Russ

I already have them. Maruszczyk Frog 6A Swamp ash bodies, quilted ash tops with "ceruse" finish. Roasted maple necks Ebony fingerboards Delano Xtender pickups w/ramp Noll 4-band EQ, with series/parallel/singlecoil switches Black hardware (with coloured knobs to match the ceruse colour - blue on the fretted, red on the fretless) Luminlay block inlays on the fretted, Luminlay side dots on both I guess people have been taking notice of my basses, as I've noticed that Maruszczyk have subsequently built several others to the same spec!

Yep, they restyled the Z series before release because they got a lot of comments that the bottom horn on the pre-production models looked too "bulbous". Looks a lot better now. Nice to see a manufacturer taking feedback from customers before the instrument is even released! Although they've obviously ignored any and all calls for them to redesign their fugly headstock!

+1 on the NuX. Or whatever Zoom pedal you can afford. Always hated living in badly built flats. I lived in one once and I had a very "pubby" couple living upstairs who would noisily fight regularly, things would crash and break, but then they'd make up, and it'd be even noisier (squeak, squeak, squeak... uhhh). I don't think my bass practice ever bothered them!

There is a risk, but it's minimal. If that happens, you either say it was there being repaired, or you feign ignorance and pay the fee.

You could probably fly to wherever it is in Europe on Easyjet, Ryanair, etc (even the Eurostar) and pick up the bass in person, and bring it back with you, probably with no questions asked, for less than the cost of the VAT, import duty, etc. Customs are going to be keeping an eye out for shifty people with suitcases and unusual travel histories, not some bloke with a gig bag.

Great little venue, been there a bunch of times. They have everything on there, from touring, big-name bands to tribute bands, to local first-timers. Essex (certainly the bit from Southend up to Colchester) actually has a pretty great music scene - lots of places to play, and loads of bands. And people do actually go out to gigs!

All of them were. Bernth was the guitarist for Austrian black metal band Belphegor, and Ola Englund has been in a bunch of bands over the years, including Six Feet Under and Scarpoint, and currently plays with The Haunted. He also has his own band, Feared. I think my point is that, right now, they’re most known for being YouTubers rather than gigging musicians, and it’s good to remind people that they do a lot more than ar$e about in front of a camera.

It's good to see these Youtube musicians going out there and playing live. All three of these guys are fantastic musicians, and they will also be doing a song or two together. Gutted I won't be in the country to see it.

Revelation do a CAR P-bass (well, a PJ), the RPJ-77, they're not expensive, and they're actually rather good. https://www.revelationguitars.co.uk/guitar/rpj-77/ It's a proper CAR too, shiny and the right shade of red.

He definitely left a bit of a bad taste in our mouths with his behaviour that day. I've met quite a few "famous" musician types over the years, and most of them were very nice, normal people doing a job and glad that people liked what they do (Stu and Derrick were very much in this mould). Others were obviously living in their own little bubble and were nice enough but a bit weird, but very few were unpleasant and/or obnoxious. He was one of those few. Never really enjoyed Jamiroquai again after that, especially with their subsequent, post-Stu change in direction. The footballers were great - one of my colleagues at the studio was a huge fan of Spurs, and Jamie Redknapp in particular, to the degree that he named his son Jamie. He told that to Neil "Razor" Ruddock (one of the guys we had come down to do some mocap stuff for us) and he pulled up Redknapp's number on his mobile and called him up, and put my colleague on the phone with him. That made his year. Ruddock's a big softie really!

Interesting story... back in 1997 I was working for a video games company, and we had a motion capture studio that we would rent out to clients when we weren't using it for game stuff. One of the clients we got was Sony, who were making a Minidisc ad that was going to feature a little CG character made of Minidiscs that would morph into Jay Kay doing his funny dancing. So we had to motion-capture him doing the dance. The place was in a warehouse on a sleepy industrial estate in Croydon, and, even when we had big name people there (we did a football game where we got several Premier League players down) it was always quiet. Not on that day - the place was full of Sony people from Japan, they brought a Winnebago down for Jay Kay to use as a changing room (the Premier League footballers were perfectly happy to use the toilets) and then he shows up in a souped-up Mercedes. Stuart and Derrick were with him, and they hung out with us and were very cool, but Jay would only speak to my boss, and very much had that "I'm too important to talk to you" vibe going on. Everyone just thought, "d*ck". Still, we did the job. They made the ad, and I got a Jay Kay anecdote out of it. For what it's worth, this was the ad (or one of them, anyway - apparently they made several, but this was the only one I could find, and it doesn’t have the morphing thing):

I'd quite like to hear a whole album from these three. Berthoud holds his own here, he gets a solo, and some of the harmony parts him and Bernth are doing are fantastic. Shame Ola is kinda in the background of this one, although he did get the first solo.

I have a Behringer U-Phoria audio interface. I recently upgraded to a Universal Audio Volt and it's... a little bit better? Sound from the input into Logic is pretty much identical. Output sounds a little bit better (probably a better DAC in the Universal Audio interface). Not much in it, to be honest. I've still got the Behringer connected to one of my other computers.

Eve is no longer going, but Doug (Eve's main man) is a member of Bass Upfront on Facebook, and was saying recently that he's considering opening up, but only for custom commissions. I played some Eve basses back at the Bass Guitar Show in 2014. Lovely things. Incredibly light too.

