Bassfinger

Thats a bit unfair to the venerable Monsignor Harley Benton. My MB4 does more than merely allow me to cope - it's sound is as brilliant as my Rickenbacker at 26 times the price. Sure, the fret ends aren't as finely polished, the finish not quite as lustrous, but in terms of functionality it doesn't simply cope, it damn well excels. But back to nuts...ive just measured, my Sire P5 is 40mm at the nut and is another one that gives far pricier basses a good poke in the eye.

Same here. By the time I've swapped in my strings of choice and let it settle for a few days it'll need tweak of the truss rod and the intonation will need redoing, then I want to set the string height to suit my own personal tastes. It could be set up in the shop by God himself but by the time I've done my bit it'll need redoing, so provided the basics are correct (nut cut properly, frets seated well dressed tidily, etc) I never sweat over the set up from the box. However, in this instance it sounds more like a build QC problem rather than set up issue. Nice to see Squier going the whole hog and trying to emulate Fender's hit and miss QC.

A fistful of very nice sounding Harley Benton basses with MM type pickups. Obscenely good for pennies.

I'd be inclined towards the Sire, but wouldn't at all be upset to get the Squier for my birthday. The Sire 'edgeless' necks are something else, lovely to play.

Mrs Bassfinger bought me a mandolin.

I'll probably be run out of town for heresy but I prefer the finish, sound and price of the Squier CVs to their Player Series equivalents. I'm not at all against MIM's and currently have one on the fleet, I just find the Players a bit lukewarm compared to the often cheaper alternatives.

My Sire P5. Love it.

That what we use. We have a band Google Drive account and it's stored centrally, and i print mine off. We're a bunch of old farts we try to keep it simple.

TimR claimed exactly that in his post. The words he user were "definition of insanity is ...", which seems to me like that's exactly what he was claiming.

Sadly our singist is away and our backup singist is with his own band that night, so no NYE gig this year.

Except that isn't the definition of insanity.

Neal Schon should remember the recent lesson of Joe Lycett - it'll now doubtless soon come to light that Schon once played a benefit gig for the SS or something and he'll end up looking a bit daft.

...and shoot themselves in the foot as RM are claiming that if it carries on much longer they'll be looking at making 11,000 staff redundant. So the strike may instead mean that a load of them lose their jobs, and those that are left not only don't get what they were demanding but also end up having a higher workload due to the job losses. I feel they do deserve it - as do the nurses, Ambo, lower paid rail staff - but I also feel it likely that not only are they not going to get it, they're going to end up worse off in a lot of other ways. On top of that the unions will come out of it weaker and with even less influence in the future - when you call someone's bluff and they stand firm it inevitability weakens your own position going forward. I wish them well, but with each day that passes it increasingly looks to me like each will end with an own goal of varying severity.

Yep, we've got in with the horsey set and they are out biggest customers. They absolutely sheet money, and are happy to pay - last gig I TWOC'd Mrs D's polestar and it was the cheapest car in the car park by about 90 grand, surrounded as it was by Overfinch Range Rooney's, Aston DBX's and Bentaygas. Luckily, as yet none of them have asked us to do any ABBA...

We typically charge private gigs £2000 for 2 x one hour sets, dependent kn the nature of the gig. Seems if we chuck in some ABBA we could maybe charge a bit more, eh ?

Where possible I buy from a shop, partly to allow me to check the quality of the specific instrument I'm buying, and partly because weight can vary noticeably between otherwise identical instruments. Unfortunately my serial Harley Bemton habit cannot be assuaged in this manner.

Yep, keep the basses and move back in with Mum and Dad.

Hendrix used to do it on the geetar too, and I'm given to understand he was quite a good player. Rules are one thing, but the rule is incompatible with thumb over the top to deliberately rotate that hand and put the fingers in a better position for outward bends and pull-off's on the high strings - watch Hendrix in slow-mo and you can see his hand rotating arou d the neck. If people can ignore these rules to make another technique accessible then I would suggest that the rules need a few exceptions incorporating to bring them up to date. And no, I don't do it myself because I was taught not to and that was ingrained into me at a young age. Nevertheless, I don't have any god given right to dictate how other musicians must play so if someone else can make something good happen by not following this rule then all power to them because that's how new sounde and techniques are born.

I've gone off Gary Glitter in recent years...

The most I've personally paid is £2600, but that was for my dream bass. Other than that a grand is the limit, the point for me where common sense, playability and finish coincide, although I've found basses at half that which are as good as most £1000 ones.

I had no exposed holes, so they look OK. The HB tuner spacing is a little closer than the Fender norm so 3 of the Wilkinson tuners required about 0.5mm filing off the edge where they butt up to the adjacent tuner. The backplate covers the old holes and the Wilko tuners actually work very nicely.

I wired mine as per standard. You can see why I went for Wilkinson tuners very quickly!

Good lord, no! As stock they have nothing to be ashamed of low down, and with the Warman pickup it's like Joss Ackland clearing his throat.

Elton John, makes it up by ear and breaks half the rules in the book. Mark Knopfler, freely admits his technique would give any tutor nightmares yet his playing and songwriting send shivers down my spine. Ian Anderson, defies established convention on flute, bass, guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, penny whistle, claghorn (google it), drums and keyboard, but doesn't seem any the worse for it. Lemmy, well...he was Lemmy and was utterly unapologetic about it. Seems to me that not holding a digit in a certain manner did nothing to fetter their rampant creativity, and in many cases may have even facilitated it as it has with me. The sound a musician makes is what ultimately matters, and if they can get the sound they want by not following a 'correct' method that someone has only invented since 1951 then why the hell shouldn't they?

I got banned trom Talkbass too for refusing to change my avatar from a poppy - it was that time of year and Im an ex squaddie so am prone to such bouts of remembrance - as the admin said it was 'politcal'. In response I deliberately committed forum hari kari by calling the admin something that rhymes with brick and was banned. You are of course very welcome here. As a community, and a genuinely warm one, Basschat is in a different league. You'll do particularly well if you like Harley Bentons.