Bassassin

Yeah, it's the same bass. Depends if anyone's really going to cough £650 for it.

Apart from the name and the pickups (which might well have been swapped) that's the same bass as my very first one, which I had brand new in 1978 for the sum of £59. Never heard of Vision before, but it is MIJ, it is a bargain at £49 and it is a piece of crap. If there was postage I'd quite likely buy it to see if it's as bad as I remember, see if I could make it play OK (I know how to do a decent setup now) and to tidy it up and make a quick 70-odd quid profit.

Depends on the band - a lot of bands have a revolving-door membership with one or two members being the core of the band. I'm a big fan of Opeth, who had released four or five albums before I discovered them. The current line-up has only two members of the line-up they had when I first saw them and bizarrely, neither of them are actually original members! Mikael Akerfeldt, guitarist, vocalist & sole songwriter, actually joined Opeth as bassist in the band's early days. Completely different situation though if a band's identitiy is entirely dependent on its individual members. I could hardly see, say, Alex Lifeson recruiting a random drummer & bassist and get away with touring as Rush, for example. For me there's a bit of a whiff surrounding current incarnations of bands like Big Country, who tour under that name with only two members of its "classic" lineup, and despite the fact that writer/frontman Stuart Adamson - who in many ways was the band - has been dead for 18 years. That doesn't seem right.

Hmm. Interesting that this bass sold a fortnight ago, and this is a re-list. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fender-Squier-Jv-P-Bass/283598948420 Maybe this is why it's relisted - £685 would be reasonable these days for a decent condition JV. If it didn't turn out to be a bitsa.

Lurk around your local car boot for long enough and one will turn up, it'll be £20 and you'll still feel ripped off.

You're all right, but, paradoxically, wrong at the same time. But can we find a way throught this apparent cognitive dissonance? Oh god, if we must, you say. The bass in the pic is a Teisco Del Rey EB110 Tulip, related to, but not identical to the Kay EB100. If you look at the body shape of the Kay, it's not the same & not a "Tulip". This is what the guy in the pic's playing: https://reverb.com/uk/item/196751-teisco-del-rey-eb-110-tulip-31-inch-scale-bass-original-case-1960-s-sunburst The original Teiscos are quite collectable these days (hipsters, I expect) and a lot less common than the Kays, which were sold in every Woolies and your Ma's Kay (obvs) catalogue, somewhere in the pages beyond the ladies underwear section. They are, despite being Taiwanese & not Japanese, sort-of Teiscos, having been made in a factory established by and initially owned by Kawai/Teisco, which made a lot of identical & similar models. There - today you learned something you genuinely never gave a sh!t about.

It's slightly more interesting than the MIJ copies in that it's actually an East German-made Musima - easy to ID from the external heel-end truss adjustment and the curious use of rather high-quality Gotoh Resolite tuners. Here's a somewhat more broken one in Estonia: https://www.osta.ee/en/retro-elektrikitarr-musima-action-bass-35-95632552.html And here's one on UK Ebay, unconvincingly pretending to be a 70s Jazz! https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/used-70s-original-electric-bass-guitar-fender-jazz-neck/312771076085 Kingfisher will have been a local importer rebrand - in fact most of these Musimas (Musimae?) turn up unbranded. There were also matching Strat versions too, seen several at my local car boot over the years. As far as the neck's concerned - it might be sortable, with a bit of brute force and a few washers. Get the neck off, manually bend it (brace the head on the floor, bend it back against your knee) and then see if the adjuster will tighten. If not, you should be able to get the adjuster nut off & bung a washer or two under it to give the nut a few more turns. This is an old P copy I had, being (successfully) persuaded to abandon its tendency to forward-bow. Strings are slacked off and it's clamped at the body end, bent back over the neck rest, and out of shot, the head's clamped to the bench to tension the whole thing. Left it like that for 3 days then cranked the truss rod to hold it straight. Sorted! Don't be afraid to flex a neck - it'll bend way further than you expect without breaking. Probably...

Not really clear how the poor soul behind this knockoff brand "couldn't keep pace with demand". I'm pretty confident I could buy a bunch of £90 Harley Bentons, kick them around in the mud a bit and knock out 10 or so of these a week. Easy.

If anyone's interested (which I suspect no-one is, but as usual I'll bang on anyway, sod the lot of you ) this is an East German-made Musima, probably mid-80s. Identifiable from the combination of the protruding truss adjuster, and the odd use of rather classy Gotoh Resolite tuners. Loads of Musimas seem to have been sold unbranded, which as this one shows, makes them a prime candidate for the application of fakey stickers. Dunno if the gen-u-wine Fender screw makes it worth the £77 it's currently bid at.

These were crap. It's a cheap Korean knock-off of the Kramer Duke, which was in itself a cheapsh!t, bodged-up-in-an-afternoon attempt to bandwagon-jump the 80s headless market, whilst avoiding the inconvenience of bothering to design appropriate hardware. But at least the Kramer had decent Schaller parts, which this doesn't.

