Russ

I would be disappointed if that turns out to be the case, mostly because I've not encountered anything like that from them. But I've never found them difficult to deal with, other than the language barrier (mein Deutsch ist nicht ser gut) and I've not seen any of their stuff with these sorts of problems before.

Nope, the hardware looks wrong to me. Besides, I've played quite a few Ooshyks and I've never seen any with these sorts of problems. Besides, N64Lover said he requested a Jazzmaster-style bass and they hadn't done one like that, and Maruszczyk do the Mopped, which is very much a Jazzmaster/Jaguar shape (albeit with the controls in a more conventional place). The colour looks a lot like their Green Valley metallic finish, though. (disclaimer - I own two Maruszczyks )

If you have the official Rootmaster gig bag, with the woolly lining, the headphone switch almost inevitably gets pressed when you put it in there. So that's the first thing I check whenever I take it out!

Er… someone needs to tell ChatGPT that a Yamaha BB2000 is a bass, not an amp! I think Rourke used pretty much whatever was available in terms of amps, I don’t think he has a preferred brand. Back then, if you were northern and played any kind of rock, you probably had a Laney, Hiwatt or Carlsbro rather than the American brands or “boutique” stuff like Trace. But that sunburst P-Bass was ever-present.

Fretless. Bridge pickup. Lots and lots of compression. Midrange-heavy EQ, boost a lot around 800Hz-1kHz, cutting most of the bass and treble. Bakithi has a very particular touch on the bass though - he plays fairly hard, with high-ish action, and mostly plays over the end of the neck. I went to a bass clinic with him a few years back and got to see it up close (as well as the original old Washburn bass he used on those sessions). Same applies to a lot of 80s bass tones - very prominent and punchy, but not actually all that much low end. That was often left to the synths and the Simmons/808 bass drum.

The subscription cost for a Shopify site like that is… steep. The lower subscription tiers can be cheap (they just take a smallish cut of your sales via Shop Pay) but once you scale up to something with all the bells and whistles, it can get very pricey very quickly. But, compared to a lot of e-commerce solutions, it mostly “just works”.

Yep, they've really upped their game in recent years. It's not just for little sites, or people who have just outgrown Etsy any more. We've been seriously considering the possibility of moving my employer's site over to it, since Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a pain in the ar$e.

Lots of big guitar companies use Shopify, including Fender. Gibson also just moved their entire online store to it. This is probably meaningless to anyone not involved in webdev, but you can see the Shopify config code right there in the Fender site's pages.

Yep, it's just a holding page for a Shopify site. They all look like that.

There was a ton of stuff earlier today, random stuff about how to contact airlines and stupid stuff like that. Dropped Kiwi a line, and next time I looked, it was all gone.

The overseas-built MTDs, in my experience, are a mixed bag. I've played some lovely ones, and some that just felt "dead" - you know, like they have no vibe to them whatsoever. When they're good, they're very good though, but try before you buy. On the other hand, everything that comes out of Mike Tobias' workshop is superb, and they sound like nothing else.

We’re never going to see his like again. He was the ultimate musical and intellectual product of an era that has now passed, and he was pretty much at the pinnacle of the first-call session bassist mountain. RIP. I had the good fortune to try out an AJ Presentation bass when I visited Fodera about 10 years back. I’ve never played a bass that sounded so much like a piano in the low register - stunning thing. One pickup, no controls, straight to an XLR out. Unbelievably clear and deep. Huge and heavy, though - no wonder he played it sitting down!

It sounds nice for a one-knob compressor. It's not quite the Trace dual-band compressor, which is still, for me, the gold standard for onboard compressors, but it's good. Personally, I prefer to do most of my tone shaping, including compression, outside of the head and mostly just use the EQ on the head to adjust for the room (adjust bass and low mids for a boomy or solid stage, more mids for a smaller room, etc).

For me, MTV died when they took Headbanger's Ball off air and started filling it with reality TV. It hasn't existed in its original form for over 20 years at this point. No great loss and was inevitable, really. If people want to watch music videos these days, they have Youtube, although they're at the mercy of the Youtube algorithm when it comes to being exposed to new music.

I have to say, I've never played a Tune I didn't like. Quality Japanese construction, nice pickups and comfy necks. I craved a Bass Maniac when I first started playing, but settled for a very similar-looking Bass Collection.

Met him at the London Bass Show back in 2014 or so. He was there showing off his new-at-the-time Cort basses. Had a short conversation with him, but didn’t want to bring up any of his controversial stuff, about practicing with metronomes and so on. I also met Lee Sklar there, who was far nicer, more approachable and happy to talk to anyone who came up to him.

She was a regular there for quite a while, maybe she still is. I know she used to have a very nice custom Sei.

