lemmywinks

Yeah this, my backup bass is a cheapy which has a neck I love and a solid low B string. Swapped the tuners out for some Grover clones (tenner second hand on eBay) and stuck an expensive preamp in it (£150 used East Uni Pre off here) and will be using it as my main bass for some upcoming dep gigs as it sounds so good and feels great to play. Total cost was under £300 and it punches well above its weight. If I sell it on the East is staying with me though!

Upgrades are fine, I won't think twice about swapping something on my gigging basses as I'm the person using them, always keep the originals in case you sell it on though.

Also the Tech 21 Dug Punnick pedal and the JHS Punchline.

There's also the Gallien Krueger Plex, Tech 21 FLy Rig, EBS MicroBass 3 and also a cheaper Fly Rig clone I can't remember the name of EDIT: Valeton Bass Dapper was the cheaper one

You could just use the boost footswitch to quickly match levels if you don't use it for anything else.

I think someone mentioned on one of the HB Block 800B threads found that the noise from that was due to paint preventing it from being properly grounded, same deal with some of their guitars (there's a KDH video with a tele he bought) which have painted bridges and saddles that don't ground properly. Maybe as simple as that.

Some people complained about background noise on the Harley Benton btw, might be worth looking into before buying.

Been using a Fishman Platinum Pro EQ for years, love the comp and eq (with sweepable mids) on it plus it has an accurate tuner and a really nice DI. The HPF and brilliance controls are handy for taming excess at either end of the bass frequency range. The Sonicake B Factory might be a good cheaper option, I would tell you all about it but the one I ordered went missing!

RE AliExpress - I use it regularly and there's a ton of nice parts on there, namely some really good inexpensive bridges and other bits of hardware. I'd avoid Wilkinson stuff on there though as there's always a chance is might be a fake. There are/were fake WIlkinsons and according to the head guy at Harley Benton that's why they had to stop using them. I have a set of the Wilinson WOJB5 ceramic magnet Jazz pickups in my backup bass and they sound great, a bit more aggressive than regular J pickups but that's not a bad thing and I use that bass as my main instrument for any heavier dep gigs I get. They were initially a temporary measure but they're more than good enough to stay. I wouldn't worry about it unless it's not the sound you like.

The bass you're after would look like this:

As already mentioned it won't sound anything like a MM pickup due to being pushed right back against the bridge. If you just want to beef it up a little then the cheap option would be a higher output overwound pickup (Warman do a cheap one) or if you want to spend more money then swap the preamp out one which has adjustable gain for each pickup like an East or something.

I did wonder if that was a real store tbh, the owner has done a great job of making it look almost exactly like one of those scam pop-up web stores that steal your credit card details! Good to know it's legit

Great price that, pretty much what you'd excpect to pay in a private sale.

To throw a spanner in the works - the new price of the Player II is in used MiJ territory.

I don't know if anybody has ever found any information about the mysterious Sire factory, they claim it's their own facility in Indonesia (and now also China) with their parent brand Dame being produced in Korea and that they don't use OEMs. I would imagine they do shift decent numbers, I regularly see them on the gigging circuit here and have a few mates who own them. They'll have probably done a small run of the new Godin clones and even less singlecuts but gone big on the Z series, the singlecuts are targeting the boutique on a budget market really and I imagine they'll be able to be heavily discounted and still not make a loss. Hopefully the Godins were a huge flop and I can pick up a GB5-FL when they're at clearance prices! EDIT: Looking at Andertons they may just be doing batches of the F series based on preorders.

The recent Charvel basses were just Mexican Fenders with loud colours and atrocious premps weren't they? Jackson also seemed to have turned their Concert line into pointy headstock Fender clones and the Spectra line is just a wonky Soundgear copy. Shame as the old Concert shape was a neat diversion from the usual Jackson aesthetic:

Having control over the keys player's eq in the mix. Best bit is he doesn't even know or care.

There's still nothing there to compete with a Sire V7, Cort Fusion or the old Sadowsky Metro Express line, the £400-£600 price point is where it's at for a lot of people and all Fender/Squier have is passive instruments.

There's still gaps in the Fender/Squier range though such as the lack of a proper active Jazz in between the Squier Affinity and MiM Player Plus ranges. Think the Contemporary J bazz (not with humbuckers) is discontinued. It's like they just saw Sire gobble up that part of the market and thought "yeah that's fine, we'll just make weird stuff nobody wants"

You can buy heavy duty bridges on AliExpress for a reasonable price: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004594501983.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002623534069.html

Think it's just the material that's different, the Pro Go X is made of the same stuff as the Pro Go Deluxe. I got mine when they were discounted to £50 a few years back, wouldn't pay more than £80 tbh as the TFG Extreme is cheaper and of similar quality. If your budget is around £100 then look at the TFG Ultimate as well, that's a great gigbag and nicer than the Pro Go X.

Just get a new bridge, you'll be able to find a replacement on AliExpress. What's string spacing does yours have?

They've also used EB4 for the SG shaped EB4L. Such a stupid way to name your product line, almost like they don't care about basses at all.

Yeah but that's a stupid idea to begin with and not really true as with the last two versions the number refers to the amount of strings, for example an EB5 could be either of these: https://bassbros.co.uk/product/2013-gibson-eb-5-string/ https://www.waltons.ie/product/gibson-eb-5-bass-natural-satin-5-string/

Blame Gibson, not yourself! I was also wrong btw, the EB model name had already been used for four different shapes, not three. I forgot the violin shape, silly Gibson me.