Shaggy

Yes, that was the point - the original circuit might be perfectly acceptable; but if you're going to fit high grade pickups then something like an East circuit is going to complement the pickups to get the very best tone out of them. As there no rush, you'll get boutique bargainaceous gear here on BC for the price of generic new - I had some Barts on here for peanuts that I put into an MB1 Squier P/J that absolutely transformed it into a bass as good as any big-name equivalent.

Upgrading pickups are almost always the single best way of massively improving tone /response of an electric instrument. With the Clipper being a Warwick "clone" I guess EMG's or MECS's would be appropriate, but my choice would be Bartolini's - they just seem to work great in any bass. A decent active circuit upgrade (pretty cheap these days) would then get the best out of the pickups. They look like nice basses, and anything through that Hiwatt is gonna sound huge!

These...... Also bridge saddles that don't fall out when there's no string tension on them when changing strings, and personally I prefer master vol / balance pan for 2 p/up basses rather than vol / vol. Some of these features go way back - loads of '60's instruments were zero-fret, and my mid-60's Vox teardrop (active) had a built-in tuner in the sense that pulling out the treble control produced a E tone that you could tune to

Seriously cool looking old bass, though I can well beleive mgeek that it's almost certainly fairly horrible to play. A few years ago I bought an old six-string semi in a junk shop for 30 quid purely with the intention of ripping out the pickups for a '60's inspired project build, but didn't have the heart to - so re-finned it instead (it had a botched brush varnish re-fin job covered with punk-era graffiti) and upgraded the crude original bridge & tailpiece. Turns out the pickups are Fenton-Weill units (like in the OP) and guitar is probably a"Broadway" - one of Rosetti's budget bitsa brands of the early '60's. Quite tempted by this thread to use those pickups and circuit for a super-streamline build now though!

Fantastic stuff, and I liked the understated and very funky guitar playing too As ever, I'm entirely baffled how bassists who wear their bass so high up the body manage to do it. I'll have to give it a go, and imagine I've got shorter arms.

Boris Johnson on keyboards? Great stuff

PM'd

Jamie sold me his very lovely Wawick Streamer - definitely one of the good guys on BC; easy deal, great communications, and sent the bass fast and super well packed Thanks fella!

It was, but a bit of zoot suit going on there too, I think DB had his creative roots in '50's & '60's small-town Americana

When I saw it (when it came out) the entire cinema audience got up and danced in the aisles. It's still an unfulfilled ambition of mine to have a suit like David Byrne's...... For me Talking Heads peak period were "Fear of music" and "Remain in light" - I think they went a tad mainstream after that. I loved DB's solo and collaborative work - particularly "The Catherine Wheel" and "My life in the bush of ghosts", and that's more what I still listen to

(See pic) - a bit hard to see, but fret lines & dots to left are reinforced with Tipp-Ex, ones to right aren't (my '77 Ovation Magnum 1 fretless) recently used the missus's sparkly iridescent clear nail varnish - really catches the light!

Tipp-Ex fine correction pen lines sealed with clear nail varnish Nail varnish remover will take it all off without affecting the varnish (assuming it's Poly)

Ramones were always '60's American bubblegum pop with distorted guitar, but instrumental in making Punk happen

I think Hugh Cornwell said that the Stranglers had their roots in late '60's English psychedelia. Like Dr Feelgood and The Jam they'd started before Punk with inspiration directly from the '60's, but got fuelled by the energy and musical freedom of Punk like so many other bands at the time. I've a particular soft spot for the Stranglers, as it was a gig at Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1977 that switched this particular spotty 16-year old from violin to bass guitar - I was gigging within a month. And "Rattus...." has to be one of the best debut albums of all time; "Hanging around" still makes the hairs stand up..... (No longer dyed green, alas)

Great advice I'm in a job where I often have to give people pre-interview advice or post-interview feedback, and one thing I always tell them is that being nervous is good - it gives you an edge. A bit of adrenaline gets you thinking faster, muscles working better, etc. Being a total nervous wreck is not good however, hence the sage advice above about preparedness Also - nothing worse than watching a bored band just "going through the motions" I bet all the true stars who have been doing it for decades still get nerves, because they care about the performance Personlly, I think bass is the best position in a band there is - you can hide at the back and just look cool, or act like a total loon and do a "Flea" or a "Sid Vicious" - up to you! . I wouldn't want to be front-man - that would make me nervous.....

Partly marketing, and partly we (the public) do love our labels - "The King", "The Boss", "The Fab Four" etc.... To me Aretha was the Queen, simply because she exuded Soul even though there may have been technically better singers around, and I doubt we will ever see the like of those icons of the '60's again (Stones included, whatever label describes them) because the world and the route to stardom are now so very different. To me - very unoriginally - Soul reached its absolute apex with "What's going on" in 1971. I even like a lot of what Aretha (and Marvin) did in the '80's, unlike some of their contemporaries

I entirely disagree with the first part of that, whilst agreeing that a great deal of mumbo-jumbo IS "perpetuated by those with a vested interest." All solid electric instruments have a acoustic tone, which you can hear by holding your ear against the body whilst playing (how I used to tune-up pre-gig before electric tuners!), and that acoustic tone underpins the amplified tone - in my experience a solid bass that sounds dead acoustically will sound lacklustre amplified, whatever its construction happens to be. Most of my basses are Gibson, and leaving aside the major variations due to pickups and active / passive EQ etc; a mahogany-bodied solid bass will tend to sound warm and harmonically rich whereas a maple body will sound more "brittle" with less harmonics. However, no reason at all why resonant woods regarded as "cheap" like basswood and Carolina can't sound as good as or even better than expensive boutique hardwoods, and I'm sure the crap tone on my old Columbus was far more to do with the pickups that had the magnetic strength equivalent to the arm-wrestling strength of a gnat than the ply body.

Even expensive top end acoustic guitars are frequently constructed with laminated woods (ie ply) and semi-acoustics almost invariably are - eg the Gibson ES-335 which most players wouldn't regard as cheap. For flat thin sections ply is stiffer and more stable than wood, stronger in most dimensions (though wood is stronger in compression along the grain), and also formable into convex shapes. As said above there's ply and there's ply - I'm sure the body constrruction of that Ritter is tonally superior to anything other than a slab of really premium tone wood. The ply in 'a 70's Columbus Jazz bass copy is cheap nasty crumbly stuff, as I found out when replacing the neck pickup on mine with a Gibson mudbucker in around 1978 - of all the basses I've had it's the only one I found nothing endearing about whatsoever, other than it being my first long scale bass. I swapped it for a bike. Hopefully the OP's is a good one - one of my favourite basses was my old Kalamazoo KB-1 which had an MDF body made by a manufacturer of toilet seats.....