Maybe they will do some new music. All we know right now is that they're playing some shows next year. Geddy and Alex are both in their 70s now, and, as you have pointed out, have other things going on. I doubt that two septuagenarians would be putting themselves through the rigours of touring again unless it was something they really wanted to do rather than just doing it for the money.

Agreed about The Who. But they did it anyway, and they've still been out there selling out huge venues. Arguably they're in an even worse situation, with only 50% of the band still being alive! As for Zep, I thought the 2007 Celebration Day reunion gig was great - Jason smashed it, and as a two-nights-only thing, it was enough to cement their legacy, plus we got a good 4K Blu-Ray out of it, for all of us who wore out our VHS copies of The Song Remains The Same! You could apply this to any number of other bands with dead/retired members - I hear it a lot about Queen, for instance. I feel the same way about them that I feel about this Rush tour - people want to hear this music, preferably with the involvement of as many of the original musicians as possible. And that's what they get. I have no issue with Bri and Rog getting up there with Adam Lambert and bashing out We Will Rock You, in exactly the same way that I will have no issues with hearing Geddy and Alex doing The Spirit Of Radio with Aneke on drums. The same way that McCartney still gets up there and does Beatles songs at the age of 83. Their legacies are no less secure for them still wanting to go out there and play their songs. For me, I just want them to get the setlist right - the classics, of course, but also make sure their newer stuff is represented too!

If we're still on this side of the pond next summer, we're definitely going. NY is closer, but I'd love to go to the Toronto show and get those hometown vibes. Not seen Rush since Wembley Arena in 1992 and I'd love to see them again. Anika is a monster drummer and will be a great successor for Neil. I'm sure there's people out there who might have preferred to see Danny Carey or Mike Portnoy, but I think she's a great choice. She's got the chops and the groove to do it justice. As for those thinking this is cynical - it's been ten years. It's their band and the fact that they haven't done anything for ten years suggests that they are doing this on their own terms. And it's being done with the full blessing on Neil's family. The Foo Fighters were back out there a few months after Taylor Hawkins passed away and you didn't find too many people saying that about them. The Who had a gig three days after John Entwistle died!

Great instuments, but very different to a Rob Allen. They're full scale and have a more conventionally electric tone. Get one if you can though, Status are still making them as of right now, and apparently actually have a couple of them in stock.

One thing I have noticed about G&L's recent strategy is that they reserved a lot of the really good stuff for one retailer - Sweetwater. There were lots of limited edition Tributes (including some lovely black'n'maple L2000/L2500s with blocks) and various nice custom shop one-offs with lovely finishes and interesting pickup combinations - there's a stunning P/MFD L2000 with a blackburst finish up there right now. By effectively only having one retail outlet for all their good stuff, they were massively shooting themselves in the foot.

There’s still graphite in there, but only in the same way as many other makers now - stiffening rods in the neck. They did this before back in the 90s before going back to the full graphite necks. Apparently the newer Statii with the wood necks are very good and sound very similar to the all-graphite ones (the phenolic fingerboards and Hyperactive pickups are responsible for much of the sound) but Status’ USP was always the graphite neck. Mike Walsh at Zoot was supposed to be tooling up to produce graphite necks - I’m wondering how far he’s got with that. He could be one to watch, since he now makes his own pickups, circuits, etc too. Back on topic, sort of - I played an L2000 with a Status graphite neck back in the mid-2000s. That was a good bass - extremely bright sound, but thick. Total slap machine. If Fender are going to keep the Tribute series going, that’s a good thing. Fender’s factories in the Far East are very good, with great QC. I just hope they don’t just keep them in a holding pattern, with the exact same products, colours, etc. It needs to be differentiated from the BBE era somehow.

I passed up a Wal for £250 in Cash Converters back in the mid-90s. It was a Mk1 with the V-shaped neck carve and it felt horrible in my hands. Would probably be worth a fortune now though. It was pretty much entirely because of Justin Chancellor of Tool that Wal got their second wind. After Aenima came out in 1996, you never saw a cheap Wal again. And now they regularly go for five-figure sums used and have a six-year waiting list if you want a new one.

In terms of custom instruments, that's not usually the case - people like to pick their own choice of woods, hardware, pickups, neck dimensions, number of strings, fretted/fretless, etc and the chances of selling it on the used market mostly rely on someone else who's in the market for that sort of instrument having the same taste as you, and not wanting to deal with the lead time or additional expense of ordering their own. Almost all basses, possibly with the exception of Wals and old Fenders, depreciate like used cars. Anyway, you buy a bass to play it, not as an investment. Then again, you're supposed to buy a house to live in it, and I suppose that doesn't stop people looking on them as investments...