Looks like a generic Fender copy covered in filth. One of the things in life I simply am not equipped to "get".

Is that what you get now instead of the NME's current favourite landfill indie haircut band? Not watched it for about 4 years - my, how times change. Used to force myself to sit through it as it was the only live music on TV. In recent years I appear to have exhausted my supply of giveafuk.

In fairness exactly the same result could have been achieved with a much smaller - and lower - shim in the back end of the pocket, simply changing the angle of the neck rather than raising the entire thing. Would look somewhat less, err, conspicuous too. The majority of bolt-neck instruments I've worked on either already have, or benefit from a shim at the back of the pocket.

Mine was a CMI - Jim Marshall's Cleartone Musical Instruments brand - @razze06 has it now. Don't remember seeing this model branded Shaftesbury, only the Nobblies.

Voted B - seemingly the unpopular choice but I've always enjoyed playing new places in front of people who had no idea who we were, and what they were going to get. Money for fuel is a bonus too. Doesn't always happen...

The 'Oo were the first band I really got into and Townshend, in his day, was a genius-level composer. I don't really do all-time favourites but for me Quadrophenia is unparalleled as a suite of conceptual music, it's an album I never tire of. However - Moon died within a few months of my becoming a fan and in a real sense, that was when The Who ended. I've always had some interest in their sporadic career since then, was beyond gutted when we lost Entwistle, and have bought a few albums and seen what's left of them a couple of times. But this - little more than a leaden 12-bar with Daltrey grunting away like he's lost his inhaler. A bit of a relief in a way, won't have to be tempted to give any more money to a thicko geriatric millionaire with ignorant, obnoxious political views.

That nut looks like it's been strung l/h at some point. The scratchplate is the same shape as the original - they were always ugly! Easy to use it as a template to make a replacement though. Not sure what's gone on with the neck joint - mine was bolt-on but I have an idea some of them were glued. Mine had a cover over the screws but can't remember what it was like underneath, except it wasn't like that! Would definitely need to see the neck to understand what he means about it being bent. Seem to remember these have a 2-way truss rod, might be possible to tweak it. Although £350 seems a bit much for what really looks like a project.

It's a bitsa, or at very least, heavily modded. You may find some answers, or some definitive clues if you take it apart, but looking at the pics I can see pickup, knobs & tuners from a 70s Taiwanese-made Kay, a home-made scratchplate, P-Bass bridge cover and a Letraset headstock logo. I'm betting that big piece of plastic is covering a multitude of old routes and screwholes. Would be interesting to see.

I do remember seeing The Vandals supporting Pearl Jam about 20 years ago - I only remember the name of the band for two reasons: their drummer was in the original line-up of A Perfect Circle, and their singer inexplicably got his kit off during the PJ support gig. Fortunately I was far enough back not to experience either psychological trauma or retina burn. Phew. I wasn't so lucky for a couple of gigs my last band did in our early days. In a triumph of booking mismatch we (a female-fronted proggy/gothy/rocky band) were on the same bill as local hardcore punk veterans The Swellbellys - who, as the name & pedigree suggests were rather well-fed gentlemen from the halcyon days of punk rock. The intervening decades might have softened their waistlines, but not their attitude or desire for freedom of expression - their encore involved the entire band getting naked, and exhorting the boisterous, enthusiastic and very, very drunk audience to do the same. In a very, very small room. I still have nightmares. Often about chipolatas and scotch eggs.

First bass was a nasty little shortscale J-ish thing branded Grant, exactly like this: Didn't have a proper amp for a couple of years, for bedroom practice I rigged up a cable to connect the bass to the aux input in my little stereo. First amp came from a local charity shop, cost me £30, I think. One of these: Which regrettably, I don't have any more - in fact I don't know what happened to it. The band I was in split, the amp was in the drummer's mum's basement, which flooded before I got around to collecting it. It probably ended up in a skip - which is a shame, because I could probably pay off the mortgage with it now...

I know a bit about Wandre from my adventures in vintage guitar shenanigans - they're incredibly rare & collectable 60s Italian exotica, as much period art as musical instruments. Not to my taste, but I've always hoped one would turn up at the local car boot for a tenner - they look like that sort of thing. Fwiw the Etrurian here is by far one of their more restrained designs, and at the current bid (£470-odd) would be a ridiculous bargain. Check this: https://reverb.com/item/11437659-wandre-rock-bass-first-series-masterpiece-davoli

I'd be prepared to say it's a genuine MIJ Squier neck - as far as I can see the tuners are the Gotoh GB1types frequently used by Fujigen, would be odd to use them on a stickered-up cheapo. Don't think that 7-screw bridge was ever used on anything associated with Fender though, and the black-back body looks pretty suss - would expect it to be ply. Bitsa, I'd say.

It's not true anyway. Stickers won't touch a poly finish, and nitro's rubbish to start with. (#controversial)

Frequently. Used to habitually use Rotosound Swing Bass, always stone dead after one gig or two rehearsals.