Krysbass

This started life as a Stagg Fusion fretless – £99 new. First mod was DiMarzio pickups to replace the original very low output, noisy items. Then: I shielded the electronics cavity with copper foil – originally this wasn’t shielded at all. I shimmed the neck, as the string height adjustment at the bridge was about as low as it could go – the shim allowed me to raise the action at the bridge and gave more room for adjustment across the strings. The rosewood (?) fretboard was originally coated with a black dye that came off on my fingers when playing, so was carefully cleaned to reveal the wood underneath, then oiled and polished. The original Stagg branded tuning heads were typically bargain basement, so replaced with a set of Gotoh GB707s that were easily fitted with very little filing of the holes in the headstock. The original headstock was annoyingly pointy, so I re-modelled it and sanded off the original Stagg logo at the same time. The Stagg Logo on the neck plate was also ground off and the neck-plate re-painted. This is my only fretless and despite its humble origins and still modest budget; it sounds and plays well. Learned a few things too along the way. Currently considering upgrading the bridge and control pots…..☺️

I’m astonished that the store allowed the bass to get into that condition in the first place. Hopefully they don’t just allow customers to take display basses off the wall and try out unsupervised? And if they do supervise; surely they should be ensuring that nothing a customer is doing (or wearing) can damage an instrument’s finish? I have a gigged bass now 35 years old that is in far better order!😲

Got a Labrador (well almost as he’s also part red setter) and I’ve always driven Fords including a couple of Fiestas - the most ubiquitous car in the UK, but well made and unflinchingly reliable. So since bass playing is my escape from such ordinariness; I have always felt that my choice of basses must resist going down the most popular and iconic route of Fender or Gibson and their copyists - however highly regarded these basses are.

Subjective of course; but to these eyes this is the bass equivalent of a car composed of the front end of a Ferrari grafted onto a Ford model T.😲

Agreed. It should be whatever works is fine. I just recall having a couple of lessons around 15 years ago as my playing had hit a plateau and straight away the tutor insisted I should have my thumb behind the fretboard - so I went away and spent a long time correcting that. Now seeing CS play; I’m again questioning whether I needed to do that.

My thumb also stays behind the neck - so I think you may have a point there.😳

Despite the wisdom that curling the thumb of your fretting hand over the top of the fretboard is “bad technique”; I never cease to be amazed at how many highly competent, creative, successful and iconic bassists (and guitarists) I’ve seen do this to no apparent detriment to their abilities.😯

I managed with one bass for the first 24 years or so. But over the last 12 years the collection has grown to 5 basses and although various things have conspired to ensure that I’ve been bandless since May 2019; I’d struggle to justify letting any of the 5 go. Then again, Sod’s law being what it is; if I was to strip back to 1 bass, that would be the very time a project would come along needing the basses I’d just got rid of.🤨

Just don’t get the Lorde cover. I’m all for creativity but to these ears it just sounds like she’s close to vomiting.🤢 But I’m probably just being “boring and old-fashioned” so I’ll get my coat.😳

Obviously the late, great John Entwistle. Aside from him letting his fingers do the talking; the icing on the coolness cake for me was his lack of participation in the smashing up of gear (at least on stage - I know he had his moments off stage) which I always considered crass and wasteful.

It comes across as a tad immature, petty and now boring too from someone old enough and wealthy enough to have moved on from the bad blood with his ex band mates. - Especially since we were led to believe they had buried the hatchet as of their one-off re-grouping at Live8.

+1 - that’s pretty much me too, except that I choose not to sing. For me, playing bass is still a pleasure that I fear would only be diluted if I had to sing at the same time - so I don’t.😎

Always loved that Planet Earth bassline, but frustratingly it’s always been beyond my non-existent abilities with a pick. 😳 I agree that JT is underrated - plenty of great lines in DD songs and thankfully (for me) most are more suited to finger style playing. But never motivated to go to a DD gig, as I tend to prefer to hear the band at gigs rather than the audience.

Gigging as a 5-piece, all male 1980s covers band with a set list of well-known 80s songs to suit our line-up - then at one gig; along comes a request for anything by Kylie Minogue......?

Westone wood...

I aspire to being Michelin star but being towards the end of my 4th decade as a bassist perhaps I should be past the aspiring bit by now? Cooking is another passion of mine and I can put together some interesting things, but to do it I cut corners. Where I will often buy a ready made sauce rather than make one from scratch. Similarly with bass lines I will get most of the notes and the overall feel right rather than staying 100% faithful to the original song (recipe)😂

I dislike all basses with pickguards. But I’ve always been puzzled as to why most twin-Pickup basses with pickguards only deem a pickguard to be necessary around the neck pickup and not the bridge pickup too? To me this says that the pickguard is more about style than any sort of functionality, and therefore unnecessary......

Here goes... No Scratchplates, solid paint finishes, sunburst paint finishes, maple or any similarly light coloured fretboards, bridges made out of bent metal (solid, cast Bridges only please), “relic’d” finishes, headless basses, basses without bodies (eg Steinberger), chrome hardware styled to look like it came from a 60s American diner, headstock designs that cause the strings to exit the nut at a sharp angle...... Or in short, probably 75% of the basses out there.

An account manager at a large print company. A role best described as “precision guess-work based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge”. 😂

You sir win the award for quoting weight metric. Even though I’m in my late 50s I went metric some years ago and lbs and ozs now mean little to me. So maybe if we all used both metric and imperial measures, everyone would understand?

I have been in both originals and covers bands - but mostly the latter. Although I enjoyed creating my own bass lines in the originals bands, what I didn’t get along with was all the boring, non-musical stuff that creeps in such as promoting the band, long gaps between gigs and paying to play far-away venues in a vain attempt to raise the band’s profile because no-one local books originals bands. So playing other people’s music is where it’s firmly at for me. And it’s just bass in my case, as I don’t do vocals; which allows me the undiluted pleasure of fully immersing myself in the huge and superb range of bass-lines that so many much more talented people than me have created. What’s not to like?

I agree with the original post here. But I must add that I also only play pub/club gigs and frankly; taking £2k or more of bass exotica to some of those joints would scare me silly or at least feel like overkill. So each of my 5 basses is worth under £1,000 and most of them hugely under it. They are all good quality basses - but just not bass-bling. If I was a pro bassist, I’d probably have a completely different view.

Ralf!🤢

A drummer with a fan pointed at him who always played too hard, with the result that on fast songs he would soon get tired, causing the tempo to get slower and slower, ending up as a ballad. It also meant bits would often work loose and fall off his kit. At one gig a cymbal hit the deck, only missing the mains lead to my amp by a couple of cm. That was the final straw for me - I resigned the morning after that gig.