaning and polishing my basses. Life is busier now and I'm not nearly as diligent about cleaning or even changing strings. That said, I still rotate through the arsenal regularly and make sure everything is relatively clean and in working order. If a bass is filthy or in unplayable condition, why have it? There is a certain level of stewardship required in owning a musical instrument, IMO. As far as selling an instrument goes, I would never put a bass up for sale without first cleaning and polishing it, giving it a fresh set of strings and doing a full setup. It's just common sense: you'll get a better return from a bass that looks and plays great than you will from a bass that looks like it was dragged through a swamp behind a tractor.

You may have the wires reversed on one of the pickups. It's normal on a J-bass for there to be a drop in mids when both p'ups are at full, but there shouldn't be a substantial drop in either bass or volume. Try swapping wires as you said and all should be well.

The nicest P5 I ever played, bar none, was a Sadowsky and well over the 1,000 price range. That said, I'm actually pretty impressed by the American Fenders and wouldn't mind adding one to my arsenal (since Sadowskys just aren't in my budget these days!). The Sandberg that Iain posted doesn't look too shabby, either.