Brother Jones

It's a fashion thing - like block inlays. Hard to get away from the fact that they serve no function at all, other than adding weight and getting in the way of adjustment.

Don't mean to offend, but Warwick are long past their best IME. They made their name in the late eighties (when everyone was playing them), especially with the original Thumb - which really was exceptional. The Rockbass thing really devalued them as a brand. Now they just sound and feel clunky and dead. I've tried about ten over the past two years (including two of their Custom Shop ones) and they've all been extremely disappointing. I'd rather have a Sadowsky, In fact I'd rather have a Jap Jazz. More responsosive, better neck and about a third of the price.

[quote name='Deep Thought' post='376642' date='Jan 11 2009, 10:38 AM']Pat-trip dispenser Creep Not up to much[/quote] It's a bit of a private language isn't it? . They've been pretty crap since Mark 'sacked' (ie assaulted) the band in New York in 1998 and Steve and the other decided they'd had enough. I used to have a massive discrepancy between the music I enjoyed listening to (Wire, the Fall, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, etc) and the music I enjoyed playing on my bass (the usual Jaco/Stanley fusion/funk stuff). The people who put the two together - ie played lines that I really enjoyed covering - were Norman Watt-Roy, Colin Moulding, Foxton, Dave Allen and Bruce Adamson. It's hard to take Graham Lewis from Wire too seriously because he was so pompous. And I'm not convinced that Tina Weymouth actually wrote many of the Heads lines, but could be wrong. Oh and the bloke from the Bunnymen was pretty good. I used to love playing 'Rescue' which had some funky little moments in it.

Hi-fi speaker reviewers used to have an agreed standard fequency for sensitivity measurements. I think it was 1 kHz, but I could be misremembering.

My Dad bought me one as a reward for doing alright in my A-levels in 1988. At the time, everyone was gagging for some sort of Status copy that we could fit Superwound 30-90s to and go bonkers on... They first came out in '85 or '86. It's greatest selling point for me at the time was that it was a through-neck which was almost unheard of on the mass market. They were very well put together. I think in the late eighties they were £275 and were available either in black or (more rarely at first) in a kind of stained natural finish. No idea what the woods were - all maple? Basswood? The earlier ones had EMG Select humbuckers - which were passive pups - and a switchable active output with treb/bass and the famous little red light. It got a bit more complicated in the (?) early nineties as Hohner expanded the range and perhaps replaced the Select humbuckers with single coils. Around the same time they introduced the 'B-bass' which was a sort of Jack 5.

I've yet to play a better 4-string than my UV70 tbh... Great choice.

The first three Police albums.

[quote name='spog' post='364503' date='Dec 27 2008, 10:43 PM']Back in the day it was JDs, Statuses and so forth[/quote] Yeah, I remember those days. Times are different now though and people's slapping preferences have a lot more to do with Marcus Miller than they do with Mark King - the very hi-fi trebly, always using the bridge pup thing is less popular than it was. I'm loving the occasional bit of slapping my Precision around, but the obvious (boring?) alternative is a maple board Jazz - a CIJ reissue would prob be best vfm.

I bought a mint red-stain SB-Elite II from a BC'er when BC was called...something else...about two years ago. I love it to bits. It's quite Alembic like in that the neck doesn't have a lot of taper and the electronics are pretty unusual. It's passive, but for a good three months I didn't realise because it's so versatile. It has (I think) two volumes, two switches which are possibly coil taps or something to do with series/parallel and a weird passive tone control that sounds unlike any other passive tone control I've ever used. It's going to need some work soon though, as the output sounds very low compared to my Fenders (let alone Sadowskys) and there's quite a lot of RF noise. But the sheer through-neck build quality, sustain, versatility and (dammit) good looks of the thing mean that it's one of the only basses I'm just not interested in selling.

I know this has been discussed before (sorry...), but I have a 'burst/maple CIJ 70s Jazz that I need a black or tort pickguard for. Ironically the guard off my 1978 US Jazz will not fit. . What's the best reliable way of sourcing a guard that will fit? Thanks.

I taught quite a bit about ten or fifteen years ago. I couldn't read music and was not an MU member. People would just come up to me after gigs or as friends of a friend. You need to know theory in terms of the relationship between chords and scales, but as long as you're honest with someone about what you can equip them to do I'm not sure why you'd need too much regulation...