Hasn’t Dirnt jumped ship back to Gibson? I’ve seen him pimping the new Epiphone version of the Grabber online recently. Or is he “non-exclusive”?

Hopefully they’re more like the Trace Elliot people then. I’ve heard good things about their current range of guitar amps, that they still have that wonderfully fuzzy Hiwatt sound, so hopefully someone there knows what they’re doing.

Abe Laboriel is an absolute monster, and, considering his sheer number of credits, should be far better known than he is. The man just bleeds groove, and has invented more techniques and different playing styles than practically anyone else! His son also plays drums for Paul McCartney... The only other players I can think of who just ooze groove the way he does are Bobby Vega and Richard Bona.

Depends if they bought the people along with the name, and if the new owners care about the brand and its heritage. For instance, Marshall are now owned by the Swedish company who made their headphones and Bluetooth speakers, but it’s still Marshall because all the same people work there in Milton Keynes. Trace Elliot is owned by Peavey now, and obviously none of the original Trace people work there, but the people who are making the new Trace gear are enormous Trace fanboys who are obsessed with getting the sound and feel as close to the original Trace experience as possible. Just wondering which one of these Hiwatt is closest to in that regard…?

Hiwatt seem to be the last of the old-school British amp companies to get on the small-but-powerful bass amp thing - Laney. Orange, etc have been at it for a while now. Now, if Marshall would just get back into making bass amps...

I haven't found it for sale online anywhere. Maybe it's just been announced but not released yet? They've always made good gear - the guitarist in my band has a Hiwatt head and it sounds wonderfully filthy. They're just a bit "invisible" these days.

Looks like another classic British amp manufacturer have jumped on the lightweight bass amp train - Hiwatt. https://britampco.co.uk/hiwatt/shop/details/HW-BD-770-STUDIO-BLACK.html Not sure when these came out - must have been fairly recently, but has anyone tried one? They do a more "traditional" looking version too - same amp in a more classic-looking Hiwatt head enclosure.

@MacDaddy OK, you win. More pics. This is the Spector that changed my life (just after I had a nice set of Nordstrand BigBladeMan pickups fitted): … and me and my my Sei, which I’ve now had for 21 years:

I've had a few that were important to me. One that changed the course of my life. And another one I'd like to track down and get back. My first bass was an "Axe" Precision copy that I got in 1991. It was not a good instrument. I upgraded it with some Seymour Duncan pickups (the ones that had the little white EQ switches actually built into the pickup) but, eventually realised you can't polish a turd, and sold it to the local music shop and got something better. I actually came across it again some years later, and, blimey, it was horrible. So, it was important in as much as it was my first bass, but, facing facts, it was a piece of 💩. The first really significant one is a Spector NS5-CRFM that I bought in 2005, because the act of buying that bass took my life in a totally different direction. I'd been looking for a nice Spector for a while, and I found this one online, but it was in the US and the person selling it wouldn't ship internationally. Luckily, I had a holiday to the US booked, so I thought I'd ask this girl I knew a little bit from some online interactions (who was at uni in the next town over from where I was going to stay on my trip) if I could get it delivered to her, and then pick it up while I was over. She said yes. And we've been married 18 years and have three kids who wouldn't exist if it wasn't for that bass. And I still have it - it's a family heirloom now! The one that got away was a bass I had made by Chris McIntyre, back when he was working at The Gallery in London, This would have been back in about 1996. It wasn't a proper Sei - that came later. I bought a through-neck body from Brandoni, and got Chris to basically transform it into something entirely different - different body shape, longer neck (ie, it went from having 22 frets to 26), different headstock, Kahler trem, everything. I loved that bass on a very fundamental level. Playing it got me through some very difficult times in the late 90s (suffice to say a whole lot of things fell apart in a very short space of time), and it's probably not an exaggeration to say that I might not be here today but for that bass. I foolishly sold it to the Notting Hill Music Exchange in 2001 because I needed the money. I've been looking out for it sporadically for the last 23 years. I have lots of other nice basses now (two lovely custom Maruszczyks, my wonderful Sei, a MM Bongo, the aforementioned Spector and a few others) but I'd love to get that one back again. It'd be like coming full circle. This was it:

It’s one of my all-time favourite records. It evokes a mood, and paints a far more realistic picture of Los Angeles than most other bands do - no glamour, no hyperbole, just love for a place where these people grew up. There’s some lovely bass on there, and Navarro is utterly sublime on some of the tunes - the solo on “Big Sur” is beautiful, and probably the second best thing he’s ever recorded (the first being the solo in Three Days, which was apparently all one take).

His pitch has always been pretty bad live. There's some video out there of him in Porno For Pyros doing the Woodstock '94 festival and I'm not sure he got a single note in key. When they came back for the 2010 NIN/JA tour with Nine Inch Nails, he sounded great. He'd started using IEMs and was actually singing mostly in key. He's deteriorated significantly since then though. Although what I saw of the show they did in London a couple of months back wasn't too bad. By Perry standards, anyway. Dave, Chaney and Perkins had a side project for a while called The Panic Channel back in 2006. They did one album that wasn't bad, but it was a lot more "conventional" alt-rock than what everyone was used to hearing from Jane's. It was OK, just not very interesting.